Lady Connie

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

AUTHOR OF “ELTHAM HOUSE,” “DELIA BLANCHFLOWER,” ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY
ALBERT STERNER

1916

Contents

List of Illustrations

There Connie found Nora’s latest statement headed “List of Liabilities”

PART I

CHAPTER I

“Well, now we’ve done all we can, and all I mean to do,” said Alice Hooper, with a pettish accent of fatigue. “Everything’s perfectly comfortable, and if she doesn’t like it, we can’t help it. I don’t know why we make such a fuss.”

The speaker threw herself with a gesture of fatigue into a dilapidated basket-chair that offered itself. It was a spring day, and the windows of the old schoolroom in which she and her sister were sitting were open to a back garden, untidily kept, but full of fruit-trees just coming into blossom. Through their twinkling buds and interlacing branches could be seen grey college walls—part of the famous garden front of St. Cyprian’s College, Oxford. There seemed to be a slight bluish mist over the garden and the building, a mist starred with patches of white and dazzlingly green leaf. And, above all, there was an evening sky, peaceful and luminous, from which a light wind blew towards the two girls sitting by the open window. One, the elder, had a face like a Watteau sketch, with black velvety eyes, hair drawn back from a white forehead, delicate little mouth, with sharp indentations at the corners, and a small chin. The other was much more solidly built—a girl of seventeen, in a plump phase, which however an intelligent eye would have read as not likely to last; a complexion of red and brown tanned by exercise; an expression in her clear eyes which was alternately frank and ironic; and an inconvenient mass of golden brown hair.

“We make a fuss, my dear,” said the younger sister, “because we’re bound to make a fuss. Connie, I understand, is to pay us a good round sum for her board and lodging, so it’s only honest she should have a decent room.”

“Yes, but you don’t know what she’ll call decent,” said the other rather sulkily. “She’s probably been used to all sorts of silly luxuries.”

“Why of course, considering Uncle Risborough was supposed to have twenty-odd thousand a year. We’re paupers, and she’s got to put up with us. But we couldn’t take her money and do nothing in return.”

Nora Hooper looked rather sharply at her sister. It fell to her in the family to be constantly upholding the small daily traditions of honesty and fair play. It was she who championed the servants, or insisted, young as she was, on bills being paid, when it would have been more agreeable to buy frocks and go to London for a theatre. She was a great power in the house, and both her languid, incompetent mother, and her pretty sister were often afraid of her. Nora was a “Home Student,” and had just begun to work seriously for English Literature Honours. Alice on the other hand was the domestic and social daughter. She helped her mother in the house, had a head full of undergraduates, and regarded the “Eights” week and Commemoration as the shining events of the year.

Both girls were however at one in the uneasy or excited anticipation with which they were looking forward that evening to the arrival of a newcomer, who was, it seemed, to make part of the household for some time. Their father, Dr. Ewen Hooper, the holder of a recently founded classical readership, had once possessed a younger sister of considerable beauty, who, in the course of an independent and adventurous career, had captured—by no ignoble arts—a widower, who happened to be also an earl and a rich man. It happened while they were both wintering at Florence, the girl working at paleography, in the Ambrosian Library, while Lord Risborough, occupying a villa in the neighbourhood of the Torre San Gallo, was giving himself to the artistic researches and the cosmopolitan society which suited his health and his tastes. He was a dilettante of the old sort, incurably in love with living, in spite of the loss of his wife, and his only son; in spite also of an impaired heart—in the physical sense—and various other drawbacks. He came across the bright girl student, discovered that she could talk very creditably about manuscripts and illuminations, gave her leave to work in his own library, where he possessed a few priceless things, and presently found her company, her soft voice, and her eager, confiding eyes quite indispensable. His elderly sister, Lady Winifred, who kept house for him, frowned on the business in vain; and finally departed in a huff to join another maiden sister, Lady Marcia, in an English country ménage, where for some years she did little but lament the flesh-pots of Italy—Florence. The married sister, Lady Langmoor, wrote reams of plaintive remonstrances, which remained unanswered. Lord Risborough married the girl student, Ella Hooper, and never regretted it. They had one daughter, to whom they devoted themselves—preposterously, their friends thought; but for twenty years, they were three happy people together. Then virulent influenza, complicated with pneumonia, carried off the mother during a spring visit to Rome, and six weeks later Lord Risborough died of the damaged heart which had held out so long.

The daughter, Lady Constance Bledlow, had been herself attacked by the influenza epidemic which had killed her mother, and the double blow of her parents’ deaths, coming on a neurasthenic condition, had hit her youth rather hard. Some old friends in Rome, with the full consent of her guardian, the Oxford Reader, had carried her off, first to Switzerland, and then to the Riviera for the winter, and now in May, about a year after the death of her parents, she was coming for the first time to make acquaintance with the Hooper family, with whom, according to her father’s will, she was to make her home till she was twenty-one. None of them had ever seen her, except on two occasions; once, at a hotel in London; and once, some ten years before this date, when Lord Risborough had been D.C.L-ed at the Encænia, as a reward for some valuable gifts which he had made to the Bodleian, and he, his wife, and his little girl, after they had duly appeared at the All Souls’ luncheon, and the official fête in St. John’s Gardens, had found their way to the house in Holywell, and taken tea with the Hoopers.

Nora’s mind, as she and her sister sat waiting for the fly in which Mrs. Hooper had gone to meet her husband’s niece at the station, ran persistently on her own childish recollections of this visit. She sat in the window-sill, with her hand behind her, chattering to her sister.

“I remember thinking when Connie came in here to tea with us—‘What a stuck-up thing you are!’ And I despised her, because she couldn’t climb the mulberry in the garden, and because she hadn’t begun Latin. But all the time, I envied her horribly, and I expect you did too, Alice. Can’t you see her black silk stockings—and her new hat with those awfully pretty flowers, made of feathers? She had a silk frock too—white, very skimp, and short; and enormously long black legs, as thin as sticks; and her hair in plaits. I felt a thick lump beside her. And I didn’t like her at all. What horrid toads children are! She didn’t talk to us much, but her eyes seemed to be always laughing at us, and when she talked Italian to her mother, I thought she was showing off, and I wanted to pinch her for being affected.”

“Why, of course she talked Italian,” said Alice, who was not much interested in her sister’s recollections.

“Naturally. But that didn’t somehow occur to me. After all I was only seven.”

“I wonder if she’s really good-looking,” said Alice slowly, glancing, as she spoke, at the reflection of herself in an old dilapidated mirror, which hung on the schoolroom wall.

“The photos are,” said Nora decidedly. “Goodness, I wish she’d come and get it over. I want to get back to my work—and till she comes, I can’t settle to anything.”

“Well, they’ll be here directly. I wonder what on earth she’ll do with all her money. Father says she may spend it, if she wants to. He’s trustee, but Uncle Risborough’s letter to him said she was to have the income if she wished—now. Only she’s not to touch the capital till she’s twenty-five.”

“It’s a good lot, isn’t it?” said Nora, walking about. “I wonder how many people in Oxford have two thousand a year? A girl too. It’s really rather exciting.”

“It won’t be very nice for us—she’ll be so different.” Alice’s tone was a little sulky and depressed. The advent of this girl cousin, with her title, her good looks, her money, and her unfair advantages in the way of talking French and Italian, was only moderately pleasant to the eldest Miss Hooper.

“What—you think she’ll snuff us out?” laughed Nora. “Not she! Oxford’s not like London. People are not such snobs.”

“What a silly thing to say, Nora! As if it wasn’t an enormous pull everywhere to have a handle to your name, and lots of money!”

“Well, I really think it’ll matter less here than anywhere. Oxford, my dear—or some of it—pursues ‘the good and the beautiful’”—said Nora, taking a flying leap on to the window-sill again, and beginning to poke up some tadpoles in a jar, which stood on the window-ledge.

Alice did not think it worth while to continue the conversation. She had little or nothing of Nora’s belief in the other-worldliness of Oxford. At this period, some thirty odd years ago, the invasion of Oxford on the north by whole new tribes of citizens had already begun. The old days of University exclusiveness in a ring fence were long done with; the days of much learning and simple ways, when there were only two carriages in Oxford that were not doctors’ carriages, when the wives of professors and tutors went out to dinner in “chairs” drawn by men, and no person within the magic circle of the University knew anybody—to speak of—in the town outside. The University indeed, at this later moment, still more than held its own, socially, amid the waves of new population that threatened to submerge it; and the occasional spectacle of retired generals and colonels, the growing number of broughams and victorias in the streets, or the rumours of persons with “smart” or “county” connections to be found among the rows of new villas spreading up the Banbury Road were still not sufficiently marked to disturb the essential character of the old and beautiful place. But new ways and new manners were creeping in, and the young were sensitively aware of them, like birds that feel the signs of coming weather.

Alice fell into a brown study. She was thinking about a recent dance given at a house in the Parks, where some of her particular friends had been present, and where, on the whole, she had enjoyed herself greatly. Nothing is ever perfect, and she would have liked it better if Herbert Pryce’s sister had not—past all denying—had more partners and a greater success than herself, and if Herbert Pryce himself had not been—just a little—casual and inattentive. But after all they had had two or three glorious supper dances, and he certainly would have kissed her hand, while they were sitting out in the garden, if she had not made haste to put it out of his reach. “You never did anything of the kind till you were sure he did not mean to kiss it!” said conscience. “I did not give myself away in the least!”—was vanity’s angry reply. “I was perfectly dignified.”

Herbert Pryce was a young fellow and tutor—a mathematical fellow; and therefore, Alice’s father, for whom Greek was the only study worth the brains of a rational being, could not be got to take the smallest interest in him. But he was certainly very clever, and it was said he was going to get a post at Cambridge—or something at the Treasury—which would enable him to marry. Alice suddenly had a vague vision of her own wedding; the beautiful central figure—she would certainly look beautiful in her wedding dress!—bowing so gracefully; the bridesmaids behind, in her favourite colours, white and pale green; and the tall man beside her. But Herbert Pryce was not really tall, and not particularly good-looking, though he had a rather distinguished hatchet face, with a good forehead. Suppose Herbert and Vernon and all her other friends, were to give up being “nice” to her as soon as Connie Bledlow appeared? Suppose she was going to be altogether cut out and put in the background? Alice had a kind of uneasy foreboding that Herbert Pryce would think a title “interesting.”

Meanwhile Nora, having looked through an essay on “Piers Plowman,” which she was to take to her English Literature tutor on the following day, went aimlessly upstairs and put her head into Connie’s room. The old house was panelled, and its guest-room, though small and shabby, had yet absorbed from its oaken walls, and its outlook on the garden and St. Cyprian’s, a certain measure of the Oxford charm. The furniture was extremely simple—a large hanging cupboard made by curtaining one of the panelled recesses of the wall, a chest of drawers, a bed, a small dressing-table and glass, a carpet that was the remains of one which had originally covered the drawing-room for many years, an armchair, a writing-table, and curtains which having once been blue had now been dyed a serviceable though ugly dark red. In Nora’s eyes it was all comfortable and nice. She herself had insisted on having the carpet and curtains redipped, so that they really looked almost new, and the one mattress on the bed “made over”; she had brought up the armchair, and she had gathered the cherry-blossoms, which stood on the mantelpiece shining against the darkness of the walls. She had also hung above it a photograph of Watts “Love and Death.” Nora looked at the picture and the flowers with a throb of pleasure. Alice never noticed such things.

And now what about the maid? Fancy bringing a maid! Nora’s sentiments on the subject were extremely scornful. However Connie had simply taken it for granted, and she had been housed somehow. Nora climbed up an attic stair and looked into a room which had a dormer window in the roof, two strips of carpet on the boards, a bed, a washing-stand, a painted chest of drawers, a table, with an old looking-glass, and two chairs. “Well, that’s all I have!” thought Nora defiantly. But a certain hospitable or democratic instinct made her go downstairs again and bring up a small vase of flowers like those in Connie’s room, and put it on the maid’s table. The maid was English, but she had lived a long time abroad with the Risboroughs.

Sounds! Yes, that was the fly stopping at the front door! Nora flew downstairs, in a flush of excitement. Alice too had come out into the hall, looking shy and uncomfortable. Dr. Hooper emerged from his study. He was a big, loosely built man, with a shock of grizzled hair, spectacles, and a cheerful expression.

A tall, slim girl, in a grey dust-cloak and a large hat, entered the dark panelled hall, looking round her. “Welcome, my dear Connie!” said Dr. Hooper, cordially, taking her hand and kissing her. “Your train must have been a little late.”

“Twenty minutes!” said Mrs. Hooper, who had followed her niece into the hall. “And the draughts in the station, Ewen, were something appalling.”

The tone was fretful. It had even a touch of indignation as though the speaker charged her husband with the draughts. Mrs. Hooper was a woman between forty and fifty, small and plain, except for a pair of rather fine eyes, which, in her youth, while her cheeks were still pink, and the obstinate lines of her thin slit mouth and prominent chin were less marked, had beguiled several lovers, Ewen Hooper at their head.

Dr. Hooper took no notice of her complaints. He was saying to his niece—“This is Alice, Constance—and Nora! You’ll hardly remember each other again, after all these years.”

“Oh, yes, I remember quite well,” said a clear, high-pitched voice. “How do you do!—how do you do?”

And the girl held a hand out to each cousin in turn. She did not offer to kiss either Alice or Nora. But she looked at them steadily, and suddenly Nora was aware of that expression of which she had so vivid although so childish a recollection—as though a satiric spirit sat hidden and laughing in the eyes, while the rest of the face was quite grave.

“Come in and have some tea. It’s quite ready,” said Alice, throwing open the drawing-room door. Her face had cleared suddenly. It did not seem to her, at least in the shadows of the hall, that her cousin Constance was anything of a beauty.

“I’m afraid I must look after Annette first. She’s much more important than I am!”

And the girl ran back to where a woman in a blue serge coat and skirt was superintending the carrying in of the luggage. There was a great deal of luggage, and Annette, who wore a rather cross, flushed air, turned round every now and then to look frowningly at the old gabled house into which it was being carried, as though she were more than doubtful whether the building would hold the boxes. Yet as houses went, in the older parts of Oxford, Medburn House, Holywell, was roomy.

“Annette, don’t do any unpacking till after tea!” cried Lady Constance. “Just get the boxes carried up, and rest a bit. I’ll come and help you later.”

The maid said nothing. Her lips seemed tightly compressed. She stepped into the hall, and spoke peremptorily to the white-capped parlourmaid who stood bewildered among the trunks.

“Have those boxes—” she pointed to four—two large American Saratogas, and two smaller trunks—“carried up to her ladyship’s room. The other two can go into mine.”

“Miss!” whispered the agitated maid in Nora’s ear, “we’ll never get any of those boxes up the top-stairs. And if we put them four into her ladyship’s room, she’ll not be able to move.”

“I’ll come and see to it,” said Nora, snatching up a bag. “They’ve got to go somewhere!”

Mrs. Hooper repeated that Nora would manage it, and languidly waved her niece towards the drawing-room. The girl hesitated, laughed, and finally yielded, seeing that Nora was really in charge. Dr. Hooper led her in, placed an armchair for her beside the tea-table, and stood closely observing her.

“You’re like your mother,” he said, at last, in a low voice; “at least in some points.” The girl turned away abruptly, as though what he said jarred, and addressed herself to Alice.

“Poor Annette was very sick. It was a vile crossing.”

“Oh, the servants will look after her,” said Alice indifferently.

“Everybody has to look after Annette!—or she’ll know the reason why,” laughed Lady Constance, removing her black gloves from a very small and slender hand. She was dressed in deep mourning with crape still upon her hat and dress, though it was more than a year since her mother’s death. Such mourning was not customary in Oxford, and Alice Hooper thought it affected.

Mrs. Hooper then made the tea. But the newcomer paid little attention to the cup placed beside her. Her eyes wandered round the group at the tea-table, her uncle, a man of originally strong physique, marred now by the student’s stoop, and by weak eyes, tried by years of Greek and German type; her aunt—

“What a very odd woman Aunt Ellen is!” thought Constance.

For, all the way from the station, Mrs. Hooper had talked about scarcely anything but her own ailments, and the Oxford climate. “She told us all about her rheumatisms—and the east winds—and how she ought to go to Buxton every year—only Uncle Hooper wouldn’t take things seriously. And she never asked us anything at all about our passage, or our night journey! And there was Annette—as yellow as an egg—and as cross—”

However Dr. Hooper was soon engaged in making up for his wife’s shortcomings. He put his niece through many questions as to the year which had elapsed since her parent’s death; her summer in the high Alps, and her winter at Cannes.

“I never met your friends—Colonel and Mrs. King. We are not military in Oxford. But they seem—to judge from their letters—to be very nice people,” said the Professor, his tone, quite unconsciously, suggesting the slightest shade of patronage.

“Oh, they’re dears,” said the girl warmly. “They were awfully good to me.”

“Cannes was very gay, I suppose?”

“We saw a great many people in the afternoons. The Kings knew everybody. But I didn’t go out in the evenings.”

“You weren’t strong enough?”

“I was in mourning,” said the girl, looking at him with her large and brilliant eyes.

“Yes, yes, of course!” murmured the Reader, not quite understanding why he felt himself a trifle snubbed. He asked a few more questions, and his niece, who seemed to have no shyness, gave a rapid description, as she sipped her tea, of the villa at Cannes in which she had passed the winter months, and of the half dozen families, with whom she and her friends had been mostly thrown. Alice Hooper was secretly thrilled by some of the names which dropped out casually. She always read the accounts in the Queen, or the Sketch, of “smart society” on the Riviera, and it was plain to her that Constance had been dreadfully “in it.” It would not apparently have been possible to be more “in it.” She was again conscious of a hot envy of her cousin which made her unhappy. Also Connie’s good looks were becoming more evident. She had taken off her hat, and all the distinction of her small head, her slender neck and sloping shoulders, was more visible; her self-possession, too, the ease and vivacity of her gestures. Her manner was that of one accustomed to a large and varied world, who took all things without surprise, as they came. Dr. Hooper had felt some emotion, and betrayed some, in this meeting with his sister’s motherless child; but the girl’s only betrayal of feeling had lain in the sharpness with which she had turned away from her uncle’s threatened effusion. “And how she looks at us!” thought Alice. “She looks at us through and through. Yet she doesn’t stare.”

But at that moment Alice heard the word “prince,” and her attention was instantly arrested.

“We had some Russian neighbours,” the newcomer was saying; “Prince and Princess Jaroslav; and they had an English party at Christmas. It was great fun. They used to take us out riding into the mountains, or into Italy.” She paused a moment, and then said carelessly—as though to keep up the conversation—“There was a Mr. Falloden with them—an undergraduate at Marmion College, I think. Do you know him, Aunt Ellen?” She turned towards her aunt.

But Mrs. Hooper only looked blank. She was just thinking anxiously that she had forgotten to take her tabloids after lunch, because Ewen had hustled her off so much too soon to the station.

“I don’t think we know him,” she said vaguely, turning towards Alice.

“We know all about him. He was introduced to me once.”

The tone of the eldest Miss Hooper could scarcely have been colder. The eyes of the girl opposite suddenly sparkled into laughter.

“You didn’t like him?”

“Nobody does. He gives himself such ridiculous airs.”

“Does he?” said Constance. The information seemed to be of no interest to her. She asked for another cup of tea.

“Oh, Falloden of Marmion?” said Dr. Hooper. “I know him quite well. One of the best pupils I have. But I understand he’s the heir to his old uncle, Lord Dagnall, and is going to be enormously rich. His father’s a millionaire already. So of course he’ll soon forget his Greek. A horrid waste!”

“He’s detested in college!” Alice’s small face lit up vindictively. “There’s a whole set of them. Other people call them ‘the bloods.’ The dons would like to send them all down.”

“They won’t send Falloden down, my dear, before he gets his First in Greats, which he will do this summer. But this is his last term. I never knew any one write better Greek iambics than that fellow,” said the Reader, pausing in the middle of his cup of tea to murmur certain Greek lines to himself. They were part of the brilliant copy of verses by which Douglas Falloden of Marmion, in a fiercely contested year, had finally won the Ireland, Ewen Hooper being one of the examiners.

“That’s what’s so abominable,” said Alice, setting her small mouth. “You don’t expect reading men to drink, and get into rows.”

“Drink?” said Constance Bledlow, raising her eyebrows.

Alice went into details. The dons of Marmion, she said, were really frightened by the spread of drinking in college, all caused by the bad example of the Falloden set. She talked fast and angrily, and her cousin listened, half scornfully, but still attentively.

“Why don’t they keep him in order?” she said at last. “We did!” And she made a little gesture with her hand, impatient and masterful, as though dismissing the subject.

And at that moment Nora came into the room, flushed either with physical exertion, or the consciousness of her own virtue. She found a place at the tea-table, and panting a little demanded to be fed.

“It’s hungry work, carrying up trunks!”

“You didn’t!” exclaimed Constance, in large-eyed astonishment. “I say, I am sorry! Why did you? I’m sure they were too heavy. Why didn’t Annette get a man?”

And sitting up, she bent across the table, all charm suddenly, and soft distress.

“We did get one, but he was a wretched thing. I was worth two of him,” said Nora triumphantly. “You should feel my biceps. There!”

And slipping up her loose sleeve, she showed an arm, at which Constance Bledlow laughed. And her laugh touched her face with something audacious—something wild—which transformed it.

“I shall take care how I offend you!”

Nora nodded over her tea.

“Your maid was shocked. She said I might as well have been a man.”

“It’s quite true,” sighed Mrs. Hooper. “You always were such a tomboy, Nora.”

“Not at all! But I wish to develop my muscles. That’s why I do Swedish exercises every morning. It’s ridiculous how flabby girls are. There isn’t a girl in my lecture I can’t put down. If you like, I’ll teach you my exercises,” said Nora, her mouth full of tea-cake, and her expression half friendly, half patronising.

Connie Bledlow did not immediately reply. She seemed to be quietly examining Nora, as she had already examined Alice, and that odd gleam in the eyes under depths appeared again. But at last she said, smiling—

“Thank you. But my muscles are quite strong enough for the only exercise I want. You said I might have a horse, Uncle Ewen, didn’t you?” She turned eagerly to the master of the house.

Dr. Hooper looked at his wife with some embarrassment. “I want you to have anything you wish for—in reason—my dear Connie; but your aunt is rather exercised about the proprieties.”

The small dried-up woman behind the tea-urn said sharply:

“A girl can’t ride alone in Oxford—she’d be talked about at once!”

Lady Connie flushed mutinously.

“I could take a groom, Aunt Ellen!”

“Well, I don’t approve of it,” said Mrs. Hooper, in the half plaintive tone of one who must speak although no one listens. “But of course your uncle must decide.”

“We’ll talk it over, my dear Connie, we’ll talk it over,” said Dr. Hooper cheerfully. “Now wouldn’t you like Nora to show you to your room?”

The girls went upstairs together, Nora leading the way.

“It’s an awful squash in your room,” said Nora abruptly. “I don’t know how you’ll manage.”

“My fault, I suppose, for bringing so many things! But where else could I put them?”

Nora nodded gravely, as though considering the excuse. The newcomer suddenly felt herself criticised by this odd schoolgirl and resented it.

The door of the spare-room was open, and the girls entered upon a scene of chaos. Annette rose from her knees, showing a brick-red countenance of wrath that strove in vain for any sort of dignity. And again that look of distant laughter came into Lady Connie’s eyes.

“My dear Annette, why aren’t you having a rest, as I told you! I can do with anything to-night.”

“Well, my lady, if you’ll tell me how you’ll get into bed, unless I put some of these things away, I should be obliged!” said Annette, with a dark look at Nora. “I’ve asked for a wardrobe for you, and this young lady says there isn’t one. There’s that hanging cupboard”—she pointed witheringly to the curtained recess—“your dresses will be ruined there in a fortnight. And there’s that chest of drawers. Your things will have to stay in the trunks, as far as I can see, and then you might as well sleep on them. It would give you more room!”

With which stroke of sarcasm, Annette returned to the angry unpacking of her mistress’s bag.

“I must buy a wardrobe,” said Connie, looking round her in perplexity. “Never mind, Annette, I can easily buy one.”

It was now Nora’s turn to colour.

“You mustn’t do that,” she said firmly. “Father wouldn’t like it. We’ll find something. But do you want such a lot of things?”

She looked at the floor heaped with every variety of delicate mourning, black dresses, thick and thin, for morning and afternoon; and black and white, or pure white, for the evening. And what had happened to the bed? It was already divested of the twilled cotton sheets and marcella quilt which were all the Hoopers ever allowed either to themselves or their guests. They had been replaced by sheets ‘of the finest and smoothest linen, embroidered with a crest and monogram in the corners, and by a coverlet of old Italian lace lined with pale blue silk; while the down pillows at the head with their embroidered and lace-trimmed slips completed the transformation of what had been a bed, and was now almost a work of art.

And the dressing-table! Nora went up to it in amazement. It too was spread with lace lined with silk, and covered with a toilet-set of mother-of-pearl and silver. Every brush and bottle was crested and initialled. The humble looking-glass, which Nora, who was something of a carpenter, had herself mended before her cousin’s arrival, was standing on the floor in a corner, and a folding mirror framed in embossed silver had taken its place.

“I say, do you always travel with these things?” The girl stood open-mouthed, half astonished, half contemptuous.

“What things?”

Nora pointed to the toilet-table and the bed.

Connie’s expression showed an answering astonishment.

“I have had them all my life,” she said stiffly. “We always took our own linen to hotels, and made our rooms nice.”

“I should think you’d be afraid of their being stolen!” Nora took up one of the costly brushes, and examined it in wonder.

“Why should I be? They’re nothing. They’re just like other people’s!” With a slight but haughty change of manner, the girl turned away, and began to talk Italian to her maid.

“I never saw anything like them!” said Nora stoutly.

Constance Bledlow took no notice. She and Annette were chattering fast, and Nora could not understand a word. She stood by awkward and superfluous, feeling certain that the maid who was gesticulating, now towards the ceiling, and now towards the floor, was complaining both of her own room and of the kitchen accommodation. Her mistress listened carelessly, occasionally trying to soothe her, and in the middle of the stream of talk, Nora slipped away.

“It’s horrid!—spending all that money on yourself,” thought the girl of seventeen indignantly. “And in Oxford too!—as if anybody wanted such things here.”

Meanwhile, she was no sooner gone than her cousin sank down on the armchair, and broke into a slightly hysterical fit of laughter.

“Can we stand it, Annette? We’ve got to try. Of course you can leave me if you choose.”

“And I should like to know how you’d get on then!” said Annette, grimly, beginning again upon the boxes.

“Well, of course, I shouldn’t get on at all. But really we might give away a lot of these clothes! I shall never want them.”

The speaker looked frowning at the stacks of dresses and lingerie. Annette made no reply; but went on busily with her unpacking. If the clothes were to be got rid of, they were her perquisites. She was devoted to Constance, but she stood on her rights.

Presently a little space was cleared on the floor, and Constance, seeing that it was nearly seven o’clock, and the Hoopers supped at half past, took off her black dress with its crape, and put on a white one, high to the throat and long-sleeved; a French demi-toilette, plain, and even severe in make, but cut by the best dressmaker in Nice. She looked extraordinarily tall and slim in it and very foreign. Her maid clasped a long string of opals, which was her only ornament, about her neck. She gave one look at herself in the glass, holding herself proudly, one might have said arrogantly. But as she turned away, and so that Annette could not see her, she raised the opals, and held them a moment softly to her lips. Her mother had habitually worn them. Then she moved to the window, and looked out over the Hoopers’ private garden, to the spreading college lawns, and the grey front beyond.

“Am I really going to stay here a whole year—nearly?” she asked herself, half laughing, half rebellious.

Then her eye fell upon a medley of photographs; snaps from her own camera, which had tumbled out of her bag in unpacking. The topmost one represented a group of young men and maidens standing under a group of stone pines in a Riviera landscape. She herself was in front, with a tall youth beside her. She bent down to look at it.

“I shall come across him I suppose—before long.” And raising herself, she stood awhile, thinking; her face alive with an excitement that was half expectation, and half angry recollection.

CHAPTER II

“My dear Ellen, I beg you will not interfere any more with Connie’s riding. I have given leave, and that really must settle it. She tells me that her father always allowed her to ride alone—with a groom—in London and the Campagna; she will of course pay all the expenses of it out of her own income, and I see no object whatever in thwarting her. She is sure to find our life dull enough anyway, after the life she has been living.”

“I don’t know why you should call Oxford dull, Ewen!” said Mrs. Hooper resentfully. “I consider the society here much better than anything Connie was likely to see on the Riviera—much more respectable anyway. Well, of course, everybody will call her fast—but that’s your affair. I can see already she won’t be easily restrained. She’s got an uncommonly strong will of her own.”

“Well, don’t try and restrain her, dear, too much,” laughed her husband. “After all she’s twenty, she’ll be twenty-one directly. She may not be more than a twelvemonth with us. She need not be, as far as my functions are concerned. Let’s make friends with her and make her happy.”

“I don’t want my girls talked about, thank you, Ewen!” His wife gave an angry dig to the word “my.” “Everybody says what a nice ladylike girl Alice is. But Nora often gives me a deal of trouble—and if she takes to imitating Connie, and wanting to go about without a chaperon, I don’t know what I shall do. My dear Ewen, do you know what I discovered last night?”

Mrs. Hooper rose and stood over her husband impressively.

“Well—what?”

“You remember Connie went to bed early. Well, when I came up, and passed her door, I noticed something—somebody in that room was—smoking! I could not be mistaken. And this morning I questioned the housemaid. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ she said, ‘her ladyship smoked two cigarettes last night, and Mrs. Tinkler’—that’s the maid—‘says she always smokes two before she goes to bed.’ Then I spoke to Tinkler—whose manner to me, I consider, is not at all what it should be—and she said that Connie smoked three cigarettes a day always—that Lady Risborough smoked—that all the ladies in Rome smoked—that Connie began it before her mother died—and her mother didn’t mind—”

“Well then, my dear, you needn’t mind,” exclaimed Dr. Hooper.

“I always thought Ella Risborough went to pieces—rather—in that dreadful foreign life,” said Mrs. Hooper firmly. “Everybody does—you can’t help it.”

“I don’t know what you mean by going ‘to pieces,’” said Ewen Hooper warmly. “I only know that when they came here ten years ago, I thought her one of the most attractive—one of the most charming women I had ever seen.”

From where he stood, on the hearth-rug of his study, smoking an after-breakfast pipe, he looked down—frowning—upon his wife, and Mrs. Hooper felt that she had perhaps gone too far. Never had she forgotten, never had she ceased to resent her own sense of inferiority and disadvantage, beside her brilliant sister-in-law on the occasion of that long past visit. She could still see Ella Risborough at the All Souls’ luncheon given to the newly made D.C.Ls, sitting on the right of the Vice-Chancellor, and holding a kind of court afterwards in the library; a hat that was little more than a wreath of forget-me-nots on her dark hair, and a long, lace cloak draping the still young and graceful figure. She remembered vividly the soft, responsive eyes and smile, and the court of male worshippers about them. Professors, tutors young and old, undergraduates and heads of houses, had crowded round the mother and the long-legged, distinguished-looking child, who clung so closely to her side; and if only she could have given Oxford a few more days, the whole place would have been at Ella Risborough’s feet. “So intelligent too!” said the enthusiastic—“so learned even!” A member of the Roman “Accademia dei Lincei,” with only one other woman to keep her company in that august band; and yet so modest, so unpretending, so full of laughter, and life, and sex! Mrs. Hooper, who generally found herself at these official luncheons in a place which her small egotism resented, had watched her sister-in-law from a distance, envying her dress, her title, her wealth, bitterly angry that Ewen’s sister should have a place in the world that Ewen’s wife could never hope to touch, and irrevocably deciding that Ella Risborough was “fast” and gave herself airs. Nor did the afternoon visit, when the Risboroughs, with great difficulty, had made time for the family call on the Hoopers, supply any more agreeable memories. Ella Risborough had been so rapturously glad to see her brother, and in spite of a real effort to be friendly had had so little attention to spare for his wife! It was true she had made much of the Hooper children, and had brought them all presents from Italy. But Mrs. Hooper had chosen to think the laughing sympathy and evident desire to please “affectation,” or patronage, and had been vexed in her silent corner to see how little her own two girls could hold their own beside Constance.

As for Lord Risborough, he had frankly found it difficult to remember Mrs. Hooper’s identity, while on the other hand he fell at once into keen discussion of some recent finds in the Greek islands with Ewen Hooper, to whom in the course of half an hour it was evident that he took a warm liking. He put up his eye-glass to look at the Hooper children; he said vaguely, “I hope that some day you and Mrs. Hooper will descend upon us in Rome;” and then he hurried his wife away with the audible remark—“We really must get to Blenheim, Ellie, in good time. You promised the Duchess—”

So ill-bred—so snobbish—to talk of your great acquaintances in public! And as for Lady Risborough’s answer—“I don’t care twopence about the Duchess, Hugh! and I haven’t seen Ewen for six years,”—it had been merely humbug, for she had obediently followed her husband, all the same.

Recollections of this kind went trickling through Mrs. Hooper’s mind, roused by Ewen’s angry defence of his sister. It was all very well, but now the long-legged child had grown up, and was going to put her—Ellen Hooper’s—daughters in the shade, to make them feel their inferiority, just as the mother had done with herself. Of course the money was welcome. Constance was to contribute three hundred a year, which was a substantial addition to an income which, when all supplemental earnings—exams, journalism, lectures—were counted, rarely reached seven hundred. But they would be “led into expenses”—the maid was evidently a most exacting woman; and meanwhile, Alice, who was just out, and was really quite a pretty girl, would be entirely put in the background by this young woman with her forward manner, and her title, and the way she had as though the world belonged to her. Mrs. Hooper felt no kinship with her whatever. She was Ewen’s blood—not hers; and the mother’s jealous nature was all up in arms for her own brood—especially for Alice. Nora could look after herself, and invariably did. Besides Nora was so tiresome! She was always ready to give the family case away—to give everything away, preposterously. And, apropos, Mrs. Hooper expressed her annoyance with some silly notions Nora had just expressed to her.

“I do hope, Ewen, you won’t humour and spoil Constance too much! Nora says now she’s dissatisfied with her room and wants to buy some furniture. Well, let her, I say. She has plenty of money, and we haven’t. We have given her a great deal more than we give our own daughters—”

“She pays us, my dear!”

Mrs. Hooper straightened her thin shoulders.

“Well, and you give her the advantage of your name and your reputation here. It is not as though you were a young don, a nobody. You’ve made your position. Everybody asks us to all the official things—and Connie, of course, will be asked, too.”

A smile crept round Dr. Hooper’s weak and pleasant mouth.

“Don’t flatter yourself, Ellen, that Connie will find Oxford society very amusing after Rome and the Riviera.”

“That will be her misfortune,” said Mrs. Hooper, stoutly. “Anyway, she will have all the advantages we have. We take her with us, for instance, to the Vice-Chancellor’s to-night?”

“Do we?” Dr. Hooper groaned. “By the way, can’t you let me off, Ellen? I’ve got such a heap of work to do.”

“Certainly not! People who shut themselves up never get on, Ewen. I’ve just finished mending your gown, on purpose. How you tear it as you do, I can’t think! But I was speaking of Connie. We shall take her, of course—”

“Have you asked her?”

“I told her we were all going—and to meet Lord Glaramara. She didn’t say anything.”

Dr. Hooper laughed.

“You’ll find her, I expect, a very independent young woman—”

But at that moment his daughter Nora, after a hurried and perfunctory knock, opened the study door vehemently, and put in a flushed face.

“Father, I want to speak to you!”

“Come in, my dear child. But I can’t spare more than five minutes.”

And the Reader glanced despairingly at a clock, the hands of which were pointing to half past ten a.m. How it was that, after an eight o’clock breakfast, it always took so long for a man to settle himself to his work he really could not explain. Not that his conscience did not sometimes suggest the answer, pointing to a certain slackness and softness in himself—the primal shrinking from work, the primal instinct to sit and dream—that had every day to be met and conquered afresh, before the student actually found himself in his chair, or lecturing from his desk with all his brains alert. Anyway, the Reader, when there was no college or university engagement to pin him down, would stand often—“spilling the morning in recreation”; in other words, gossiping with his wife and children, or loitering over the newspapers, till the inner monitor turned upon him. Then he would work furiously for hours; and the work when done was good. For there would be in it a kind of passion, a warmth born of the very effort and friction of the will which had been necessary to get it done at all.

Nora, however, had not come in to gossip. She was in a white heat.

“Father!—we ought not to let Connie furnish her own rooms!”

“But, my dear, who thinks of her doing any such thing? What do you mean?” And Dr. Hooper took his pipe out of his mouth, and stood protesting.

“She’s gone out, she and Annette. They slipped out just now when mother came in to you; and I’m certain they’ve gone to B’s”—the excited girl named a well-known Oxford furniture shop—“to buy all sorts of things.”

“Well, after all, it’s my house!” said the Reader, smiling. “Connie will have to ask my leave first.”

“Oh, she’ll persuade you!” cried Nora, standing before her father with her hands behind her. “She’ll make us all do what she wants. She’ll be like a cuckoo in the nest. She’ll be too strong for us.”

Ewen Hooper put out a soothing hand, and patted his youngest daughter on the shoulder.

“Wait a bit, my dear. And when Connie comes back just ask her to step in here a moment. And now will you both please be gone—at once?—quick march!”

And taking his wife and daughter by the shoulders, he turned them both forcibly out, and sat down to make his final preparations for a lecture that afternoon on the “feminism” of Euripides.

Meanwhile Connie Bledlow and her maid were walking quickly down the Broad towards the busy Cornmarket with its shops. It was a brilliant morning—one of those east wind days when all clouds are swept from the air, and every colour of the spring burns and flashes in the sun. Every outline was clear; every new-leafed tree stood radiant in the bright air. The grey or black college walls had lost all the grimness of winter, they were there merely to bring out the blue of the sky, the yellow gold, the laburnum, the tossing white of the chestnuts. The figures, even, passing in the streets, seemed to glitter with the trees and the buildings. The white in the women’s dresses; the short black gowns and square caps of the undergraduates; the gay colours in the children’s frocks; the overhanging masses of hawthorn and lilac that here and there thrust themselves, effervescent and rebellious, through and over college walls:—everything shimmered and shone in the May sunlight. The air too was tonic and gay, a rare thing for Oxford; and Connie, refreshed by sleep, walked with such a buoyant and swinging step that her stout maid could hardly keep up with her. Many a passer-by observed her. Men on their way to lecture, with battered caps and gowns slung round their necks, threw sharp glances at the tall girl in black, with the small pale face, so delicately alive, and the dark eyes that laughed—aloof and unabashed—at all they saw.

“What boys they are!” said Constance presently, making a contemptuous lip. “They ought to be still in the nursery.”

“What—the young men in the caps, my lady?”

“Those are the undergraduates, Annette—the boys who live in the colleges.”

“They don’t stare like the Italian young gentlemen,” said Annette, shrugging her shoulders. “Many a time I wanted to box their ears for the way they looked at you in the street.”

Connie laughed. “I liked it! They were better-looking than these boys. Annette, do you remember that day two years ago when I took you to that riding competition—what did they call it?—that gymkhana—in the Villa Borghese—and we saw all those young officers and their horses? What glorious fellows they were, most of them! and how they rode!”

Her cheek flushed to the recollection. For a moment the Oxford street passed out of sight. She saw the grassy slopes, the stone pines, the white walls, the classic stadium of the Villa Borghese, with the hot June sun stabbing the open spaces, and the deep shadows under the ilexes; and in front of the picture, the crowd of jostling horses, with their riders, bearing the historic names of Rome—Colonnas, Orsinis, Gaetanis, Odescalchis, and the rest. A young and splendid brood, all arrogant life and gaiety, as high-mettled as their English and Irish horses. And in front a tall, long-limbed cavalry officer in the Queen’s household, bowing to Constance Bledlow, as he comes back, breathless and radiant from the race he has just won, his hand tight upon the reins, his athlete’s body swaying to each motion of his horse, his black eyes laughing into hers. Why, she had imagined herself in love with him for a whole week!

Then, suddenly, she perceived that in her absence of mind she was running straight into a trio of undergraduates who were hurriedly stepping off the path to avoid her. They looked at her, and she at them. They seemed to her all undersized, plain and sallow. They carried books, and two wore glasses. “Those are what he used to call ‘smugs’!” she thought contemptuously, her imagination still full of the laughing Italian youths on their glistening horses. And, she began to make disparaging remarks about English young men to Annette. If this intermittent stream of youths represented them, the English gioventù was not much to boast of.

Next a furniture shop appeared, with wide windows, and a tempting array of wares, and in they went. Constance had soon bought a wardrobe and a cheval-glass for herself, an armchair, a carpet, and a smaller wardrobe for Annette, and seeing a few trifles, like a French screen, a small sofa, and an inlaid writing-table in her path, she threw them in. Then it occurred to her that Uncle Ewen might have something to say to these transactions, and she hastily told the shopman not to send the things to Medburn House till she gave the order.

Out they went, this time into the crowded Cornmarket, where there were no colleges, and where the town that was famous long before the University began, seemed to be living its own vigorous life, untrammelled by the men in gowns. Only in seeming, however, for in truth every single shop in the street depended upon the University.

They walked on into the town, looking into various colleges, sitting in Broad Walk, and loitering over shops, till one o’clock struck from Oxford’s many towers.

“Heavens!” said Constance—“and lunch is at 1.15!”

They turned and walked rapidly along the “Corn,” which was once more full of men hurrying back to their own colleges from the lecture rooms of Balliol and St. John’s. Now, it seemed to Constance that the men they passed were of a finer race. She noticed plenty of tall fellows, with broad shoulders, and the look of keen-bitten health.

“Look at that pair coming!” she said to Annette. “That’s better!”

The next moment, she stopped, confused, eyes wide, lips parted. For the taller of the two had taken off his cap, and stood towering and smiling in her path. A young man, of about six foot three, magnificently made, thin with the leanness of an athlete in training,—health, power, self-confidence, breathing from his joyous looks and movements—was surveying her. His lifted cap showed a fine head covered with thick brown curls. The face was long, yet not narrow; the cheek-bones rather high, the chin conspicuous. The eyes—very dark and heavily lidded—were set forward under strongly marked eyebrows; and both they, the straight nose with its close nostrils, and the red mouth, seemed to be drawn in firm yet subtle strokes on the sunburnt skin, as certain Dutch and Italian painters define the features of their sitters in a containing outline as delicate as it is unfaltering. The aspect of this striking person was that of a young king of men, careless, audacious, good-humoured; and Constance Bledlow’s expression, as she held out her hand to him, betrayed, much against her will, that she was not indifferent to the sight of him.

“Well met, indeed!” said the young man, the gaiety in his look, a gaiety full of meaning, measuring itself against the momentary confusion in hers. “I have been hoping to hear of you—for a long time!—Lady Constance. Are you with the—the Hoopers—is it?”

“I am staying with my uncle and aunt. I only arrived yesterday.” The girl’s manner had become, in a few seconds, little less than repellent.

“Well, Oxford’s lively. You’ll find lots going on. The Eights begin the day after to-morrow, and I’ve got my people coming up. I hope you’ll let Mrs. Hooper bring you to tea to meet them? Oh, by the way, do you know Meyrick? I think you must have met him.” He turned to his companion, a fair-haired giant, evidently his junior. “Lord Meyrick—Lady Constance Bledlow. Will you come, Lady Connie?”

“I don’t know what my aunt’s engagements are,” said Constance stiffly.

The trio had withdrawn into the shade of a wide doorway belonging to an old Oxford inn. Annette was looking at the windows of the milliner’s shop next door.

“My mother shall do everything that is polite—everything in the world! And when may I come to call? You have no faith in my manners, I know!” laughed the young man. “How you did sit upon me at Cannes!” And again his brilliant eyes, fixed upon her, seemed to be saying all sorts of unspoken things.

“How has he been behaving lately?” said Constance drily, turning to Lord Meyrick, who stood grinning.

“Just as usual! He’s generally mad. Don’t depend on him for anything. But I hope you’ll let me do anything I can for you! I should be only too happy.”

The girl perceived the eager admiration with which the young fellow was regarding her, and her face relaxed.

“Thank you very much. Of course I know all about Mr. Falloden! At Cannes, we made a league to keep him in order.”

Falloden protested vehemently that he had been a persecuted victim at Cannes; the butt of Lady Connie and all her friends.

Constance, however, cut the speech short by a careless nod and good-bye, beckoned to Annette and was moving away, when he placed himself before her.

“But I hope we shall meet this very night—shan’t we?—at the Vice-Chancellor’s party?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, but of course you will be there! The Hoopers are quite sure to bring you. It’s at St. Hubert’s. Some old swell is coming down. The gardens are terribly romantic—and there’ll be a moon. One can get away from all the stuffy people. Do come!”

He gave her a daring look.

“Good-bye,” said Constance again, with a slight decided gesture, which made him move out of her way.

In a few moments, she and her maid were lost to sight on the crowded pavement.

Falloden threw back his head and laughed, as he and Lord Meyrick pursued the opposite direction. But he said nothing. Meyrick, his junior by two years, who was now his most intimate friend in the Varsity, ventured at last on the remark—

“Very good-looking! But she was certainly not very civil to you, Duggy!”

Falloden flushed hotly.

“You think she dislikes me? I’ll bet you anything you please she’ll be at the party to-night.”

Constance and her maid hurried home along the Broad. The girl perceived little or nothing on the way; but her face was crossed by a multitude of expressions, which meant a very active brain. Perhaps sarcasm or scorn prevailed, yet mingled sometimes with distress or perplexity.

The sight of the low gabled front of Medburn. House recalled her thoughts. She remembered her purchases and Nora’s disapproving eyes. It would be better to go and beard her uncle at once. But just as she approached the house, she became aware of a slenderly built man in flannels coming out of the gates of St. Cyprian’s, the college of which the gate and outer court stood next door to the Hoopers.

He saw her, stopped with a start of pleasure, and came eagerly towards her.

“Lady Constance! Where have you sprung from? Oh, I know—you are with the Hoopers! Have you been here long?”

They shook hands, and Constance obediently answered the newcomer’s questions. She seemed indeed to like answering them, and nothing could have been more courteous and kind than his manner of asking them. He was clearly a senior man, a don, who, after a strenuous morning of lecturing, was hurrying—in the festal Eights week—to meet some friends on the river. His face was one of singular charm, the features regular, the skin a pale olive, the hair and eyes intensely black. Whereas Falloden’s features seemed to lie, so to speak, on the surface, the mouth and eyes scarcely disturbing the general level of the face mask—no indentation in the chin, and no perceptible hollow tinder the brow,—this man’s eyes were deeply sunk, and every outline of the face—cheeks, chin and temples—chiselled and fined away into an almost classical perfection. The man’s aspect indeed was Greek, and ought only to have expressed the Greek blitheness, the Greek joy in life. But, in truth, it was a very modern and complex soul that breathed from both face and form.

Constance had addressed him as “Mr. Sorell.” He turned to walk with her to her door, talking eagerly. He was asking her about various friends in whose company they had last met—apparently at Rome; and he made various references to “your mother,” which Constance accepted gently, as though they pleased her.

They paused at the Hoopers’ door.

“But when can I see you?” he asked. “Has Mrs. Hooper a day at home? Will you come to lunch with me soon? I should like to show you my rooms. I have some of those nice things we bought at Syracuse—your father and I—do you remember? And I have a jolly look out over the garden. When will you come?”

“When you like. But chaperons seem to be necessary!”

“Oh, I can provide one—any number! Some of the wives of our married fellows are great friends of mine. I should like you to know them. But wouldn’t Mrs. Hooper bring you?”

“Will you write to her?”

He looked a little confused.

“Of course I know your uncle very well. He and I work together in many things. May I come and call?”

“Of course you may!” She laughed again, with that wilful sound in the laugh which he remembered. He wondered how she was going to get on at the Hoopers. Mrs. Hooper’s idiosyncrasies were very generally known. He himself had always given both Mrs. Hooper and her eldest daughter a wide berth in the social gatherings of Oxford. He frankly thought Mrs. Hooper odious, and had long since classed Miss Alice as a stupid little thing with a mild talent for flirtation.

Then, as he held out his hand to say good-bye, he suddenly remembered the Vice-Chancellor’s party.

“By the way, there’s a big function to-night. You’re going, of course? Oh, yes—make them take you! I hadn’t meant to go—but now I shall—on the chance!”

He grasped her hand, holding it a little. Then he was gone, and the Hoopers’ front door swung suddenly wide, opened by some one invisible.

Connie, a little flushed and excited, stepped into the hall, and there perceived Mrs. Hooper behind the door.

“You are rather late, Constance,” said that lady coldly. “But, of course, it doesn’t matter. The servants are at their dinner still, so I opened the door. So you know Mr. Sorell?”

From which Constance perceived that her aunt had observed her approach to the house, in Mr. Sorell’s company, through the little side window of the hall. She straightened her shoulders impatiently.

“My father and mother knew him in Rome, Aunt Ellen. He used to come to our apartment. Is Uncle Ewen in the study? I want to speak to him.”

She knocked and went in. Standing with her back to the door she said abruptly—

“I hope you won’t mind, Uncle Ewen, but I’ve been buying a few things we want, for my room and Annette’s. When I go, of course they can be turned out. But may I tell the shop now to send them in?”

The Reader turned in some embarrassment, his spectacles on his nose.

“My dear girl, anything to make you comfortable! But I wish you had consulted me. Of course, we would have got anything you really wanted.”

“Oh, that would have been dreadfully unfair!” laughed Constance. “It’s my fault, you see. I’ve got far too many dresses. One seemed not to be able to do without them at Cannes.”

“Well, you won’t want so many here,” said Dr. Ewen cheerfully, as he rose from his table crowded with books. “We’re all pretty simple at Oxford. We ought to be of course—even our guests. It’s a place of training.” He dropped a Greek word absently, putting away his papers the while, and thinking of the subject with which he had just been busy. Constance opened the door again to make her escape, but the sound recalled Dr. Ewen’s thoughts.

“My dear—has your aunt asked you? We hope you’ll come with us to the Vice-Chancellor’s party to-night. I think it would interest you. After all, Oxford’s not like other places. I think you said last night you knew some undergraduates—”

“I know Mr. Falloden of Marmion,” said Constance, “and Mr. Sorell.”

The Reader’s countenance broke into smiles.

“Sorell? The dearest fellow in the world! He and I help each other a good deal, though of course we differ—and fight—sometimes. But that’s the salt of life. Yes, I remember, your mother used to mention Sorell in her letters. Well, with those two and ourselves, you’ll have plenty of starting-points. Ah, luncheon!” For the bell rang, and sent Constance hurrying upstairs to take off her things.

As she washed her hands, her thoughts were very busy with the incidents of her morning’s walk. The colours had suddenly freshened in the Oxford world. No doubt she had expected them to freshen; but hardly so soon. A tide of life welled up in her—a tide of pleasure. And as she stood a moment beside the open window of her room before going down, looking at the old Oxford garden just beneath her, and the stately college front beyond, Oxford itself began to capture her, touching her magically, insensibly, as it had touched the countless generations before her. She was the child of two scholars, and she had been brought up in a society both learned and cosmopolitan, traversed by all the main currents and personalities of European politics, but passionate all the same for the latest find in the Forum, the newest guesses in criticism, for any fresh light that the present could shed upon the past. And when she looked back upon the moments of those Roman years which had made the sharpest mark upon her, she saw three figures stand out—her gracious and graceful mother; her father, student and aristocrat, so eagerly occupied with life that he had scarcely found the time to die; and Mr. Sorell, her mother’s friend, and then her own. Together—all four—they had gone to visit the Etruscan tombs about Viterbo, they had explored Norba and Ninfa, and had spent a marvellous month at Syracuse.

“And I have never seen him since papa’s death!—and I have only heard from him twice. I wonder why?” She pondered it resentfully. And yet what cause of offence had she? At Cannes, had she thought much about him? In that scene, so troubled and feverish, compared with the old Roman days, there had been for her, as she well knew, quite another dominating figure.

“Just the same!” she thought angrily. “Just as domineering—and provoking. Boggling about Uncle Ewen’s name, as if it was not worth his remembering! I shall compel him to be civil to my relations, just because it will annoy him so much.”

At lunch Constance declared prettily that she would be delighted to go to the Vice-Chancellor’s party. Nora sat silent through the meal.

After lunch, Connie went to talk to her aunt about the incoming furniture. Mrs. Hooper made no difficulties at all. The house had long wanted these additions, only there had been no money to buy them with. Now Mrs. Hooper felt secretly certain that Constance, when she left them, would not want to take the things with her, so that she looked on Connie’s purchases of the morning as her own prospective property.

A furniture van appeared early in the afternoon with the things. Nora hovered about the hall, severely dumb, while they were being carried upstairs. Annette gave all the directions.

But when later on Connie was sitting at her new writing-table contemplating her transformed room with a childish satisfaction, Nora knocked and came in.

She walked up to Connie, and stood looking down upon her. She was very red, and her eyes sparkled.

“I want to tell you that I am disappointed in you—dreadfully disappointed in you!” said the girl fiercely.

“What do you mean!” Constance rose in amazement.

“Why didn’t you insist on my father’s buying these things? You ought to have insisted. You pay us a large sum, and you had a right. Instead, you have humiliated us—because you are rich, and we are poor! It was mean—and purse-proud.”

“How dare you say such things?” cried Connie. “You mustn’t come into my room at all, if you are going to behave like this. You know very well I didn’t do it unkindly. It is you who are unkind! But of course it doesn’t matter. You don’t understand. You are only a child!” Her voice shook.

“I am not a child!” said Nora indignantly. “And I believe I know a great deal more about money than you do—because you have never been poor. I have to keep all the accounts here, and make mother and Alice pay their debts. Father, of course, is always too busy to think of such things. Your money is dreadfully useful to us. I wish it wasn’t. But I wanted to do what was honest—if you had only given me time. Then you slipped out and did it!”

Constance stared in bewilderment.

“Are you the mistress in this house?” she said.

Nora nodded. Her colour had all faded away, and her breath was coming quick. “I practically am,” she said stoutly.

“At seventeen?” asked Connie, ironically.

Nora nodded again.

Connie turned away, and walked to the window. She was enraged with Nora, whose attack upon her seemed quite inexplicable and incredible. Then, all in a moment, a bitter forlornness overcame her. Nora, standing by the table, and already pierced with remorse, saw her cousin’s large eyes fill with tears. Connie sat down with her face averted. But Nora—trembling all over—perceived that she was crying. The next moment, the newcomer found Nora kneeling beside her, in the depths of humiliation and repentance.

“I am a beast!—a horrid beast! I always am. Oh, please, please don’t cry!”

“You forget”—said Connie, with difficulty—“how I—how I miss my mother!”

And she broke into a fit of weeping. Nora, beside herself with self-disgust, held her cousin embraced, and tried to comfort her. And presently, after an agitated half-hour, each girl seemed to herself to have found a friend. Reserve had broken; they had poured out confidences to each other; and after the thunder and the shower came the rainbow of peace.

Before Nora departed, she looked respectfully at the beautiful dress of white satin, draped with black, which Annette had laid out upon the bed in readiness for the Vice-Chancellor’s party.

“It will suit you perfectly!” she said, still eager to make up. Then—eyeing Constance—

“You know, of course, that you are good-looking?”

“I am not hideous—I know that,” said Constance, laughing. “You odd girl!”

“We have heard often how you were admired in Rome. I wonder—don’t be offended!”—said Nora, bluntly—“have you ever been in love?”

“Never!” The reply was passionately prompt.

Nora looked thoughtful.

“Perhaps you don’t know whether you were or not. Girls get so dreadfully mixed up. But I am sure people—men—have been in love with you.”

“Well, of course!” said Connie, with the same emphatic gaiety.

Nora opened her eyes.

“‘Of course?’ But I know heaps of girls with whom nobody has ever been in love!”

As soon as she was alone, Connie locked her door, and walked restlessly up and down her room, till by sheer movement she had tamed a certain wild spirit within her let loose by Nora’s question. And as she walked, the grey Oxford walls, the Oxford lilacs and laburnums, vanished from perception. She was in another scene. Hot sun—gleaming orange-gardens and blue sea—bare-footed, black-eyed children—and a man beside her, on whom she has been showering epithets that would have shamed—surely!—any other human being in the world. Tears of excitement are in her eyes; in his a laughing triumph mixed with astonishment.

“But, now—” she thinks, drawing herself up, erect and tense, her hands behind her head; “now, I am ready for him. Let him try such ways again—if he dare!”

CHAPTER III

The party given at St. Hubert’s on this evening in the Eights week was given in honour of a famous guest—the Lord Chancellor of the day, one of the strongest members of a strong Government, of whom St. Hubert’s, which had nurtured him through his four academic years, was quite inordinately proud. It was very seldom that their great nursling was able or willing to revisit the old nest. But the head of the college, who had been in the same class-list and rowed in the same boat with the politician, was now Vice-Chancellor of the University; and the greater luminary had come to shine upon the lesser, by way of heightening the dignity of both. For the man who has outsoared his fellows likes to remind himself by contrast of his callow days, before the hungry and fighting impulses had driven him down—a young eaglet—upon the sheepfolds of law and politics; while to the majority of mankind, even to-day, hero-worship, when it is not too exacting, is agreeable.

So all Oxford had been bidden. The great hall of St. Hubert’s, with its stately portraits and its emblazoned roof, had been adorned with flowers and royally lit up. From the hills round Oxford the “line of festal light” made by its Tudor windows, in which gleamed the escutcheons of three centuries, could have been plainly seen. The High Street was full of carriages, and on the immaculate grass of the great quadrangle, groups of the guests, the men in academic costume, the women in the airiest and gayest of summer dresses, stood to watch the arrivals. The evening was clear and balmy; moonrise and dying day disputed the sky; and against its pale blue still scratched over with pale pink shreds and wisps of cloud, the grey college walls, battlemented and flecked with black, rose warmed and transfigured by that infused and golden summer in which all, Oxford lay bathed. Through open gateways there were visions of green gardens, girdled with lilacs and chestnuts; and above the quadrangle towered the crocketed spire of St. Mary’s, ethereally wrought, it seemed, in ebony and silver, the broad May moon behind it. Within the hall, the guests were gathering fast. The dais of the high table was lit by the famous candelabra bequeathed to the college under Queen Anne; a piano stood ready, and a space had been left for the college choir who were to entertain the party. In front of the dais in academic dress stood the Vice-Chancellor, a thin, silver-haired man, with a determined mouth, such as befitted the champion of a hundred orthodoxies; and beside him his widowed sister, a nervous and rather featureless lady who was helping him to receive. The guest of the evening had not yet appeared.

Mr. Sorell, in a master’s gown, stood talking with a man, also in a master’s gown, but much older than himself, a man with a singular head—both flat and wide—scanty reddish hair, touched with grey, a massive forehead, pale blue eyes, and a long pointed chin. Among the bright colours of so many of the gowns around him—the yellow and red of the doctors of law, the red and black of the divines, the red and white of the musicians—this man’s plain black was conspicuous. Every one who knew Oxford knew why this eminent scholar and theologian had never become a doctor of divinity. The University imposes one of her few remaining tests on her D.D’s; Mr. Wenlock, Master of Beaumont, had never been willing to satisfy it, so he remained undoctored. When he preached the University sermon he preached in the black gown; while every ambitious cleric who could put a thesis together could flaunt his red and black in the Vice-Chancellor’s procession on Sundays in the University church. The face was one of mingled irony and melancholy, and there came from it sometimes the strangest cackling laugh.

“Well, you must show me this phoenix,” he was saying in a nasal voice to Sorell, who had been talking eagerly. “Young women of the right sort are rare just now.”

“What do you call the right sort, Master?”

“Oh, my judgment doesn’t count. I only ask to be entertained.”

“Well, talk to her of Rome, and see if you are not pleased.”

The Master shrugged his shoulders.

“They can all do it—the clever sort. They know too much about the Forum. They make me wish sometimes that Lanciani had never been born.”

Sorell laughed.

“This girl is not a pedant.”

“I take your word. And of course I remember her father. No pedantry there. And all the scholarship that could be possibly expected from an earl. Ah, is this she?”

For in the now crowded hall, filled with the chatter of many voices, a group was making its way from the doorway, on one member of which many curious eyes had been already turned. In front came Mrs. Hooper, spectacled, her small nose in air, the corners of her mouth sharply drawn down. Then Dr. Ewen, grey-haired, tall and stooping; then Alice, pretty, self-conscious, provincial, and spoilt by what seemed an inherited poke; and finally a slim and stately young person in white satin, who carried her head and her long throat with a remarkable freedom and self-confidence. The head was finely shaped, and the eyes brilliant; but in the rest of the face the features were so delicate, the mouth, especially, so small and subtle, as to give a first impression of insignificance. The girl seemed all eyes and neck, and the coils of brown hair wreathed round the head were disproportionately rich and heavy. The Master observing her said to himself—“No beauty!” Then she smiled—at Sorell apparently, who was making his way towards her—and the onlooker hurriedly suspended judgment. He noticed also that no one who looked at her could help looking again; and that the nervous expression natural to a young girl, who realises that she is admired but that policy and manners forbid her to show any pleasure in the fact, was entirely absent.

“She is so used to all her advantages that she forgets them,” thought the Master, adding with an inward smile—“but if we forgot them—perhaps that would be another matter! Yes—she is like her mother—but taller.”

For on that day ten years earlier, when Ella Risborough had taken Oxford by storm, she and Lord Risborough had found time to look in on the Master for twenty minutes, he and Lord Risborough having been frequent correspondents on matters of scholarship for some years. And Lady Risborough had chattered and smiled her way through the Master’s lonely house—he had only just been appointed head of his college and was then unmarried—leaving a deep impression.

“I must make friends with her,” he thought, following Ella Risborough’s daughter with his eyes. “There are some gaps to fill up.”

He meant in the circle of his girl protégées. For the Master had a curious history, well known in Oxford. He had married a cousin of his own, much younger than himself; and after five years they had separated, for reasons undeclared. She was now dead, and in his troubled blue eyes there were buried secrets no one would ever know. But under what appeared to a stranger to be a harsh, pedantic exterior the Master carried a very soft heart and an invincible liking for the society of young women. Oxford about this time was steadily filling with girl students, who were then a new feature in its life. The Master was a kind of queer patron saint among them, and to a chosen three or four, an intimate mentor and lasting friend. His sixty odd years, and the streaks of grey in his red straggling locks, his European reputation as a scholar and thinker, his old sister, and his quiet house, forbade the slightest breath of scandal in connection with these girl-friendships. Yet the girls to whom the Master devoted himself, whose essays he read, whose blunders he corrected, whose schools he watched over, and in whose subsequent love affairs he took the liveliest interest, were rarely or never plain to look upon. He chose them for their wits, but also for their faces. His men friends observed it with amusement. The little notes he wrote them, the birthday presents he sent them—generally some small worn copy of a French or Latin classic—his coveted invitations, or congratulations, were all marked by a note of gallantry, stately and old-fashioned like the furniture of his drawing-room, but quite different from anything he ever bestowed upon the men students of his college.

Of late he had lost two of his chief favourites. One, a delicious creature, with a head of auburn hair and a real talent for writing verse, had left Oxford suddenly to make a marriage so foolish that he really could not forgive her or put up with her intolerable husband; and the other, a muse, with the brow of one and the slenderest hand and foot, whom he and others were hopefully piloting towards a second class at least—possibly a first—in the Honour Classical School, had broken down in health, so that her mother and a fussy doctor had hurried her away to a rest-cure in Switzerland, and thereby slit her academic life and all her chances of fame. Both had been used to come—independently—for the Master was in his own, way far too great a social epicure to mix his pleasures—to tea on Sundays; to sit on one side of a blazing fire, while the Master sat on the other, a Persian cat playing chaperon on the rug between, and the book-lined walls of the Master’s most particular sanctum looking down upon them; while in the drawing-room beyond, Miss Wenlock, at the tea-table, sat patiently waiting till her domestic god should declare the seance over, allow her to make tea, and bring in the young and honoured guest. And now both charmers had vanished from the scene and had left no equals behind. The Master, who possessed the same sort of tact in training young women that Lord Melbourne showed in educating the girl-Queen, was left without his most engaging occupation.

Ah!—that good fellow, Sorell, was bringing her up to him.

“Master, Lady Constance would like to be introduced to you.”

The Master was immensely flattered. Why should she wish to be introduced to such an old fogey? But there she was, smiling at him.

“You knew my father. I am sure you did!”

His elderly heart was touched, his taste captured at once. Sorell had engineered it all perfectly. His description of the girl had fired the Master; and his sketch of the Master in the girl’s ear, as a kind of girlhood’s arbiter, had amused and piqued her. “Yes, do introduce me! Will he ever ask me to tea? I should be so alarmed!”

It was all settled in a few minutes. Sunday was to see her introduction to the Master’s inner circle, which met in summer, not between books and a blazing fire, but in the small college garden hidden amid the walls of Beaumont. Sorell was to bring her. The Master did not even go through the form of inviting either Mrs. Hooper or Miss Hooper. In all such matters he was a chartered libertine and did what he pleased.

Then he watched her in what seemed something of a triumphal progress through the crowded hall. He saw the looks of the girl students from the newly-organised women’s colleges—as she passed—a little askance and chill; he watched a Scotch metaphysical professor, with a fiery face set in a mass of flaming hair and beard, which had won him the nickname from his philosophical pupils of “the devil in a mist,” forcing an introduction to her; he saw the Vice-Chancellor graciously unbending, and man after man come up among the younger dons to ask Sorell to present them. She received it all with a smiling and nonchalant grace, perfectly at her ease, it seemed, and ready to say the right thing to young and old. “It’s the training they get—the young women of her sort—that does it,” thought the Master. “They are in society from their babyhood. Our poor, battered aristocracy—the Radicals have kicked away all its natural supports, and left it dans l’air; but it can still teach manners and the art to please. The undergraduates, however, seem shy of her.”

For although among the groups of men, who stood huddled together mostly at the back of the room, many eyes were turned upon the newcomer, no one among them approached her. She held her court among the seniors, as no doubt, thought the Master, she had been accustomed to do from the days of her short frocks. He envisaged the apartment in the Palazzo Barberini whereof the fame had often reached Oxford, for the Risboroughs held open house there for the English scholar and professor on his travels. He himself had not been in Rome for fifteen years, and had never made the Risboroughs’ acquaintance in Italy. But the kind of society which gathers round the English peer of old family who takes an apartment in Rome or Florence for the winter was quite familiar to him—the travelling English men and women of the same class, diplomats of all nations, high ecclesiastics, a cardinal or two, the heads of the great artistic or archæological schools, Americans, generals, senators, deputies—with just a sprinkling of young men. A girl of this girl’s age and rank would have many opportunities, of course, of meeting young men, in the free and fascinating life of the Roman spring, but primarily her business in her mother’s salon would have been to help her mother, to make herself agreeable to the older men, and to gather her education—in art, literature, and politics—as a coming woman of the world from their talk. The Master could see her smiling on a monsignore, carrying tea to a cardinal, or listening to the Garibaldian tales of some old veteran of the Risorgimento.

“It is an education—of its own kind,” he thought. “Is it worth more or less than other kinds?”

And he looked round paternally on some of the young girl students then just penetrating Oxford; fresh, pleasant faces—little positive beauty—and on many the stamp, already prematurely visible, of the anxieties of life for those who must earn a livelihood. Not much taste in dress, which was often clumsy and unbecoming; hair, either untidy, or treated as an enemy, scraped back, held in, the sole object being to take as little time over it as possible; and, in general, the note upon them all of an educated and thrifty middle-class. His feelings, his sympathies, were all with them. But the old gallant in him was stirred by the tall figure in white satin, winding its graceful way through the room and conquering as it went.

“Ah—now that fellow, Herbert Pryce, has got hold of her, of course! If ever there was a climber!—But what does Miss Hooper say?”

And retreating to a safe corner the Master watched with amusement the flattering eagerness with which Mr. Pryce, who was a fellow of his own college, was laying siege to the newcomer. Pryce was rapidly making a great name for himself as a mathematician. “And is a second-rate fellow, all the same,” thought the Master, contemptuously, being like Uncle Ewen a classic of the classics. But the face of little Alice Hooper, which he caught from time to time, watching—with a strained and furtive attention—the conversation between Pryce and her cousin, was really a tragedy; at least a tragi-comedy. Some girls are born to be supplanted!

But who was it Sorell was, introducing to her now?—to the evident annoyance of Mr. Pryce, who must needs vacate the field. A striking figure of a youth! Golden hair, of a wonderful ruddy shade, and a clear pale face; powerfully though clumsily made; and with a shy and sensitive expression.

The Master turned to enquire of a Christ Church don who had come up to speak to him.

“Who is that young man with a halo like the ‘Blessed Damosel’?”

“Talking to Lady Constance Bledlow? Oh, don’t you know? He is Sorell’s protégé, Radowitz, a young musician—and poet!—so they say. Sorell discovered him in Paris, made great friends with him, and then persuaded him to come and take the Oxford musical degree. He is at Marmion, where the dons watch over him. But they say he has been abominably ragged by the rowdy set in college—led by that man Falloden. Do you know him?”

“The fellow who got the Ireland last year?”

The other nodded.

“As clever and as objectionable as they make ’em! Ah, here comes our great man!”

For amid a general stir, the Lord Chancellor had made his entrance, and was distributing greetings, as he passed up the hall, to his academic contemporaries and friends. He was a tall, burly man, with a strong black head and black eyes under bushy brows, combined with an infantile mouth and chin, long and happily caricatured in all the comic papers. But in his D.C.L. gown he made a very fine appearance; assembled Oxford was proud of him as one of the most successful of her sons; and his progress toward the dais was almost royal.

Suddenly, his voice—a famous voix d’or, well known in the courts and in Parliament—was heard above the general buzz. It spoke in astonishment and delight.

“Lady Constance! where on earth have you sprung from? Well, this is a pleasure!”

And Oxford looked on amused while its distinguished guest shook a young lady in white by both hands, asking eagerly a score of questions, which he would hardly allow her to answer. The young lady too was evidently pleased by the meeting; her face had flushed and lit up; and the bystanders for the first time thought her not only graceful and picturesque, but positively handsome.

“Ewen!” said Mrs. Hooper angrily in her husband’s ear, “why didn’t Connie tell us she knew Lord Glaramara! She let me talk about him to her—and never said a word!—a single word!”

Ewen Hooper shrugged his shoulders.

“I’m sure I don’t know, my dear.”

Mrs. Hooper turned to her daughter who had been standing silent and neglected beside her, suffering, as her mother well knew, torments of wounded pride and feeling. For although Herbert Pryce had been long since dismissed by Connie, he had not yet returned to the side of the eldest Miss Hooper.

“I don’t like such ways,” said Mrs. Hooper, with sparkling eyes. “It was ill-bred and underhanded of Connie not to tell us at once—I shall certainly speak to her about it!”

“It makes us look such fools,” said Alice, her mouth pursed and set. “I told Mr. Pryce that Connie knew no one to-night, except Mr. Sorell and Mr. Falloden.”

The hall grew more crowded; the talk more furious. Lord Glaramara insisted, with the wilfulness of the man who can do as he pleases, that Constance Bledlow—whoever else came and went—should stay beside him.

“You can’t think what I owed to her dear people in Rome three years ago!” he said to the Vice-Chancellor. “I adored her mother! And Constance is a charming child. She and I made great friends. Has she come to live in Oxford for a time? Lucky Oxford! What—with the Hoopers? Don’t know ’em. I shall introduce her to some of my particular allies.”

Which he did in profusion, so that Constance found herself bewildered by a constant stream of new acquaintances—fellows, professors, heads of colleges—of various ages and types, who looked at her with amused and kindly eyes, talked to her for a few pleasant minutes and departed, quite conscious that they had added a pebble to the girl’s pile and delighted to do it.

“It is your cousin, not the Lord Chancellor, who is the guest of the evening!” laughed Herbert Pryce, who had made his way back at last to Alice Hooper. “I never saw such a success!”

Alice tossed her head in a petulant silence; and a madrigal by the college choir checked any further remarks from Mr. Pryce. After the madrigal came a general move for refreshments, which were set out in the college library and in the garden. The Lord Chancellor must needs offer his arm to his host’s sister, and lead the way. The Warden followed, with the wife of the Dean of Christ Church, and the hall began to thin. Lord Glaramara looked back, smiling and beckoning to Constance, as though to say—“Don’t altogether desert me!”

But a voice—a tall figure—interposed—

“Lady Constance, let me take you into the garden? It’s much nicer than upstairs.”

A slight shiver ran, unseen, through the girl’s frame. She wished to say no; she tried to say no. And instead she looked up—haughty, but acquiescent.

“Very well.”

And she followed Douglas Falloden through the panelled passage outside the hall leading to the garden. Sorell, who had hurried up to find her, arrived in time to see her disappearing through the lights and shadows of the moonlit lawn.

“We can do this sort of thing pretty well, can’t we? It’s banal because it happens every year, and because it’s all mixed up with salmon mayonnaise, and cider-cup—and it isn’t banal, because it’s Oxford!”

Constance sat in the shadow of a plane-tree with Falloden at her feet

Constance was sitting under the light shadow of a plane-tree, not yet fully out; Falloden was stretched on the grass at her feet. Before her ran a vast lawn which had taken generations to make; and all round it, masses of flowering trees, chestnuts, lilacs, laburnums, now advancing, now receding, made inlets or promontories of the grass, turned into silver by the moonlight. At the furthest edge, through the pushing pyramids of chestnut blossom and the dim drooping gold of the laburnums, could be seen the bastions and battlements of the old city wall, once a fighting reality, now tamed into the mere ornament and appendage of this quiet garden. Over the trees and over the walls rose the spires and towers of a wondrous city; while on the grass, or through the winding paths disappearing into bosky distances, flickered white dresses, and the slender forms of young men and maidens. A murmur of voices rose and fell on the warm night air; the sound of singing—the thin sweetness of boyish notes—came from the hall, whose decorated windows, brightly lit, shone out over the garden.

“It’s Oxford—and it’s Brahms,” said Constance. “I seem to have known it all before in music: the trees—the lawn—the figures—appearing and disappearing—the distant singing—”

She spoke in a low, dreamy tone, her chin propped on her hand. Nothing could have been, apparently, quieter or more self-governed than her attitude. But her inner mind was full of tumult; resentful memory; uneasy joy; and a tremulous fear, both of herself and of the man at her feet. And the man knew it, or guessed it. He dragged himself a little nearer to her on the grass.

“Why didn’t you tell me when you were coming?”

The tone was light and laughing.

“I owe you no account of my actions,” said the girl quickly.

“We agreed to be friends.”

“No! We are not friends.” She spoke with suppressed violence, and breaking a twig from the tree overshadowing her, she threw it from her, as though the action were a relief.

He sat up, looking up into her face, his hands clasped round his knees.

“That means you haven’t forgiven me?”

“It means that I judge and despise you,” she said passionately; “and that it was not an attraction to me to find you here—quite the reverse!”

“Yet here you are—sitting with me in this garden—and you are looking delicious! That dress becomes you so—you are so graceful—so exquisitely graceful. And you never found a more perfect setting than this place—these lawns and trees—and the old college walls. Oxford was waiting for you, and you for Oxford. Are you laughing at me?”

“Naturally!”

“I could rave on by the hour if you would listen to me.”

“We have both something better to do—thank goodness! May I ask if you are doing any work?”

He laughed.

“Ten hours a day. This is my first evening out since March. I came to meet you.”

Constance bowed ironically. Then for the first time, since their conversation began, it might have been seen that she had annoyed him.

“Friends are not allowed to doubt each other’s statements!” he said with animation. “You see I still persist that you allowed me that name, when—you refused me a better. As to my work, ask any of my friends. Talk to Meyrick. He is a dear boy, and will tell you anything you like. He and I ‘dig’ together in Beaumont Street. My schools are now only three weeks off. I work four hours in the morning. Then I play till six—and get in another six hours between then and 1 a.m.”

“Wonderful!” said Constance coolly. “Your ways at Cannes were different. It’s a mercy there’s no Monte Carlo within reach.”

“I play when I play, and work when I work!” he said with emphasis. “The only thing to hate and shun always—is moderation.”

“And yet you call yourself a classic! Well, you seem to be sure of your First. At least Uncle Ewen says so.”

“Ewen Hooper? He is a splendid fellow—a real Hellenist. He and I get on capitally. About your aunt—I am not so sure.”

“Nobody obliges you to know her,” was the tranquil reply.

“Ah!—but if she has the keeping of you! Are you coming to tea with me and my people? I have got a man in college to lend me his rooms. My mother and sister will be up for two nights. Very inconsiderate of them—with my schools coming on—but they would do it. Thursday?—before the Eights? Won’t my mother be chaperon enough?”

“Certainly. But it only puts off the evil day.”

“When I must grovel to Mrs. Hooper?—if I am to see anything of you? Splendid! You are trying to discipline me again—as you did at Cannes!”

In the semidarkness she could see the amusement in his eyes. Her own feeling, in its mingled weakness and antagonism, was that of the feebler wrestler just holding his ground, and fearing every moment to be worsted by some unexpected trick of the game. She gave no signs of it, however.

“I tried, and I succeeded!” she said, as she rose. “You found out that rudeness to my friends didn’t answer! Shall we go and get some lemonade? Wasn’t that why you brought me here? I think I see the tent.”

They walked on together. She seemed to see—exultantly—that she had both angered and excited him.

“I am never rude,” he declared. “I am only honest! Only nobody, in this mealy-mouthed world, allows you to be honest; to say and do exactly what represents you. But I shall not be rude to anybody under your wing. Promise me to come to tea, and I will appear to call on your aunt and behave like any sucking dove.”

Constance considered it.

“Lady Laura must write to Aunt Ellen.”

“Of course. Any other commands?”

“Not at present.”

“Then let me offer some humble counsels in return. I beg you not to make friends with that red-haired poseur I saw you talking to in the hall.”

“Mr. Radowitz!—the musician? I thought him delightful! He is coming to play to me to-morrow.”

“Ah, I thought so!” said Falloden wrathfully. “He is an impossible person. He wears a frilled shirt, scents himself, and recites his own poems when he hasn’t been asked. And he curries favour—abominably—with the dons. He is a smug—of the first water. There is a movement going on in college to suppress him. I warn you I may not be able to keep out of it.”

“He is an artist!” cried Constance. “You have only to look at him, to talk to him, to see it. And artists are always persecuted by stupid people. But you are not stupid!”

“Yes, I am, where poseurs are concerned,” said Falloden coldly. “I prefer to be. Never mind. We won’t excite ourselves. He is not worth it. Perhaps he’ll improve—in time. But there is another man I warn you against—Mr. Herbert Pryce.”

“A great friend of my cousins’,” said Constance mockingly.

“I know. He is always flirting with the eldest girl. It is a shame; for he will never marry her. He wants money and position, and he is so clever he will get them. He is not a gentleman, and he rarely tells the truth. But he is sure to make up to you. I thought I had better tell you beforehand.”

“My best thanks! You breathe charity!”

“No—only prudence. And after my schools I throw my books to the dogs, and I shall have a fortnight more of term with nothing to do except—are you going to ride?” he asked her abruptly. “You said at Cannes that you meant to ride when you came to Oxford.”

“My aunt doesn’t approve.”

“As if that would stop you! I can tell you where you can get a horse—a mare that would just suit you. I know all the stables in Oxford. Wait till we meet on Thursday. Would you care to ride in Lathom Woods? (He named a famous estate near Oxford.) I have a permit, and could get you one. They are relations of mine.”

Constance excused herself, but scarcely with decision. Her plans, she said, must depend upon her cousins. Falloden smiled and dropped the subject for the moment. Then, as they moved on together through the sinuous ways of the garden, flooded with the scent of hawthorns and lilacs, towards the open tent crowded with folk at the farther end, there leapt in both the same intoxicating sense of youth and strength, the same foreboding of passion, half restlessness, and half enchantment....

“I looked for you everywhere,” said Sorell, as he made his way to Constance through the crowd of departing guests in the college gateway. “Where did you hide yourself? The Lord Chancellor was sad not to say good-bye to you.”

Constance summoned an answering tone of regret.

“How good of him! I was only exploring the garden—with Mr. Falloden.”

At the name, there was a quick and stiffening change in Sorell’s face.

“You knew him before? Yes—he told me. A queer fellow—very able. They say he’ll get his First. Well—we shall meet at the Eights and then we’ll make plans. Goodnight.”

He smiled on her, and went his way, ruminating uncomfortably as he walked back to his college along the empty midnight streets. Falloden? It was to be hoped there was nothing in that! How Ella Risborough would have detested the type! But there was much that was not her mother in the daughter. He vowed to himself that he would do his small best to watch over Ella Risborough’s child.

There was little or no conversation in the four-wheeler that bore the Hooper party home. Mrs. Hooper and Alice were stiffly silent, while the Reader chaffed Constance a little about her successes of the evening. But he, too, was sleepy and tired, and the talk dropped. As they lighted their bedroom candles in the hall, Mrs. Hooper said to her niece, in her thin, high tone, mincing and coldly polite:

“I think it would have been better, Constance, if you had told us you knew Lord Glaramara. I don’t wish to find fault, but such—such concealments—are really very awkward!”

Constance opened her eyes. She could have defended herself easily. She had no idea that her aunt was unaware of the old friendship between her parents and Lord Glaramara, who was no more interesting to her personally than many others of their Roman habitués, of whom the world was full. But she was too preoccupied to spend any but the shortest words on such a silly thing.

“I’m sorry, Aunt Ellen. I really didn’t understand.”

And she went up to bed, thinking only of Falloden; while Alice followed her, her small face pinched and weary, her girlish mind full of pain.

CHAPTER IV

On the day after the Vice-Chancellor’s party, Falloden, after a somewhat slack morning’s work, lunched in college with Meyrick. After hall, the quadrangle was filled with strolling men, hatless and smoking, discussing the chances of the Eights, the last debate at the Union, and the prospects of individual men in the schools.

Presently the sound of a piano was heard from the open windows of a room on the first floor.

“Great Scott!” said Falloden irritably to Meyrick, with whom he was walking arm in arm, “what a noise that fellow Radowitz makes! Why should we have to listen to him? He behaves as though the whole college belonged to him. We can’t hear ourselves speak.”

“Treat him like a barrel-organ and remove him!” said Meyrick, laughing. He was a light-hearted, easy-going youth, a “fresher” in his first summer term, devoted to Falloden, whose physical and intellectual powers seemed to him amazing.

“Bombard him first!” said Falloden. “Who’s got some soda-water bottles?” And he beckoned imperiously to a neighbouring group of men,—“bloods”—always ready to follow him in a “rag,” and heroes together with him of a couple of famous bonfires, in Falloden’s first year.

They came up, eager for any mischief, the summer weather in their veins like wine. They stood round Falloden laughing and chaffing, till finally three of them disappeared at his bidding. They came rushing back, from various staircases, laden with soda-water bottles.

Then Falloden, with two henchmen, placed himself under Radowitz’s windows, and summoned the offender in a stentorian voice:

“Radowitz! stop that noise!”

No answer—except that Radowitz in discoursing some “music of the future,” and quite unaware of the shout from below, pounded and tormented the piano more than ever. The waves of crashing sound seemed to fill the quadrangle.

“We’ll summon him thrice!” said Falloden. “Then—fire!”

But Radowitz remained deaf, and the assailant below gave the order. Three strong right arms below discharged three soda-water bottles, which went through the open window.

“My goody!” said Meyrick, “I hope he’s well out of the way!” There was a sound of breaking glass. Then Radowitz, furious, appeared at his window, his golden hair more halolike than ever in the bright sun.

“What are you doing, you idiots?”

“Stop that noise, Radowitz!” shouted Falloden. “It annoys us!”

“Can’t help it. It pleases me,” said Radowitz shortly, proceeding to close the window. But he had scarcely done so, when Falloden launched another bottle, which went smash through the window and broke it. The glass fell out into the quadrangle, raising all the echoes. The rioters below held their laughing breaths.

“I say, what about the dons?” said one.

“Keep a lookout!” said another.

But meanwhile Radowitz had thrown up the injured window, and crimson with rage he leaned far out and flung half a broken bottle at the group below. All heads ducked, but the ragged missile only just missed Meyrick’s curly poll.

“Not pretty that!—not pretty at all!” said Falloden coolly. “Might really have done some mischief. We’ll avenge you, Meyrick. Follow me, you fellows!”

And in one solid phalanx, they charged, six or seven strong, up Radowitz’s staircase. But he was ready for them. The oak was sported, and they could hear him dragging some heavy chairs against it. Meanwhile, from the watchers left in the quad, came a loud cough.

“Dons!—by Jove! Scatter!” And they rushed further up the staircase, taking refuge in the rooms of two of the “raggers.” The lookout in the quadrangle turned to walk quietly towards the porter’s lodge. The Senior Tutor—a spare tall man with a Jove-like brow—emerged from the library, and stood on the steps surveying the broken glass.

“All run to cover, of course!” was his reflection, half scornful, half disgusted. “But I am certain I heard Falloden’s voice. What a puppy stage it is! They would be much better employed worrying old boots!”

But philosopher or no, he got no clue. The quadrangle was absolutely quiet and deserted, save for the cheeping of the swallows flitting across it, and the whistling of a lad in the porter’s lodge. The Senior Tutor returned to the library, where he was unpacking a box of new books.

The rioters emerged at discreet intervals, and rejoined each other in the broad street outside the college.

“Vengeance is still due!”—said Falloden, towering among them, always with the faithful and grinning Meyrick at his side—“and we will repay. But now, to our tents! Ta, ta!” And dismissing them all, including Meyrick, he walked off alone in the direction of Holywell. He was going to look out a horse for Constance Bledlow.

As he walked, he said to himself that he was heartily sick of this Oxford life, ragging and all. It was a good thing it was so nearly done. He meant to get his First, because he didn’t choose, having wasted so much time over it, not to get it. But it wouldn’t give him any particular pleasure to get it. The only thing that really mattered was that Constance Bledlow was in Oxford, and that when his schools were over, he would have nothing to do but to stay on two or three weeks and force the running with her. He felt himself immeasurably older than his companions with whom he had just been rioting. His mind was set upon a man’s interests and aims—marriage, travel, Parliament; they were still boys, without a mind among them. None the less, there was an underplot running through his consciousness all the time as to how best to punish Radowitz—both for his throw, and his impertinence in monopolising a certain lady for at least a quarter of an hour on the preceding evening.

At the well-known livery-stables in Holywell, he found a certain animation. Horses were in demand, as there were manoeuvres going on in Blenheim Park, and the minds of both dons and undergraduates were drawn thither. But Falloden succeeded in getting hold of the manager and absorbing his services at once.

“Show you something really good, fit for a lady?”

The manager took him through the stables, and Falloden in the end picked out precisely the beautiful brown mare of which he had spoken to Constance.

“Nobody else is to ride her, please, till the lady I am acting for has tried her,” he said peremptorily to Fox. “I shall try her myself to-morrow. And what about a groom?—a decent fellow, mind, with a decent livery.”

He saw a possible man and another horse, reserving both provisionally. Then he walked hurriedly to his lodgings to see if by any chance there were a note for him there. He had wired to his mother the day before, telling her to write to Constance Bledlow and Mrs. Hooper by the evening’s post, suggesting that, on Thursday before the Eights, Lady Laura should pick her up at Medburn House, take her to tea at Falloden’s lodgings and then on to the Eights. Lady Laura was to ask for an answer addressed to the lodgings.

He found one—a little note with a crest and monogram he knew well.

Medburn House.
“Dear Mr. Falloden,—I am very sorry I can not come to tea to-morrow. But my aunt and cousins seem to have made an engagement for me. No doubt I shall see Lady Laura at the boats. My aunt thanks her for her kind letter.
“Yours very truly,
“Constance Bledlow.”

Falloden bit his lip. He had reckoned on an acceptance, having done everything that had been prescribed to him; and he felt injured. He walked on, fuming and meditating, to Vincent’s Club, and wrote a reply.

“DEAR LADY CONSTANCE,—A thousand regrets! I hope for better luck next time. Meanwhile, as you say, we shall meet to-morrow at the Eights. I have spent much time to-day in trying to find you a horse, as we agreed. The mare I told you of is really a beauty. I am going to try her to-morrow, and will report when we meet. I admire your nepticular (I believe neptis is the Latin for niece) docility!
“Yours sincerely,
“DOUGLAS FALLODEN.”

“Will that offend her?” he thought. “But a pin-prick is owed. I was distinctly given to understand that if the proprieties were observed, she would come.”

In reality, however, he was stimulated by her refusal, as he was by all forms of conflict, which, for him, made the zest of life.

He shut himself up that evening and the following morning with his Greats work. Then he and Meyrick rushed up to the racket courts in the Parks for an hour’s hard exercise, after which, in the highest physical spirits, a splendid figure in his white flannels, with the dark blue cap and sash of the Harrow Eleven—(he had quarrelled with the captain of the Varsity Eleven very early in his Oxford career, and by an heroic sacrifice to what he conceived to be his dignity had refused to let himself be tried for it)—he went off to meet his mother and sister at the railway station.

It was, of course, extremely inconsiderate of his mother to be coming at all in these critical weeks before the schools. She ought to have kept away. And yet he would be very glad to see her—and Nelly. He was fond of his home people, and they of him. They were his belongings—and they were Fallodens. Therefore his strong family pride accepted them, and made the most of them.

But his countenance fell when, as the train slowed into the railway station, he perceived beckoning to him from the windows, not two Fallodens, but four!

“What has mother been about?” He stood aghast. For there were not only Lady Laura and Nelly, but Trix, a child of eleven, and Roger, the Winchester boy of fourteen, who was still at home after an attack of measles.

They beamed at him as they descended. The children were quite aware they were superfluous, and fell upon him with glee.

“You don’t want us, Duggy, we know! But we made mother bring us.”

“Mother, really you ought to have given me notice!” said her reproachful son. “What am I to do with these brats?”

But the brats hung upon him, and his mother, “fat, fair and forty,” smiled propitiatingly.

“Oh, my dear Duggy, never mind. They amuse themselves. They’ve promised to be good. And they get into mischief in London, directly my back’s turned. How nice you look in flannels, dear! Are you going to row this afternoon?”

“Well, considering you know that my schools are coming on in a fortnight—” said Falloden, exasperated.

“It’s so annoying of them!” said Lady Laura, sighing. “I wanted to bring Nelly up for two or three weeks. We could have got a house. But your father wouldn’t hear of it.”

“I should rather think not! Mother, do you want me to get a decent degree, or do you not?”

“But of course you’re sure to,” said Lady Laura with provoking optimism, hanging on his arm. “And now give us some tea, for we’re all ravenous! And what about that girl, Lady Constance?”

“She can’t come. Her aunt has made another engagement for her. You’ll meet her at the boats.”

Lady Laura looked relieved.

“Well then, we can go straight to our tea. But of course I wrote. I always do what you tell me, Duggy. Come along, children!”

“Trix and I got a packet of Banbury cakes at Didcot,” reported Roger, in triumph, showing a greasy paper. “But we’ve eat ’em all.”

“Little pigs!” said Falloden, surveying them. “And now I suppose you’re going to gorge again?”

“We shall disgrace you!” shouted both the children joyously—“we knew we should!”

But Falloden hunted them all into a capacious fly, and they drove off to Marmion, where a room had been borrowed for the tea-party. Falloden sat on the box with folded arms and a sombre countenance. Why on earth had his mother brought the children? It was revolting to have to appear on the barge with such a troop. And all his time would be taken up with looking after them—time which he wanted for quite other things.

However, he was in for it. At Marmion he led the party through two quads and innumerable passages, till he pointed to a dark staircase up which they climbed, each member of the family—except the guide—talking at the top of their voices. On the third floor, Falloden paused and herded them into the room of a shy second-year man, very glad to do such a “blood” as Falloden a kindness, and help entertain his relations.

“Well, thank God, I’ve got you in!” said Falloden gloomily, as he shut the door behind the last of them.

“How Duggy does hustle us! I’ve had nothing of a tea!” said Roger, looking resentfully, his mouth full of cake, at his elder brother, who was already beginning to take out his watch, to bid his mother and sisters resume their discarded jackets, and to send a scout for a four-wheeler.

But Falloden was inexorable. He tore his sister Nelly, a soft fluffy creature of seventeen, away from the shy attentions of the second-year man, scoffed in disgust at Trix’s desire for chocolates after a Gargantuan meal, and declared that they would all be late for the Eights, if any more gorging was allowed. His mother rose obediently. To be seen with such a son in the crowded Oxford streets filled her with pride. She could have walked beside him for hours.

At the college gate, Trix pinched her brother’s arm.

“Well, Duggy, say it!”

“Say what, you little scug?”

“‘Thank God, I’ve got you out!’” laughed the child, laying her cheek against his coat-sleeve. “That’s what you’re thinking. You know you are. I say, Duggy, you do look jolly in those colours!”

“Don’t talk rot!” grumbled Falloden, but he winked at her in brotherly fashion, and Trix was more than happy. Like her mother, she believed that Douglas was simply the handsomest and cleverest fellow in the world. When he scolded it was better than other people’s praise, and when he gave you a real private wink, it raised a sister to the skies. On such soil does male arrogance grow!

Soon they were in the stream of people crossing Christ Church river on their way to the boats. The May sunshine lay broad on the buttercup meadows, on the Christ Church elms, on the severe and blackened front of Corpus, on the long gabled line of Merton. The river glittered in the distance, and towards it the crowd of its worshippers—young girls in white, young men in flannels, elderly fathers and mothers from a distance, and young fathers and mothers from the rising tutorial homes of Oxford—made their merry way. Falloden looked in all directions for the Hooper party. A new anxiety and eagerness were stirring in him which he resented, which he tried to put down. He did not wish, he did not intend, if he could help it, to be too much in love with anybody. He was jealous of his own self-control, and intensely proud of his own strength of will, as he might have been of a musical or artistic gift. It was his particular gift, and he would not have it weakened. He had seen men do the most idiotic things for love. He did not intend to do such things. Love should be strictly subordinate to a man’s career; women should be subordinate.

At the same time, from the second week of their acquaintance on the Riviera, he had wished to marry Constance Bledlow. He had proposed to her, only to be promptly refused, and on one mad afternoon, in the woods of the Esterels, he had snatched a kiss. What an amazing fuss she made about that kiss! He thought she would have cut him for ever. It was with the greatest difficulty, and only after a grovelling apology, that he had succeeded in making his peace. Yet all through the days of her wrath he had been quite certain that he would in the end appease her; which meant a triumphant confidence on his part that to a degree she did not herself admit or understand, he had captured her. Her resolute refusal to correspond with him, even after they had made it up and he was on the point of returning to Oxford, had piqued him indeed. But he was aware that she was due at Oxford, as her uncle’s ward, some time in May; and meanwhile he had coolly impressed upon himself that in the interests of his work, it was infinitely better he should be without the excitement of her letters. By the time she arrived, he would have got through the rereading of his principal books, which a man must do in the last term before the schools, and could begin to “slack.” And after the schools, he could devote himself.

But now that they had met again, he was aware of doubts and difficulties that had not yet assailed him. That she was not indifferent to him—that his presence still played upon her nerves and senses—so much he had verified. But during their conversation at the Vice-Chancellor’s party he had become aware of something hard and resistant in her—in her whole attitude towards him—which had considerably astonished him. His arrogant self-confidence had reckoned upon the effect of absence, as making her softer and more yielding when they met again. The reverse seemed to be the case, and he pondered it with irritation....

“Oh, Duggy, isn’t it ripping?” cried Trix, leaping and sidling at his elbow like a young colt.

For they had reached the river, which lay a vivid blue, flashing under the afternoon sun and the fleecy clouds. Along it lay the barges, a curving many-tinted line, their tall flag-staffs flying the colours of the colleges to which they belonged, their decks crowded with spectators. Innumerable punts were crossing and recrossing the river—the towing-path opposite was alive with men. Everything danced and glittered, the white reflections in the river, the sun upon the oars, the row of extravagantly green poplars on the further bank. How strong and lusty was the May light!—the yellow green of the elms—the gold of the buttercupped meadow! Only the dying moon in the high blue suggested a different note; as of another world hidden behind the visible world, waiting patiently, mysteriously, to take its place—to see it fade.

“Oh, Duggy, there’s somebody waving to you. Oh, it’s Lord Meyrick. And who’s that girl with him? She’s bowing to you, too. She’s got an awfully lovely frock! Oh, Duggy, do look at her!”

Falloden had long since looked at her. He turned carelessly to his mother. “There’s Meyrick, mother, on that barge in front. You know you’re dining with him to-night in Christ Church. And that’s Constance Bledlow beside him, to whom I asked you to write.”

“Oh, is it? A good-looking girl,” said his mother approvingly. “And who is that man beside her, with the extraordinary hair? He looks like somebody in Lohengrin.”

Falloden laughed, but not agreeably.

“You’ve about hit it! He’s a Marmion man. A silly, affected creature—half a Pole. His music is an infernal nuisance in college. We shall suppress it and him some day.”

“What barge is it, Duggy? Are we going there?”

Falloden replied impatiently that the barge they were nearing belonged to Christ Church, and they were bound for the Marmion barge, much further along.

Meanwhile he asked himself what could have taken the Hooper party to the Christ Church barge? Ewen Hooper was a Llandaff man, and Llandaff, a small and insignificant college, shared a barge with another small college some distance down the river.

As they approached the barge he saw that while Constance had Radowitz on her right, Sorell of St. Cyprian’s stood on the other side of her. Ah, no doubt, that accounted for it. Sorell had been originally at “the House,” was still a lecturer there, and very popular. He had probably invited the Hoopers with their niece. It was, of course, the best barge in the best position. Falloden remembered how at the Vice-Chancellor’s party Sorell had hovered about Constance, assuming a kind of mild guardianship; until he himself had carried her off. Why? What on earth had she to do with Sorell? Well, he must find out. Meanwhile, she clearly did not intend to take any further notice of his neighbourhood. Sorell and Radowitz absorbed her. They were evidently explaining the races to her, and she stood between them, a docile and charming vision, turning her graceful head from side to side. Falloden and his party crossed her actual line of sight. But she took no further notice; and he heard her laugh at something Radowitz was saying.

“Oh, Mr. Falloden, is that you—and Lady Laura! This is a pleasure!”

He turned to see a lady whom he cordially detested—a head’s wife, who happened to be an “Honourable,” the daughter of a small peer, and terribly conscious of the fact. She might have reigned in Oxford; she preferred to be a much snubbed dependent of London, and the smart people whose invitations she took such infinite trouble to get. For she was possessed of two daughters, tall and handsome girls, who were an obsession to her, an irritation to other people, and a cause of blushing to themselves. Her instinct for all men of family or title to be found among the undergraduates was amazingly extensive and acute; and she had paid much court to Falloden, as the prospective heir to a marquisate. He had hitherto treated her with scant attention, but she was not easily abashed, and she fastened at once on Lady Laura, whom she had seen once at a London ball.

“Where are you going, Lady Laura? To Marmion? Oh, no! Come on to our barge, you will see so much better, and save yourself another dusty bit of walk. Here we are!”

And she waved her parasol gaily towards a barge immediately ahead, belonging to one of the more important colleges. Lady Laura looked doubtfully at her son.

Falloden suddenly accepted, and with the utmost cordiality.

“That’s really very good of you, Mrs. Manson! I shall certainly advise my mother to take advantage of your kind offer. But you can’t do with all of us!” He pointed smiling to Trix and Roger.

“Of course I can! The more the merrier!” And the lively lady stooped, laid an affectionate hand on Roger’s shoulder, and said in a stage aside—“Our ices are very good!”

Roger hastily retreated.

The starting-gun had boomed—communicating the usual thrill and sudden ripple of talk through the crowded barges.

“Now they’re off!”

Lady Laura, Nelly, and “the babes” hung over the railing of the barge, looking excitedly for the first nose of a boat coming round the bend. Falloden, between the two fair-haired Miss Mansons, manoeuvred them and himself into a position at the rear where he could both see and be seen by the party on the Christ Church barge, amid which a certain large white hat with waving feathers shone conspicuous. The two girls between whom he stood, who had never found him in the least accessible before, were proud to be seen with him, and delighted to try their smiles on him. They knew he was soon going down, and they had visions of dancing with him in London, of finding an acquaintance, perhaps even a friend, at last, in those chilly London drawing-rooms, before which, if their mother knew no such weakness, they often shivered.

Falloden looked down upon them with a half sarcastic, half benignant patronage, and made himself quite agreeable. From the barge next door, indeed, the Manson and Falloden parties appeared to be on the most intimate terms. Mrs. Manson, doing the honours of the college boat, flattering Lady Laura, gracious to the children, and glancing every now and then at her two girls and their handsome companion, was enjoying a crowded and successful moment.

But she too was aware of the tall girl in white on the neighbouring deck, and she turned enquiringly to Falloden.

“Do you know who she is?”

“The Risboroughs’ daughter—Lady Constance Bledlow.” Mrs. Manson’s eyebrows went up.

“Indeed! Of course I knew her parents intimately! Where is she staying?”

Falloden briefly explained.

“But how very interesting! I must call upon her at once. But—I scarcely know the Hoopers!”

Falloden hung over the barge rail, and smiled unseen.

“Here they come!—here they come!” shouted the children, laying violent hands on Falloden that he might identify the boats for them.

Up rolled a mighty roar from the lower reaches of the river as the boats came in sight, “Univ” leading; and the crowd of running and shouting men came rushing along the towing-path. “Univ” was gallantly “bumped” in front of its own barge, and Magdalen went head of the river. A delirious twenty minutes followed. Bump crashed on bump. The river in all its visible length flashed with the rising and falling oars—the white bodies of the rowers strained back and forth. But it was soon over, and only the cheering for the victorious crews remained; and the ices—served to the visitors!—of which Roger was not slow to remind his hostess.

The barges emptied, and the crowd poured out again into the meadows. Just outside the Christ Church barge, Constance with Nora beside her, and escorted by Sorell and Lord Meyrick, lifted a pair of eyes to a tall fellow in immaculate flannels and a Harrow cap. She had been aware of his neighbourhood, and he of hers, long before it was possible to speak. Falloden introduced his mother. Then he resolutely took possession of Constance.

“I hope you approve what I have been doing about the mare?”

“I am of course most grateful. When am I to try her?”

“I shall take her out to-morrow afternoon. Then I’ll report.”

“It is extremely kind of you.” The tone was strictly conventional.

He said nothing; and after a minute she could not help looking up. She met an expression which showed a wounded gentleman beside her.

“I hope you saw the races well?” he said coldly.

“Excellently. And Mr. Sorell explained everything.”

“You knew him before?”

“But of course!” she said, laughing. “I have known him for years.”

“You never mentioned him—at Cannes.”

“One does not always catalogue one’s acquaintance, does one?”

“He seems to be more than an acquaintance.”

“Oh, yes. He is a great friend. Mamma was so fond of him. He went with us to Sicily once. And Uncle Ewen likes him immensely.”

“He is of course a paragon,” said Falloden.

Constance glanced mockingly at her companion.

“I don’t see why he should be called anything so disagreeable. All we knew of him was—that he was delightful! So learned—and simple—and modest—the dearest person to travel with! When he left us at Palermo, the whole party seemed to go flat.”

“You pile it on!”

“Not at all. You asked me if he were more than an acquaintance. I am giving you the facts.”

“I don’t enjoy them!” said Falloden abruptly.

She burst into her soft laugh.

“I’m so sorry. But I really can’t alter them. Where has my party gone to?”

She looked ahead, and saw that by a little judicious holding back Falloden had dexterously isolated her both from his own group and hers. Mrs. Manson and Lady Laura were far ahead in the wide, moving crowd that filled the new-made walk across the Christ Church meadow; so were the Hoopers and the slender figure and dark head of Alexander Sorell.

“Don’t distress yourself, please. We shall catch them up before we get to Merton Street. And this only pays the very smallest fraction of your debt! I understood that if my mother wrote—”

She coloured brightly.

“I didn’t promise!” she said hastily. “And I found the Hoopers were counting on me.”

“No doubt. Oh, I don’t grumble. But when friends—suppose we take the old path under the wall? It is much less crowded.”

And before she knew where she was, she had been whisked out of the stream of visitors and undergraduates, and found herself walking almost in solitude in the shadow of one of the oldest walls in Oxford, the Cathedral towering overhead, the crowd moving at some distance on their right.

“That’s better,” said Falloden coolly. “May I go on? I was saying that when one friend disappoints another—bitterly!—there is such a thing as making up!”

There were beautiful notes in Falloden’s deep voice, when he chose to employ them. He employed them now, and the old thrill of something that was at once delight and fear ran through Constance. But she looked him in the face, apparently quite unmoved.

“Now it is you who are piling it on! You will use such tragic expressions for the most trivial things. Of course, I am sorry if—”

“Then make amends!”—he said quickly. “Promise me—if the mare turns out well—you will ride in Lathom Woods—on Saturday?”

His eyes shone upon her. The force of the man’s personality seemed to envelope her, to beat down the resistance which, as soon as he was out of her sight, the wiser mind in her built up.

She hesitated—smiled. And again the smile—or was it the May sun and wind?—gave her that heightening, that touch of brilliance that a face so delicate must often miss.

Falloden’s fastidious sense approved her wholly: the white dress; the hat that framed her brow; the slender gold chains which rose and fell on her gently rounded breast; her height and grace. Passion beat within him. He hung on her answer.

“Saturday—impossible! I am not free till Monday, at least. And what about the groom?” She looked up.

“I shall parade him to-morrow, livery, horse and all. I undertake he shall give satisfaction. The Lathom Woods just now are a dream!”

“It is all a dream!” she said, looking round her at the beauty of field and tree, of the May clouds, and the grey college walls—youth and youth’s emotion speaking in the sudden softening of her eyes.

He saw—he felt her—yielding.

“You’ll come?”

“I—I suppose I may as well ride in Lathom Woods as anywhere else. You have a key?”

“The groom will have it. I meet you there.”

She flushed a bright pink.

“That might have been left vague!”

“How are you to find your way through those woods without a guide?” he protested.

She was silent a moment, then she said with decision:

“I must overtake my people.”

“You shall. I want you to talk to my mother—and—you have still to introduce me to your aunt and cousins.”

Mirth crept into her eyes. The process of taming him had begun.

Falloden on the way back to his lodgings handed over his family to the tender offices of Meyrick and a couple of other gilded youths, who had promised to look after them for the evening. They were to dine at the Randolph, and go to a college concert. Falloden washed his hands of them, and shut himself up for five or six hours’ grind, broken only by a very hasty meal. The thought of Constance hovered about him—but his will banished it. Will and something else—those aptitudes of brain which determined his quick and serviceable intelligence.

When after his frugal dinner he gave himself in earnest to the article in a French magazine, on a new French philosopher, which had been recommended to him by his tutor as likely to be of use to him in his general philosophy paper, his mind soon took fire; Constance was forgotten, and he lost himself in the splendour shed by the original and creative thought of a great man, climbing, under his guidance, as the night wore on, from point to point, and height to height, amid the Oxford silence, broken only by the chiming bells, and a benighted footfall in the street outside, until he seemed to have reached the bounds of the phenomenal and to be close on that outer vastness whence stream the primal forces—Die Mütter—as Goethe called them—whose play is with the worlds.

Then by way of calming the brain before sleep, he fell upon some notes to be copied and revised, on the “Religious Aspects of Greek Drama,” and finally amused himself with running through an ingenious “Memoria Technica” on the 6th Book of the Ethics which he had made for himself during the preceding winter.

Then work was done, and he threw it from him with the same energy as that wherewith he had banished the remembrance of Constance some hours before. Now he could walk his room in the May dawn, and think of her, and only of her. With all the activity of his quickened mental state, he threw himself into the future—their rides together—their meetings, few and measured till the schools were done—then!—all the hours of life, and a man’s most obstinate effort, spent in the winning of her. He knew well that she would be difficult to win.

But he meant to win her—and before others could seriously approach her. He was already nervously jealous of Sorell—and contemptuously jealous of Radowitz. And if they could torment him so, what would it be when Constance passed into that larger world of society to which sooner or later she was bound? No, she was to be wooed and married now. The Falloden custom was to marry early—and a good custom too. His father would approve, and money from the estate would of course be forthcoming. Constance was on her father’s side extremely well-born; the Hooper blood would soon be lost sight of in a Risborough and Falloden descent. She was sufficiently endowed; and she had all the grace of person and mind that a Falloden had a right to look for in his wife.

Marriage, then, in the autumn, when he would be twenty-four—two years of travel—then Parliament—

On this dream he fell asleep. A brisk wind sprang up with the sunrise, and rustled round his lightly-darkened room. One might have heard in it the low laughter of Fortune on the watch.

CHAPTER V

“You do have the oddest ways,” said Nora, perched at the foot of her cousin’s bed; “why do you stay in bed to breakfast?”

“Because I always have—and because it’s the proper and reasonable thing to do,” said Constance defiantly. “Your English custom of coming down at half past eight to eat poached eggs and bacon is perfectly detestable.”

She waved her teaspoon in Nora’s face, and Nora reflected—though her sunburnt countenance was still severe—that Connie was never so attractive as when, in the freshest of white dressing-gowns, propped among the lace and silk of her ridiculous pillows and bedspreads, she was toying with the coffee and roll which Annette brought her at eight o’clock, as she had been accustomed to bring it since Connie was a child. Mrs. Hooper had clearly expressed her disapproval of such habits, but neither Annette nor Connie had paid any attention. Annette had long since come to an understanding with the servants, and it was she who descended at half past seven, made the coffee herself, and brought up with it the nearest thing to the morning rolls of the Palazzo Barberini which Oxford could provide—with a copy of The Times specially ordered for Lady Constance. The household itself subsisted on a copy of the Morning Post, religiously reserved to Mrs. Hooper after Dr. Hooper had glanced through it—he, of course, saw The Times at the Union. But Connie regarded a newspaper at breakfast as a necessary part of life.

After her coffee, accordingly, she read The Times, and smoked a cigarette, proceedings which were a daily source of wonder to Nora and reprobation in the minds of Mrs. Hooper and Alice. Then she generally wrote her letters, and was downstairs after all by half past ten, dressed and ready for the day. Mrs. Hooper declared to Dr. Ewen that she would be ashamed for any of their Oxford friends to know that a niece of his kept such hours, and that it was a shocking example for the servants. But the maids took it with smiles, and were always ready to run up and down stairs for Lady Connie; while as for Oxford, the invitations which had descended upon the Hooper family, even during the few days since Connie’s arrival, had given Aunt Ellen some feverish pleasure, but perhaps more annoyance. So far from Ewen’s “position” being of any advantage to Connie, it was Connie who seemed likely to bring the Hoopers into circles of Oxford society where they had till now possessed but the slenderest footing. An invitation to dinner from the Provost of Winton and Mrs. Manson, to “Dr. and Mrs. Hooper, Miss Hooper and Lady Constance Bledlow,” to meet an archbishop, had fairly taken Mrs. Hooper’s breath away. But she declaimed to Alice none the less in private on the innate snobbishness of people.

Nora, however, wished to understand.

“I can’t imagine why you should read The Times,” she said with emphasis, as Connie pushed her tray away, and looked for her cigarettes. “What have you to do with politics?”

“Why, The Times is all about people I know!” said Connie, opening amused eyes. “Look there!” And she pointed to the newspaper lying open amid the general litter of her morning’s post, and to a paragraph among the foreign telegrams describing the excitement in Rome over a change of Ministry. “Fall of the Italian Cabinet. The King sends for the Marchese Bardinelli.”

“And there’s a letter from Elisa Bardinelli, telling me all about it!” She tossed some closely-written sheets to Nora, who took them up doubtfully.

“It is in Italian!” she said, as though she resented the fact.

“Well, of course! Did you think it would be in Russian? You really ought to learn Italian, Nora. Shall I teach you?”

“Well—it might be useful for my Literature,” said Nora slowly. “There are all those fellows Chaucer borrowed from—and then Shakespeare. I wouldn’t mind.”

“Thank you!” said Connie, laughing. “And then look at the French news. That’s thrilling! Sir Wilfrid’s going to throw up the Embassy and retire. I stayed with them a night in Paris on my way through—and they never breathed. But I thought something was up. Sir Wilfrid’s a queer temper. I expect he’s had a row with the Foreign Office. They were years in Rome, and of course we knew them awfully well. Mamma adored her!”

And leaning back with her hands behind her head, Connie’s sparkling look subsided for a moment into a dreamy sweetness.

“I suppose you think Oxford a duck-pond after all that!” said Nora pugnaciously.

Constance laughed.

“Why, it’s new. It’s experience. It’s all to the good.”

“Oh, you needn’t suppose I am apologising for Oxford!” cried Nora. “I think, of course, it’s the most interesting place in the world. It’s ideas that matter, and ideas come from the universities!” And the child-student of seventeen drew herself up proudly, as though she bore the honour of all academie on her sturdy shoulders.

Constance went into a fit of laughter.

“And I think they come from the people who do things, and not only from the people who read and write about them when they’re done. But goodness—what does it matter where they come from? Go away, Nora, and let me dress!”

“There are several things I want to know,” said Nora deliberately, not budging. “Where did you get to know Mr. Falloden?”

The colour ran up inconveniently in Connie’s cheeks.

“I told you,” she said impatiently. “No!—I suppose you weren’t there. I met him on the Riviera. He came out for the Christmas holidays. He was in the villa next to us, and we saw him every day.”

“How you must have hated him!” said Nora, with energy, her hands round her knees, her dark brows frowning.

Constance laughed again, but rather angrily.

“Why should I hate him, please? He’s extraordinarily clever—”

“Yes, but such a snob!” said Nora, setting her white teeth. Connie sprang up in bed.

“Nora, really, the way you talk of other people’s friends. You should learn—indeed, you should—not to say rude and provoking things!”

“Why should it provoke you? I’m certain you don’t care for him—you can’t!” cried Nora. “He’s the most hectoring, overbearing creature! The way he took possession of you the other day at the boats! Of course he didn’t care, if he made everybody talk about you!”

Constance turned a little white.

“Why should anybody talk?” she said coldly. “But really, Nora, I must turn you out. I shall ring for Annette.” She raised herself in bed.

“No, no!” Nora caught her hand as it stretched out towards the bell. “Oh, Connie, you shall not fall in love with Mr. Falloden! I should go mad if you did.”

“You are mad already,” said Constance, half laughing, half furious. “I tell you Mr. Falloden is a friend of mine—as other people are. He is very good company, and I won’t have him abused—for nothing. His manners are abominable. I have told him so dozens of times. All the same, he amuses me—and interests me—and you are not to talk about him, Nora, if you can’t talk civilly.”

And looking rather formidably great-ladyish, Constance threw severe glances at her cousin.

Nora stood up, first on one foot, then on the other. She was bursting with things to say, and could not find words to say them in. At last she broke out—

“I’m not abusing him for nothing! If you only knew the horrid, rude things—mean things too—at dances and parties—he does to some of the girls I know here; just because they’re not swells and not rich, and he doesn’t care what they think about him. That’s what I call a snob—judging people by whether they’re rich and important—by whether it’s worth while to know them. Hateful!”

“You foolish child!” cried Connie. “He’s so rich and important himself, what can it matter to him? You talk as though he were a hanger-on—as though he had anything to gain by making up to people. You are absurd!”

“Oh, no—I know he’s not like Herbert Pryce,” said Nora, panting, but undaunted. “There, that was disgusting of me!—don’t remember that I ever said that, Connie!—I know Mr. Falloden needn’t be a snob, because he’s got everything that snobs want—and he’s clever besides. But it is snobbish all the same to be so proud and stand-off, to like to make other people feel small and miserable, just that you may feel big.”

“Go away!” said Constance, and taking up one of her pillows, she threw it neatly at Nora, who dodged it with equal skill. Nora retreated to the other side of the door, then quickly put her head through again.

“Connie!—don’t!”

“Go away!” repeated Connie, smiling, but determined.

Nora looked at her appealingly, then shut her lips firmly, turned and went away. Connie spent a few minutes in meditation. She resented the kind of quasi-guardianship that this clever backfisch assumed towards her, though she knew it meant that Nora had fallen in love with her. But it was inconvenient to be so fallen in love with—if it was to mean interference with her private affairs.

“As if I couldn’t protect myself!”

The mere thought of Douglas Falloden was agitating enough, without the consciousness that a pair of hostile eyes, so close to her, were on the watch.

She sprang up, and went through her dressing, thinking all the time. “What do I really feel about him? I am going to ride with him on Monday—without telling anybody; I vowed I would never put myself in his power again. And I am deliberately doing it. I am in my guardian’s house, and I am treating Uncle Ewen vilely.”

And why?—why these lapses from good manners and good feeling? Was she after all in love with him? If he asked her to marry him again, as he had asked her to marry him before, would she now say yes, instead of no? Not at all! She was further—she declared—from saying yes now, than she had been under his first vehement attack. And yet she was quite determined to ride with him. The thought of their rides in the radiant Christmas sunshine at Cannes came back upon her with a rush. They had been one continuous excitement, simply because it was Falloden who rode beside her—Falloden, who after their merry dismounted lunch under the pines, had swung her to her saddle again—her little foot in his strong hand—so easily and powerfully. It was Falloden who, when she and two or three others of the party found themselves by mistake on a dangerous bridle-path, on the very edge of a steep ravine in the Esterels, and her horse had become suddenly restive, had thrown himself off his own mount, and passing between her horse and the precipice, where any sudden movement of the frightened beast would have sent him to his death, had seized the bridle and led her into safety. And yet all the time, she had disliked him almost as much as she had been drawn to him. None of the many signs of his autocratic and imperious temper had escaped her, and the pride in her had clashed against the pride in him. To flirt with him was one thing. The cloud of grief and illness, which had fallen so heavily on her youth, was just lifting under the natural influences of time at the moment when she and Falloden first came across each other. It was a moment for her of strong reaction, of a welling-up and welling-back of life, after a kind of suspension. The strong young, fellow, with his good looks, his masterful ways, and his ability—in spite of the barely disguised audacity which seemed inseparable from the homage it pleased him to pay to women—had made a deep and thrilling impression upon her youth and sex.

And yet she had never hesitated when he had asked her to marry him. Ride with him—laugh with him—quarrel with him, yes!—marry him, no! Something very deep in her recoiled. She refused him, and then had lain awake most of the night thinking of her mother and feeling ecstatically sure, while the tears came raining, that the dear ghost approved that part of the business at least, if no other.

And how could there be any compunction about it? Douglas Falloden, with his egotism, his pride in himself, his family, his wits, his boundless confidence in his own brilliant future, was surely fair game. Such men do not break their hearts for love. She had refused his request that he might write to her without a qualm; and mostly because she imagined so vividly what would have been his look of triumph had she granted it. Then she had spent the rest of the winter and early spring in thinking about him. And now she was going to do this reckless thing, out of sheer wilfulness, sheer thirst for adventure. She had always been a spoilt child, brought up with boundless indulgence, and accustomed to all the excitements of life. It looked as though Douglas Falloden were to be her excitement in Oxford. Girls like the two Miss Mansons might take possession of him in public, so long as she commanded those undiscovered rides and talks which revealed the real man. At the same time, he should never be able to feel secure that she would do his bidding, or keep appointments. As soon as Lady Laura’s civil note arrived, she was determined to refuse it. He had counted on her coming; therefore she would not go. Her first move had been a deliberate check; her second should be a concession. In any case she would keep the upper hand.

Nevertheless there was an inner voice which mocked, through all the patting and curling and rolling applied by Annette’s skilled hands to her mistress’s brown hair. Had not Falloden himself arranged this whole adventure ahead?—found her a horse and groom, while she was still in the stage of thinking about them, and settled the place of rendezvous?

She could not deny it; but her obstinate confidence in her own powers and will was not thereby in the least affected. She was going because it amused her to go; not because he prescribed it.

The following day, Saturday, witnessed an unexpected stream of callers on Mrs. Hooper. She was supposed to be at home on Saturday afternoons to undergraduates; but the undergraduates who came were few and shy. They called out of respect for the Reader, whose lectures they attended and admired. But they seldom came a second time; for although Alice had her following of young men, it was more amusing to meet her anywhere else than under the eyes of her small, peevish mother, who seemed to be able to talk of nothing else than ailments and tabloids, and whether the Bath or the Buxton waters were the better for her own kind of rheumatism.

On this afternoon, however, the Hoopers’ little drawing-room and the lawn outside were crowded with folk. Alexander Sorell arrived early, and found Constance in a white dress strolling up and down the lawn under a scarlet parasol and surrounded by a group of men with whom she had made acquaintance on the Christ Church barge. She received him with a pleasure, an effusion, which made a modest man blush.

“This is nice of you!—I wondered whether you’d come!”

“I thought you’d seen too much of me this week already!” he said, smiling—“but I wanted to arrange with you when I might take you to call on the Master of Beaumont. To-morrow?”

“I shall be plucked, you’ll see! You’ll be ashamed of me.”

“I’ll take my chance. To-morrow then, at four o’clock before chapel?”

Constance nodded—“Delighted!”—and was then torn from him by her uncle, who had fresh comers to introduce to her. But Sorell was quite content to watch her from a distance, or to sit talking in a corner with Nora, whom he regarded as a child,—“a jolly, clever, little thing!”—while his mind was full of Constance.

The mere sight of her—the slim willowy creature, with her distinguished head and her beautiful eyes—revived in him the memory of some of his happiest and most sacred hours. It was her mother who had produced upon his own early maturity one of those critical impressions, for good or evil, which men so sensitive and finely strung owe to women. The tenderness, the sympathy, the womanly insight of Ella Risborough had drawn him out of one of those fits of bitter despondency which are so apt to beset the scholar just emerging, strained and temporarily injured, from the first contests of life.

He had done brilliantly at Oxford—more than brilliantly—and he had paid for overwork by a long break-down. After getting his fellowship he had been ordered abroad for rest and travel. There was nobody to help him, nobody to think for him. His father and mother were dead; and of near relations he had only a brother, established in business at Liverpool, with whom he had little or nothing in common. At Rome he had fallen in with the Risboroughs, and had wandered with them during a whole spring through enchanted land of Sicily, where it gradually became bearable again to think of the too-many things he knew, and to apply them to his own pleasure and that of his companions. Ella Risborough was then forty-two, seventeen years older than himself, and her only daughter was a child of sixteen. He had loved them all—father, mother, and child—with the adoring gratitude of one physically and morally orphaned, to whom a new home and family has been temporarily given. For Ella and her husband had taken a warm affection to the refined and modest fellow, and could not do enough for him. His fellowship, and some small savings, gave him all the money he wanted, but he was starved of everything else that Man’s kindred can generally provide—sympathy, and understanding without words, and the little gaieties and kindnesses of every day. These the Risboroughs offered him without stint, and rejoiced to see him taking hold on life again under the sunshine they made for him. After six months he was quite restored to health, and he went back to Oxford to devote himself to his college work.

Twice afterwards he had gone to Rome on short visits to see the Risboroughs. Then had come the crash of Lady Risborough’s sudden death followed by that of her husband. The bitterness of Sorell’s grief was increased by the fact that he saw no means, at that time, of continuing his friendship with their orphan child. Indeed his fastidious and scrupulous temperament forbade him any claim of the kind. He shrank from being misunderstood. Constance, in the hands of Colonel King and his wife, was well cared for, and the shrewd and rather suspicious soldier would certainly have looked askance on the devotion of a man around thirty, without fortune or family, to a creature so attractive and so desirable as Constance Bledlow.

So he had held aloof, and as Constance resentfully remembered she had received but two letters from him since her father’s death. Ewen Hooper, with whom he had an academic rather than a social acquaintance, had kept him generally informed about her, and he knew that she was expected in Oxford. But again he did not mean to put himself forward, or to remind her unnecessarily of his friendship with her parents. At the Vice-Chancellor’s party, indeed, an old habit of looking after her had seized him again, and he had not been able to resist it. But it was her long disappearance with Falloden, her heightened colour, and preoccupied manner when they parted at the college gate, together with the incident at the boat-races of which he had been a witness, which had suddenly developed a new and fighting resolve in him. If there was one type in Oxford he feared and detested more than another it was the Falloden type. To him, a Hellene in temper and soul—if to be a Hellene means gentleness, reasonableness, lucidity, the absence of all selfish pretensions—men like Falloden were the true barbarians of the day, and the more able the more barbarian.

Thus, against his own will and foresight, he was on the way to become a frequenter of the Hoopers’ house. He had called on Wednesday, taken the whole party to the boats on Thursday, and given them supper afterwards in his rooms. They had all met again at the boats on Friday, and here he was on Saturday, that he might make plans with Constance for Sunday and for several other days ahead. He was well aware that things could not go on at that pace; but he was determined to grasp the situation, and gauge the girl’s character, if he could.

The tea-party at Mrs. Hooper’s

He saw plainly that her presence at the Hoopers was going to transform the household in various unexpected ways. On this Saturday afternoon Mrs. Hooper’s stock of teacups entirely ran out; so did her garden chairs. Mrs. Manson called—and Lord Meyrick, under the wing of a young fellow of All Souls, smooth-faced and slim, one of the “mighty men” of the day, just taking wing for the bar and Parliament. Falloden, he understood, had put in an appearance earlier in the afternoon; Herbert Pryce, and Bobbie Vernon of Magdalen, a Blue of the first eminence, skirmished round and round the newcomer, taking possession of her when they could. Mrs. Hooper, under the influence of so much social success, showed a red and flustered countenance, and her lace cap went awry. Alice helped her mother in the distribution of tea, but was curiously silent and self-effaced. It was dismally true that the men who usually paid attention to her were now entirely occupied with Constance. Bobbie Vernon, who was artistic, was holding an ardent though intermittent discussion with Constance on the merits of old pictures and new. Pryce occasionally took part in it, but only, as Sorell soon perceived, for the sake of diverting a few of Connie’s looks and gestures, a sally or a smile, now and then to himself.

In the middle of it she turned abruptly towards Sorell. Her eyes beckoned, and he carried her off to the further end of the garden, where they were momentarily alone. There she fell upon him.

“Why did you never write to me all last winter?”

He could not help a slight flush.

“You had so many friends without me,” he said, stammeringly, at last.

“One hasn’t so many old friends.” The voice was reproachful. “I thought you must be offended with me.”

“How could I be!”

“And you call me Lady Constance,” she went on indignantly. “When did you ever do such a thing in Rome, or when we were travelling?”

His look betrayed his feeling.

“Ah, but you were a little girl then, and now—”

“Now”—she said impatiently—“I am just Constance Bledlow, as I was then—to you. But I don’t give away my Christian name to everybody. I don’t like, for instance, being forced to give it to Aunt Ellen!”

And she threw a half-laughing, half-imperious glance towards Mrs. Hooper in the distance.

Sorell smiled.

“I hope you’re going to be happy here!” he said earnestly.

“I shall be happy enough—if I don’t quarrel with Aunt Ellen!”

“Don’t quarrel with anybody! Call me in, before you do. And do make friends with your uncle. He is delightful.”

“Yes, but far too busy for the likes of me. Oh, I dare say I shall keep out of mischief.”

But he thought he detected in her tone a restlessness, a forlornness, which pained him.

“Why not take up some study—some occupation? Learn something—go in for Honours!” he said, laughing.

She laughed too, but with a very decided shake of the head. Then she turned upon him suddenly.

“But there is something I should like to learn! Papa began to teach me. I should like to learn Greek.”

“Bravo!” he said, with a throb of pleasure. “And take me for a teacher!”

“Do you really mean it?”

“Entirely.” They strolled on, arranging times and seasons, Constance throwing herself into the scheme with a joyous and childlike zest.

“Mind you—I shall make you work!” he said firmly.

“Rather! May Nora come too?—if she wishes? I like Nora!”

“Does that mean—”

“Only that Alice doesn’t like me!” she said with a frank smile. “But I agree—my uncle is a dear.”

“And I hear you are going to ride?”

“Yes. Mr. Falloden has found me a horse and groom.”

“When did you come to know Mr. Falloden? I don’t remember anybody of that name at the Barberini.”

She explained carelessly.

“You are going out alone?”

“In general. Sometimes, no doubt, I shall find a friend. I must ride!”—she shook her shoulders impatiently—“else I shall suffocate in this place. It’s beautiful—Oxford!—but I don’t understand it—it’s not my friend yet. You remember that mare of mine in Rome—Angelica! I want a good gallop—God and the grass!”

She laughed and stretched her long and slender arms, clasping her hands above her head. He realised in her, with a disagreeable surprise, the note that was so unlike her mother—the note of recklessness, of vehement will. It was really ill-luck that some one else than Douglas Falloden could not have been found to look after her riding.

“I suppose you will be ‘doing’ the Eights all next week?” said Herbert Pryce to the eldest Miss Hooper.

Alice coldly replied that she supposed it was necessary to take Connie to all the festivities.

“What!—such a blasé young woman! She seems to have been everywhere and seen everything already. She will be able to give you and Miss Nora all sorts of hints,” said the mathematical tutor, with a touch of that patronage which was rarely absent from his manner to Alice Hooper. He was well aware of her interest in him, and flattered by it; but, to do him justice, he had not gone out of his way to encourage it. She had been all very well, with her pretty little French face, before this striking creature, her cousin, appeared on the scene. And now of course she was jealous—that was inevitable. But it was well girls should learn to measure themselves against others—should find their proper place.

All the same, he was quite fond of her, the small kittenish thing. An old friend of his, and of the Hoopers, had once described her as a girl “with a real talent for flirtation and an engaging penury of mind.” Pryce thought the description good. She could be really engaging sometimes, when she was happy and amused, and properly dressed. But ever since the appearance of Constance Bledlow she seemed to have suffered eclipse; to have grown plain and dull.

He stayed talking to her, however, a little while, seeing that Constance Bledlow had gone indoors; and then he departed. Alice ran upstairs, locked her door, and stood looking at herself in the glass. She hated her dress, her hat, the way she had done her hair. The image of Constance in her white silk hat with its drooping feathers, her delicately embroidered dress and the necklace on her shapely throat, tormented her. She was sick with envy—and with fear. For months she had clung to the belief that Herbert Pryce would ask her to marry him. And now all expectation of the magic words was beginning to fade from her mind. In one short week, as it seemed to her, she had been utterly eclipsed and thrown aside. Bob Vernon too, whose fancy for her, as shown in various winter dances, had made her immensely proud, he being then in that momentary limelight which flashes on the Blue, as he passes over the Oxford scene—Vernon had scarcely had a word for her. She never knew that he cared about pictures! And there was Connie—knowing everything about pictures!—able to talk about everything! As she had listened to Connie’s talk, she had felt fairly bewildered. Of course it was no credit to Connie to be able to rattle off all those names and things. It was because she had lived in Italy. And no doubt a great deal of it was showing off.

All the same, poor miserable Alice felt a bitter envy of Connie’s opportunities.

CHAPTER VI

“My brother will be here directly. He wants to show you his special books,” said Miss Wenlock shyly.

The Master’s sister was a small and withered lady, who had been something of a beauty, and was now the pink of gentle and middle-aged decorum. She was one of those women it is so easy to ignore till you live with them. Then you perceive that in their relations to their own world, the world they make and govern, they are of the stuff which holds a country together, without which a country can not exist. She might have come out of a Dutch picture—a Terburg or a Metsu—so exquisite was she in every detail—her small, white head, her regular features, the lace coif tied under her chin, the ruffles at her wrist, the black brocade gown, which never altered in its fashion and which she herself cut out, year after year, for her maid to make,—the chatelaine of old Normandy silver, given her by her brother years before, which hung at her waist.

Opposite her sat a very different person, yet of a type no less profitable to this mixed life of ours. Mrs. Mulholland was the widow of a former scientific professor, of great fame in Oxford for his wit and Liberalism. Whenever there was a contest on between science and clericalism in the good old fighting days, Mulholland’s ample figure might have been seen swaying along the road from the Parks to Convocation, his short-sighted eyes blinking at every one he passed, his fair hair and beard streaming in the wind, a flag of battle to his own side, and an omen of defeat to the enemy. His mots still circulated, and something of his gift for them had remained with the formidable woman who now represented him. At a time when short dresses for women were coming in universally, she always wore hers long and ample, though they were looped up by various economical and thrifty devices; on the top of the dress—which might have covered a crinoline, but didn’t—a shawl, long after every one else had ceased to wear shawls; and above the shawl a hat, of the large mushroom type and indecipherable age. And in the midst of this antique and generally untidy gear, the youngest and liveliest face imaginable, under snow-white hair: black eyes full of Irish fun, a pugnacious and humorous mouth, and the general look of one so steeped in the rich, earthy stuff of life that she might have stepped out of a novel of Fielding’s or a page of “Lavengro.”

When Constance entered, Mrs. Mulholland turned round suddenly to look at her. It was a glance full of good will, but penetrating also, and critical. It was as though the person from whom it came had more than a mere stranger’s interest in the tall young lady in white, now advancing towards Miss Wenlock.

But she gave no immediate sign of it. She and Miss Wenlock had been discussing an Oxford acquaintance, the newly-married wife of one of the high officials of the University. Miss Wenlock, always amiable, had discreetly pronounced her “charming.”

“Oh, so dreadfully charming!” said Mrs. Mulholland with a shrug, “and so sentimental that she hardens every heart. Mine becomes stone when I talk to her. She cried when I went to tea with her—a wedding visit if you please! I think it was because one of the kangaroos at Blenheim had just died in childbirth. I told her it was a mercy, considering that any of them would hug us to death if they got a chance. Are you a sentimentalist, Lady Constance?” Mrs. Mulholland turned gaily to the girl beside her, but still with the same touch of something coolly observant in her manner.

Constance laughed.

“I never can cry when I ought to,” she said lightly.

“Then you should go to tea with Mrs. Crabbett. She could train anybody to cry—in time. She cultivates with care, and waters with tears, every sorrow that blows! Most of us run away from our troubles, don’t we?”

Constance again smiled assent. But suddenly her face stiffened. It was like a flower closing, or a light blown out.

Mrs. Mulholland thought—“She has lost a father and a mother within a year, and I have reminded her. I am a cruel, clumsy wretch.”

And thenceforward she roared so gently that Miss Wenlock, who never said a malicious thing herself, and was therefore entirely dependent on Sarah Mulholland’s tongue for the salt of life, felt herself cheated of her usual Sunday entertainment. For there were few Sundays in term-time when Mrs. Mulholland did not “drop in” for tea and talk at Beaumont before going on to the Cathedral service.

But under the gentleness, Constance opened again, and expanded. Mrs. Mulholland seemed to watch her with increasing kindness. At last, she said abruptly—

“I have already heard of you from two charming young men.”

Constance opened a pair of conscious eyes. It was as though she were always expecting to hear Falloden’s name, and protecting herself against the shock of it. But the mistake was soon evident.

“Otto Radowitz told me you had been so kind to him! He is an enthusiastic boy, and a great friend of mine. He deals always in superlatives. That is so refreshing here in Oxford where we are all so clever that we are deadly afraid of each other, and everybody talks drab. And his music is divine! I hear they talk of him in Paris as another Chopin. He passed his first degree examination the other day magnificently! Come and hear him some evening at my house. Jim Meyrick, too, has told me all about you. His mother is a cousin of mine, and he condescends occasionally to come and see me. He is, I understand, a ‘blood.’ All I know is that he would be a nice youth, if he had a little more will of his own, and had nicer friends!” The small black eyes under the white hair flamed.

Constance started. Miss Wenlock put up a soothing hand—

“Dear Sarah, are you thinking of any one?”

“Of course I am!” said Mrs. Mulholland firmly. “There is a young gentleman at Marmion who thinks the world belongs to him. Oh, you know Mr. Falloden, Grace! He got the Newdigate last year, and the Greek Verse the other day. He got the Ireland, and he’s going to get a First. He might have been in the Eleven, if he’d kept his temper, and they say he’s going to be a magnificent tennis player. And a lot of other tiresome distinctions. I believe he speaks at the Union, and speaks well—bad luck to him!”

Constance laughed, fidgeted, and at last said, rather defiantly—

“It’s sometimes a merit to be disliked, isn’t it? It means that you’re not exactly like other people. Aren’t we all turned out by the gross!”

Mrs. Mulholland looked amused.

“Ah, but you see I know something about this young man at home. His mother doesn’t count. She has her younger children, and they make her happy. And of course she is absurdly proud of Douglas. But the father and this son Douglas are of the same stuff. They have a deal more brains and education than their forbears ever wanted; but still, in soul, they remain our feudal lords and superiors, who have a right to the services of those beneath them. And everybody is beneath them—especially women; and foreigners—and artists—and people who don’t shoot or hunt. Ask their neighbours—ask their cottagers. Whenever the revolution comes, their heads will be the first to go! At the same time they know—the clever ones—that they can’t keep their place except by borrowing the weapons of the class they really fear—the professional class—the writers and thinkers—the lawyers and journalists. And so they take some trouble to sharpen their own brains. And the cleverer they are, the more tyrannous they are. And that, if you please, is Mr. Douglas Falloden!”

“I wonder why you are so angry with him, my dear Sarah,” said Miss Wenlock mildly.

“Because he has been bullying my nice boy, Radowitz!” said Mrs. Mulholland vehemently. “I hear there has been a disgraceful amount of ragging in Marmion lately, and that Douglas Falloden—can you conceive it?—a man in his last term, whom the University imagines itself to be turning out as an educated specimen!—is one of the ring-leaders—the ring-leader. It appears that Otto wears a frilled dress shirt—why shouldn’t he?—that, having been brought up in Paris till he was nineteen, he sometimes tucks his napkin under his chin—that he uses French words when he needn’t—that he dances like a Frenchman—that he recites French poetry actually of his own making—that he plays too well for a gentleman—that he doesn’t respect the customs of the college, et cetera. There is a sacred corner of the Junior Common Room, where no freshman is expected to sit after hall. Otto sat in it—quite innocently—knowing nothing—and, instead of apologising, made fun of Jim Meyrick and Douglas Falloden who turned him out. Then afterwards he composed a musical skit on ‘the bloods,’ which delighted every one in college, who wasn’t a ‘blood.’ And now there is open war between him and them. Otto doesn’t talk of it. I hear of it from other people. But he looks excited and pale—he is a very delicate creature!—and we, who are fond of him, live in dread of some violence. I never can understand why the dons are so indulgent to ragging. It is nothing but a continuation of school bullying. It ought to be put down with the strongest possible hand.”

Miss Wenlock had listened in tremulous sympathy, nodding from time to time. Constance sat silent and rather pale—looting down. But her mind was angry. She said to herself that nobody ought to attack absent persons who can’t defend themselves,—at least so violently. And as Mrs. Mulholland seemed to wait for some remark from her, she said at last, with a touch of impatience:

“I don’t think Mr. Radowitz minds much. He came to us—to my uncle’s—to play last night. He was as gay as possible.”

“Radowitz would make jokes with the hangman!” said Mrs. Mulholland. “Ah, well, I think you know Douglas Falloden”—the tone was just lightly touched with significance—“and if you can lecture him—do!” Then she abruptly changed her subject:

“I suppose you have scarcely yet made acquaintance with your two aunts who live quite close to the Fallodens in Yorkshire?”

Constance looked up in astonishment.

“Do you know them?”

“Oh, quite well!” The strong wrinkled face flashed into laughter. But suddenly the speaker checked herself, and laid a worn hand gently on Constance’s knee—“You won’t mind if I tell you things?—you won’t think me an impertinent old woman? I knew your father”—was there just an imperceptible pause on the words?—“when he was quite a boy; and my people were small squires under the shelter of the Risboroughs before your father sold the property and settled abroad. I was brought up with all your people—your Aunt Marcia, and your Aunt Winifred, and all the rest of them. I saw your mother once in Rome—and loved her, like everybody else. But—as probably you know—your Aunt Winifred—who was keeping house for your father—gathered up her silly skirts, and departed when your father announced his engagement. Then she and your Aunt Marcia settled together in an old prim Georgian house, about five miles from the Fallodens; and there they have been ever since. And now they are tremendously excited about you!”

“About me?” said Constance, astonished. “I don’t know them. They never write to me. They never wrote to father!”

Mrs. Mulholland smiled.

“All the same you will have a letter from them soon. And of course you remember your father’s married sister, Lady Langmoor?”

“No, I never even saw her. But she did sometimes write to father.”

“Yes, she was not quite such a fool as the others. Well, she will certainly descend on you. She’ll want you for some balls—for a drawing-room—and that kind of thing. I warn you!”

The girl’s face showed her restive.

“Why should she want me?—when she never wanted me before—or any of us?”

“Ah, that’s her affair! But it is your other aunts who delight me. Your Aunt Marcia, when I first knew her, was in an ascetic phase. People called it miserliness—but it wasn’t; it was only a moral hatred of waste—in anything. We envied her abominably, when I was a girl in my early teens, much bothered with dressing, because she had invented a garment—the only one of any kind that she wore under her dress. She called it a ‘Unipantaloonicoat’—you can imagine why! It included stockings. It was thin in summer and thick in winter. There was only one putting on—pouf!—and then the dress. I thought it a splendid idea, but my mother wouldn’t let me copy it. Your Aunt Winifred had just the opposite mania—of piling on clothes—because she said there were ‘always draughts.’ If one petticoat fastened at the back, there must be another over that which fastened at the front—and another at the side—and so on, ad infinitum. But then, alack!—they suddenly dropped all their absurdities, and became quite ordinary people. Aunt Winifred took to religion; she befriends all the clergy for miles round. She is the mother of Mother Church. And Aunt Marcia, after having starved herself of clothes for years and collected nothing more agreeable than snails, now wears silks and satins, and gossips and goes out to tea, and collects blue china like anybody else. I connect it with the advent of a certain General who after all went off solitary to Malta, and died there. Poor Marcia! But you will certainly have to go and stay there.”

“I don’t know!” said Constance, her delicate mouth setting rather stiffly.

“Ah, well—they are getting old!”

Mrs. Mulholland’s tone had softened again, and when it softened there was a wonderful kindness in it.

A door opened suddenly. The Master came in, followed by Alexander Sorell.

“My dear Edward!” said Miss Wenlock, “how late you are!”

“I was caught by a bore, dear, after chapel. Horace couldn’t get rid of his, and I couldn’t get rid of mine. But now all is well. How do you do, Lady Constance? Have you had enough tea, and will you come and see my books?”

He carried her off, Connie extremely nervous, and wondering into what bogs she was about to flounder.

But she was a scholar’s daughter, and she had lived with books. She would have scorned to pretend, and her pose, if she had one, was a pose of ignorance—she claimed less than she might. But the Master soon discovered that she had many of her father’s tastes, that she knew something of archæology—he bore it even when she shyly quoted Lanciani—that she read Latin, and was apparently passionately fond of some kinds of poetry. And all the time she pleased his tired eyes by her youth and freshness, and when as she grew at ease with him, and began to chatter to him about Rome, and how the learned there love one another, the Master’s startling, discordant laugh rang out repeatedly.

The three in the other room heard it.

“She is amusing him,” said Miss Wenlock, looking rather bewildered. “They are generally so afraid of him.”

The Master put his head into the drawing-room.

“I am taking Lady Constance into the garden, my dear. Will you three follow when you like?”

He took her through the old house, with the dim faces of former masters and college worthies shining softly on its panelled walls, in the golden lights from the level sun outside, and presently they emerged upon the garden which lay like an emerald encased on three sides by surfaces of silver-grey stone, and overlooked by a delicate classical tower designed by the genius of Christopher Wren. Over one-half of the garden lay an exquisite shadow; the other was in vivid light. The air seemed to be full of bells—a murmurous voice—the voice of Oxford; as though the dead generations were perpetually whispering to the living—“We who built these walls, and laid this turf for you—we, who are dead, call to you who are living—carry on our task, continue our march:

“On to the bound of the waste—
On to the City of God!”

A silence fell upon Constance as she walked beside the Master. She was thinking involuntarily of that absent word dropped by her uncle—“Oxford is a place of training”—and there was a passionate and troubled revolt in her. Other ghostly wills seemed to be threatening her—wills that meant nothing to her. No!—her own will should shape her own life! As against the austere appeal that comes from the inner heart of Oxford, the young and restless blood in her sang defiance. “I will ride with him to-morrow—I will—I will!”

But the Master merely thought that she was feeling the perennial spell of the Oxford beauty.

“You are going to like Oxford, I hope?”

“Yes—” said Constance, a little reluctantly. “Oh, of course I shall like it. But it oppresses me—rather.”

“I know!” he said eagerly—always trying to place himself in contact with the young mind and life, always seeking something from them in which he was constantly disappointed. “Yes, we all feel that! We who are alive must always fight the past, though we owe it all we have. Oxford has been to me often a witch—a dangerous—almost an evil witch. I seemed to see her—benumbing the young forces of the present. And the scientific and practical men, who would like to scrap her, have sometimes seemed to me right. And then one changes—one changes!”

His voice dropped. All that was slightly grotesque in his outer man, the broad flat head, the red hair, the sharp wedge-like chin, disappeared for Constance in the single impression of his eyes—pale blue, intensely melancholy, and most human.

“Take up some occupation—some study—” he said to her gently. “You won’t be long here; but still, ask us for what we can give. In Oxford one must learn something—or teach something. If not, life here goes sour.”

Constance repeated Sorell’s promise to teach her Greek.

“Excellent!” said the Master. “You will be envied. Sorell is a capital fellow! And one of the ablest of our younger scholars—though of course”—the speaker drew himself up with a slight acerbity—“he and I belong to different schools of criticism. He was devoted to your mother.”

Constance assented dumbly.

“And shows already”—thought the Master—“some dangerous signs of being devoted to you. Poor wretch!” Aloud he said—“Ah, here they come. I must get some more chairs.”

The drawing-room party joined them, and the gathering lasted a little longer. Sorell walked up and down with Constance. She liked him increasingly—could not help liking him. And apart from his personal charm, he recalled all sorts of pleasant things and touching memories to her. But he was almost oppressively refined and scrupulous and high-minded. “He is too perfect!” she thought rebelliously. “One can’t be as good as that. It isn’t allowed.”

As to Mrs. Mulholland, Constance felt herself taken possession of—mothered—by that lady. She could not understand why, but though rather puzzled and bewildered, she did not resist. There was something, indeed, in the generous dark eyes that every now and then touched the girl’s feeling intolerably, as though it reminded her of a tenderness she had been long schooling herself to do without.

“Come and see me, my dear, whenever you like. I have a house in St. Giles, and all my husband’s books. I do a lot of things—I am a guardian—I work at the schools—the town schools for the town children, et cetera. We all try to save our souls by committees nowadays. But my real business is to talk, and make other people talk. So I am always at home in the evenings after dinner, and a good many people come. Bring Nora sometimes. Alice doesn’t like me. Your aunt will let you come—though we don’t know each other very well. I am very respectable.”

The laughing face looked into Constance’s, which laughed back.

“That’s all right!” said Mrs. Mulholland, as though some confidences had been exchanged between them. “You might find me useful. Consider me a friend of the family. I make rather a good umbrella-stand. People can lean against me if they like. I hold firm. Good-bye. That’s the Cathedral bell.”

But Constance and Sorell, followed discreetly by Annette, departed first. Mrs. Mulholland stayed for a final word to the Master, before obeying the silver voice from St. Frideswide’s tower.

“To think of that girl being handed over to Ellen Hooper, just when all her love affairs will be coming on! A woman with the wisdom of a rabbit, and the feelings of a mule! And don’t hold your finger up at me, Master! You know you can’t suffer fools at all—either gladly—or sadly. Now let me go, Grace!—or I shan’t be fit for church.”

“A very pretty creature!” said Ewen Hooper admiringly—“and you look very well on her, Constance.”

He addressed his niece, who had been just put into her saddle by the neat groom who had brought the horses.

Mrs. Hooper, Alice and Nora were standing on the steps of the old house. A knot of onlookers had collected on the pavement—mostly errand boys. The passing undergraduates tried not to look curious, and hurried by. Constance, in her dark blue riding-habit and a tricorne felt hat which she had been accustomed to wear in the Campagna, kept the mare fidgeting and pawing a little that her uncle might inspect both her and her rider, and then waved her hand in farewell.

“Where are you going, Connie?” cried Nora.

“Somewhere out there—beyond the railway,” she said vaguely, pointing with her riding-whip. “I shall be back in good time.”

And she went off followed by Joseph, the groom, a man of forty, lean and jockey-like, with a russet and wrinkled countenance which might mean anything or nothing.

“A ridiculous hat!” said Alice, maliciously. “Nobody wears such a hat in England to ride in. Think of her appearing like that in the Row!”

“It becomes her.” The voice was Nora’s, sharp and impatient.

“It is theatrical, like everything Connie does,” said Mrs. Hooper severely. “I beg that neither of you will copy her.”

Nora walked to the door opening on the back garden, and stood there frowning and smiling unseen.

Meanwhile Joseph followed close at Connie’s side, directing her, till they passed through various crowded streets, and left the railway behind. Then trotting under a sunny sky, on a broad vacant road, they made for a line of hills in the middle distance.

The country was early June at its best. The river meadows blazed with buttercups; the river itself, when Constance occasionally caught a glimpse of its windings, lay intensely blue under a wide azure sky, magnificently arched on a great cornice built of successive strata of white and purple cloud, which held the horizon. Over the Lathom Woods the cloud-line rose and fell in curves that took the line of the hill. The woods themselves lay in a haze of heat, the sunlight on the rounded crests of the trees, and the shadows cast by the westerly sun, all fused within the one shimmering veil of blue. The air was fresh and life-giving. Constance felt herself in love with life and the wide Oxford scene. The physical exercise delighted her, and the breathless sense of adventure.

But it was disagreeable to reflect, as she must do occasionally, that the sphinx-like groom knew perfectly well that she was going to the Lathom Woods, that he had the key of the nearest gate in his pocket, that he would be a witness of her meeting with Falloden, whatever they did with him afterwards, and that Falloden had in all probability paid him largely to hold his tongue. All that side of it was odious—degrading. But the thought of the green rides, and the man waiting for her, set all the blood in her wild veins dancing. Yet there was little or nothing in her feeling of a girl’s yearning for a lover. She wanted to see Falloden—to talk with him and dispute with him. She could not be content for long without seeing him. He excited her—provoked her—haunted her. And to feel her power over him was delightful, if it had not been spoilt by a kind of recurrent fear—a panic fear of his power over her.

What did she know of him after all? She was quite aware that her friends, the Kings, had made some enquiries at Cannes before allowing her to see so much of him as she had done during his stay with the rich and hospitable Jaroslavs. She believed Colonel King had not liked him personally. But Douglas Falloden belonged to one of the oldest English families, settled on large estates in Yorkshire, with distinguished records in all the great services; he was heir presumptive to a marquisate, so long as his uncle, Lord Dagnall, now past seventy, did not take it into his head to marry; and there was his brilliant career at Oxford, his good looks and all the rest of it. Constance had a strong dash of the worldling in her mixed character. She had been brought up with Italian girl friends of the noble class, in whom the practical instincts of a practical race were closely interwoven with what the Englishman thinks of as Italian “romance” or “passion.” She had discussed dowries and settlements since she was fifteen; and took the current values of wealth and birth for granted. She was quite aware of her own advantages, and was not at all minded to throw them away. A brilliant marriage was, perhaps, at the back of her mind, as it is at the back of the minds of so many beautiful creatures who look and breathe poetry, while they are aware, within a few pounds, of what can be done in London on five thousand—or ten thousand—a year. She inevitably thought of herself as quite different from the girls of poor or middle-class families, who must earn their living—Nora, for instance.

And yet there was really a gulf between her and the ordinary worldling. It consisted in little else than a double dose of personality—a richer supply of nerve and emotion. She could not imagine life without money, because she had always lived with rich people. But money was the mere substratum; what really mattered was the excitement of loving, and being loved. She had adored her parents with an absorbing affection. Then, as she grew up, everywhere in her Roman life, among her girl friends, or the handsome youths she remembered riding in the Villa Borghese gymkhana, she began to be aware of passion and sex; she caught the hints of them, as it were of a lightning playing through the web of life, flashing, and then gone—illuminating or destroying. Her mind was full of love stories. At twenty she had been the confidante of many, both from her married and her unmarried friends. It was all, so far, a great mystery to her. But there was in her a thrilled expectation. Not of a love, tranquil and serene, such as shone on her parents’ lives, but of something overwhelming and tempestuous; into which she might fling her life as one flings a flower into the current of Niagara.

It was the suggestion of such a possibility that had drawn her first to Douglas Falloden. For three golden days she had imagined herself blissfully in love with him. Then had come disillusion and repulsion. What was violent and imperious in him had struck on what was violent and imperious in her. She had begun to hold him off—to resist him. And that resistance had been more exciting even than the docility of the first phase. It had ended in his proposal, the snatched kiss, and a breach. And now, she had little idea of what would happen; and would say to herself, recklessly, that she did not care. Only she must see him—must go on exploring him. And as for allowing her intimacy with him to develop in any ordinary way—under the eyes of the Hoopers—or of Oxford—it was not to be thought of. Rather than be tamely handed over to him in a commonplace wooing, she would have broken off all connection with him; and that she had not the strength to do.

“Here is the gate, my lady.”

The man produced a key from his pocket and got down to open it. Constance passed into a green world. Three “drives” converged in front of her, moss-carpeted, and close-roofed by oak-wood in its first rich leaf. After the hot sun on the straight and shadeless road outside, these cool avenues stretching away into a forest infinity, seemed to beckon a visitant towards some distant Elysian scene—some glade haunted of Pan.

Constance looked down them eagerly. Which was she to take?—suddenly, far down the right hand drive, a horseman—coming into view. He perceived her, gave a touch to his horse, and was quickly beside her.

Both were conscious of the groom, who had reined in a few yards behind, and sat impassive.

Falloden saluted her joyously. He rode a handsome Irish horse, nearly black, with a white mark on its forehead; a nervous and spirited creature, which its rider handled with the ease of one trained from his childhood to the hunting field. His riding dress, with its knee-breeches and leggings pleased the feminine eye; so did his strong curly head as he bared it, and the animation of his look.

“This is better, isn’t it, than ‘’ammer, ’ammer, ’ammer on the ’ard ’igh road!’ I particularly want to show you the bluebells—they’re gorgeous! But they’re quite on the other side—a long way off. And then you’ll be tired—you’ll want tea. I’ve arranged it.”

“Joseph”—he turned to the groom—“you know the head keeper’s cottage?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, go off there and wait. Tell the keeper’s wife that I shall bring a lady to tea there in about an hour. She knows.” Joseph turned obediently, took the left hand road, and was soon out of sight.

The two riders paced side by side through the green shadows of the wood. Constance was flushed—but ‘she looked happy and gracious. Falloden had not seen her so gracious since Oxford had brought them again across each other. They fell at once, for the first time since her arrival, into the easy talk of their early Riviera days; and he found himself doing his very best to please her. She asked him questions about his approaching schools; and it amused him, in the case of so quick a pupil, to frame a “chaffing” account of Oxford examinations and degrees; to describe the rush of an Honour man’s first year before the mods’ gate is leaped; the loitering and “slacking” of the second year and part of the third; and then the setting of teeth and girding of loins, when a man realises that some of the lost time is gone forever, and that the last struggle is upon him.

“What I am doing now is degrading!—getting ‘tips’ from the tutors—pinning up lists—beastly names and dates—in my rooms—learning hard bits by heart—cribbing and stealing all I can. And I have still some of my first year’s work to go through again. I must cut Oxford for the last fortnight—and go into retreat.”

Constance expressed her wonder that any one could ever do any work in the summer term—

“You are all so busy lunching each other’s Sisters and cousins and aunts! It is a great picnic—not a university,” she said flippantly.

“Distracting, I admit—but—”

He paused.

“But—what?”

After a moment, he turned a glowing countenance towards her.

“That is not my chief cause of flight!”

She professed not to understand.

“It is persons distract me—not tea-parties. Persons I want to be seeing and talking to—persons I can not keep myself away from.”

He looked straight before him. The horses ambled on together, the reins on their necks. In the distance a cuckoo called from the river meadows, and round the two young figures one might have fancied an attendant escort of birds, as wrens, tits, pippets, fled startled by their approach.

Constance laughed. The laugh, though very musical, was sarcastic.

“I don’t see you as a shuttlecock!”

“Tossed by the winds of fate? You think I can always make myself do what I wish?”

“That’s how I read you—at present.”

‘Hm—a charming character! Everything calculated—nothing spontaneous. That I think is what you mean?”

“No. But I doubt your being carried away.”

He flushed hotly.

“Lady Connie!—”

He paused. Her colour rushed too. She saw what he was thinking of; she perceived her blunder.

“For what else did you castigate me at Cannes?” he said, in a low voice. And his black eyes looked passionately into hers. But she recovered herself quickly.

“At any rate, you have more will than most people,” she said lightly. “Aren’t you always boasting of it? But you are quite right to go away.”

“I am not going for a week,” he put in quickly. “There will be time for two more rides.”

She made no reply, and they paced on. Suddenly the trees began to thin before them, and a splendid wave of colour swept across an open glade in full sunlight.

“Marvellous!” cried Constance. “Oh, stop a moment!”

They pulled up on the brink of a sea of blue. All around them the bluebells lay glowing in the sunshine. The colour and sparkle of them was a physical delight; and with occasional lingering tufts of primroses among them and the young oak scrub pushing up through the blue in every shade of gold and bronze, they made an enchanted garden of the glade.

Falloden dismounted, tied up his horse, and gathered a bunch for his companion.

“I don’t know—ought we?” she said regretfully. “They are not so beautiful when they are torn away. And in a week they will be gone—withered!”

She stooped over them, caressing them, as, taking a strap from the pocket of his own saddle, he tied the flowers to her pommel.

He looked up impetuously.

“Only to spring again!—in this same wood—in other woods—for us to see. Do you ever think how full the world is of sheer pleasure—small and great?” And his eyes told her plainly what his pleasure was at that moment.

Something jarred. She drew herself away, though with fluttering pulses. Falloden, with a strong effort, checked the tide of impulse in himself. He mounted again, and suggested a gallop, through a long stretch of green road on the further side of the glade. They let their horses go, and the flying hoof-beats woke the very heart of the wood.

“That was good!” cried Falloden, as they pulled up, drawing in deep draughts of the summer wind. Then he looked at her admiringly.

“How well you hold yourself! You are a perfect rider!”

Against her will Constance sparkled under his praise. Then they turned their horses towards the keeper’s cottage, and the sun fell lower in the west.

“Mr. Falloden,” said Constance presently, “I want you to promise me something.”

“Ask me,” he said eagerly.

“I want you to give up ragging Otto Radowitz!”

His countenance changed.

“Who has been talking to you?”

“That doesn’t matter. It is unworthy of you. Give it up.”

Falloden laughed with good humour.

“I assure you it does him a world of good!”

She argued hotly; astonished, in her young inexperience, that his will could so soon reassert itself against hers; sharply offended, indeed, that after she had given him the boon of this rendezvous, he could hesitate for a moment as to the boon she asked in return—had humbled herself to ask. For had she not often vowed to herself that she would never, never ask the smallest favour of him; while on her side a diet of refusals and rebuffs was the only means to keep him in check?

But that diet was now gaily administered to herself.

Falloden argued with energy that a man who has never been to a public school has got to be “disciplined” at the university; that Otto Radowitz, being an artist, was specially in need of discipline; that no harm had been done him, or would be done him. But he must be made to understand that certain liberties and impertinences would not be tolerated by the older men.

“He never means them!” cried Constance. “He doesn’t understand. He is a foreigner.”

“No! He is an Englishman here—and must behave as such. Don’t spoil him, Lady Connie!”

He looked at her imperiously—half smiling, half frowning.

“Remember!—he is my friend!”

“I do remember,” he said drily. “I am not likely to forget.” Constance flushed, and proudly dropped the subject. He saw that he had wounded her, but he quietly accepted it. There was something in the little incident that made her more aware of his overbearing character than ever.

“If I married him,” she thought, “I should be his slave!”

Tea had been daintily spread for them under a birch-tree near the keeper’s lodge. The keeper’s wife served them with smiles and curtsies, and then discreetly disappeared. Falloden waited on Constance as a squire on his princess; and all round them lay the green encircling rampart of the wood. In the man’s every action, there was the homage of one who only keeps silence because the woman he loves imposes it. But Constance again felt that recurrent fear creeping over her. She had been a fool—a fool!

He escorted her to the gate of the wood where Joseph was waiting.

“And now for our next merry meeting?” he said, as he got down to tighten her stirrup which had stretched a little.

Constance hurriedly said she could not promise—there were so many engagements.

Falloden did not press her. But he held her hand when she gave it him.

“Are you angry with me?” he said, in a low voice, while his eyes mocked a little.

“No—only disappointed!”

“Isn’t that unkind? Haven’t we had a golden time?” His tone smote her a little.

“It was heavenly,” she said, “till—”

“Till I behaved like a brute?”

She laughed excitedly, and waved farewell.

Falloden, smiling, watched her go, standing beside his horse—a Siegfried parting from Brunhilde.

When she and the groom had disappeared, he mounted and rode off towards another exit.

“I must be off to-morrow!” he said to himself with decision—“or my schools will go to the dogs!”

CHAPTER VII

“Three more invitations!—since lunch,” said Mrs. Hooper, as she came into the schoolroom, where her elder daughter sat by the window renovating a garden hat.

Her mother dropped the envelopes on a small table beside Alice, and sitting down on the other side of it, she waited for her daughter’s comments.

Alice threw down her work, and hastily opened the notes. She flushed an angry pink as she read them.

“I might as well not exist!” she said shortly, as she pushed them away again.

For two of the notes requested the pleasure of Dr. and Mrs. Hooper’s and Lady Constance Bledlow’s company at dinner, and the third, from a very great lady, begged “dear Mrs. Hooper” to bring Lady Constance to a small party in Wolsey College Gardens, to meet the Chancellor of the University, a famous Tory peer, who was coming down to a public, meeting. In none of the three was there any mention of the elder Miss Hooper.

Mrs. Hooper looked worried. It was to her credit that her maternal feeling, which was her only passion, was more irritated by this sudden stream of invitations than her vanity was tickled.

What was there indeed to tickle anybody’s vanity in the situation? It was all Constance—Constance—Constance! Mrs. Hooper was sometimes sick of the very name “Lady Constance Bledlow,” It had begun to get on her nerves. The only defence against any sort of “superiority,” as some one has said, is to love it. But Mrs. Hooper did not love her husband’s niece. She was often inclined to wish, as she caught sight of Alice’s pinched face, that the household had never seen her. And yet without Connie’s three hundred a year, where would the household be!

Mrs. Hooper was painfully, one might have said, guiltily aware of that side of the business. She was an incompetent, muddling woman, who had never learnt to practise the simple and dignified thrift so common in the academic households of the University. For nowhere, really, was plain living gayer or more attractive than in the new Oxford of this date. The young mothers who wheeled their own perambulators in the Parks, who bathed and dressed and taught their children, whose house-books showed a spirited and inventive economy of which they were inordinately proud, who made their own gowns of Liberty stuff in scorn of the fashion, were at the same time excellent hostesses, keeping open house on Sundays for their husbands’ undergraduate pupils, and gallantly entertaining their own friends and equals at small flowery dinner-parties in Morris-papered rooms, where the food and wine mattered little, and good talk and happy comradeship were the real fare. Meanwhile the same young mothers were going to lectures on the Angevins, or reading Goethe or Dante in the evenings—a few friends together, gathering at each other’s houses; then were discussing politics and social reform; and generally doing their best—unconsciously—to silence the croakers and misogynists who maintained that when all the girl babies in the perambulators were grown up, and Oxford was flooded with womenkind like all other towns, Oxford would have gone to “Death and damnation.”

But Mrs. Hooper, poor lady, was not of this young and wholesome generation. She was the daughter of a small Midland manufacturer, who had rushed into sudden wealth, for a few years, had spent it all in riotous living, over a period just sufficient to spoil his children, and had then died leaving them penniless. Ewen Hooper had come across her when he was lecturing at a northern university, immediately after his own appointment at Oxford. He had passed a harassed and penurious youth, was pining for a home. In ten days he was engaged to this girl whom he met at the house of a Manchester professor. She took but little wooing, was indeed so enchanted to be wooed that Ewen Hooper soon imagined himself in love with her; and all was done.

Nor indeed had it answered so badly for him—for a time. She had given him children, and a home, though an uncomfortable one. Greek scholarship and Greek beauty were the real idols of his heart and imagination. They did not fail him. But his wife did him one conspicuous ill turn. From the first days of their marriage, she ran her husband badly into debt; and things had got slowly worse with the years. Mrs. Hooper was the most wasteful of managers; servants came and went interminably; and while money oozed away, there was neither comfort nor luxury to show for it. As the girls grew up, they learnt to dread the sound of the front doorbell, which so often meant an angry tradesman; and Ewen Hooper, now that he was turning grey, lived amid a perpetual series of mean annoyances with which he was never meant to cope, and which he was now beginning to hand over, helplessly, to his younger daughter Nora, the one member of the family who showed some power to deal with them.

The situation had been almost acute, when Lord Risborough died. But there was a legacy in his will for Ewen Hooper which had given a breathing space; and Connie had readily consented to pay a year’s maintenance in advance. Yet still the drawer of bills, on which Nora kept anxious watch, was painfully full; and of late the perennial difficulty of ready money had reappeared.

Mrs. Hooper declared she must have a new dress, if these invitations were to be accepted.

“I don’t want anything extravagant,” she said fretfully. “But really it’s too bad of Nora to say that I could have my old blue one done up. She never seems to care how her mother looks. If all this fuss is going to be made about Constance and I am to take her out, I must be decent!”

The small underhung mouth shut obstinately. These musts of her mother’s and Alice’s were Nora’s terror. They always meant a new bill.

Alice said—“Of course! And especially when Constance dresses so extravagantly!” she added bitterly. “One can’t look like her scullery-maid!”

Mrs. Hooper sighed. She glanced round her to see that the door was shut.

“That silly child, Nora, had quite a scene with Connie this morning, because Connie offered to give her that pretty white dress in Brandon’s window. She told me Connie had insulted her. Such nonsense! Why shouldn’t Connie give her a dress—and you too? She has more money than she knows how to spend.”

Alice did not reply. She, too, wanted new dresses; she could hardly endure the grace and costliness of Connie’s garments, when she compared them with her own; but there was something in her sad little soul also that would not let her be beholden to Connie. Not without a struggle, anyway.

“I don’t want Connie to give me things either,” she said sulkily. “She’s never been the least nice to me. She makes a pet of Nora, and the rest of us might be doormats for all the notice she takes of us.”

“Well, I don’t know—she’s quite civil,” said Mrs. Hooper reflectively. She added, after a minute—“It’s extraordinary how the servants will do anything for her!”

“Why, of course, she tips them!” cried Alice, indignantly. Mrs. Hooper shrugged her shoulders. It was quite indifferent to her whether Connie tipped them or not, so long as she gained by the result. And there was no denying the fact that the house had never gone so smoothly as since Connie’s arrival. At the same time her conscience reminded her that there was probably something else than “tipping” in the matter. For instance—both Constance and Annette were now intimately acquainted with each of Mrs. Hooper’s three maids, and all their family histories; whereas Mrs. Hooper always found it impossible to remember their surnames. A few days before this date, Susan the housemaid had received a telegram telling her of the sudden death of a brother in South Africa. In Mrs. Hooper’s view it was providential that the death had occurred in South Africa, as there could be no inconvenient question of going to the funeral. But Connie had pleaded that the girl might go home for two days to see her mother; Annette had done the housework during her absence; and both maid and mistress had since been eagerly interested in the girl’s mourning, which had been largely supplied out of Connie’s wardrobe. Naturally the opinion of the kitchen was that “her ladyship is sweet!”

Alice, however, had not found any sweetness in Connie. Was it because Mr. Herbert Pryce seemed to take a mysterious pleasure in pointing out her, charms to Alice? Alice supposed he meant it well. There was a didactic element in him which was always leading him to try and improve other people. But it filled her with a silent fury.

“Is everybody coming to the picnic to-morrow?” asked Mrs. Hooper presently.

“Everybody.” Alice pointed indifferently to a pile of notes lying on her desk.

“You asked Connie if we should invite Mr. Falloden?”

“Of course I did, mother. He is away till next week.”

“I wonder if she cares for him?” said Mrs. Hooper vaguely.

Alice laughed.

“If she does, she consoles herself pretty well, when he’s not here.”

“You mean with Mr. Sorell?”

Alice nodded.

“Such a ridiculous pretence, those Greek lessons!” she said, her small face flaming. “Nora says, after they have done a few lines, Constance begins to talk, and Mr. Sorell throws himself back in his chair, and they chatter about the places they’ve seen together, and the people they remember, till there’s no more time left. Nora says it’s a farce.”

“I say, who’s taking my name in vain?” said Nora, who had just opened the schoolroom door and overheard the last sentence.

“Come in and shut the door,” said Alice, “we were talking about your Greek lessons.”

“Jolly fun they are!” said Nora, balancing herself, as usual, on the window-sill. “We don’t do much Greek, but that don’t matter! What are these notes, mother?”

Mrs. Hooper handed them over. Alice threw a mocking look at her sister.

“Who said that Oxford didn’t care about titles? When did any of those people ever take any notice of us?”

“It isn’t titles—it’s Connie!” said Nora stoutly. “It’s because she’s handsome and clever—and yet she isn’t conceited; she’s always interested in other people. And she’s an orphan—and people were very fond of her mother. And she talks scrumptiously about Italy. And she’s new—and there’s a bit of romance in it—and—well, there it is!”

And Nora pulled off a twig from the banksia rose outside, and began to chew it energetically with her firm white teeth, by way of assisting her thoughts.

“Isn’t conceited!” repeated Alice with contempt. “Connie is as proud as Lucifer.”

“I didn’t say she wasn’t. But she isn’t vain.”

Alice laughed.

“Can’t you see the difference?” said Nora impatiently. “‘Proud’ means ‘Don’t be such a fool as to imagine that I’m thinking of you!’—‘Vain’ means ‘I wonder dreadfully what you’re thinking of me?’”

“Well then, Connie is both proud and vain,” said Alice with decision.

“I don’t mean she doesn’t know she’s rich, and good-looking and run after,” said Nora, beginning to flounder. “But half the time, anyway, she forgets it.”

“Except when she is talking to men,” said Alice vindictively, to which Mrs. Hooper added with her little obstinate air—

“Any girl who likes admiration as much as Connie does must be vain. Of course, I don’t blame her.”

“Likes admiration? Hm,” said Nora, still chewing at her twig. “Yes, I suppose she does. But she’s good at snubbing, too.” And she threw a glance at her sister. She was thinking of a small evening party the night before, at which, it seemed to her, Connie had several times snubbed Herbert Pryce rather severely. Alice said nothing. She knew what Nora meant. But that Connie should despise what she had filched away only made things worse.

Mrs. Hooper sighed again—loudly.

“The point is—is she carrying on with that man, Mr. Falloden?”

Nora looked up indignantly. Her mother’s vulgarity tormented her.

“How can she be ‘carrying on,’ mother? He won’t be in Oxford again till his schools.”

“Oh, you never know,” said Mrs. Hooper vaguely. “Well, I must go and answer these notes.”

She went away. Nora descended gloomily from the window-sill.

“Mother wants a new dress. If we don’t all look out, we shall be in Queer Street again.”

“You’re always so dismal,” said Alice impatiently. “Things are a great deal better than they were.”

“Well, goodness knows what would have happened to us if they weren’t!” cried Nora. “Besides they’re not nearly so much better as you think. And the only reason why they’re better is that Uncle Risborough left us some money, and Connie’s come to live here. And you and mother do nothing but say horrid things about her, behind her back!”

She looked at her sister with accusing eyes. But Alice tossed her head, and declared she wasn’t going to be lectured by her younger sister. “You yourself told mother this morning that Connie had insulted you.”

“Yes, and I was a beast to say so!” cried the girl “She meant it awfully well. Only I thought she thought I had been trying to sponge on her; because I said something about having no dresses for the Commem. balls, even if I wanted to ‘come out’ then—which I don’t!—and she straightaway offered to give me that dress in Brandon’s. And I was cross, and behaved like a fiend. And afterwards Connie said she was awfully sorry if she’d hurt my feelings.”

And suddenly Nora’s brown eyes filled with tears.

“Well, you get on with her,” said Alice, with fresh impatience—“and I don’t. That’s all there is to it. Now do go away and let me get on with the hat.”

That night, after Connie had finished her toilet for the night and was safely in bed, with a new novel of Fogazzaro before her and a reading lamp beside her, she suddenly put out her arms, and took Annette’s apple-red countenance—as the maid stooped over her to straighten the bed-clothes—between her two small hands.

“Netta, I’ve had a real bad day!”

“And why, please, my lady?” said Annette rather severely, as she released herself.

“First I had a quarrel with Nora—then some boring people came to lunch—then I had a tiresome ride—and now Aunt Ellen has been pointing out to me that it’s all my fault she has to get a new dress, because people will ask me to dinner-parties. I don’t want to go to dinner-parties!”

And Connie fell back on her pillows, with a great stretch, her black brows drawn over eyes that still smiled beneath them.

“It’s very ungrateful of you to talk of a tiresome ride—when that gentleman took such pains to get you a nice horse,” said Annette, still tidying and folding as she moved about the room. Constance watched her, her eyes shining absently as the thoughts passed through them. At last she said:

“Do come here, Annette!”

Annette came, rather unwillingly. She sat down on the end of Constance’s bed, and took out some knitting from her pocket. She foresaw a conversation in which she would need her wits about her, and some mechanical employment steadied the mind.

“Annette, you know,” said Constance slowly, “I’ve got to be married some time.”

“I’ve heard you say that before.” Annette began to count some stitches.

“Oh, it’s all very well,” said Constance, with amusement—“you think you know all about me, but you don’t. You don’t know, for instance, that I went to ride over a week ago with a young man, without telling you, or Aunt Ellen, or Uncle Ewen, or anybody!” She waited to see the effect of her announcement. Annette did appear rather startled.

“I suppose you met him on the road?”

“I didn’t! I made an appointment with him. We went to a big wood, some miles out of Oxford, belonging to some people he knows, where there are beautiful grass rides. He has the key of the gates—we sent away the groom—and I was an hour alone with him—quite! There!”

There was a defiant accent on the last word. Annette shook her head. She had been fifteen years in the Risboroughs’ service, and remembered Connie when she was almost a baby.

“Whatever were you so silly for? You know your mamma wouldn’t have let you.”

“Well, I’ve not got my mamma,” said Connie slowly. “And I’m not going to be managed by Aunt Ellen, Netta. I intend to run my own show.”

“Who is it?” said Annette, knitting busily.

Connie laughed.

“Do you think I’m going to tell you?”

“You needn’t. I’ve got eyes in my head. It’s that gentleman you met in France.”

Connie swung herself round and laid violent hands on Annette’s knitting.

“You shan’t knit. Look at me! You can’t say he’s not good-looking?”

“Which he knows—a deal sight more than is good for him,” said Annette, setting her mouth a little grimly.

“Everybody knows when they’re good-looking, you dear silly! Of course, he’s most suitable—dreadfully so. And I can’t make up my mind whether I care for him a bit!”

She folded her arms in front of her, her little chin fell forward on her white wrappings, and she stared rather sombrely into vacancy.

“What’s wrong with him?” said Annette after a pause—adopting a tone in which she might have discussed a new hat.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Connie dreamily.

She was thinking of Falloden’s sudden departure from Oxford, after his own proposal of two more rides. His note, “crying off” till after the schools, had seemed to her not quite as regretful as it might have been; his epistolary style lacked charm. And it was impertinent of him to suggest Lord Meyrick as a substitute. She had given the Lathom Woods a wide berth ever since her first adventure there; and she hoped that Lord Meyrick had spent some disappointed hours in those mossy rides.

All the same it looked as though she were going to see a good deal of Douglas Falloden. She raised her eyes suddenly.

“Annette, I didn’t tell you I’d heard from two of my aunts to-day!”

“You did!” Annette dropped her knitting of her own accord this time, and sat open-mouthed.

“Two long letters. Funny, isn’t it? Well, Aunt Langmoor wants me to go to her directly—in time anyway for a ball at Tamworth House—horribly smart—Prince and Princess coming—everybody begging for tickets. She’s actually got an invitation for me—I suppose by asking for it!—rather calm of her. She calls me ‘Dearest Connie.’ And I never saw her! But papa used to be fond of her, and she was never rude to mamma. What shall I say?”

“Well, I think you’d much better go,” said Annette decidedly. “You’ve never worn that dress you got at Nice, and it’ll be a dish-cloth if you keep it much longer. The way we have to crush things in this place!”

And she looked angrily even at the capacious new wardrobe which took up one whole side of the room.

“All right!” laughed Constance. “Then I’ll accept Aunt Langmoor, because you can’t find any room for my best frock. It’s a toss up. That settles it. Well, but now for Aunt Marcia—”

She drew a letter from the pages of her French book, and opened it.

“My dear Constance”—so it ran—“I should like to make your acquaintance, and I hear that you are at Oxford with your uncle. I would come and see you but that I never leave home. Oxford, too, depresses me dreadfully. Why should people learn such a lot of useless things? We are being ruined by all this education. However, what I meant to say was that Winifred and I would be glad to see you here if you care to come. Winifred, by the way, is quite aware that she behaved like a fool twenty-two years ago. But as you weren’t born then, we suggest it shouldn’t matter. We have all done foolish things. I, for instance, invented a dress—a kind of bloomer thing—only it wasn’t a bloomer. I took a shop for it in Bond Street, and it nearly ruined me. But I muddled through—that’s our English way, isn’t it?—and somehow things come right. Now, I am very political, and Winifred’s very churchy—it doesn’t really matter what you take up. So do come. You can bring your maid and have a sitting-room. Nobody would interfere with you. But, of course, we should introduce you to some nice people. If you are a sensible girl—and I expect you are, for your father was a very clever man—you must know that you ought to marry as soon as possible. There aren’t many young men about here. What becomes of all the young men in England, I’m sure I don’t know. But there are a few—and quite possible. There are the Kenbarrows, about four miles off—a large family—nouveaux riches—the father made buttons, or something of the kind. But the children are all most presentable, and enormously rich. And, of course, there are the Fallodens—quite near—Mr. and Lady Laura, Douglas, the eldest son, a girl of seventeen, and two children. You’ll probably see Douglas at Oxford. Oh, I believe Sir Arthur Falloden, père, told me the other day you had already met him somewhere. Winifred and I don’t like Douglas. But that’s neither here nor there. He’s a magnificent creature, who can’t be bothered with old ladies. He’ll no doubt make himself agreeable to you—cela va sans dire. I don’t altogether like what I hear sometimes about the Fallodens. Of course Sir Arthur’s very rich, but they say he’s been speculating enormously, and that he’s been losing a good deal of money lately. However, I don’t suppose it matters. Their place, Flood Castle, is really splendid—old to begin with, and done up! They have copied the Americans and given every room a bathroom. Absurd extravagance! And think of the plumbing! It was that kind of thing gave the Prince of Wales typhoid. I hate drains!

“Well, anyway, do come and see us. Sophia Langmoor tells me she has written to you, and if you go to her, you might come on here afterwards. Winifred who has just read this letter says it will ‘put you off.’ I don’t see why it should. I certainly don’t want it to. I’m downright, I know, but I’m not hypocritical. The world’s just run on white lies nowadays—and I can’t stand it. I don’t tell any—if I can help.

“Oh, and there is Penfold Rectory not very far off—and a very nice man there, though too ‘broad’ for Winifred. He tells me he’s going to have some people staying with him—a Mr. Sorell, and a young musician with a Polish name—I can’t remember it. Mr. Sorell’s going to coach the young man, or something. They’re to be paying guests, for a month at least. Mr. Powell was Mr. Sorell’s college tutor—and Mr. Powell’s dreadfully poor—so I’m glad. No wife, mercifully!

“Anyway, you see, there are plenty of people about. Do come.

“I am, dear Constance,
Your affectionate aunt,
MARCIA RISBOROUGH.”

“Now what on earth am I going to do about that?” said Constance, tossing the letter over to Annette.

“Well, Mr. and Mrs. Hooper are going, cook says, to the Isle of Wight, and Miss Alice is going with them,” said Annette, “and Miss Nora’s going to join them after a bit in Scotland.”

“I know all that,” said Constance impatiently. “The question is—do you see me sitting in lodgings at Ryde with Aunt Ellen for five or six weeks, doing a little fancy-work, and walking out with Aunt Ellen and Alice on the pier?”

Annette laughed discreetly over her knitting, but said nothing.

“No,” said Connie decidedly. “That can’t be done. I shall have to sample Aunt Marcia. I must speak to Uncle Ewen to-morrow. Now put the light out, please, Annette; I’m going to sleep.”

But it was some time before she went to sleep. The night was hot and thunderous, and her windows were wide open. Drifting in came the ever-recurring bells of Oxford, from the boom of the Christ Church “Tom,” far away, through every variety of nearer tone. Connie lay and sleepily listened to them. To her they were always voices, half alive, half human, to which the dreaming mind put words that varied with the mood of the dreamer.

Presently, she breathed a soft good night into the darkness—“Mummy—mummy darling! good night!” It was generally her last waking thought. But suddenly another—which brought with it a rush of excitement—interposed between her and sleep.

“Tuesday,” she murmured—“Mr. Sorell says the schools will be over by Tuesday. I wonder!—”

And again the bluebell carpet seemed to be all round her—the light and fragrance and colour of the wood. And the man on the black horse beside her was bending towards her, all his harsh strength subdued, for the moment, to the one end of pleasing her. She saw the smile in his dark eyes; and the touch of sarcastic brusquerie in the smile, that could rouse her own fighting spirit, as the touch of her whip roused the brown mare.

“Am I really so late?” said Connie, in distress, running downstairs the following afternoon to find the family and various guests waiting for her in the hall.

“Well, I hope we shan’t miss everybody,” said Alice sharply. “How late are we?”

She turned to Herbert Pryce.

The young don smiled and evaded the question.

“Nearly half an hour!” said Alice. “Of course they’ll think we’re not coming.”

“They” were another section of the party who were taking a couple of boats round from the lower river, and were to meet the walkers coming across the Parks, at the Cherwell.

“Dreadfully sorry!” said Connie, who had opened her eyes, however, as though Alice’s tone astonished her. “But my watch has gone quite mad.”

“It does it every afternoon!” murmured Alice to a girl friend of Nora’s who was going with the party. It was an aside, but plainly heard by Constance—whose cheeks flushed.

She turned appealingly to Herbert Pryce.

“Please carry my waterproof, while I button my gloves.” Pryce was enchanted. As the party left the house, he and Constance walked on together, ahead of the others. She put on her most charming manners, and the young man was more than flattered.

What was it, he asked himself, complacently, that gave her such a delicate distinction? Her grey dress, and soft grey hat, were, he supposed, perfect of their kind. But Oxford in the summer term was full of pretty dresses. No, it must be her ease, her sureness of herself that banished any awkward self-consciousness both in herself and her companions, and allowed a man to do himself justice.

He forgot her recent snubs and went off at score about his own affairs, his college, his prospects of winning a famous mathematical prize given by the Berlin Academy, his own experience of German Universities, and the shortcomings of Oxford. On these last he became scornfully voluble. He was inclined to think he should soon cut it, and go in for public life. These university towns were really very narrowing!

“Certainly,” said Constance amiably. Was he thinking of Parliament?

Well, no, not at once. But journalism was always open to a man with brains, and through journalism one got into the House, when the chance came along. The House of Commons was dangerously in want of new blood.

“I am certain I could speak,” he said ardently. “I have made several attempts here, and I may say they have always come off.”

Constance threw him a shy glance. She was thinking of a dictum of Uncle Ewen’s which he had delivered to her on a walk some days previously. “What is it makes the mathematicians such fools? They never seem to grow up. They tell us they’re splendid fellows, and of course we must believe them. But who’s to know?”

Meanwhile, Alice and Sorell followed them at some distance behind, while Mrs. Hooper and three or four other members of the party brought up the rear. Sorell’s look was a little clouded. He had heard what passed in the hall, and he found himself glancing uncomfortably from the girl beside him to the pair forging so gaily ahead. Alice Hooper’s expression seemed to him that of something weak and tortured. All through the winter, in the small world of Oxford, the flirtation between Pryce of Beaumont and Ewen Hooper’s eldest girl had been a conspicuous thing, even for those who had little or no personal knowledge of the Hoopers. It was noticed with amusement that Pryce had at last found some one to whom he might talk as long and egotistically as he pleased about himself and his career; and kindly mothers had said to each other that it would be a comfort to the Hoopers to have one of the daughters settled, though in a modest way.

“It is pleasant to see that your cousin enjoys Oxford so much,” said Sorell, as they neared the museum, and saw Pryce and Connie disappearing through the gate of the park.

“Yes. She seems to like it,” said Alice coldly.

Sorell began to talk of his first acquaintance with the Risboroughs, and of Connie’s mother. There was no hint in what he said of his own passionate affection for his dead friends. He was not a profaner of shrines. But what he said brought out the vastness of Connie’s loss in the death of her mother; and he repeated something of what he had heard from others of her utter physical and mental collapse after the double tragedy of the year before.

“Of course you’ll know more about it than I do. But one of the English doctors in Rome, who is a friend of mine, told me that they thought at one time they couldn’t pull her through. She seemed to have nothing else to live for.”

“Oh, I don’t think it was as bad as that,” said Alice drily. “Anyway, she’s quite well and strong now.”

“She’s found a home again. That’s a great comfort to all her mother’s old friends.”

Sorell smiled upon his companion; the sensitive kindness in his own nature appealing to the natural pity in hers.

But Alice made no reply; and he dropped the subject.

They walked across the park, under a wide summer sky, towards the winding river, and the low blue hills beyond it. At the Cherwell boat-house they found the two boats, with four or five men, and Nora, as usual, taking charge of everything, at least till Herbert Pryce should appear.

Connie was just stepping into the foremost boat, assisted by Herbert Pryce, who was in his shirt-sleeves, while Lord Meyrick and another Marmion man were already in the boat.

“Sorell, will you stroke the other boat?” said Pryce, “and Miss Nora, will you have a cushion in the bows? Now I think we’re made up. No—we want another lady. And running his eyes over those still standing on the bank, he called a plump little woman, the wife of a Llandaff tutor, who had been walking with Mrs. Hooper.

“Mrs. Maddison, will you come with us? I think that will about trim us.”

Mrs. Maddison obeyed him with alacrity, and the first boat pushed off. Mrs. Hooper, Alice, Sorell, two St. Cyprian undergraduates and Nora’s girl friend, Miss Watson, followed in the second.

Then, while the June evening broadened and declined, the party wound in and out of the curves of the Cherwell. The silver river, brimming from a recent flood, lay sleepily like a gorged serpent between the hay meadows on either side. Flowers of the edge, meadow-sweet, ragged-robin and yellow flags, dipped into the water; willows spread their thin green over the embattled white and blue of the sky; here and there a rat plunged or a bird fled shrieking; bushes of wild roses flung out their branches, and everywhere the heat and the odours of a rich open land proclaimed the fulness of the midland summer.

Connie made the life of the leading boat. Something had roused her, and she began to reveal some of the “parlour-tricks,” with which she had amused the Palazzo Barberini in her Roman days. A question from Pryce stirred her into quoting some of the folk-songs of the Campagna, some comic, some tragic, fitting an action to them so lively and true that even those of her hearers who could not follow the dialect sat entranced. Then some one said—“But they ought to be sung!” And suddenly, though rather shyly, she broke into a popular canzone of the Garibaldian time, describing the day of Villa Gloria; the march of the morning, the wild hopes, the fanfaronade; and in the evening, a girl hiding a wounded lover and weeping both for him and “Italia” undone.

The sweet low sounds floated along the river.

“Delicious!” said Sorell, holding his oar suspended to listen. He remembered the song perfectly. He had heard her sing it in many places—Rome, Naples, Syracuse. It was a great favourite with her mother, for whom the national upheaval of Italy—the heroic struggle of the Risorgimento—had been a life-long passion.

“Why did Connie never tell us she could sing!” said Mrs. Hooper in her thin peevish voice. “Girls really shouldn’t hide their accomplishments.”

Sorell’s oar dropped into the water with a splash.