The memorial service for Sir David Bright was largely attended. Perhaps he was fortunate in the moment of his death, for other men, whose military reputations had been as high as his, were to go on with the struggle while the world wondered at their blunders. It was only the second of those memorial services for prominent men which were to become so terribly usual as the winter wore on. Great was the sympathy felt for the young widow at the loss of one so brave, so kindly, so popular among all classes.

Lady Rose Bright was quite young and very fair. She did not put on a widow's distinctive garments because Sir David had told her that he hated weeds. But she wore a plain, heavy cloak, and a long veil fell into the folds made by her skirts. The raiment of a gothic angel, an angel like those in the portico at Rheims, has these same straight, stern lines. "Black is sometimes as suggestive of white," was the reflection of one member of the congregation, "as white may be suggestive of mourning." Sir Edmund Grosse, who had known Rose from her childhood, felt some new revelation in her movements; there was a fuller development of womanhood in her walk, and there was a reserve, too, as of one consecrated and set apart. He heaved a deep sigh as she passed near him going down the church, and their eyes met. She had no shrinking in her bearing; her reserves were too deep for her to avoid an open meeting with other human eyes. She looked at Sir Edmund for a moment as if giving, rather than demanding, sympathy; and indeed, there was more trouble in his eyes than in hers.

The service had gone perilously near to Roman practices. It was among the first of those uncontrollable instinctive expressions of faith in prayer for the departed which were a marked note of English feeling during the Boer war. Questions as to their legality were asked in Parliament, but little heeded, for the heart of the nation, "for her children mourning," sought comfort in the prayers used by the rest of the Christian world.

Rose's mother went home with her and they talked, very simply and in sympathy, of the tributes to the soldier's memory. Then, when luncheon came and the servants were present, they spoke quietly of the work to be done for soldiers' wives and of a meeting the mother was to attend that afternoon. Lady Charlton was the mother one would expect Rose to have—indeed, such complete grace of courtliness and kindness points to an education. Afterwards, while they were alone, Lady Charlton, in broken sentences, sketched the future. She supposed Rose would stay on although the house was too big. Much good might be done in it. There could be no doubt as to how money must be spent this winter; and there were the services they both loved in the Church of the Fathers of St. Paul near at hand. Lady Charlton saw life in pictures and so did Rose. Neither of them broke through any reserve; neither of them was curious. It did not occur to Rose to wonder how her mother had lived and felt in her first days as a widow. Lady Charlton did not wonder how Rose felt now. Rose, she thought, was wonderful; life was full of mercies; there was so much to be thankful for; and could not those who had suffered be of great consolation to others in sorrow?

They arranged to meet at Evensong in St. Paul's Chapel, and then Lady Charlton would come back and stay the night. On the next day she was due at the house of her youngest married daughter.

Rose was presently left alone, and she cried quite simply. For a moment she thought of Edmund Grosse and the sadness in his eyes. Why had he not volunteered for the war? What a contrast!

A large photograph of Sir David in his general's uniform stood on the writing-table in the study downstairs. There were also a picture and a miniature in the drawing-room, but Rose thought she would like to look at the photograph again. It was the last that had been taken. Then too she would look over some of his things. She wanted little presents for his special friends; nothing for its own value, but because the hero had used them. And she would like to bring the big photograph upstairs.

The study, usually cold and deserted since the master had gone away, was bright with a large fire. Rose did not know that it was an expression of sympathy from the under-housemaid, whose lover was at the war. But when she stood opposite the big photograph of the fine manly face and figure, and the large open eyes looked so straight into hers, she shrank a little. Something in the room made her shrink into herself. Her eyes rested on the Victoria Cross in the photograph, on the medals that had covered his breast. "I shall have them all," she said, and then she faltered a little. She had faltered in that room before now; she had often shrunk into herself when the intensely courteous voice had asked her as she came into his study what she wanted. She blamed herself gently now, and for two opposite reasons: she blamed herself because she had wanted what she had not got, and she blamed herself because she had not done more to get it. "He was always so gentle, so courteous. I ought to have been quite, quite happy. And why didn't I break through our reserve, and then we might——" Dimly she felt, but she did not want to own it to herself, that she had married him as a hero-worshipper. She had reverenced him more than she loved him. "I ought not to have done it," she thought, "but I meant what was right, and I could have loved him—— Oh, I did love him afterwards—only I never could tell him, and——" Further thoughts led the way to irreverence, even to something worse. They were wrong thoughts, thoughts against faith and truth and right; there was no place for such thoughts in Rose's heart. She moved now, and opened drawers and dusted and put together a few things—paper-knives, match-boxes, a writing-case, a silver sealing-wax holder, and so on; the occupation interested and soothed her. She had the born mystic's love of little kind actions, little presents, things treasured as symbols of the union of spirits, all the more because of their slight material value. Then, too, the child element, which is in every good woman, gave a zest to the occupation and made it restful.

Lady Rose had put several small relics in a row on the edge of the lower part of the big mahogany bookcase, and was counting on her fingers the names of the friends for whom they were intended. Her grief was sufficiently real to make her, perhaps, overestimate the number of those to whom such relics would be precious. A tender smile was on her lips at the recollection of an old soldier servant of Sir David's who had been with him in Egypt. She hesitated a moment between two objects—one, a good silver-mounted leather purse, and the other an inkstand of brass and marble. These two things were the recipients of her unjust aversion for long after that moment.

Simmonds, the butler, opened the door, quite certain that the visitor he announced must be admitted, and conscious of the fitness of the big study for his reception. It was Sir David's solicitor. But the butler was disappointed at the manner of his entrance. He did not analyse the disappointment. He was half conscious of the fact that the rôle of the family lawyer on the occasion was so simple and easy. He would himself have assumed a degree of pomp, of sympathy, of respect, carrying a subdued implication that he brought solid consolation in his very presence. Simmonds grieved truly for Sir David, but he felt, too, the blank caused by the absence of all funeral arrangements in a death at the war. He had been butler in more than one house of mourning before, and he knew all his duties in that capacity. After this he would know how to be butler in the event of death in battle. But now, when the memorial service had taken, in a poor sort of way, the place of the funeral, of course the solicitor ought to come, and past deficiencies could be overlooked. Why, then, should the man prove totally unequal to his task? Mr. Murray, Junior, had usually a much better manner than to-day. Perhaps he was startled at being shown at once into the widow's presence. Probably he might have expected to wait a few moments in the big study, while Simmonds went to seek his mistress.

But there was Lady Rose turning round from the bookcase as they came in. Mr. Murray stooped to-day, and his large head was bent downwards, making it the more evident that the drops of perspiration stood out upon his brow. He cast a look almost of fear at the fair face with its gentle, benignant expression. He had seen Rose once or twice before, and he knew the old-fashioned type of great lady when he met it. Was it of Rose's gentle, subtle dignity that he was afraid?

Rose drew up a chair on one side of the big square writing-table, and signed to him to take the leather arm-chair where he had last seen Sir David Bright seated. Mr. Murray plunged into his subject with an abruptness proportioned to the immense time he had taken during the morning in preparing a diplomatic opening.

"May I ask, first of all," he said, "whether you have found any will, or any document looking like a will, besides the one I have with me?"

"No," said Lady Rose in surprise, "there are no papers of any importance here, I believe; there is nothing in the house under lock and key. Sir David gave me a few rings and studs to put away, but he never cared for jewellery, and there is nothing of value."

"And do you think he can have executed any other will or written a letter that might be of use to us now?"

Rose looked still more surprised. Mr. Murray held some papers in his hand that shook as if the wintry wind outside were trying to blow them away. Rose tried not to watch them, and it teased her that she could not help doing so. The hand that held them was not visible above the table. Mr. Murray struggled to keep to the most absolutely business-like and unemotional side of his professional manner, but his obviously extreme discomfort was infectious, and Rose's calm of manner was already disturbed.

"I cannot but think, Lady Rose, that some papers may be forwarded to you through the War Office." He hesitated. "You had no marriage settlements?" he then asked abruptly.

"No, there were no settlements," said Rose. She spoke quickly and nervously. "We did not think them necessary. Sir David offered to make them, but just then he was ordered abroad and there was very little time, and my mother and I did not think it of enough importance to make us delay the wedding. It was shortly after my father's death." She paused a moment, and then went on, as if speech were a relief.

"You know that, when we married, Sir David had no reason to expect that he would ever be a rich man. We hardly knew the Steele cousins, and only had a vague idea that Mr. John Steele had been making money on the Stock Exchange. When he left his fortune to Sir David, who was his first cousin, and, in fact, his nearest relation, my mother did ask me if my husband intended to make his will. More than once after that she tried to persuade me to speak to him about it, but I disliked the subject too much."

Mr. Murray looked as if he wished that Lady Rose would go on talking; he seemed to expect more from her, but, as nothing more came, he made a great effort and plunged into the subject.

"The will I have here"—he held up the papers as he spoke—"was, in fact, made a few months after Sir David inherited Mr. John Steele's large fortune, and there was no subsequent alteration to it, but this time last year we were directed to make a codicil to this will, and I was away at the time. My brother, who is my senior partner, ventured to urge Sir David to make a new will altogether, but he declined."

There was silence in the room for some moments. Mr. Murray leant over the writing-table now, and both hands were occupied in smoothing out the papers before him.

"It is the worst will I have ever come across," he said quite suddenly, the professional manner gone and the vehemence of a strong mind in distress breaking through all conventionality. Rose drew herself up and looked at him coldly. In that moment she completely regained her self-possession.

"It is absolutely inexplicable," he went on, with a great effort at self-control. "Sir David Bright leaves this house and £800 a year to you, Lady Rose, for your lifetime, and a few gifts to friends and small legacies to old servants." He paused. Rose, with slightly heightened colour, spoke very quietly.

"Then the fortune was much smaller than was supposed?"

"It was larger, far larger than any one knew; but it is all left away."

Rose was disturbed and frankly sorry, but not by any means miserable. She knew life, and did not dislike wealth, and had had dreams of much good that might be done with it.

"To whom is it left?" she asked.

"After the small legacies I mentioned are paid off, the bulk of the fortune goes"—the lawyer's voice became more and more business-like in tone—"to Madame Danterre, a lady living in Florence."

"And unless anything is sent to me from South Africa, this will is law?"

"Yes."

Rose covered her face with her hands; she did not move for several moments. It would not have surprised Mr. Murray to know that she was praying. Presently she raised her face and looked at him with troubled eyes, but absolute dignity of bearing.

"And the codicil?"

"The codicil directs that if you continue to live in this house——"

Rose made a little sound of surprised protest.

"——the ground rent, all rates, and all taxes are to be paid. A sum much larger than can be required is left for this purpose, and it can also be spent on decorating or furnishing, or in any way be used for the house and garden. It is an elaborate affair, going into every detail."

"Should I be able to let the house?"

"For a period of four months, not longer. But should you refuse to live in this house, this sum will go with the bulk of the fortune. We had immediate application on behalf of Madame Danterre from a lawyer in Florence as soon as the news of the death reached us. It seems that she has a copy of the will."

"Has she"—Rose hesitated, and then repeated, "Has Madame Danterre any children?"

"I do not know," said Mr. Murray. "Beyond paying considerable sums to this lawyer from time to time for her benefit, we have known nothing about her. There has been also a large annual allowance since the year when Sir David came into his cousin's fortune." There was another silence, and then Mr. Murray spoke in a more natural way, though it was impossible to conceal all the sympathy that was filling his heart with an almost murderous wrath.

"After all, the General had plenty of time before starting for the war to arrange his affairs; he was not a man who would neglect business. I came here with a faint hope—or I tried to think it was a hope—that you might have another will in the house. I'm afraid this—document represents Sir David Bright's last wishes." There was a ring of indignant scorn in his voice.

Rose looked through the window on to the thin black London turf outside, and her eyes were blank from the intensity of concentration. She had no thought for the lawyer; if he had been sympathetic even to impertinence she would not have noticed it.

She was questioning her own instincts, her perceptions. No, it was almost more as if she were emptying her mind of any conscious action that her whole power of instinctive perception might have play. When the blow had fallen, her only surprise had been to find that she was not surprised, not astonished. It seemed as if she had known this all the time, for the thing had been alongside of her for years, she had lived too close to it for any surprise when it raised its head and found a name. Her reasoning powers indeed asked with astonishment why she was not surprised. She could not explain, the symptoms of the thing that had haunted her had been too subtle, too elusive, too minute to be brought forward now as witnesses. But while the lawyer looked at the open face and the large eyes, and the frank bearing of the figure in the photograph, and felt that outer man to have been the disguise of a villain, Rose, the victim, knew better. It was a supreme proof of the clear vision of her soul that she was not surprised, and that, even while she seemed to be flayed morally and exposed to things evil and of shame, she did not judge with blind indignation. He had not been wholly bad, he had not been callous in his cruelty; what he had been there would be time to understand—time for the delicacies, almost for the luxuries of forgiveness. What she was feeling after now was a point of view above passion and pain from which to judge this final opinion of the lawyer's, from which to know whether Sir David had left another will.

"There has been another will," she said very gently, "but, of course, it is more than likely that it will never be found. I am convinced"—she looked at the black and green turf all the time, and obviously spoke to herself, not to Mr. Murray—"that he did not intend to leave me to open shame"—the words were gently but very distinctly pronounced—"or to leave a scandal round his own memory. Perhaps he carried another will about with him, and if so it may be sent to me. Somehow I don't think this will happen. I think the will you have in your hand is the only one I shall ever see, but I do not therefore judge him of having faced death with the intention of spoiling my life. I shall live in this house and I shall honour his memory; he died for his country, and I am his widow."

That was all she could say on the subject then, and she could only just ask Mr. Murray if he could see her again any time the next morning. After answering that question the lawyer went silently away.

Rose stood by the table where he had sat a moment before, looking long and steadfastly at the photograph. She looked at the open face, she looked at the military bearing, she looked at the Victoria Cross,—it had been the amazing courage shown in that story that had really won her,—she looked, too, at the many medals. She had been with him once in a moment of peril in a fire and had seen the unconscious pride with which he always answered to the call of danger. She had, too, seen him bear acute pain as if that had been his talent, the thing he knew how to do.

"Ah, poor David!" she said softly. "What did she do to frighten you? Poor, poor David, you were always a coward!"

CHAPTER II

IN THE EVENING

But this was a trial to search out every part of Rose's nature. She had too much faith for sickness, death, or even terrible physical pain, to be to her in any sense a poisoned wound. There are women like Rose whose inner life can only be in peril from the pain and shame of the sin of others. To them it is an intolerable agony to be troubled in their faith in man.

Lady Charlton, swept out of the calm belonging to years of gentle actions and ideal thoughts into a storm of indignation and horror, might have lost all dignity and discretion if she had not been checked by reverence for the dumb anguish and misery of her favourite daughter. She had some notion of the thoughts that must pass in Rose's mind, now dull and heavy, now alert and inflicting sudden deep incisions into the quivering soul. Marriage had been to them both very sacred. They hated, beyond most good women, anything that seemed to materialise or lower the ideal. If there can be imagined a scale of standards for the relations of men and women, of which Zola had not touched the extremity at one end, the first place at the other extremity might be assigned to such Englishwomen as Rose and her mother. The most subtle and amazingly high motives had been assigned to Lord Charlton's most ordinary actions, and happily he had been so ordinary a person that no impossible shock had been given to the ideal built up about him. And it had not been difficult or insincere to carry on something of the same illusion with regard to the man who had won the Victoria Cross and had been very popular with Tommy Atkins. David Bright's very reserves, the closed doors in his domestic life, did not prevent, and indeed in some ways helped, the process. The mother had known in the depth of her heart that Rose was lonely, but then she was childless. Rose had never, even in moments when the nameless mystery that was in her home oppressed her most in its dull, voiceless way, tried to tell her mother what she did not herself understand. Sir David had been courteous, gentle, attentive, but never happy. Rose knew now that he had always been guiltily afraid.

Lady Charlton had had a few moments' warning of disaster, for she was horrified at the change in Rose's face when she met her at the door of the church after Evensong. She herself had been utterly soothed and rested by the beauty of the service. There was so much that fitted in with all her ideals in mourning the great soldier. Little phrases about him and about Rose flitted through her mind. Widows were widows indeed to Lady Charlton. Rose would live now chiefly for Heaven and to soothe the sorrows of earth. She did not say to herself that Rose would not be broken-hearted and crushed, nor did she take long views. If years hence Rose were to marry again her mother could make another picture in which Sir David would recede into the background. Now he was her hero whom Rose mourned, and whose loss had consecrated her more entirely to Heaven; then he would unconsciously become in her mother's eyes a much older man whom Rose had married almost as a child. There would be nothing necessarily to mar the new picture if all else were fitting.

But the peace of gentle sorrow had left Rose's face, and it wore a look her mother had never seen on it before. The breath of evil was close upon her; it had penetrated very near, so near that she seemed evil to herself as it embraced her. She was too dazed, too confused to remember that Divine purity had been enclosed in that embrace. What terrified her most was the thought that had suddenly come that possibly the unknown woman in Florence had been the real lawful wife, and that her own marriage had been a sin, a vile pretence and horror. For the first time in her life the grandest words of confidence that have expressed and interpreted the clinging faith of humanity seemed an unreality. Rose had never known the faintest temptation to doubt Providence before this miserable evening. She resented with her whole being the idea that possibly she had been the cause of the grossest wrong to an injured wife. And there was ground in reason for such a fear, for it seemed difficult to believe that any claim short of that of a wife could have frightened Sir David into such a course. The other and more common view, that it was because he had loved his mistress throughout, did not appeal to her. Vice had for her few recognisable features; she had no map for the country of passion, no precedents to refer to. It seemed to Rose most probable that Sir David had believed his first wife to be dead when he married her; that, on finding he was mistaken, his courage had failed, and that he had carried on a gigantic scheme of bribery to prevent her coming forward. This view was in one sense a degree less painful, as it would make him innocent of the first great deception, the huge lie of making love to her as if he were a free man. The depths and extent of her misery could be measured by the strange sense of a bitter gladness invading the very recesses of her maternal instinct, and replacing what had been the heartfelt sorrow of six years. "It is a mercy I have no child!" she cried, and the cry seemed to herself almost blasphemous.

When she came out of the church it was raining, and the wind blowing. It was only a short walk to her own house, and she and her mother had made a rule not to take out servants and the carriage for their devotions. She would have walked on in total silence, but her mother could not bear the suspense.

"Rose, what is it?" she cried, in a tone of authority and intense anxiety. After all it might be easier to answer now as they battled with the rain.

"I don't know how to tell you, mother. Mr. Murray has been with me and shown me the will. There was some one all the time who had some claim on him. She may have been his real wife—I know nothing except that since we have had John Steele's fortune David has always paid her an income and now has left her a very great deal and me very little. That would not matter—God knows it is not the poverty that hurts—but the thing itself, the horror, the shame, the publicity. I mind it all, everything, more than I ought. I——" She stopped, not a word more would come.

Lady Charlton could only make broken sounds of incredulous horror. When they crossed the brilliantly lighted hall the mother suddenly seemed much older, and Rose, for the first time, bore all the traces of a great, an overpowering sorrow.

"It wasn't natural to be so calm," thought the maid, who had been with her since her girlhood, as she helped her to take off her cloak. "She didn't understand at first. It's coming over her now, poor dear, and indeed he was a real gentleman, and such a husband! Never a harsh word—not one—that I ever heard, at least."

It was some time before Lady Charlton could be brought to believe it all, and then at first she was overwhelmed with self-blame. Her mind fastened chiefly on the fact that she had allowed the marriage without settlements. Then the next thought was the horror of the publicity, the way in which this dreadful woman must be heard of and talked about. Lady Charlton's broken sentences had almost the feebleness of extreme old age that cannot accept as true what it cannot understand. "It seems impossible, quite impossible," she said. She was very tired, and Rose wished it had been practicable to keep this knowledge from her till later. She knew that her mother was one of those highly-strung women whose nerve power is at its best quite late at night. As it was, Lady Charlton had to dress for dinner and sit as upright as usual through the meal, and to talk a little before the servants. Rose appeared the more dazed of the two then, though her mind had been quite clear before. There was nothing said as soon as they were alone, but, as if with one accord, both glanced at each of the many letters brought by the last post, and, if it were one of condolence, laid it aside unread. The butler had placed on a small table two evening papers, which had notices of the memorial service for Sir David Bright, and one had some lines "In Memoriam" from a poet of considerable repute. Rose, finding the papers at her elbow, got up and changed her chair. It was not till they had gone up to their rooms and parted that Lady Charlton felt speech to be possible. She wrapped her purple dressing-gown round her and went into Rose's room. She found her sitting in a low chair by the fire leaning forward, her elbows pressed on her knees, her face buried in her hands. Then, very quietly and impersonally, they discussed the situation. With a rare self-command the mother never used one expression of reprobation; if she had done so, Rose could not have spoken again. It seemed more and more, as they spoke in the two gentle voices, so much alike in tone and accent, in a half pathetic, half musical intonation; it seemed as they sat so quietly without tears, almost without gestures, as if they discussed the story of another woman and another man. There were some differences in their views, and the mother's was ever the hardest on the dead man. For instance, Rose believed through all that another will existed, although she was convinced that she should never see it. Her mother's judgment coincided with the lawyer's; the soldier would have made the change, if it were made at all, before starting for the war. No, the whole thing had been too recently gone into; it was so short a time since the codicil had been added. Of that codicil, too, Lady Charlton's view was quite clear. She thought the object of adding it had been to save appearances. "As long as you live in this house, furnished as well as possible, people will forget the wording of the will, or they will think that money was given to you in his lifetime to escape the death duties."

Like many idealists and even mystics, both mother and daughter took sensible views on money matters. They did not undervalue the fortune that had gone; they were both honestly sorry it had gone, and would have taken any reasonable means to get it back again. Only Rose allowed that possibly there might have been some claim in justice on the woman's part; she could not frame her lips to use the words again. Without "legal wife" or any such terms passing between them, they were really arguing the point. Lady Charlton had not the faintest shadow of a doubt "the woman was a wicked woman, and the wicked woman, as wicked women do, had entrapped a" (the adjective was conspicuous by its absence) "a man." Such a woman was to be forgiven, even—a bitter sigh could not be suppressed—to be prayed for; but it was not necessary to try to take a falsely charitable view of her, or invent unlikely circumstances in her defence. It was a relief to the darkest of all dark thoughts in Rose's mind, the doubt of the validity of her own marriage, to hear her mother settling this question as she had settled so many questions years ago, by the weight of personal authority.

At last the clock on the stairs below told them that it was two in the morning, and Lady Charlton had to leave London by an early train. She was torn between the claim of her youngest married daughter, who was laid up in a lonely country house in Scotland, and that of Rose in this new and miserable trouble.

"I could telegraph to Bertha that I can't come," she said suddenly. "But I am afraid she would miss me."

"No, no," murmured Rose firmly, "Bertha needs you most now; you must go," and then, fearing her mother might think she did not want her quite, quite enough, "I shall look forward to your coming back soon, very soon."

"Could you—could you come and sleep in my room, Rose?" They were standing up by the fireplace now.

"If you like mother, only it will be worse for me to-morrow night." They both looked away from the fire round the room—the room that had been hers since the first days after the honeymoon.

Then at the same moment Lady Charlton opened her arms and Rose drew within them, and leant her fair head on her mother's shoulder. So they stood for a few moments in absolute stillness.

"God bless you, my child," and Rose was left, as she wished, alone.

CHAPTER III

"AS YOU HOPE TO BE FORGIVEN"

Two months passed, and at last the War Office received a parcel for Lady Rose Bright. It had been sent to headquarters by the next officer in command under Sir David, who had met his own fate a few weeks later. Rose received the parcel at tea-time, brought to her by a mounted messenger from the War Office.

A great calm had settled in Rose's soul during these weeks. She had met her trouble alone and standing. At first, all had been utter darkness and bitter questioning. Then the questioning had ceased. Even the wish to have things clear to her mind and to know why she should have this particular trial was silenced, and in the completeness of submission she had come back to life and to peace. Nothing was solved, nothing made clear, but she was again in the daylight. But when she received the little parcel in its thick envelope she trembled excessively. It was addressed in a handwriting she had never seen before. She could not for some moments force herself to open it. When she did she drew out a faded photograph, a diamond ring, and a sheet of paper with writing in ink. The photograph was of Sir David as quite a young man—she had never seen it before; the ring had one very fine diamond, and that she had never seen before. On the paper was written in his own hand.—

"This will be brought to you if I die in battle. Forgive me, as you too hope to be forgiven. Justice had to be done. I have tried to make it as little painful as I could."

That was all. There was nothing else in the envelope. She took up the photograph, she took up the ring, and examined them in turn. It was so strange, this very remarkable diamond, which she had never seen before, sent to her as if it were a matter of course. He had never worn much jewellery, and he had left in her care the few seals and rings he possessed. Then the photograph of her husband as a young man, so much younger than when she had known him. Why send it to her now? What had she to do with this remote past? But the paper was the most astonishing of all. She had been standing when she undid the things; she left the ring and the photograph on the table, and she sank into a chair near the fire holding the bit of paper. The tone of it astonished and confused her. It was more the stern moralist asking to be forgiven for doing right than the guilty husband asking for mercy in her thoughts of him.

"Yes," thought Rose at length, "that is because she was his wife, and when he came to face death it was the great wrong of infidelity to her that haunted him. I must have seemed almost a partner in the wrong."

Again the confused sense of guilt seized her, the horrible possibility of having been a wife only in name. She did not weigh the matter calmly enough to feel quite as distinctly as she ought to have done that she could not be touched or denied in the faintest degree by a sin that was not her sin. Still she raised her head as she could not have done some weeks before; for the most acute phase of her trial had been faced and had been passed. Now in her moments of most bitter pain in the very depths of her soul was peace. As she became calmer she tried again to connect together those three parts of the message from the battle-field, the ring, the photograph, and the letter; but she could not do so. At last she put them away in the drawer of her bureau, and then wrote to tell her mother and the lawyer that Sir David had sent her a photograph, a ring, and a few private lines—that was all. There was no will.

Still everything had not been brought back. There had been portmanteaux sent down to Capetown, and there might yet be discovered a small despatch box, or a writing case, something or other that might hold a will. But the limit of time was reached at last; the portmanteaux and a despatch box were recovered, but they held no will.

The solicitor delayed to the last possible moment, and then the will was proved. It was published in the papers at a moment when a lull in the war gave leisure for private gossip, and the gossip accordingly raged hotly. All the sweetness, gentleness, and kindness that made Rose deservedly popular did not prevent there being two currents of opinion. There are wits so active that they cannot share the views of all right-minded people. While the majority sympathised deeply with Rose, there were a few who insinuated that she must be to some degree to blame for what had happened.

"Well, don't you know, I never could understand why she married a man so much older than herself. Of course she had not a penny and he was awfully rich, and people don't look too close into a man's character in such cases. It is rather convenient for some women to be very innocent."

Sir Edmund Grosse, to whom the remark was addressed at a small country house party, turned his back for a moment on the speaker in order to pick up a paper, and then said in a low, indifferent voice: "David Bright came into his cousin's fortune unexpectedly a year after he married Lady Rose."

The subject was dropped that time, but he met it again in somewhat the same terms in London. There seemed a sort of vague impression that Lady Rose had married for the sake of the wealth she had lost. Also at his club there was talk he did not like, not against Rose indeed, but dwelling on the other side of the story, and he hated to hear Rose's name connected with it. People forgot his relationship, and after all he was only a second cousin.

Edmund Grosse was at this time just over forty. He was a tall, loosely built man, with rather a colourless face, with an expression negative in repose, and faintly humorous when speaking. He was rich and supposed to be lazy; he knew his world and had lived it in and for it systematically. Some one had said that he took all the frivolous things of life seriously and all the serious things frivolously. He could advise on the choice of a hotel or a motor-car with intense earnestness, and he had healed more than one matrimonial breach that threatened to become tragic by appealing to the sense of humour in both parties. He never took for granted that anybody was very good or very bad. The best women possible liked him, and looked sorry and incredulous when they were informed by his enemies that he had no morals. He had never told any one that he was sad and bored. Nor had he ever thought it worth while to mention that he had indifferent health and knew what it was to suffer pain. If such personal points were ever approached by his friends they found that he did not dwell upon them. He had the air of not being much interested in himself.

For a long time he had felt no acute sensations of any kind; he had believed them to belong to youth and that was past. But that matter of David Bright's will had stirred him to the very depths. He spent solitary hours in cursing the departed hero, and people found him tiresome and taciturn in company.

At last he determined to meddle in Rose's concerns, and he went to see Mr. Murray, Junior, at his office. There ensued some pretty plain speaking as to the late hero between the two men. Edmund Grosse half drawled out far the worst comments of the two; he liked the lawyer and let himself speak freely. And although the visit was apparently wholly unproductive of other results, it was a decided relief to his feelings. Then he heard that Rose had come back to London, and he went to see her. It was about nine months since she had become a widow. She was alone in the big beautifully furnished drawing-room, which was just as of old. Except that a neat maid had opened the door, instead of a butler, he saw no change.

Rose looked a little nervous for a moment, and then frankly pleased to see him. Edmund always had a talent for seeming to be as natural in any house as if he were the husband or the brother or part of the furniture. Somehow, as Rose gave him tea and they settled into a chat, she felt as if he had been there very often lately, whereas in fact she had not seen him since David died, except at the memorial service. He began to tell her what visits he had paid, whom he had seen, the little gossip he expressed so well in his gentle, sleepy voice; and then he drew her on as to her own interests, her charities, her work for the soldiers' wives. He said nothing more that day, but he dropped in again soon, and then again.

At last one evening he observed quite quietly, in a pause in their talk: "So you live here on £800 a year?"

Rose did not feel annoyed, though she did not know why she was not angry.

"Yes, I can manage," she said simply.

"You can't tell yet; it's too soon." He got up out of his low chair near the fireplace, now filled with plants, and stood with his back against the chimney. "You know it's absurd," he said. Rose moved uneasily and was silent.

"It's absurd," he repeated, "there's another will somewhere. David would never have done that." He struck that note at the start, and cursed David all the deeper in the depths of his diplomatic soul. Rose looked at him gratefully, kindly.

"I think there is another will somewhere," she said, "but I am sure it will never be found. It's no use to think or talk of it, Edmund."

He fidgeted for a moment with the china on the chimney-piece.

"For 'auld lang syne,' Rose," he said in a very low voice, "and because you might possibly, just possibly, have made something of me if you had chosen, let me know a little more about it. I want to see what was in his last letter."

Rose flushed deeply. It was difficult to say why she yielded except that most people did yield to Grosse if he got them alone. She drew off the third finger of her left hand a very remarkable diamond ring and gave it to him. Then she took out of a drawer a faded photograph of a young, commonplace, open-faced officer, now framed in an exquisite stamped leather case, and handed that to him also. He saw that she hesitated.

"May I have the rest," he said very gently. Even her mother had never seen the piece of paper. No, she could not show that. Edmund did not insist further, and a moment later he seemed to have forgotten that she had not given him what he asked for.

"Did he often wear this ring?"

"Never. I never saw it till now, and I had never seen the photograph."

"It was taken in India," he commented, "and the ring has a date twenty years ago."

"I never noticed that," said Rose. She was feeling half consciously soothed and relieved as a child might feel comforted who had found a companion in a room that was haunted.

"Things from such a remote past," he murmured abstractedly. "Did he explain in writing why he sent those things?"

"No, he said nothing about them, he only——" she paused. Edmund did not move, and in a few moments she gave him the paper. He ground his teeth as he read it, he grew white about the lips, but he said nothing. He was horribly disappointed—the scoundrel asked for forgiveness. Then he had not made another will. Edmund did not look round at Rose, but she was acutely present to his consciousness—the woman's beauty, the child's innocence, the suffering and the strength in her face. "As you would be forgiven!" That was a further insult, it seemed to him. To talk of Rose wanting forgiveness. Then a strange kind of sarcasm took hold of him. So it was; she had not been able to believe in himself; he, Edmund, had not been ideal in any sense. Therefore she had passed him by, and then a hero had come whom she had worshipped, and this was the end of it. Every word in the paper burnt into him. "Justice"—how dared he? "Made it as little painful as he could"—it was insufferable, and the coward was beyond reach, had taken refuge whither human vengeance could not follow him.

He succeeded in leaving Rose's house without betraying his feelings, but he felt that no good had come of this attempt, so far at any rate. That night he slept badly, which he did pretty often, but he experienced an unusual sensation on waking. He felt as if he had been working hard and in vain all night at a problem, and he suddenly said to himself, "The ring, the photograph, and the paper were of course meant for the other woman, and she has got whatever was meant for Rose. Now if the thing that was meant for Rose was the will, Madame Danterre has got it now unless she has had the nerve to destroy it." He felt as if he had been an ass till this moment. Then he went to see Mr. Murray, Junior, who listened with profound attention until he had finished what he had to tell him.

"Lady Rose has allowed you to see the paper, then?" he said at last. "She has not even shown it to Lady Charlton. He asked her pardon," he mused, half to himself, "and said justice must be done. I am afraid, Sir Edmund, that that points in the same direction as our worst fears—that Madame Danterre was his wife."

"But he would not have written such a letter as that to Rose; it is impossible. 'Forgive as you too hope to be forgiven.' That sentence in connection with Lady Rose is positively grotesque, whereas it would be most fitting when addressed elsewhere."

Mr. Murray could not see the case in the same light as Edmund. He allowed the possibility of the scrap of paper and the ring having been sent to Rose by mistake, but he was not inclined to indulge in what seemed to him to be guesswork as to what conceivably had been intended to be sent to her in place of them.

"There is, too," he argued, "a quite possible interpretation of the words of that scrap of paper. It is possible that he was full of remorse for his treatment of Madame Danterre. Sometimes a man is haunted by wrong-doing in the past until it prevents his understanding the point of view of anybody but the victim of the old haunting sin. Remorse is very exclusive, Sir Edmund. In such a state of mind he would hardly think of Lady Rose enough to realise the bearing of his words. 'Forgive as you too hope to be forgiven' would be an appeal wrung out from him by sheer suffering. It is a possible cry from any human being to another. Then as to the ring and the photograph, we have no proof that he put them in the envelope. They may have been found on him and put into the envelope by the same hand that addressed it. I quite grant you that those few words are extraordinary, but they can be explained. But even if it were obvious that they were intended for somebody else, you cannot deduce from that, that another letter, intended for Lady Rose and containing a will, was sent elsewhere."

But Sir Edmund was obstinate. The piece of paper had been intended for Madame Danterre, together with the ring and the photograph—things belonging to Sir David's early life, to the days when he most probably loved this other woman; he even went so far as to maintain that the lady in Florence had given Sir David the ring.

"After all," said Mr. Murray, "what can you do? You could only raise hopes that won't be fulfilled."

"I think myself that my explanation would calm my cousin's mind; the possibility that she was not Sir David's wife is, I am convinced, the most painful part of the trial to her. I shall write it to her, but I shall also tell her that there is no hope whatever of proving what I believe to be the truth."

"None at all; do impress that upon her, Sir Edmund. We have nothing to begin upon. The officer who sent the paper to headquarters is dead; Sir David's own servant is dead; Sir David's will in favour of Madame Danterre has been published without even a protest."

"Lady Rose will not be inclined to raise the question."

"No, I believe that is true," said the lawyer; "Lady Rose Bright is a wise woman."

But Mr. Murray was annoyed to find that Edmund Grosse was far less wise, and that whatever he might promise to say to Rose he would not really be content to leave things alone. He intended to go to Florence and to get into touch with Madame Danterre. Such interference could do no good, and it might do harm.

"I won't alarm her," said Edmund, "believe me, she will have no reason to suppose that I am in Florence on her account. I am, in any case, going to the Italian lakes this autumn, and I have often been offered the loan of a flat overlooking the Arno. If the offer is still open I shall accept it. I have long wished to know that fascinating town a little better."

When Rose received the letter from Edmund it had the effect he had expected. It was simply calming, not exciting. Rose was even more anxious than the lawyer that nothing should be attempted in order to follow up her cousin's suggestion. But she could now let her imagination be comforted by Edmund's solution of the mystery, and let her fancy rest in the thought of a very different letter intended for herself. The words on that scrap of paper no longer burnt with such agony into her soul, and she no longer felt it a dreadful duty to wear the ring with its glorious stone so full of light, an object that was to her intensely repugnant. She would put it away, and with it all dark and morbid thoughts. She had a life to lead, thoughts to think, actions to do, and all that was in her own control must escape from the shadow of the past into a working daylight.

CHAPTER IV

THE WICKED WOMAN IN FLORENCE

Edmund Grosse's friend was delighted to put the flat in the Palazzo at his disposal. The weather was unusually warm for the autumn when Edmund arrived in Florence. He was glad to get there, and glad to get away from the gay group he had left in a beautiful villa on Lake Como; and probably they were glad to see him go.

Edmund had indeed only stayed with them long enough to leave a very marked impression of low spirits and irritation. "What's come to Grosse?" was asked by more than one guest of the hostess.

"I don't know, but he really is impossible. It's partly because of Billy—but I won't condescend to explain that Billy proposed himself and I could not well refuse."

Billy is the only one of this gay, quarrelsome little group that need be named here. It was really partly on his account that Edmund so quickly left them to their gossip alternating with happy phrases of joy in the beauty of mountains and lakes, and to their quarrels alternating with moments of love-making, so avowedly brief that only an artist could believe in its exquisite enjoyment. Neither Edmund nor Billy were really habitués of this Bohemian circle. They both belonged to a more conventional social atmosphere; they were at once above and below the rest of the party. The cause of antipathy to Billy on Sir Edmund's part was a certain likeness in their lives—contrasting with a most marked dissimilarity of character.

Sir Edmund could not say that Billy was a fool or a snob, because Billy did nothing but lead a perfectly useless life as expensively as possible; and he did the same himself. He could not even say that Billy lived among fools and snobs, because many of Billy's friends were his own friends too. He could not say that Billy had been a coward because he had not volunteered to fight in the Boer war, because Sir Edmund had not volunteered himself. He could not say that Billy employed the wrong tailor; it would show only gross ignorance or temper to say so. But just the things in which he felt himself superior, utterly different in fact from Billy, were the stupid, priggish things that no one boasts of. He read a good deal; he thought a good deal; he knew he might have had a future, and the bitterness of his heart lay in the fact that at fifteen years later in life than Billy he was still so completely a slave to all that Billy loved. Every detail of their lives seemed to add to the irritation. It was only the day he left London that he had discovered that Billy's new motor was from the same maker as his own; in fact, except in colour, the motors were twins. This was the latest, and not even the least, cause of annoyance. For it betrayed what he was always trying to conceal from himself, that there appeared to be an actual rivalry between him and Billy, a petty, social, silly rivalry. Billy, of simpler make, a fresher, younger, more contented animal, thought little of all this, and was irritated by Sir Edmund's assumption of superiority.

But he had never found Grosse so bearish and difficult before this visit to Como. As a rule Edmund was suavity itself, but this time even his gift of gently, almost imperceptibly, making every woman feel him to be her admirer was failing. How often he had been the life of any party in any class of society, and that not by starting amusements, not by any power of initiation, but by a gift for making others feel pleased, first with themselves, and consequently with life. He could bring the gift to good use on a royal yacht, at a Bohemian supper party, at a schoolroom tea, or at a parish mothers' meeting. But now—and he owned that his liver was out of order—he was suffering from a general disgust with things. When still a young man in the Foreign Office he had succeeded to a large fortune, and it had seemed then thoroughly worth while to employ it for social ends and social joys. Long ago he had attained those ends, and long ago he had become bored with those joys; and yet he could not shake himself free from any of the habits of body or mind he had got into during those years. He could not be indifferent to any shades of failure or success. He watched the temperature of his popularity as acutely as many men watch their bodily symptoms. Even during those days at Como, though despising his company, he knew that he felt a distinct irritation in a preference for Billy on the part of a lady whom he had at one time honoured with his notice. In arriving where he was in the English social world, he had increased, not only the need for luxury of body, but the sensitiveness and acuteness of certain perceptions as to his fellow creatures, and these perceptions were not likely to slumber again.

Edmund was oppressed by several unpleasant thoughts as well as by the heat of the night on which he arrived in Florence. He decided to sleep out in the wide brick loggia of the flat, which was nearly at the top of the great building. There was nothing to distract his gloomy thoughts from himself, not even a defect in the dinner or in the broad couch of a bed from which he could look up between the brick pillars of the loggia at the naked stars. If he had been younger he would, in his sleepless hours, have owned to himself that he was suffering from "what men call love," but he could not believe easily that Edmund Grosse at forty was as silly as any boy of twenty. He pished and pshawed at the absurdity. He could not accept anything so simple and goody as his own story. That ever since Rose married he had put her out of his thought from very love and reverence for her seemed an absurd thing to say of a man of his record. Yet it was true; and all the more in consequence did the thought of Rose as a free woman derange his whole inner life now, while the thought of Rose insulted by the dead hand of the man she had married was gall and wormwood. What must Rose think of men? She had been so anxious to find a great and good man; and she had found David Bright, whose mistress was now enjoying his great wealth somewhere below in the old Tuscan capital. And how could Edmund venture to be the next man offered to her?—Edmund who had done nothing all these years, who had sunk with the opportunity of wealth; whose talents had been lost or misused. He seemed to see Rose kneeling at her prayers—the golden head bowed, the girlish figure bent. He could think of nothing in himself to distract her back to earth, poor beautiful child! Yet he had not nursed or petted or even welcomed the old passion of his boyhood. He wanted to be without it and its discomforting reproaches. It was too late to change anything or anybody. At forty how could he have a career, and what good would come of it? Yet his love for Rose was insistent on the necessity of making Rose's lover into a different man from the present Edmund Grosse. It was absurd and medieval to suppose that if he did some great or even moderately great work he could win her by doing it. It might be absurd, yet contrariwise he felt convinced that she would never take him as he was now.

So he wearied as he turned on the couch that became less and less comfortable, till he rose and, with a rug thrown over him, leant on the brick balustrade of the loggia. He stood looking at the stars in the dimness, not wholly unlike the figure of some old Roman noble in his toga, nor perhaps wholly unlike the figure of the unconverted Augustine, weary of himself and of all things.

But this remark only shows how the stars and the deep blue openings into the heavens, and the manifold suggestions of the towers of Dante's city, and the neighbourhood of Savonarola's cell, affect the imagination and call up comparisons by far too mighty. Edmund Grosse's weariness of evil is nothing but a sickly shadow of the weariness of the great imprisoned soul to whom an angel cried to take up and read aright the book of life. Grosse is in fact only a middle-aged man in pajamas with a travelling rug about his shoulders, with a sallow face, a sickly body, and a rather shallow soul. He will not go quite straight even in his love quest, and he cannot bring himself to believe how strongly that love has hold of him. He is cynical about the best part of himself and to-night only wishes that it would trouble him less.

"Damn it," he muttered at last, "I wish I had slept indoors—I am bored to death by those stars!"

Next day Grosse set about the work for which he had come to Florence. He called on two men whom he knew slightly, and found them at home, but neither of them had ever heard of Madame Danterre. Dawkins, his much-travelled servant, of course, was more successful, and by the evening was able to take Edmund in a carriage to see some fine old iron gates, and to drive round some enormous brick walls—enormous in height and in thickness.

The Villa was in a magnificent position, and the gardens, Dawkins told his master, were said to be beautiful. Madame Danterre had only just moved into it from a much smaller house in the same quarter.

Edmund next drove to the nearest chemist, and there found out that Dr. Larrone was the name of Madame Danterre's medical man. He already knew the name of her lawyer from Mr. Murray, who had been in perfunctory communication with him during the years in which Sir David had paid a large allowance to Madame Danterre. But he knew that any direct attempt to see these men would probably be worse than useless. What he wished to do was to come across Madame Danterre socially, and with all the appearance of an accidental meeting. His two friends in Florence did their best for him, but they were before long driven to recommend Pietrino, a well-known detective, as the only person who could find out for Grosse in what houses it might be possible to meet Madame Danterre.

Grosse soon recognised the remarkable gifts of the Italian detective, and confided to him the whole case in all its apparent hopelessness. There was, indeed, a touch of kindred feeling between them, for both men had a certain pleasure in dealing with human beings—humanity was the material they loved to work upon. The detective was too wise to let his zeal for the wealthy Englishman outrun discretion. He did very little in the case, and brought back a distinct opinion that Grosse could, at present, do nothing but mischief by interference. Madame Danterre had always lived a very retired life, and was either a real invalid or a valetudinarian. Her great, her enormous accession of wealth had only been used apparently in the sacred cause of bodily health. She saw at most six people, including two doctors and her lawyer; and on rare occasions, some elderly man visiting Florence—a Frenchman maybe, or an Englishman—would seek her out. She never paid any visits, although she kept a splendid stable and took long drives almost daily. The detective was depressed, for he had really been fired by Grosse's view as to the will, and he had come to so favourable an opinion of Grosse's ability that he had wished greatly for an interview between the latter and Madame Danterre to come off.

Edmund was loth to leave Florence until one evening when he despaired, for the first time, of doing any good. It was the evening on which he succeeded in seeing Madame Danterre without the knowledge of that lady. The garden of the villa into which he so much wished to penetrate was walled about with those amazing masses of brickwork which point to a date when labour was cheap indeed. Edmund had more than once dawdled under the deep shadow of these shapeless masses of wall at the hour of the general siesta.

He felt more alert while most of the world was asleep, and he could study the defences of Madame Danterre undisturbed. A lost joy of boyhood was in his heart when he discovered a corner where the brickwork was partly crumbled away, and partly, evidently, broken by use. It looked as if a tiny loophole in the wall some fifteen feet from the ground had been used as an entrance to the forbidden garden by some small human body. That evening, an hour before sunset, he came back and looked longingly at the wall. The narrow road was as empty as it had been earlier in the day. Twice he tried in vain to climb as far as the loophole, but the third time, with trousers ruined and one hand bleeding, he succeeded in crawling on to the ledge below the opening so that he could look inside. He almost laughed aloud at the absurdity of his own pleasure in doing so. Some rich, heavy scent met him as he looked down, but, fresh from the gardens of Como, this garden looked to him both heavy and desolate—heavy in its great hedges broken by statuary in alcoves cut in the green, and desolate in its burnt turf and its trailing rose trees loaded with dead roses. His first glance had been downwards, then his look went further afield, and he knew why Madame Danterre had chosen the villa, for the view of Florence was superb. He had not enjoyed it for half a moment when he heard a slight noise in the garden. Yes, down the alley opposite to him there were approaching a lady and two men servants. He held his breath with surprise. Was this Madame Danterre? the rival of Rose, the real love of David Bright? What he saw was an incredibly wizened old woman who yet held herself with considerable grace and walked with quick, long steps on the burnt grass a little ahead of the attendants, one of whom carried a deck chair, while the other was laden with cushions and books. It was evident to the onlooker at the installation of Madame Danterre in the shady, open space where three alleys met, that everything to do with her person was carried out with the care and reverence befitting a religious ceremony; and there was almost a ludicrous degree of pride in her bearing and gestures. Edmund felt how amazingly some women have the power of making others accept them as a higher product of creation, until their most minute bodily wants seem to themselves and those about them to have a sacred importance. At last, when chair and mat and cushions and books had been carefully adjusted after much consideration, she was left alone.

For a few moments she read a paper-covered volume, and Edmund determined to creep away at once, when she suddenly got up and began walking again with long, quick steps, her train sweeping the grass as she came towards the great wall; and he drew back a little, although it was almost impossible that she should see him. Her gown, of a dark dove colour, floated softly; it had much lace about the throat on which shone a string of enormous pearls; and she wore long, grey gloves. Edmund, who was an authority on the subject, thought her exquisitely dressed, as a woman who feels herself of great importance will dress even when there is no one to see her. In the midst of the extraordinarily wizened face were great dark eyes full of expression, with a fierce brightness in them. It was as if an internal fire were burning up the dried and wizened features, and could only find an outlet through the eyes. Rapidly she had passed up and down, and sometimes as she came nearer the wall Edmund saw her flash angry glances, and sometimes sarcastic glances, while her lips moved rapidly, and her very small gloved hand clenched and unclenched.

At last a noise in the deserted road behind him, the growing rumbling of a cart, made him think it safer to move, even at the risk of a little sound in doing so. He reached the ground safely before he could be seen, and proceeded to brush the brick-dust off the torn knees of his grey trousers.

He walked down the hill into the town with an air of finality, for he had determined to go back to England. He could not have analysed his impressions; he could not have accounted for his sense of impotence and defeat, but so it was. He had come across the personality of Madame Danterre, and he thereupon left her in possession of the field. But at the same time, before leaving Florence, he gave largely of the sinews of war to that able spy, the Italian detective, Pietrino.

CHAPTER V

"YOUR MOTHER'S DAUGHTER"

The surprising disposal of Sir David Bright's fortune was to have very important consequences in a quiet household among the Malcot hills, of the existence of which Sir Edmund Grosse and Lady Rose Bright were entirely unaware.

In a small wind-swept wood that appeared to be seeking shelter in the hollow under the great massive curve of a green hill, there stood one of those English country houses that must have been planned, built, and finished with the sole object of obtaining coolness and shade. The principal living rooms looked north, and the staircase and a minute study were the only spots that ever received any direct rays of the sun. All the rooms except this favoured little study had windows opening to the ground, and immediately outside grew the rich mossy turf that indicates a clay soil. The mistress of the house was not easily daunted by her surroundings, and she had impressed her cheerful, comfortable, and fairly cultured mind on all the rooms. Mrs. Carteret was the widow of a Colonel Carteret, who had retired from the army to farm his own acres, and take his place in local politics. It is needless to say that, while the politics had gained from the help of an upright and chivalrous, if narrow, mind, the acres had profited little from his attentions. When he died he left all he possessed absolutely to his widow, who was not prepared to find how very little that all had become. Mrs. Carteret took up the burden of the acres, dairy, gardens, and stable, with a sense of sanctified duty none the less heroic in sensation because she was doing all these things for her own profit. Her neighbours held her in proportionate respect; and, as she had a fine person, pleasant manners, and good connections, she kept, without the aid of wealth, a comfortable corner in the society of the county.

It was not long after Colonel Carteret's death, and some thirteen years before the death of Sir David Bright, that the immediate neighbourhood became gradually conscious of the fact that Mrs. Carteret had adopted a little niece, the child of a soldier brother who had died in India. This child, from the first, made as little effect on her surroundings as it was possible for a child to do. Molly Dexter was small, thin, and sallow; her dark hair did not curl; and her grey eyes had a curious look that is not common, yet not very rare, in childhood. It is the look of one who waits for other circumstances and other people than those now present. I know nothing so discouraging in a child friend—or rather in a child acquaintance, for friendship is warned off by such eyes—as this particular look. Mrs. Carteret took her niece cheerfully in hand, commended the quiet of her ways, and gave credit to herself and open windows for a perceptible increase in the covering of flesh on the little bones, and a certain promise of firmness in the calves of the small legs. As to the rest: "Of course it was difficult at first," she said, "but now Molly is perfectly at home with me. Nurses never do understand children, and Mary used to excite her until she had fits of passion. But that is all past. She is quite a healthy and normal child now."

Molly was growing healthy, but whether she was normal or not is another point. It does not tend to make a child normal to change everything in life at the age of seven. Not one person, hardly one thing was the same to Molly since her father's death. The language of her ayah had until then been more familiar to her than any other language. The ayah's thoughts had been her thoughts. The East had had in charge the first years of Molly's dawning intelligence, and there seemed impressed, even on her tiny figure, something that told of patience, scorn, and reserve. And yet Mrs. Carteret was quite satisfied.

Once, indeed, the widow was puzzled. Molly had strayed away by herself, and could not be found for nearly two hours. Provided with two figs and several bits of biscuit, a half-crown and a shilling, she had started to walk through the deep, heavy lanes between the great hills, with the firm intention of taking ship to France. Mrs. Carteret treated the escapade kindly and firmly; not making too much of it, but giving such sufficient punishment as to prevent anything so silly happening again. But she had no suspicion of what really had happened. Molly had, in fact, started with the intention of finding her mother. It was two years since she had come to live with Mrs. Carteret, and, if the child had spoken her secret thought, she would have told you that throughout those two years she had been meaning to run away and find her mother. In that she would have fallen into an exaggeration not uncommon with some grown-up people. It had been only at moments far apart, or occasionally for quite a succession of nights in bed, that she had spent a brief space before falling asleep in dreaming of going to seek her mother. But whole months had passed without any such thought; and during these long interludes the healthy country scenes about her, and the common causes for smiles and tears in a child's life, filled her consciousness. Still, the undercurrent of the deeper life was there, and very small incidents were strong enough to bring it to the surface. Molly had short daily lessons from the clergyman's daughter, a young lady who also took a cheerful, airy view of the child, and said she would grow out of her little faults in time. In one of these lessons Molly learnt with surprising eagerness how to find France for herself on the map. That France was much nearer to England than to India, and how it was usual to cross the Channel were facts easily acquired. Molly was amazingly backward in her lessons, or she must have learnt these things before. When lessons were over and she went out into the garden, instead of running as usual she walked so slowly that Mrs. Carteret, while talking to the gardener, actually wondered what was in that child's mind. Molly was living through again the parting with the ayah. She could feel the intensely familiar touch of the soft, dark hand; she could see the adoring love of the dark eyes with their passionate anger at the separation. The woman had to be revenged on her enemies who were tearing the child from her. "They deceive you," she said. "The beautiful mother is not dead; she lives in France, not England; they will try to keep you from her, but the faithful child will find a way."

Molly unconsciously in her own mind had already begun to put these words into English, whereas a year before she would have kept to the ayah's own language. But in either language those words came to her as the last message from that other life of warmth and love and colour in which she had once been a queen. Indeed, every English child brought home from India is a sovereign dethroned. And the repetition of the ayah's last words gave utterance to a sense of wrong that Molly nourished against her present rulers and against the world in which she was not understood.

That same day Mrs. Carteret spoke sharply and with indignation because Molly had trodden purely by accident on the pug; and her aunt said that the one thing with which she had no patience was cruelty to animals—whereas the child was passionately fond of animals. Again, on that same day, Molly fell into a very particularly dirty little pond near the cowshed at the farm. Mary, the nurse, no doubt was the sufferer, and she said that she did not suppose that black nurses minded being covered with muck—how should they?—and she supposed she must be treated as if she were a negro herself, but time would show whether she were a black slave or an Englishwoman with a house of her own which she could have now if she liked for the asking. While Mary spoke she pushed and pulled, and, in general treated Molly's small person as something unpleasant, and to be kept at a distance. Once clean and dressed again, Molly sat down quite quietly to consider the ways and means of getting to France, with the result already told.

Several years passed after that, in which Mrs. Carteret did by Molly, as by every one else, all the duties that were quite obviously evident to her, and did not go about seeking for any fanciful ones. And Molly grew up, sometimes happy, and sometimes not, saying sometimes the things she really meant when she was in a temper, and acquiescing in Mrs. Carteret's explanation that she had not meant them when she had regained her self-control.

Until Molly was between fifteen and sixteen, Mrs. Carteret was able to keep to her optimism as to their mutual relations.

"The child is, of course, very backward. I tried to think it was want of education, but I've come to see it's of no use to expect to make Molly an interesting or agreeable woman; and very plain, of course, she must be. But, you know, plenty of plain, uninteresting women have very fairly happy lives, and under the circumstances"—but there Mrs. Carteret stopped, and her guest, the wife of the vicar, knew no more of the circumstances than did the world at large.

But when Molly was about the age of fifteen she began to display more troublesome qualities, and a certain faculty for doing quite the wrong thing under a perverse appearance of attempting good works. There is nothing annoys a woman of Mrs. Carteret's stamp so much as good done in the wrong way. She had known for so many years exactly how to do good to the labourer, his family, and his widow, or to the vagrant passing by. It was really very tiresome to find that Molly, while walking in one of the lanes, had slipped off a new flannel petticoat in order to wrap up a gypsy's baby. And it might be allowed to be trying that when believing an old man of rather doubtful antecedents to be dying from exhaustion, Molly had herself sought whisky from the nearest inn. She had bought a whole bottle of whisky, though indeed, being seized with qualms, she had poured half the contents of the bottle into a ditch before going back to the cottage. And it was undoubtedly Mrs. Carteret's duty to protest when she found that Molly had held a baby with diphtheria folded closely in her arms while the mother fetched the doctor.

Can any one blame Mrs. Carteret for finding these doings a little trying? And it showed how freakish and contradictory Molly was in all her ways that she would never join nicely in school feasts, or harvest homes, or anything pleasant or cheerful. Nor did she make friends even with those she had worried over in times of sickness. She would risk some serious infection, or meddle, with her odd notions, day after day in a cottage; and then she would hardly nod to the convalescent boy or girl when she met them again in the lanes.

There was no one to tell her aunt what new, strange instincts and aspirations were struggling to the light in Molly. A passionate pity for pain would seize on her and hold her in a grip until she had done some definite act to relieve it. But pity was either not akin to love in Molly, or her affections had been too starved to take root after the immediate impulse of mercy was passed. The girl was not popular in the village, although, unlike Mrs. Carteret, her poorer neighbours had a great idea of Molly's cleverness. Needless to say that when, after some unmeasured effort at relieving suffering, Molly would come home with a sense of joy she rarely knew after any other act, it hurt her to the quick and roused her deepest anger to find herself treated like a naughty, inconsiderate child. The storms between Mrs. Carteret and Molly were increasing in number and intensity, with outspoken wrath on one side, and a white heat of dumb, indignant resistance on the other. Then, happily, there came a change. Molly's education had been of the very slightest until she was nearly sixteen, when Mrs. Carteret told her to expect the arrival of a finishing governess. She also announced that a music master from the cathedral town would, in future, come over twice a week to give her lessons.

"It's not my doing," said Mrs. Carteret,—and meaning only to be candid she sounded very ungracious; and although she did not pay for these things, it was due to her urgent representations of their need that they had been provided. Molly supposed that all such financial arrangements were made for her by her father's lawyer, of whom she had heard Mrs. Carteret speak.

Throughout these years it had never occurred to Mrs. Carteret to doubt that Molly believed her mother to be dead, and she never for a moment supposed the child's silence on the subject to be ominous. Such silence did not show any special power of reserve; many children brought up like Molly will carefully conceal knowledge which they believe that those in authority over them suppose them not to possess. Perhaps in Molly's case there was an instinctive shrinking from exposing an ideal to scorn. Perhaps there was a wholly unconscious want of faith in the ideal itself, an ideal which had been built up upon one phrase. Yet the notion of the beautiful, exiled mother, so cruelly concealed from her child, was very precious, however insecurely founded. It must be concealed from other eyes by mists of incense, and honoured in the silence of the sanctuary.

The new governess, Miss Carew, was a very fair teacher, and she soon recognised the quality of her pupil's mind. Mrs. Carteret was possibly a little disappointed on finding that Miss Carew considered Molly to be very clever, as well as very ignorant. The widow was herself accustomed to feel superior to her own circle in literary attainments,—a sensation which she justified by an occasional reading of French memoirs and by always getting through at least two articles in each Nineteenth Century. It was a detail that she had never cared for poetry; Sir James Stephen, she knew, had also never cared to have ideas expressed in verse. But she felt a little dull when Miss Carew and Molly discussed Browning and Tennyson and De Musset. Miss Carew fired Molly with new thoughts and new ambitions in matters intellectual, but also in more mundane affairs. If it is possible to be in the world and not of it we have all of us also known people who are of the world though not in it; and Miss Carew was undoubtedly one of the latter. Her tongue babbled of beauties and courts, of manners, of wealth, and of chiffons, with the free idealism of an amateur, and this without intending to do more than enliven the dull daily walks through Malcot lanes.

Two years of this companionship rapidly developed Molly. She did not now merely condemn her aunt and her friends from pure ignorant dislike; she knew from other testimony that they were rather stupid, ignorant, badly-dressed, and provincial. But the chief change in her state of mind lay in her hopes for her own future. Miss Carew had pointed out that, if such a very large salary could be given for the governess, there must surely be plenty of money for Molly's disposal later on. Why should not Molly have a splendid and delightful life before her? And then poor Miss Carew would suppress a sigh at her own prospects in which the pupil never showed the least interest. It was before Miss Carew's second year of teaching had come to an end, and while Molly was rapidly enlarging her mental horizon, that the girl came to a very serious crisis in her life.

Occupied with her first joy in knowledge, and with dreams of future delights in the great world, she had not broken out into any very freakish act of benevolence for a long time. One night, when Mrs. Carteret and Miss Carew met at dinner time, they continued to wait in vain for Molly. The servants hunted for her, Mrs. Carteret called up the front stairs, and Miss Carew went as far as the little carpenter's shop opening from the greenhouse to find her. It was a dark night, and there was nothing that could have taken her out of doors, but that she was out could not be doubted. The gardener and coachman were sent for, and before ten o'clock the policeman in the village joined in the search, and yet nothing was heard of Molly. Mrs. Carteret became really frightened, and Miss Carew was surprised to see her betray so much feeling as almost to lose her self-control. She kept walking up and down, while odd spasmodic little sentences escaped from her every few minutes.

"How could I answer for it to John if his girl came to any harm?" she repeated several times.

She kept moving from room to room with a really scared expression. Once the governess overheard her exclaim with an intensely bitter accent, "Even her wretched mother would have taken more care of her!"

At that moment the door opened; Molly came quietly in, looking at them both with bright, defiant eyes. From her hat to the edge of her skirt she appeared to be one mass of light, brown mud; her right cheek was bleeding from a scratch, and the sleeve of her coat was torn open.

"Where have you been to?" demanded Mrs. Carteret, in a voice that trembled from the reaction of fear to anger.

"I went for a walk, and I found a man lying half in the water in Brown-rushes pond; he had evidently fallen in drunk. I got him out after nearly falling in myself, and then I had to get some one to look after him. They took him in at Brown-rushes farm, and I found out who he was and went to tell his wife, who is ill, that he was quite safe. I stayed a little while with her, and then I came home. I have walked about twenty miles, and, as you can see, I have had several tumbles, and I am very tired."

Molly's voice had been very quiet, but very distinct, and her look and bearing were full of an unspoken defiance.

"And you never thought whether I should be frightened meanwhile?" said Mrs. Carteret.

"Frightened about me?" said Molly in astonishment.

"You had no thought for my anxiety—the strain on my nerves," her aunt went on.

"I thought you might be angry, but I never for a moment thought you would be frightened."

Miss Carew looked from one to the other in alarm and perplexity. She felt for them both, for the woman who had been startled by the extent of her fears, and was the more angry in consequence, and for Molly, who betrayed her utter want of belief in any kind of feeling on Mrs. Carteret's part.

"If you do not care for my feelings, or, indeed, believe in them, I wish you would have some care for your own good name." A moment's pause followed these words, and then in a low voice, but quite distinct, came the conclusion, "You must remember that your mother's daughter must be more careful than other girls."

Molly's cheeks, just now bright from the battle with the autumn wind, became as white as marble. There was no concealment possible; both women saw that the child realised the full import of the words, and that she knew they could read what was written on her face. There could be no possibility of keeping up appearances after such a moment. But Miss Carew moved forward, and flung her arms round Molly with a gesture of simple but complete womanliness. "You must have a hot bath at once," she cried, "or you will catch your death of cold."

"Perhaps it would be better if I did," cried Molly in a voice fearful to her hearers in its stony hardness and hopelessness. "What does it matter?"

Miss Carew would have been less unhappy if the child had burst into any reproaches, however angry or unseemly; she wanted to hear her say that something was a lie, that some one was a liar, but what was so awful to the ordinary little woman was to realise that Molly believed what had been said, or rather the awful implication of what had been said. The real horror was that Molly should come to such knowledge in such a way.

The girl made no effort to shake her off, and not the least response to her caress. With perfect dignity she went quietly up-stairs. With perfect dignity she let the governess and the housemaid do to her whatever they liked. They bathed Molly, rubbed her with lotions, poulticed her with mustard, gave her a hot drink, and all the time Miss Carew's heart ached at the impossibility of helping her in the very least.

"Can I leave the door open between our rooms, in case you want anything in the night?" she faltered.

"Oh, yes; certainly."

"May I kiss you?"

"Yes, of course."

CHAPTER VI

MOLLY COMES OF AGE

For some time after that terrible night Molly never spoke to Mrs. Carteret unless it were absolutely necessary. It may be difficult to believe that no explanation was sought or given and after a time things seemed to be much as before. The silence of a brooding nature is a terrible thing; and it is more common in narrow, dull lives than in any other. Uneducated men and women in villages, or servants cramped together in one house, I have known to brood over some injury in an awful silence for twenty or thirty years. If Molly's future life had been in Mrs. Carteret's hands, the sense of wrong would have burrowed deeper and been even better hidden, but Molly, aided by Miss Carew, had convinced herself that liberty would come, without any fight for it, at twenty-one; so her view of the present was that it was a tiresome but inevitable waiting for real life.

Miss Carew, watching her anxiously, could never find out what she had thought since the night of the alarm; and if she had seen into her mind at any one moment alone, she would have been misled. For Molly's imagination flew from one extreme to another. At first, indeed, that sentence, "Your mother's daughter ought to be more careful than other girls," had seemed simply a revelation of evil of which she could not doubt the truth. She saw in a flash why her mother had gone out of her life although still living. The whole possibility of shame and horror appeared to fit in with the facts of her secluded life with Mrs. Carteret. A morbid fear as to her own birth seized on the poor child's mind, and might have destroyed the healthier aspect of life for her entirely; but happily Mrs. Carteret and the governess did think of this danger, and showed some skill in laying the phantom. Some photographs of John Dexter as a young man were brought out and shown to the governess in Molly's presence, and her comments on the likeness to Molly were true and sounded spontaneous. Relieved of this horror the girl's mind reacted to the hope that Mrs. Carteret had only spoken in temper and spite, grossly exaggerating some grievance against Molly's mother. Then was the ideal restored to its pedestal, and expiatory offerings of sentiment of the most elaborate kind hung round the image of the ill-used and misunderstood, the beautiful, unattainable mother. If Miss Carew had seen into the reveries of her pupil at such a moment, she would hardly have believed how they alternated with the coldest fits of doubt and scepticism. Molly was dealing with a self-made ideal that she needed to satisfy the hunger of her nature for love and worship. But it had no foundations, no support, and it was apt to vanish with a terrible completeness. Then she would feel quite alone and horribly ashamed; she would at moments think of herself as something degraded and to be shunned. Some natures would have simply sunk into a nervous state of depression, but Molly had great vitality and natural ambition. In her ideal moments she thought of devoting her life to her mother; and the ayah's words were still a text, "The faithful child will find a way." But in darker hours she defied the world that was against her.

Molly, having decided to make no effort at any change in her life until the emancipating age of twenty-one, determined to prepare herself as fully as possible for the future. Mrs. Carteret was quite willing to keep Miss Carew until her niece was nearly twenty, and by that time the girl had read a surprising amount, while her mind was not to be despised. She had also "come out" as far as a very sleepy neighbourhood made it possible for her to see any society. She had been to three balls, and a good many garden parties. No one found her very attractive in her manners, though her appearance had in it now something that arrested attention. She took her position in the small Carteret circle in virtue of a certain energy and force of will. Molly danced, and played tennis, and rode as well as any girl in those parts, but she did not hide a silent and, at present, rather childish scorn which was in her nature. Miss Carew left her with regret and with more affection than Molly gave her back, for the governess was proud of her, and felt in watching her the pleasures of professional success. Perhaps she put down too much of this success to her own skill, but it was true that, without Miss Carew, Molly would have been a very undeveloped young person. There was still one year after this parting before Molly would be free, and it seemed longer and slower as each day passed. One interest helped to make it endurable. A trained hospital nurse had been provided for the village, and Molly spent a great deal of time learning her craft. The nursing instinct was exceedingly strong and not easily put down, and, if Molly must interfere with sick people, it was as well, in Mrs. Carteret's opinion, that she should learn how to do it properly.

But the slow months rolled by at length, and the last year of bondage was finished.

The sun did its best to congratulate Molly on her twenty-first birthday. It shone in full glory on the great, green hills, and the blue shadows in the hollows were transparent with reflected gold. The sunlight trembled in the bare branches of the beeches and turned their grey trunks to silver.

Standing in the little study, Molly's whole figure seemed to expand in the sunshine. Her eyes sparkled, her lips parted, and she at once drank in and gave forth her delight.

Some people might still agree with Mrs. Carteret that Molly was not beautiful. Still, it was an appearance that would always provoke discussion. Molly could not be overlooked, and when her mind and feelings were excited, then she gave a strange impression of intense vitality—not the pleasant overflow of animal spirits, but a suppressed, yet untamed, vitality of a more mental, more dangerous kind. Her movements were usually sudden, swift, and abrupt, yet there was in them all a singular amount of expression, and, if Molly's keen grey eyes and sensitive mouth did not convey the impression of a simple, or even of a kindly nature, they gave suggestions of light and longing, hunger and resolution.

To-day, the twenty-first birthday, was to be the first day of freedom, the last of shackles and dulness and commonplace. It was to be a day of speech and a day of revenge.

Molly was waiting now for Mrs. Carteret to come in and stand before her and hear all she meant to say about the long, unholy deception that had been put upon her. She was going to say good-bye now and be free. Molly's money would now be her own, she could take it away and share it with the deserted, misjudged mother. Nothing in all this was melodramatic; it would have been but natural if the facts had been as she supposed, only Molly made the little mistake of treating as facts her carefully built-up fancies, her long, childish story of her own life.

She was so absorbed that she hardly saw Mrs. Carteret come in and sit down in her square, substantial way in a large arm-chair. Molly, standing by the window knocking the tassel of the blind to and fro, was breathing quickly. The older woman looked through some papers in her hand, put some notes of orders for groceries on a table by her side, and flattened out a long letter on foreign paper on her knee. She looked at Molly a little nervously, with cold blue eyes over gold-rimmed spectacles reposing on her well-shaped nose, and began:

"Now that you are of age I must——"

But Molly interrupted her. In a very low voice, speaking quickly with little gasps of impatience at any hesitation in her own utterance,—

"Before you talk to me about the arrangements, I want to tell you that I have made up my mind to leave here at once. I know it will be a relief to you as well as to me. Any promise you made to my father is satisfied now, and you cannot wish to keep me here. You have always been ashamed of me, you have always disliked me, and you have always deceived me. I knew all this time that my mother was alive, and you never spoke of her except once and then it was to insult me as deeply as a girl can be insulted. If what you said were true—and I don't believe it"—her voice shook as she spoke—"there would be all the more reason why I should go to my poor mother. I want you to know, therefore, that with whatever money comes to me from my father, I shall go to my mother and try to make amends to her."

Mrs. Carteret stared over her spectacles at Molly in absolute amazement. After fourteen years of very kind treatment, which had involved a great deal of trouble, this uninteresting, silent niece had revealed herself at last! Fourteen years devoted to the idealisation of the mother who had deserted her, and to positive hatred of the relation who had mothered her! Tears rose in the hard, blue eyes. Subtleties of feeling Anne Carteret did not know, but some affection for those who are near in blood and who live under the same roof had been a matter of course to her, and Molly had hurt her to the quick. However, it was natural that common-sense and justice should quickly assert themselves to show this idiotic girl the criminal absurdity of what she said. Mrs. Carteret was unconsciously hitting back as hard as she could as she answered in a tone of cheerful common-sense:

"As a matter of fact, the money you will receive will not be your own, but an allowance from your mother—a large allowance given on the condition that you do not live with her. Happily, it is so large that there will not be any necessity for you to live here."

Mrs. Carteret held up the letter of thin foreign paper in a trembling hand, but she spoke in a perfectly calm voice:

"I was myself always against this mystery as to your mother, but I felt obliged to act by her wish in the matter. She insists that she still wishes it to be thought by the world at large that she is dead, but she agrees at last that you should know something about her. I told her that I could not allow you to come of age here and have a great deal of money at your disposal without your knowing that from your father you have only been left a fortune of two thousand pounds——"

Mrs. Carteret paused, and then, with a little snort, added, half to herself:

"The rest was all squandered away, and certainly not by his own doing."

Then she resumed her business tone:

"More than this, I obtained from your mother leave to tell you that this very large allowance comes out of a fortune left to her quite recently by Sir David Bright. I have acted by the wishes of both your parents as far as I possibly could. As to my disliking you or being ashamed of you, such notions could only come out of a morbid imagination. In spite of your feelings towards me, I still wish to be your friend. I want your father's daughter to stand well with the world. So that I am left to live here in peace undisturbed, I shall be glad to help you at any time."

Mrs. Carteret's feelings were concentrated on Molly's conduct towards herself, but Molly's consciousness was filled with the greatness of the blow that had just fallen. It seemed to her that she had only now for the first time lost her mother—her only ideal, the object of all her better thoughts. That her enemy was justified was, indeed, just then of little importance. She turned a dazed face towards her aunt:

"I ought to beg your pardon: I am sorry."

"Oh, pray don't take the trouble."

Mrs. Carteret got out of the chair with emphatic dignity, and held out some papers.

"You had better read these. I will speak to you about them afterwards."

She left the room absolutely satisfied with her own conduct. But, coming to a pause in the drawing-room, she remembered that she had made one mistake.

"How stupid of me to have left Jane Dawning's letter among those papers."

But she did not go back to fetch the letter from her cousin Lady Dawning; and she did not own to herself that that apparent negligence was her real revenge. Yet from that moment her feelings of self-satisfaction were uncomfortably disturbed.

Meanwhile, Molly was kneeling by the window in the study in floods of tears. Everything in her mind had lost its balance; and baffled, disheartened, and ashamed, she wept tears that brought no softness. She did not know it, but while to herself it seemed as if she were absorbed in weeping over her disillusionment, she was in fact deciding that, as her ideal had failed her, she would in future live only for herself, and get everything out of life that she could for her own satisfaction.

No one in the world cared for her, but she would not be defeated or crushed or forlorn. With an effort she sprang to her feet with one agile movement, and pushed her heavy hair back from her forehead with her long, thin fingers.

The colour had gone from her clear, dark skin for the moment, and her breathing was fast and uneven, but her face still showed her to be very young and very healthy. How differently the troubles of the mind are written in our faces when age has undermined the foundations and all momentary failure is a presage of a sure defeat. Molly showed her determination to be brave and calm by immediately setting herself to read the papers left for her by Mrs. Carteret.

One was in French, a long letter from a lawyer in Florence communicating Madame Danterre's wishes to Mrs. Carteret. It stated that, owing to the painful circumstances of the case, his client chose to remain under her maiden name, and to reside in Florence. Mrs. Carteret was at liberty to inform Miss Dexter of this, but she did not wish it known to anybody else. Madame Danterre further asked Mrs. Carteret to make such arrangements as she thought fit for her daughter to see something of the world, either in London or by travelling, but she did not wish her to come to Florence. Otherwise the world was before her, and £3000 a year was at her disposal. Molly could hardly, it was implied, ask for more from a mother from whom she had been torn unjustly when she was an infant. The rest of the letter was entirely about business, giving all details as to how the quarterly allowance would be paid. In conclusion was an enigmatic sentence to the effect that, by a tardy act of repentance, Sir David Bright had left Madame Danterre his fortune, and she wished her daughter to know that the large allowance she was able to make her was in consequence of this act of justice. Molly would have had no inkling of the meaning of this sentence if Mrs. Carteret had come back to claim the letter from Lady Dawning which she had unintentionally left among the lawyer's papers. But this last, a closely-written large sheet of note-paper, lay between the letter from the lawyer in Florence, and other papers from the family lawyer in London, anent the will of the late Colonel Dexter and its taking effect on his daughter's coming of age.

Molly turned carelessly from the question of £2000 and its interest at three and a half per cent. to the letter surmounted by a black initial and a coronet.

"My Dear Anne,—

"I am not coming to stay in your neighbourhood as I had hoped. I should have been very glad to have had a talk with you about Molly, if it had been possible, for her dear father's sake. Indeed, I think you are far from exaggerating the difficulties of the case. You are very reluctant to take a house in London, and you say that if you did take one and gave up all your home duties you would not now have a circle of friends there who could be of any use to a girl of her age. I feel that very likely you would be glad if my daughter would undertake her, and you are quite right in thinking that she would like a girl to take into the world. But I must be frank with you, as I want to save you from pitfalls which I may be more able to foresee than you can in your secluded home. My dear, I know that dear old John died without a penny: why if he had had any fortune as a young man—but, alas! he had none—is it possible that, in a soldier's life, with, for a few years, a madly extravagant wife to help him, he could conceivably have saved a capital that can produce £3000 a year!

"No, my dear Anne, the money is from her mother, and I must tell you that I've often wondered if that estimable lady is really dead at all. Then, you know, that I always kept up with John, and that I knew something about Sir David Bright. To conclude, Rose Bright is my cousin by marriage, and we are all dumbfounded at finding that she has been left £800 a year instead of twice as many thousands, and that the fortune has gone to a lady named Madame Danterre. It is so old a story that I don't think any one has read the conclusion aright except myself, and parole d'honneur, no one shall if I can help it. I am too fond of poor John's memory to want to hurt his child, only for the child's own sake I would not advise you to bring her up to London. I should keep her quietly with you, and trust to a man appearing on the scene—it's a thing you can trust to, where there is £3000 a year. I daresay I could send some one your way quite quietly. But don't bring John's girl to London, at any rate, just yet.

"I hope we may come within reach of you in the autumn. I should love to have a quiet day with you and to see Molly.

"Ever yours affectionately,

"Jane Dawning."

"P.S.—By the way, is the £3000 sure to go on? If it is not, might it not be as well to put a good bit of it away?"

Thus in one short hour, Molly had been told that her mother was living but did not want her child; that the ideal of motherly love had in her own case been a complete fiction; that the mother of her imagination had never existed, and, immediately afterwards, she had been given a glimpse of the world's view of her own position as a young person best concealed, or, at least, not brought too much forward.

Lastly, with the news of the money that at least meant freedom, she had gained, by a rapid intuition, a faint but unmistakable sense of discomfort as to the money itself.

It was not any scrupulous fear that it could be her duty to inquire whether Sir David Bright ought to have left his fortune to his widow! Probably Lady Rose had quite as much as many dowagers have to live on. But she had been forced to know that other people disapproved of Sir David's will. It was not a fortune entered into with head erect and eyes proudly facing a friendly world. Still, Molly was not daunted: the combat with life was harder and quite different from what she had foreseen, but she had always looked on her future as a fight.

Presently she let the "letter from Jane" fall close to the chair in which her aunt had been sitting, and moved the chair till the paper was half hidden by the chintz frill of the cover. She meant Mrs. Carteret to think that she had not read it.

She then went out for a long walk and met her aunt at luncheon with a quietly respectful manner, a little more respectful than it had ever been before.

Later in the day Molly wrote to the family lawyer, and consulted him as to how to find a suitable lady with whom to stay in London. Mrs. Carteret read and passed the letter. Seeing that Molly was determined to go to London, she was anxious to help her as much as possible, without calling down upon herself such letters of advice as the one from Lady Dawning. It proved as difficult to find just the right thing in chaperones as it is usually difficult to find exactly the right thing in any form of humanity, and December and January passed in the search. But in the end all that was to be wished for seemed to be secured in the person of Mrs. Delaport Green, who was known to a former pupil of Miss Carew's, and at length Molly went out of the rooms with the northern aspect, and drove through the wood that sheltered under the shoulder of the great green hill, with nothing about her to recall the child who had come in there for the first time fourteen years ago, except that she still had the look of one who waits for other circumstances and other people.

CHAPTER VII

EDMUND GROSSE CONTINUES TO INTERFERE

Mr. Murray had had no belief in Sir Edmund Grosse's doings, and he indulged in the provoking air of "I told you so," when the latter, who had not been in London for several months, appeared at the office, and owned to the futility of his visit to Florence. Meanwhile, Mr. Murray had also carried on a fruitless enquiry in a different direction.

"The General's two most intimate friends were killed about two months after his death, and his servant died in the same action—probably before Sir David himself. I have tried to find out if he had any talk on his own affairs with friends on board ship going out, but it seems not. I can show you the list of those who went out with him."

Sir Edmund knew something of most people and after studying the list he went to look up an old soldier friend at the Army and Navy Club. Indeed, for some weeks he was often to be seen there, and he was as attentive to Generals as an anxious parent seeking advancement in the Army for an only son. He soon became discouraged as to obtaining any information regarding David's later years, but some gossip on his younger days he did glean. Nothing could have been better than David's record; he seemed to have been a paragon of virtue.

"That's what made it all the more strange that he should have fallen into the hands of Mrs. Johnny Dexter," mused an old Colonel as he puffed at one of Grosse's most admirable cigars. "Poor old David; he was wax in her hands for a few weeks, then he got fever and recovered from her and from it at the same time—he went home soon after. He'd have done anything for her at one moment."

This Colonel might well have been flattered by Edmund's attentions; but he gave little in return for them except what he said that day.

"Mrs. Johnny Dexter! Why, I'm sure I have known Dexters," thought Edmund, as he strolled down Pall Mall after this conversation. He stopped to think, regardless of public observation. "Why, of course, that old bore Lady Dawning was a Miss Dexter. I'll go and see her this very day."

Lady Dawning was gratified at Sir Edmund's visit, and was nearly as much surprised at seeing him as he was at finding himself in the handsome, heavily-furnished room in Princes Gate. Stout, over fifty, and clumsily wigged, it rarely enough happened to Lady Dawning to find not only a sympathetic listener but an eager inquirer into those romantic days when love's young dream for her cousin Johnny Dexter was stifled by parental authority: "And it all ended in my becoming Lady Dawning." A sigh of satisfaction concluded the episode of romance, and led the way back to the present day.

When Lady Dawning had advised Mrs. Carteret to keep poor dear Johnny's girl quietly in the country, she had by no means intended to let any of her friends know anything about Molly. She had looked important and mysterious when people spoke of Sir David Bright's amazing will, but she made a real sacrifice to Johnny's memory by not divulging her knowledge of facts or her own conclusions from those facts. But the enjoyment of talking of her own romantic youth to Edmund had had a softening effect.

Sir Edmund appeared to be so very wise and safe.

"Of course, it is only to you," came first; and then, "It would be a relief to me to get the opinion of a man of the world; poor dear Anne Carteret consults me, and I really don't know what to advise. Fancy! that woman allows the girl £3000 a year, and Anne Carteret would probably have acted on my advice and kept her quiet so that no one need know anything of the wretched story, but the girl won't be quiet, and will come up to London, and it seems so unsafe, don't you know? They are looking for a chaperone, as nothing will make Anne come herself. And if it all comes out it will be so unpleasant for poor dear Rose Bright to meet this girl all dressed up with her money; don't you think so?"

Lady Dawning was now quite screaming with excitement, and very red in nose and chin. It would be a long time before she could be quite dull again. But Edmund was far too deeply interested to notice details.

They parted very cordially, and Lady Dawning promised to let him know if she heard from Anne Carteret, and, if possible, to pass on the name of the chaperone woman who was to take Molly into society.

"And so your protégée is to arrive to-night?" said Edmund Grosse.

"Yes, and I am so frightened;" and with a little laugh appreciative of herself in general, Mrs. Delaport Green held up a cup of China tea in a pretty little white hand belonging to an arm that curved and thickened from the wrist to the elbow in perfect lines.

Sir Edmund gave the arm the faintest glance of appreciation before it retreated into lace frills within its brown sleeve. Those lace frills were the only apparent extravagance in the simple frock in question, and simplicity was the chief note in this lady's charming appearance.

"I don't believe you are frightened, but probably she is frightened enough."

"I know nothing whatever about her," sighed the little woman, "and we are only doing it because we are so dreadfully hard up; my maid says that I shall soon not have a stitch to my back, and that would be so fearfully improper. At least"—she hesitated—"I am doing it because times are bad. Tim really knows nothing about it; I mean that he does not know that Miss Dexter is a 'paying guest', and it does sound horribly lower middle-class, doesn't it? But I'm so afraid Tim won't be able to go to Homburg this year, and he is eating and drinking so much already, and it's only the beginning of April. What will happen if he can't drink water and take exercise all this summer?"

"But I suppose you know her name?"

"I believe it is Molly Dexter. And do you think I should say 'Molly' at once—to-night, I mean?"

Sir Edmund did not answer this question.

"I used to know some Dexters years ago."

"Yes, it is quite a good name, and Molly is of good family: she is a cousin of Lady Dawning, but she is an orphan. I think I must call her Molly at once," and the little round eyes looked wistful and kindly.

Sir Edmund was able from this to conclude rightly that Mrs. Delaport Green was not aware of the existence of Madame Danterre, and would have no suspicions as to the sources of the fortune that supplied Molly's large allowance. It had, in fact, been thought wiser not to offer explanations which had not been called for.

"It will be very tiresome for you," said Grosse. "You will have to amuse her, you know, and is she worth while?"

"Quite; she will pay—let me see—she will pay for the new motor, and she will go to my dressmaker and keep her in a good temper. But, of course, I shall have to make sacrifices and find her partners. I must try and not let my poor people miss me. They would miss me dreadfully, though I know you don't think so."

"And you don't even know what she is like?"

"Oh, yes, I do; I have seen her once, and she is oh! so interesting: olive skin, black, or almost black, hair, almond-shaped grey eyes—no, I don't mean almond-shaped, but really very curiously-shaped eyes, full of—let me see if I can tell you what they are full of—something that, in fact, makes you shiver and feel quite excited. But, do you know, she hardly speaks, and then in such a low voice. I'll tell you now, I'll tell you exactly what she reminds me of: do you know a picture in a very big gallery in Florence of a woman who committed some crime? It's by one of the pupils of one of the great masters; just try and think if you don't know what I mean. Oh, must you go? But won't you come again, and see how we get on, and how I bear up?"

When Molly did arrive, her dainty little hostess petted and patted her and called her "Molly" because she "could not help it."

"Oh, we will do the most delightful things, now that you have come; we must, of course, do balls and plays, and then we will have quite a quiet day in the country in the new motor, and we will take some very nice men with us. And then you won't mind sometimes coming to see people who are ill or poor or old?"

The little voice rose higher and higher in a sort of wail.

"It does cheer them up so to look in and out with a few flowers, and it need not take long."

"I don't mind people when they are really ill," said Molly, in her low voice, "but I like them best unconscious."

Mrs. Delaport Green stared for a moment; then she jumped up and ran forward with extended hands to greet a lady in a plain coat and skirt and an uncompromising hat.

"Oh, how kind of you to come, and how are you getting on? Molly dear, this is the lady who lives in horrid Hoxton taking care of my poor people I told you about. Do tell her what you really mean about liking people best when they are unconscious, and you will both forgive me if I write one tiny little note meanwhile?"

Molly gave some tea to the newcomer as if she had lived in the house for years, and drew her into a talk which soon allayed her rising fears as to whether her own time would have to be devoted to horrid Hoxton. By calm and tranquil questions she elicited the fact that Mrs. Delaport Green had visited the settlement once during the winter.

"She comes as a sunbeam," said the resident with obviously genuine admiration, "and, of course, with all the claims on her time, and her anxiety as to her husband's health, we don't wish her to come often. She is just the inspiration we want."

The hostess having meanwhile asked four people to dinner, came rustling back, and, sitting on a low stool opposite the lady of the settlement, held one of her visitor's large hands in both her own and patted it and asked questions about a number of poor people by name, and made love to her in many ways, until the latter, cheered and refreshed by the sunbeam, went out to seek the first of a series of 'busses between Chelsea and Hoxton.

Mrs. Delaport Green gave a little sigh.

"I must order the motor. The dear thing needn't have come your very first night, need she? It makes me miserable to leave you, but I was engaged to this dinner before I knew that you existed even! Isn't it odd to think of that?" Her voice was full of feeling.

"And you must be longing to go to your room. You won't have to dine with Tim, because he is dining at his club. Promise me that you won't let Tim bore you: he likes horrid fat people, so I don't think he will; and are you sure you have got everything you want?"

Molly's impressions of her new surroundings were written a few weeks later in a letter to Miss Carew.

"My dear Carey,—

"I have been here for three weeks, but I doubt if I shall stay three months.

"I am living with a very clever woman, and I am learning life fairly quickly and getting to know a number of people. But I am not sure if either of us thinks our bargain quite worth while, though we are too wise to decide in a hurry. There are great attractions: the house, the clothes, the food, the servants, are absolutely perfect; the only thing not quite up to the mark in taste is the husband. But she sees him very little, and I hardly exchange two words with him in the day, and his attitude towards us is that of a busy father towards his nursery. But I rather suspect that he gets his own way when he chooses. The servants work hard, and, I believe, honestly like her. The clergyman of the parish, a really striking person, is enthusiastic; so is her husband's doctor, so are one religious duchess and two mundane countesses. I believe that it is impossible to enumerate the number and variety of the men who like her. There are just one or two people who pose her, and Sir Edmund Grosse is one. He snubs her, and so she makes up to him hard. I must tell you that I have got quite intimate with Sir Edmund. He is of a different school from most of the men I have seen. He pays absurd compliments very naturally and cleverly, rather my idea of a Frenchman, but he is much more candid all the time. I shock people here if I simply say I don't like any one. If you want to say anything against anybody you must begin by saying—'Of course, he means awfully well,' and after that you may imply that he is the greatest scoundrel unhung. Sir Edmund is not at all ill-natured, and he can discuss people quite simply—not as if he wished to defend his own reputation for charity all the time. He won't allow that Adela Delaport Green is a humbug: he says she is simply a happy combination of extraordinary cleverness and stupidity, of simplicity and art. 'I believe she hardly ever has a consciously disingenuous moment,' he said to me last night. 'She likes clergymen and she likes great ladies, and she likes to make people like her. Of course, she is always designing; but she never stops to think, so that she doesn't know she is designing. She is an amazing mimic. Something in this room to-night made me think of Dorset House directly I came in, and I remembered that, of course, she was at the party there last night. She must have put the sofa and the palms in the middle of the room to-day. At dinner to-night she suddenly told me that she wished she had been born a Roman Catholic, and I could not think why until I remembered that a Princess had just become a Papist. She could never have liked the Inquisition, but she thought the Pope had such a dear, kind face. Now she will probably tremble on the verge of Rome until several Anglican bishops have asked their influential lady friends to keep her out of danger.'

"'And you don't call her a humbug?'

"'No; she is a child of nature, indulging her instincts without reflection. And please mark one thing, young lady; her models are all good women—very good women—and that's not a point to be overlooked.'

"I told him—I could not help it—how funny she had been yesterday, talking of going to early church. 'I do love the little birds quite early,' she said, 'and one can see the changes of the season even in London, going every day, you know, and one feels so full of hope walking in the early morning fasting, and hope is next to charity, isn't it?—though, of course, not so great.'

"And she has been out in the shut motor exactly once in the early morning since I came up, and she knew that I knew it.

"However, Sir Edmund maintained that, at the moment, Adela quite believed she went out early every day, and I am not sure he is not right. But then, you see, Carey, that with her power of believing what she likes, and of intriguing without knowing it, I am not quite sure that she will last very well. She might get tired of me—quite believe I had done something which I had not done at all! And then the innocent little intrigues might become less amusing to me than to other people. However, I believe I am useful for the present, and the life here suits me on the whole. But I will report again soon if the symptoms become more unfavourable, and ask your opinion as to my plans for the season if the Delaport Green alliance breaks down before then.

"Yours affectionately,

"Molly Dexter."

CHAPTER VIII

AT GROOMBRIDGE CASTLE

Mrs. Delaport Green counted it as a large asset in Molly's favour that Sir Edmund Grosse was so attentive. Adela did not seriously mind Sir Edmund's indifference to herself if he were only a constant visitor at her house, but she was far from understanding the motives that drew him there to see Molly. In fact, having decided, on the basis of his own theory of the conduct of Madame Danterre, that Molly had no right to any of the luxuries she enjoyed, he had been prepared to think of her as an unscrupulous and designing young woman. Somehow, from the moment he first saw her he felt all his prejudices to be confirmed. There was something in Molly which appeared to him to be a guilty consciousness that the wealth she enjoyed was ill-gotten. Miss Dexter, he thought, had by no means the bearing of a fresh ingenuous child who was innocently benefiting by the wickedness of another. The poor girl was, in fact, constantly wondering whether the people she met were hot partisans of Lady Rose Bright, or whether they knew of Madame Danterre's existence, and if so, whether they had the further knowledge that Miss Molly Dexter was that lady's daughter. They might, for either of these reasons, have some secret objection to herself. But she was skilful enough to hide the symptoms of these fears and suspicions from the men and women she usually came across in society, who only thought her reserve pride, and her occasional hesitations a little mysterious. From Sir Edmund she concealed less because she liked him much more, and he kindly interpreted her feelings of anxiety and discomfort to be those of guilt in a girl too young to be happy in criminal deceit. With his experience of life, and with his usually just perceptions, he ought to have known better; but there is some quality in a few men or women, intangible and yet unmistakable, which makes us instinctively suspect present, or foretell future, moral evil; and poor Molly was one of these. What it was, on the other hand, which made her trust Sir Edmund and drew her to him, it would need a subtle analysis of natural affinities to decide. No doubt it was greatly because he sought her that Molly liked him, but it was not only on that account. Nor was this only because Edmund was worldly wise, successful, and very gentle. There was a quality in the attraction that drew Molly to Edmund that cannot be put into words. It is the quality without which there has never been real tragedy in the relations of a woman to a man. In the first weeks in London this attraction hardly reached beyond the merest liking, and was a pleasant, sunny thing of innocent appearance.

Mrs. Delaport Green was, for a short time, of opinion that the problem of whether to prolong Molly's visit or not would be settled for her by a quite new development. Then she doubted, and watched, and was puzzled.

Why, she thought, should such a great person as Sir Edmund Grosse, who was certainly in no need of fortune-hunting, be so attentive to Molly if he did not really like her? At times she had a notion that he did not like her at all, but at other times surely he liked her more than he knew himself. He said that she was graceful, clever, and interesting; and the acute little onlooker had not the shadow of a doubt that he held these opinions, but why did she at moments think that he disliked Molly? Certainly the dislike, if dislike it were, did not prevent him from very constantly seeking her society. It was the only intimacy that Molly had formed since she had come up to London.

As Lent was drawing to a close, Mrs. Delaport Green became much occupied at the thought of how many services she wished to attend. "One does so wish one could be in several churches at once," she murmured to a devout lady at an evening party. But, finding one of these churches to be excessively crowded on Palm Sunday, she had gone for a turn in the country in her motor with a friend, "as, after all, green fields, and a few early primroses make one realise, more than anything else in the world, the things one wishes one could think about quietly at such seasons."

For Easter there were the happiest prospects, as she and Molly had been invited to stay at a delightful house "far from the madding crowd"—Groombridge Castle—with a group of dear friends.

Molly, knowing that "dear friends" with her hostess meant new and most desirable acquaintances, bought hats adorned with spring flowers and garments appropriate to the season with great satisfaction.

Their luggage, their bags, and their maid looked perfect on the day of departure, and Tim had gone off to Brighton in an excellent temper. Mrs. Delaport Green trod on air in pretty buckled shoes, and patted the toy terrier under her arm and felt as if all the society papers on the bookstall knew that they would soon have to tell whither she was going.

"I saw Sir Edmund Grosse's servant just now," she said to Molly with great satisfaction. "Very likely Sir Edmund is coming to Groombridge. Why does one always think that everybody going by the same train is coming with one? Did you tell him where we were going?"

"No, I don't think so; I have hardly seen him for a week, and I thought he was going abroad for Easter."

When the three hours' journey was ended and the friends emerged on the platform, they were both glad to see Sir Edmund's servant again and the luggage with his master's name. There was a crowd of Easter holiday visitors, and Mrs. Delaport Green and Molly were some moments in making their way out of the station. When they were seated in the carriage that was to take them to the Castle, Mrs. Delaport Green turned expectantly to the footman.

"Are we to wait for any one else?"

"No, ma'am; Lady Rose Bright and the two gentlemen have started in the other carriage."

They drove off.

"I am so glad it is Lady Rose Bright." Molly hardly heard the words.

"I have so wished to know her," Adela went on joyfully, "and she has had such an interesting story and so extraordinary."

"Can I get away—can I go back?" thought Molly, and she leant forward and drew off her cloak as if she felt suffocated. "To meet her is just the one thing I can't do. Oh, it is hard, it is horrible!"

"You see," Adela continued, "she married Sir David Bright, who was three times her age, because he was very rich, and also, of course, because she loved him for having won the Victoria Cross, and then he died, and they found he had left all the money to some one he had liked better all the time. So there is a horrid woman with forty thousand a-year somewhere or other, and Rose Bright is almost starving and can't afford to buy decent boots, and every one is devoted to her. I am rather surprised that she should come to Groombridge for a party, she has shut herself up so much; but it must be a year and a half at least since that wicked old General was killed, and he certainly didn't deserve much mourning at her hands."

As Adela's little staccato voice went on, Molly stiffened and straightened and starched herself morally, not unaided by this facile description of the story in which she was so much involved. She would fight it out here and now; nothing should make her flinch; she would come up to time as calm and cool as if she were quite happy. And, after all, Sir Edmund Grosse would be there to help her.

It was not until the first of the two heavy handsome old-fashioned carriages, drawn by fine, sleek horses, was beginning to crawl up a very steep hill that its occupants began to take an interest in those who were following.

"Who is in the carriage behind us?" asked Sir Edmund of the young man usually called Billy, who was sitting opposite him, and whom he was never glad to meet.

"Mrs. Delaport Green and a girl I don't know—very dark and thin."

Edmund growled and fidgeted.

"Horrid vulgar little woman," he muttered between his teeth, "pushes herself in everywhere, and I suppose she has got the heiress with her."

"Don't be so cross, Edmund," said Lady Rose. "Who is the heiress?"

"Oh! a Miss Dickson—not Dickson—what is it? The money was all made in beer"—which was really quite a futile little lie. "But that isn't the name: the name is Dexter. The girl is handsome and untruthful and clever; let her alone."

Rose perceived that he was seriously annoyed, and waited with a little curiosity to see the ladies in question.

As the two carriages crawled slowly up the zigzag road, climbing the long and steep hill, the occupants of both gazed at the towers of the Castle whenever they came in sight at a turn of the road, or at an opening in the mighty horse-chestnuts and beeches, but they spoke little about them. Those in the first carriage were too familiar with Groombridge and its history and the others were too ignorant of both to have much to say. Edmund Grosse gave expression to Rose's thought at the sight of the familiar towers when he said:

"Poor old Groombridge! it is hard not to have a son or even a nephew to leave it all to."

"He likes the cousin very much," said Rose.

"But isn't Mark Molyneux going to be a priest?" said the young man, Billy, to Lady Rose. "I heard the other day that he is in one of the Roman seminaries—went there soon after he left Oxford."

Edmund answered him.

"Groombridge told me he thought he would give that up. He said he believed it was a fancy that would not last."

"He did very well at Oxford," said Rose, "and the Groombridges are devoted to him. It is so good of them with all their old-world notions not to mind more his being a Roman Catholic."

The talk was interrupted by the two men getting out to ease the horses on a steep part of the drive.

Rose's own point of view that a young and earnest priest, even although, unfortunately, not an Anglican, might do much good in such a position as that of the master of Groombridge Castle, would certainly not have been understood by her two companions.

Meanwhile, in the second carriage, Molly was becoming more and more distracted from painful thoughts by the glory of the summer's evening, and the historic interest of the Castle. She felt at first disinclined to disturb the unusual silence of the lady beside her. Certainly the principal tower of the Castle, in its dark red stone, looked uncommonly fine and commanding, and about it flew the martlets that "most breed and haunt" where the air is delicate.

The horse-chestnut leaves were breaking through their silver sheaths in points of delicate green, and daffodils and wild violets were thick in grass and ground ivy, while rabbits started away from within a few feet of the road.

But, although reluctant to break the silence, at last interest in the scene made Molly ask:

"Do you know the date?"

"Oh, Norman undoubtedly," said Mrs. Delaport Green; "the round towers, you know. Round towers go back to almost any date."

Molly was dissatisfied. "You don't know what reign it was built in?"

"Some time soon after the Conqueror; I think Tim did tell me all about it. He looked it up in some book last night."

As a matter of fact, the present Castle had been built under George III., and the towers would have betrayed the fact to more educated observers; while even Molly could see when they came close to the great mass of building that the windows and, indeed, all the decoration was of an inferior type of revived Gothic. But, however an architect might shake his head at Groombridge, it was really a striking building, massive and very well disposed, and in an astonishingly fine position, commanding an immense view of a great plain on nearly three sides, while to the east was stretched the rest of the range of splendidly-wooded hills on the westerly point of which it was situated. In the sweet, soft air many delicate trees and shrubs were developed as well as if they had been in quite a sheltered place.

Lady Groombridge was giving tea to the first arrivals when Mrs. Delaport Green and Molly were shown into the big hall of the Castle.

"Let us come for a walk; we can slip out through this window," murmured Sir Edmund, as he took her empty tea-cup from his cousin.

Rose began to move, but Lady Groombridge claimed her attention before she could escape.

"Do you know Mrs. Delaport Green and Miss Dexter?"

Rose, as she heard Molly's name, found herself looking quite directly into very unexpected and very remarkable grey eyes with dark lashes. Her gentle but reserved greeting would have been particularly negative after Edmund's warning as to both ladies, but she did not quite control a look of surprise and interest. There was a great light in Molly's face as she saw the young and beautiful woman whom she had dreaded intensely to meet.

Rose was evidently unconscious of a certain gentle pride of bearing, but was fully conscious of a wish to be kindly and loving. In neither of these aspects—and they were revealed in a glance to Molly—did Rose attract her. But Molly's look, which puzzled Rose, was as a flame of feeling, burning visibly through the features of the dark, healthy face, and finding its full expression in the eyes. The glory of the landscape she had just passed through, and the excitement of finding herself in such a building, added fuel to Molly's feelings, and seemed to give a historic background to her meeting with her enemy. Some subtle and curious sympathy lit Rose's face for a moment, and then she shrank a little as if she recoiled from a slight shock, and turning with a smile to Sir Edmund Grosse, she followed him down the great hall and out into a passage beyond. He had given Molly an intimate but rather careless nod before he turned away.

Edmund was quite silent as he walked out on the terrace, and seemed as absorbed as Rose in the view that lay below them. But it was with the scene he had just witnessed inside the Castle that his mind was filled. There had been something curiously dramatic in the meeting which he would have done a great deal to prevent. But, annoyed as he was, he could not help dwelling for a moment on the picture of the two with a certain artistic satisfaction. Rose, in her plain, almost poor, clinging black clothes was, as always, amazingly graceful; he felt, not for the first time, as if her every movement were music.

"But that girl is handsome. How she looked into Rose's face, the amazing little devil!—she is plucky."

Then he caught himself up abruptly; it was no use to talk nonsense to himself. The point was how to keep these two apart and how short Mrs. Delaport Green's visit might be made.

"Unluckily Monday is a Bank holiday, but they shall not be asked to stay one hour after the 10.30 train on Tuesday if I have to take them away myself," he murmured. Meanwhile, it was a beautiful evening; there was a wonderful view, and Rose was here, and, for the moment, alone with him. She ran her fingers into the fair hair that was falling over her forehead, and pushed it back and her hat with it, so that the fresh spring air "may get right into my brain," she said, "and turn out London blacks."

"The blacks don't penetrate in your case," said Edmund.

"I'm afraid they do," she murmured, "but now I won't think of them. Easter Eve and this place are enough to banish worries."

"Our hostess contrives to have some worries here."

"Ah! dear Mary, I know; she can't help it; she has always been so very prosperous."

"Oh, it's prosperity, is it?" asked Edmund. He had turned from the view to look more directly at Rose.

"Yes, I know it does not have that effect on you, because you have a happier temperament."

"But am I so very prosperous?" The tone was sad and slightly sarcastic.

"It is quite glorious: one seems to breathe in everything, don't you know, and the smell of primroses; and it is so sweet to think that it is Easter Eve."

Mrs. Delaport Green was coming forth on the terrace, preceded by these words in her clear staccato voice.

"Do you think," said Rose very gently to Edmund, "that we might go down into the wood?"

Presently Molly fell behind Lady Groombridge and Mrs. Delaport Green as they walked along the terrace, and leant on the wall and looked at the view by herself.

The Castle stood on the last spur of a range of hills, and there was an abrupt descent between it and the next rounded hill-top. Covered with trees, the sharp little valley was full of shadow and mystery; and then beyond the great billowy tree-tops rose and fell for miles, until the brilliant early green of the larches and the dark hues of the many leafless branches, already ruddy with buds, became blue and at length purple in the distance.

This joy and glory of her mother earth nobody could grudge Molly, surely? But the very beauty of it all made her more weak; and tears rose in her eyes as she looked at the healing green.

"I am tired," she thought; "and, after all, what harm can it do me to meet Lady Rose Bright? And if Sir Edmund Grosse was annoyed to see me here, what does it matter?"

Presently Lady Groombridge and her admiring guest came back to where Molly was standing. In the excitement of arrival and of meeting Lady Rose, and the little shock of Sir Edmund's greeting, Molly had hardly taken stock of the mistress of the Castle. Lady Groombridge was verging on old age, but ruddy and vigorous. She wore short skirts and thick boots, and tapped the gravel noisily with her stick. She had almost forgotten that she had ever been young and a beauty, and her conversation was usually in the tone of a harassed housekeeper, only that the range of subjects that worried her extended beyond servants and linen and jam into politics and the Church and the souls of men within a certain number of miles of Groombridge Castle.

She stood talking between Molly and Mrs. Delaport Green in a voice of some impatience as she scanned the landscape in search of Rose.

"Dear me, where has Rose gone to? and she knew how much I wanted to have a talk with her before dinner. And I wanted to tell her not to let our clergyman speak about incense and candles. He was more tiresome than usual after Rose was here last time."

Mrs. Delaport Green tried to interject some civil remarks, but Lady Groombridge paid not the slightest attention. The only visitors who interested her in the least were Rose and Edmund Grosse. She could hardly remember why she had invited Mrs. Delaport Green and Molly when she met them in London, and Billy was always Lord Groombridge's guest.

"Well, if Rose won't come out of the wood, I suppose we may as well come in, and perhaps you would like to see your room;" and, with an air of resignation, she led the way.

She stood in the middle of a gorgeously-upholstered room of the date of George IV., and looked fretfully round.

"Of course it is hideous, but I think if you have a good thing even of the worst date it is best to leave it alone;" and then, with a gleam of humour in her eye, she turned to Molly, "and whenever you feel your taste vitiated (or whatever they call it nowadays) in your room next door, you can always look out of the window, you know." And then, speaking to Mrs. Delaport Green:

"We have no light of any sort or kind, and no bathrooms, but there are plenty of candles, and I can't see why, with large hip baths and plenty of water, people can't keep clean. Yes, dinner is at 8.15 sharp; I hope you have everything you want; there is no bell into your maid's room, but the housemaid can always fetch your maid."

Then she ushered Molly into the next room and, after briefly pointing out its principal defects, she left her to rest her body and tire her mind on a hard but gorgeously-upholstered couch until it should be time to dress for dinner.

CHAPTER IX

A LITTLE MORE THAN KIND

Edmund Grosse felt more tolerant of Billy at Groombridge Castle than elsewhere. At Groombridge he was looked upon as a kindly weakness of Lord Groombridge's, who consulted him about the stables and enjoyed his jokes. This position certainly made him more attractive to Edmund, but he was not sorry that Billy, who seldom troubled a church, went there on Easter Sunday morning and left him in undisturbed possession of the terrace.

The sun was just strong enough to be delightful, and, with an interesting book and an admirable cigar, it ought to have been a goodly hour for Grosse. But the fact was that he had wished to walk to church with Rose, and he had quite hoped that if it were only for his soul's sake she would betray some wish for him to come. But if she didn't, he wouldn't. He knew quite well that she would be pleased if he went, but if she were so silly and self-conscious as to be afraid of appearing to want his company—well and good; she should do without it.

He had been disappointed and annoyed with Rose during their walk on the evening before. The simple, matter-of-fact way in which they had been jogging along in London was changed. At first, indeed, she had been natural enough, but then she had become silent for some moments, and afterwards had veered away from personal topics with a tiresome persistency. He half suspected the truth, that this was due to a careless word of his own which had betrayed how suddenly he had given up his intention to spend Easter on the Riviera. If she had jumped to the conclusion that this change was because Edmund had learnt at the eleventh hour that Rose would be at Groombridge, she had no right to be so quick-sighted. It was almost "Missish" of Rose, he told himself, to be so ready to think his heart in danger, and to be so unnecessarily tender of his feelings. She might wait for him to begin the attack before she began to build up fortifications.

He was at the height of his irritation against Rose, when the three other ladies came out on the terrace. Lady Groombridge instantly told Mrs. Delaport Green that she knew she wished to visit the dairy, and hustled her off through the garden. Edmund rose and smiled, with his peculiar, paternal admiration, at Molly, whose dark looks were at their very best set in the complete whiteness of her hat and dress. Then he glanced after the figures that were disappearing among the rose-bushes.

"The party is not in the least what your chaperone expected; indeed, we can hardly be dignified by the name of a party at all, but you see how happy she is. She even enjoyed dear old Groombridge's prosing last night, and she has been very happy in church, and now she is going to see the dairy. The only thing that troubles her is that Lady Groombridge has not allowed her to change her gown, and a well-regulated mind cannot enjoy her prayers and a visit to cows in the same gown. Now suppose," he looked at Molly with a lazy, friendly smile, "you put on a short skirt and come for a walk."

A little later they were walking through the woods on the hills beyond the Castle. Perhaps he intended that Rose, who had stayed to speak to the vicar, should find that he had not been waiting about for her return.

"I would give a good deal to possess the cheerful philosophy of Mrs. Delaport Green," he said, as, looking down through an opening in the trees, they could see that little woman with her skirts gracefully held up standing by while Lady Groombridge discoursed to the keeper of cows, who looked sleek and prosperous and a little sulky the while.

"You would be wise to learn some of it from her," Edmund went on. "Isn't this nice? Let us sit upon the ground, as it is dry, and feel how good everything is. You like this sort of thing, don't you?"

Molly murmured "Yes," and sat down on a mossy bank and looked up into the glorious blue sky and then at a tuft of large, pale primroses in the midst of dark ground ivy, then far down to the fields where a group of brown cows, rich in colour, stood lazily content by a blue stream that sparkled in the sunlight. Edmund was not hard-hearted, and Molly looked very young, and a pathetic trouble underlay the sense of pleasure in her face. There was no peace in Molly's eyes, only the quick alternations of acute enjoyment and the revolt against pain and a child's resentment at supposed blame.

Pleasure was uppermost at this moment, for so many slight, easy, human pleasures were new to her. She sat curved on the ground, with the ease and suppleness of a greyhound ready to spring, whereas Sir Edmund was forty and a little more stiff than his age warranted.

"But when you do enjoy yourself I imagine it's worth a good many hours of our friend's sunny existence. Oh, dear, dear!" For at that moment the dairy was a scene of some confusion; two enormous dogs from the Castle had bounded up to Lady Groombridge, barking outrageously, and one of them had covered her companion with mud.

"She is saying that it does not matter in the least, and that the gown is an old rag, but I'm sure it's new on to-day, and it's impossible to say how much has not been paid for it."

Molly laughed; she felt as sure that Sir Edmund was right as if she could hear every word the little woman was saying.

"Well, that you will allow is humbug!"

"Yes, I think I will this time, and I believe, too, that the philosophy has collapsed. I'm sure she's a mass of ruffled feathers, and her mind is full of things that she will hurl at the devoted head of her maid when she gets in. You can only really wound that type of woman to the quick by touching her clothes. There now, is that severe enough?"

"Why do we always talk of Mrs. Delaport Green?" asked Molly.

"Because she is on trial in your mind and you are not quite sure whether she suits."

"I might go further and fare worse," said Molly.

"Is there no one you would naturally go to?" asked Edmund.

"There is the aunt who brought me up, Mrs. Carteret, and I'd rather—" She paused. "There is nothing in this world I would not rather do than go back to her."

Molly's face was completely overcast; it was threatening and angry.

"Poor child!" said Edmund gently.

"I wonder," said Molly, "if anybody used to say 'poor child' when I was small. There must have been some one who pitied an orphan, even in the cheerful, open-air system of Aunt Anne's house, where no one ever thought of feelings, or fancies, or frights at night, or loneliness."

Edmund looked at her with a sympathy that tried to conceal his curiosity.

"Was it possible," he wondered, "that she really thought she was an orphan?"

"It's dreadful to think of a very lonely child," he said.

"But some people have to be lonely all their lives," said Molly.

Sir Edmund was touched. She had raised her head and looked at him with a pleading confidence. Then, with one swift movement, she was suddenly kneeling and tearing to pieces two or three primroses in succession.

"Some people have to say things that can never be really said, or else keep everything shut up."

"Don't you think they may make a mistake, and that the things can be said—" He hesitated; he did not want to press her unfairly into confidence; "to the right person?" he concluded rather lamely.

"Who is to find the right person?" said Molly bitterly; "the right person is easy to find for people who have just ordinary cares and difficulties, but the people who are in real difficulties don't easily find the right person. I doubt if he or she exists myself!"

She turned to find Edmund Grosse looking at her with far too much meaning in his face; there was a degree and intensity of interest in his look that might be read in more than one way.

Molly blushed with the simplicity suited to seventeen rather than to twenty-one. She was very near to the first outpouring in her life, the torrent of her pent-up thoughts and feelings was pressing against the flood-gates. It seemed to her that she had never known true and real sympathy before she felt that look. She held out her hands towards him with a little unconscious gesture of appeal.

"I have had a strange life," she said; "I am in very strange circumstances now."

But Edmund suddenly got up, and before she could speak again a slight sound on the path showed her that some one was coming.

Rose, finding every one dispersed, had taken a walk by herself in the wood. She was glad to be alone; she felt the presence of God in the woods as very near and intimate. Her mind had one of those moments of complete rest and feeding on beautiful things which come to those who have known great mental suffering in their lives, and to whom the world is not giving its gaudy preoccupations. So, walking amidst the glory of spring lit by a spiritual sunshine, Rose came round a little stunted yew-tree to find Molly kneeling on the ground ivy, and Edmund standing by her. Molly rose in one movement to her full height, as if her legs possessed no jointed impediments, and a fiercely negative expression filled the grey eyes. Rose's kind hand had unwittingly slammed the flood-gates in the moment they had opened; and Edmund, seeing that look, and feeling the air electric, suddenly reverted to a belief in Molly's sense of guilt towards Rose.

For the fraction of a second Rose looked helplessly at Edmund, and then held out a little bunch of violets to Molly.

"Won't you have these? There; they suit so well with your gown."

With a quick and very gentle touch she put the violets into Molly's belt, and smiled at her with the sunshine that was all about them.

Molly looked a little dazed, and the "Thank you" of her clear low voice was mechanical.

"I was just coming for a few minutes' walk in the wood."

Rose's voice was very rich in inflection, and now it sounded like a caress.

"But I wonder if it is late? I think I have forgotten the time, it is all so beautiful."

She laid her hand for a moment on Molly's arm.

"It is very late," said Edmund with decision, but without consulting his watch on the point.

They all moved quickly, and while making their way back to the Castle Rose and Edmund talked of Lord and Lady Groombridge, and Molly walked silently beside them.

CHAPTER X

THE PET VICE

"May I come in?"

At the same moment the door was half opened, and Lady Groombridge, in a heavy, dark-coloured gown, made her way in, with the swish of a long, silk train. She half opened the door with an air of mystery, and she closed it softly while she held her flat silver candlestick in her hand as if she wished she could conceal it, yet the oil lamps were still burning in the gallery behind her. The appearance of the wish for concealment was merely the unconscious expression of her mental condition at the moment.

Two women looked up in surprise as she made this unconsciously dramatic entrance into her guest's bedroom. Lady Rose was sitting in front of the uncurtained window in a loose, white dressing-gown, lifting a mass of her golden hair with her hair brush. She had been talking eagerly, but vaguely, before her hostess came in, in order to conceal the fact that she wished intensely to be allowed to go to bed.

Lady Rose made many such minor sacrifices on the altar of charity, and she was sorry for the tall, thin, mysterious girl who, at first almost impossibly stiff and cold, had volunteered a visit to her room to-night. It was only a very few who were ever asked to come into Rose's room, and she had hastily covered the miniature of her dead husband in his uniform with her small fan before she admitted Molly.

By some strange impulse, Molly had attached herself to Rose during the rest of that Easter Sunday. Curiosity, admiration, or jealousy might have accounted for Molly's doing this. To herself it seemed merely part of her determination to face the position without fear or fancies. If Lady Rose found out later with whom she had spent those hours, at least she should not think that Molly had been embarrassed. Perhaps, too, Sir Edmund's efforts to keep them apart made her more anxious to be with her.

Having been kindly welcomed to Rose's room, Molly found herself slightly embarrassed; they seemed to have used up all common topics during the day, and Molly was certainly not prepared to be confidential.

The entrance of the hostess came as a relief. That lady, without glancing at Rose or Molly as she came into the middle of the room, banged the candlestick down on a small table, and then threw herself into an arm-chair, which gave a creak of sympathy in response to her loud sigh.

"It is perfectly disgraceful!" she said, "and now I don't really know what has happened. On Easter Sunday night, too!"

Molly had been standing by the window, looking out on the moonlit park. She now leaned further across the wide window-seat, so that her slight, sea-green silk-clad figure might not be obtrusive, and the dark keen face was turned away for the same purpose.

"That woman has actually," Lady Groombridge went on, "been playing cards in the smoking-room on Easter Sunday night with Billy and those two boys. What Groombridge will say, I can't conceive; it is perfectly disgraceful!"

"Have they been playing for much?"

"Oh, for anything, I suppose; and Edmund Grosse says that the boy from the Parsonage has lost any amount to Billy. They have fleeced him in the most disgraceful way."

There was a long silence. Rose looked utterly distressed.

"If he had only refused to play," she said at last, as if she wished to return in imagination to a happier state of things.

"It's no use saying that now," said Lady Groombridge, with an air of ineffable wisdom.

Molly Dexter bit her tiny evening handkerchief, and her grey eyes laughed at the moonlight.

"Well, Rose, I can't say you are much comfort to me," the hostess went on presently, with a dawn of humour on her countenance as she crossed one leg over the other.

"But, my dear, what can I say?"

The tall, white figure, brush in hand, rose and stood over the elderly woman in the chair. Rose had had the healthy development of a girlhood in the country, but her regular features were more deeply marked now and there were dark lines under her clear, blue eyes.

"Do you think," said the hostess in a brooding way, "that Mrs. What's-her-name Green would tell you how much he lost, Rose, if you went to her room? Of course, I can't possibly ask her."

"Oh no; she thinks me a goody-goody old frump."

At the same moment another brush at the splendid hair betrayed a half-consciousness of the grace of her own movements.

"She wouldn't say a word to me—she is much more likely to tell one of the men. Perhaps she will tell Edmund Grosse to-morrow; he is so easy to talk to."

"But that's no use for to-night, and Groombridge will be simply furious if I ask him to interfere without telling him how much it comes to. Billy won't say a word."

"I think," said Rose very slowly, "that if we all go to bed now, we shall have some bright idea in the morning."

Before this master-stroke of suggestion had reached Lady Groombridge's brain, a very low voice came from the window.

"Would you like me to go and ask her?"

The hostess started; she had forgotten Miss Molly Dexter. A little dull blush rose to her forehead.

"Oh dear, I had forgotten you were there; but, after all, she is no relation of yours, and it isn't your fault, you know. Could you—would you really not mind asking her?"

"I don't mind at all. Might I take your candle?"

"Of course," said Lady Groombridge, "you won't, don't you know——"

"Say that you sent me?" The low, detached voice betrayed no sarcasm. She knew perfectly well that Lady Groombridge disliked being beholden to her at that moment. It was rather amusing to make her so.

For fifteen minutes after that the travelling clock by Lady Rose's bed ticked loudly, and drowned the faint murmur of her prayers while she knelt at the prie-dieu.

Lady Groombridge knew Rose too well to be surprised. But she did not, like the young widow, pass the time in prayer; she was worried—even deeply so. She was of an anxious temperament, and she was really shocked at what had happened.

Molly did not come back with any air of mystery, but with a curiously negative look.

"Thirty-five pounds," she said very quietly.

Lady Groombridge sat up, very wide awake.

"More than half his allowance for a whole year," she said with conviction.

"Oh dear, dear," said Lady Rose, rising as gracefully as a guardian angel from her prie-dieu.

Molly made no comment, although in her heart she was very angry with Mrs. Delaport Green. Her quick "Good-night" was very cordially returned by the other two.

"Now tell me something more about Miss Molly Dexter," said Rose, sinking on to a tiny footstool at Lady Groombridge's feet as soon as they were alone.

"I am ashamed to say that I know very little about her; I am simply furious with myself for having asked them at all. I don't often yield to kind-hearted impulses, and I'm sure I'm punished enough this time."

Lady Groombridge gave a snort.

"But who is she? Is she one of the Malcot Dexters?"

"Yes; I can tell you that much. She is the daughter of a John Dexter I used to know a little. He died many years ago, not very long after divorcing his wife, and this poor girl was brought up by an aunt, and Sir Edmund says she had a bad time of it. Then she made one of those odd arrangements people make nowadays, to be taken about by this Mrs. Delaport Green, and I met them at Aunt Emily's, and, of course, I thought they were all right and asked them to come here. After that I heard a little more about the girl from some one in London; I can't remember who it was now."

"Poor thing," said Rose; "she looks as if she had had a sad childhood. But what curious eyes; I find her looking through and through me."

"Yes; you have evidently got a marked attraction for her."

"Repulsion, I should have called it," said Rose, with her gentle laugh.

Lady Groombridge laughed too, and got up to go to bed.

"And what became of the mother?"

"She is living—" said the other; then she caught her sleeve in the table very clumsily, and was a moment or two disengaging the lace. "She is living," she then said rather slowly, "in Paris, I think it is, but this girl has never seen her."

"How dreadful!"

"Yes. Good-night, Rose; do get to bed quickly,—a wise remark when it is I who have been keeping you up!"

Lady Groombridge, when she got to her own room, murmured to herself:

"I only stopped just in time. I nearly said Florence, and that is where the other wicked woman lives. It's odd they should both live in Florence. But—how absurd, I'm half asleep—it would be much odder if there were not two wicked women in Florence."

Sir Edmund was aware as soon as he took his seat by Molly at the breakfast-table that she knew why Lady Groombridge was pouring out tea with a dark countenance. He put a plate of omelette in his own place, and then asked if Molly needed anything. As she answered in the negative he murmured as he sat down:

"Mrs. Delaport Green is not down?"

"She has a furious toothache."

Molly's look answered his.

"I suppose there is no such thing as a dentist left in London on Easter Monday?"

No more was safe just then; but by common consent they moved out on to the terrace as soon as they had finished breakfast.

"It is too tiresome, too silly, too wrong," said Molly.

"Yes; the pet vice should be left at home," said Edmund. "Many of them do it because it's fashionable, but this one must have it in the blood. I saw her begin to play, and she was a different creature when she touched the cards. What sort of repentence is there?"

"I found her crying last night like a child, but this morning I see she is going to brazen it out. But she wants to quarrel with me at once, so I don't get much confidence."

"But you don't mind that?"

"Not in the least, only—" Molly sighed, but intimate as their tone was, she did not now feel any inclination to reveal her greater troubles.

"I don't want to end up badly with my first venture, and I have nowhere else to go. For to-day I think she will talk of going to see the dentist until she finds out how she is treated here."

"Oh! that will be all right for to-day," said Edmund. "There are no possible trains on Bank holiday, and no motor. Let her get off early to-morrow."

Molly had evidently sought his opinion as decisive, and she turned as if to go and repeat it to Mrs. Delaport Green.

"But what will you do yourself?" he asked very gently.

"I shall go away with her, and then—I wonder—" She hesitated, and looked full into his face. "Would you be shocked if I took a flat by myself? I don't want to hunt for another Mrs. Delaport Green just now."

Sir Edmund paused. It struck him for a moment as very tiresome that he should be falling into the position of counsellor and guide to this girl, while he had anything but her prosperity at heart. He looked at her, and there was in her attitude a pathetic confidence in his judgment.

"I don't want," she went on, holding her head very straight and looking away to the wooded hills, "I don't want to do anything unconventional."

A deep blush overspread the dark face—a blush of shame and hesitation, for the words, "your mother's daughter ought to be more careful than other girls," so often in poor Molly's mind, were repeated there now.

"If there were an old governess, or some one of that sort," suggested Sir Edmund, with hesitation.

"Oh yes, yes!" cried Molly eagerly; "there is one, if I could only get her. Oh, thank you, yes! I wonder I did not think of that before." And she gave a happy, youthful laugh at this solution.

"Is it some one you really care for?" asked Edmund, with growing interest.

"I don't know about really caring"—Molly looked puzzled—"but she would do. There is one thing more I wanted to ask you. About the silly boy last night: whom does he owe the money to? I know nothing about bridge."

"He owes it to Billy."

Molly looked sorry.

"I thought, if it were to Mrs. Delaport Green——"

"You might have paid the money?" Edmund smiled kindly at her. "No, no, Miss Dexter, that will be all right."

She turned from him, laughing, and went indoors to Mrs. Delaport Green's room.

She found that lady writing letters, and the floor was scattered with them, six deep round the table. She put her hand to her face as Molly came in.

"There are no possible trains," said Molly, "so I'm afraid you must bear it. Sir Edmund advises us to go by an early train to-morrow: he thinks to-day you would be better here, as there won't be a dentist left in London."

"I am very brave at bearing pain, fortunately," was the answer, "and I am trying, even now, to get on with my letters. I think I shall go to Eastbourne to-morrow; there are always good dentists in those places. I love the churches there, and the air will brace my nerves. I might have gone to Brighton only Tim is there. Will you"—she paused a moment—"will you come to Eastbourne too?"

Mrs. Delaport Green was not disposed to have Molly with her. She was exceedingly annoyed at the débâcle of her visit to Groombridge—a visit which she was describing in glowing terms in her letters to all her particular friends. It would be unpleasant to have Molly's critical eyes upon her; she liked, and was accustomed to, people with a very different expression.

Molly, however, ignoring very patent hints with great calmness and firmness, told her that she intended to stay with her for just as long as it was necessary before finding some one to live with in a little flat in London. She felt the possibility, at first, of Mrs. Delaport Green's becoming insolent, but she was presently convinced that she had mastered the situation. They agreed to go to Eastbourne together next day, and then to look for a flat for Molly in London. The suggestion that Mrs. Delaport Green might help Molly to choose the furniture proved very soothing indeed.

Molly went down-stairs again to let Sir Edmund know they were not going to leave till next morning, and to find out if he had succeeded in speaking to Lady Groombridge.

As she passed through the hall, she saw that he was sitting with Lady Rose by a window opening on to the terrace. She was passing on, being anxious not to interrupt them, but Rose held out her hand.

"I've hardly seen you this morning. Do come and sit with us." And then, as Molly rather shyly sat down by her side on a low sofa, Lady Rose went on:

"I was just telling Sir Edmund a very beautiful thing that has happened, only it is very sad for dear Lord Groombridge and for her. They have only had the news this morning, but it is not a secret, and it is very wonderful. You know that this place was to go to a cousin, quite a young man, and they liked him very much. They did mind his being a Roman Catholic, but they were very good about it, and now he has written that he has actually been ordained a priest, and that he will not have the property or the Castle as he is going to be just an ordinary parish priest working amongst the poor. It is wonderful, isn't it? They say the next brother is a very ordinary young man—not like this wonderful one—and so they are very much upset to-day, poor dears. They knew he was studying for the priesthood, but they did not realise that the time for his Ordination had really come."

Molly murmured shyly something that sounded sympathetic, and then, looking at Sir Edmund, ventured to say:

"Mrs. Delaport Green would like to stay till the early train to-morrow. But have you seen Lady Groombridge?"

"Yes; it's all right—or rather, it's all wrong—but she won't tell Groombridge to-day, and she will be quite fairly civil, I think."

"And this news," said Rose gently, "will make them both think less of that unfortunate affair last night."

Molly rose and moved off with an unusually genial smile.

CHAPTER XI

THE THIN END OF A CLUE

Edmund Grosse later on in the morning strolled down to the stables. He had been there the day before, but he had still something to say to the stud-groom, an old friend of his, who had the highest respect for the baronet's judgment.

Edmund loved a really well-kept stable, where hardly a straw escapes beyond the plaited edges, where the paint is renewed and washed to the highest possible pitch of cleanliness, and where a perpetual whish of water and clanking of pails testify to a constant cleaning of cobblestone yard and flagged pavement.

In the middle of Groombridge Castle stable-yard there was an oval of perfect turf, and that was surrounded by soft, red gravel; then came alternate squares of pavement and cobble-stones, on to which opened the wide doors of coach-houses and stables and harness-rooms, and the back gate of the stud-groom's house.

An old, white-haired, ruddy-faced man standing on the red gravel smiled heartily when Sir Edmund appeared. The man was in plain clothes, with a very upright collar and a pearl horseshoe-pin in his tie; his figure was well-built, but showed unmistakably that his knees had been fixed in their present shape by constant riding.

He touched his hat.

"How's the mare to-day, Akers?" asked Sir Edmund.

"Nicely, nicely; it's a splendid mash that, Sir Edmund. Old Hartley gave me the recipe for that. He was stud-groom here longer than I have been, in the old lord's day. He had hoped to have had his son to follow him, but the lad got wild, and it couldn't be."

The old man sighed, and changed the conversation. "Will you come round again, sir?"

"Yes," said Edmund; "I don't mind if I do. But you've got a son of your own about the stable, haven't you?" he asked, as they turned towards the other side of the yard.

"I had two, Sir Edmund," was the brief and melancholy answer. "Jimmy's here, but the lad I thought most on, he went and enlisted in the war, and he couldn't settle down again after that. Jimmy, he'll never rise to my place—it would not be fair, and I wouldn't let his lordship give it a thought—but the other one might have done it."

Sir Edmund felt some sympathy for the stay-at-home, whom he knew. "He seems a cheerful, steady fellow."

"He's steady enough, and he's cheerful enough," said his father, in a tone of great contempt; "but the other lad had talent—he had talent."

Both men had paused in the interest of their talk.

"My eldest son, Thomas, of whom I'm speaking, went to the war in the same ship as General Sir David Bright, and there's a thing I'd like to tell you about that, Sir Edmund. It never came into my head how curious a thing it was till yesterday—last night, I may say. Lady Rose Bright's lady's-maid come in with Lady Groombridge's lady's-maid to see my wife, and you'll excuse me if I do repeat some woman's gossip when you see why I do it. Well, the long and short of it was that it seems Lady Rose Bright has been left rather close as to fortune for a lady in her position, and the money's all gone off elsewhere. Then the maid said, Sir Edmund—whether truly or not I don't know, naturally—that there had been hopes that another will might be sent home from South Africa, but that nothing came of it. I felt, so to speak, puzzled while I was listening, and afterwards my wife says to me while we were alone, she says, 'Wasn't it our Thomas when he was on board ship wrote that he had put his name to a paper for Sir David Bright?'—witnessing, you'll understand she meant by that, sir—'and what's become of that paper I should like to know,' says she. So she up and went to her room and took out all Thomas's letters, and sure enough it was true."

Akers paused, and then very slowly extracted a fat pocket-book from his tight-fitting coat, and pulled out a letter beautifully written on thin paper. He held it with evident respect, and then, after a preparatory cough, he began to read:

"'I was sent for to-day, and taken up with another of our regiment to the state cabins by Sir David Bright's servant, and asked to put my name to a paper as witness to Sir David Bright's signature, and so I did.'"

Akers stopped, and looked across his glasses at Sir Edmund.

"I don't know if you will remember Sir David's servant, Sir Edmund; he was killed in the same battle as Sir David was, poor fellow. A big man with red hair—a Scotchman—you'd have known that as soon as he opened his mouth. He'd have chosen my boy from having known him here, in all probability."

"Yes, yes," said Grosse impatiently; "but how do you know that what he witnessed was a will?"

"Well, of course, I don't know, Sir Edmund, and of course the boy didn't know what was in the paper he witnessed; but the missus will have it that that paper was a will, and there'll be no getting it out of her head that the right will has been lost. I was wondering about it when I see you come into the yard, and I thought I'd just let you see the lad's letter. It could do no harm, and it might do good."

Edmund had been absolutely silent during this narrative, with his eyes fixed on the stud-groom's face.

"And where is Thomas now?" he asked, in a low voice.

"He's in North India somewhere, Sir Edmund, but that is his poor mother's trouble; we've not had a line from him these three months."

"Oh, I'll find him for you," said Edmund, and he was just going to ask what regiment Thomas was in when they were disturbed by the appearance of Billy emerging from the hunters' stable, and Edmund Grosse felt an unwarrantable contempt for a young man who dawdles away half the morning in the stable.

"Should I find you at six o'clock this evening?" he asked, in a low voice, of the stud-groom; and having been satisfied on that point, he strolled off and left Billy to talk of the horses.

Edmund Grosse felt for the moment as if the missing will were in his grasp, and he was quite sure now that he had never doubted its existence. What he had just heard was the very first thing approaching to evidence in favour of his own theory, which he had hitherto built up entirely on guess-work. Of course, the paper might have been some ordinary deed, some bit of business the General had forgotten to transact before starting. But, if so, he felt sure that it must have been business unknown to the brothers Murray, as they had discussed with Grosse every detail of Sir Edmund's affairs. One thing was certain: it would be quite as difficult after this to drive out of Edmund Grosse's head the belief that this paper was a will as it would be to drive it out of the head of Mrs. Akers.

Edmund was in excellent spirits at luncheon. In the afternoon he drove with Lady Groombridge and Rose and Molly to see a famous garden some eight miles off, the owners of which were away in the South. The original house to which the gardens belonged had been replaced by a modern one in Italian style at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was not interesting, and Lady Groombridge gave a sniff of contempt as she turned her back on it and her attention, and that of her friends, to the far more striking green walls beyond the wide terraced walk on the south side of the building.

In the midst of ordinary English country scenery, these gardens had been set by a great Frenchman who had caught the strange secret of the romance of utterly formal hedges. He could make of them a fitting framework for the glories of a court, or for sylvan life in Merrie England. There were miles of hedges; not yew, hornbeam had been chosen for this green, tranquil country. At one spot many avenues of hedges met together as if by accident, or by some rhythmic movement; it was a minuet of Nature's dancing, grown into formal lines but not petrified—every detail, in fact, alive with green leaves. If you stood in the midst of this meeting of the ways, the country round outside, seen in vistas between the hedges, was curiously glorified, more especially on one side where the avenues were shortened. There one saw larger glimpses of fields and woods and bits of common-land that seemed wonderfully eloquent of freedom and simplicity, nature and husbandry. But if you had not seen those glimpses through the lines of strange, stately, regal dignity—the lines of those mighty hedges—you would not have been so startled by their charm. That was the triumph of the genius of Lenôtre: he had seen that, framed in the sternest symbols of rule and order, one could get the freshest joy in the pictures of Nature's untouched handiwork. On the west side the avenues of hedges disappeared into distant vistas of wood, one only ending in a piece of most formal ornamental water. I don't know how it was, but it was difficult not to be infected by a curious sense of orgy, of human beings up to their tricks—love tricks, drinking and eating—perhaps murdering tricks—all done in some impish fantastic way, between those long hedges or behind them. If there were not something going on down one avenue you looked into, it was happening in another.

Somewhat of all this Edmund said to Molly as they strolled between the hedges which reached far above his head, but she felt that he was absent-minded while he did so. He had planned for himself a walk and a talk with Rose, but he had reckoned without his hostess, who had shown so unmistakably that she intended him to amuse Molly that it would have been discourteous to have done anything else. He had felt rather cross as he saw Lady Groombridge and Rose turn down one of the longest walks, one that seemed indeed to have no ending at all, with an air of finality, as if their tête-à-tête were to be as long as the path before them, and as secret as the hedges could keep it. He would never have come out driving with three women if he had not hoped to get a talk alone with Rose. He told himself that Rose's avoidance of him was becoming quite an affectation, and after all, he asked himself, what had he done to be treated like this?

"Why, if I were trying to make love to her she could not be more absurd! The only time after our first walk here that we have been alone she made Miss Dexter join us, and as the girl would not stay Rose found she must write letters."

As soon as he had made up his mind that he would show Rose what nonsense it all was, he could and did—not without the zest of pique—turn his attention to Molly.

"Lady Groombridge doesn't frame well here, does she?" he said, smiling. "Rather a shock at that date—the tweed skirt and the nailed boots and the felt hat."

"Yes; but Lady Rose floats down between the hedges as if she had a long train, only she hasn't," laughed Molly. "The hem of her garment never touches the earth, as a matter of fact. I wonder how it is done."

"You are right," said Edmund; "and, do you know another thing about Rose?—whatever she wears she seems to be in white."

"I know," answered Molly. "I see what you mean."

"It may be," said Edmund, "because she always wore white as a young girl. I remember the day when David Bright first saw her she was in white." Edmund had for a moment forgotten entirely why he should not have mentioned David Bright. If Molly could have read his mind at the next moment she would have seen that he was expressing a most fervent wish that he had never met her. How little he had gained, or was likely to gain, from her, and how stupid and tiresome, if not worse, was this appearance of friendship. He felt this much more strongly on account of the morning's discovery, and he was determined to keep on neutral ground.

"Have you ever seen Versailles?" he asked.

"No; I have seen absolutely nothing out of England except India, when I was a small child."

There it was again! He could not let her give him any confidences about India or anything else.

"Well, the hedges at Versailles don't impress me half as much as these do, and yet these are not half so well known. There's more of nature here, and they are not so self-contained. At Versailles the Court and its gardens were the world, and nature a tapestry hanging out for a horizon; here it is amazing how the frame leads one's eyes to the great, beautiful world outside. I never saw meadows and woods look fairer than from here."

They were silent; and in the silence Grosse heard shouting and then saw a huge dog dragging a chain, rushing along the avenue towards them, while louder shouts came from the opposite direction.

"We must run," he said very quietly, "there's something wrong with it;" and two men, still calling and waving their arms, appeared at the end nearest the house. Edmund took Molly by the arm, and they ran to meet the men.

"Get the lady over the kitchen-garden wall!" shouted one who held a gun, and as they came to the end of the hedge on their left they saw a wall at right angles to it about five feet high. Molly looked for any sort of footing in the bricks for one second, and then she felt Grosse lift her in his arms, and deposit her on the top of the wall. She rolled over on the other side into a strawberry bed in blossom. She heard a gun fired as she jumped to her feet, and a second shot followed.

"He's dead, sir," she heard a voice say. "I'll open the gate for the lady."

And then a garden gate a few yards off was opened inward, and Molly walked to meet the man whom she supposed to be a head gardener. She thanked him and went through the gate, to find Edmund, with a very white face, leaning back on a stone bench built into the wall.

"The gentleman strained himself a bit," said the gardener, in a tone of apology to Molly. "I can't think how he come to break his chain"—he meant the dog this time. "I've said he ought to be shot long ago; now they'll believe me. Why, he bit off the porter's ear at the station when he first come, and he was half mad with rage to-day."

"I'm all right," said Edmund, with a kindly smile to the horribly distressed Molly. She went up to him with a gentle, tender anxiety on her face that betrayed a too strong feeling, only he was just faint enough not to notice it.

"It's nothing, child," he said in the fatherly tone that to Molly meant so far too much. "The merest rick. I forgot, in the hurry, to think how high I was lifting you, and I also forgot that there might be cucumber frames on the other side!"

"I wouldn't have said 'over the garden wall,' sir, if there had been," said the gardener with a smile, as he offered a glass of water that had been fetched by the other man, whose coat and gaiters proclaimed him unmistakably a keeper.

"A fine dog, poor fellow," said Edmund to the latter.

The keeper shook his head. "I don't deny it, sir, but there are fine lions and fine bears, too, sir, that are kept locked up in the Zoölogical Gardens." Evidently the gardener and the keeper were of one opinion in this matter.

Presently Sir Edmund was so clearly all right that the men, after being tipped and having all their further offers of help refused, went away.

Edmund and Molly were left alone.

"How well you run!" he said, smiling.

"Yes; even without a ferocious dog behind me I can run fairly well," she said. "But I wish you had let me get over that wall alone. And I wish they could have spared that splendid animal."

"After all, he would have been shot whether we had been there or not," said Edmund. "My only bad moment was listening for the crash of broken glass and thinking that you were cut to pieces."

"You are sure that you have not hurt yourself?" Her grey eyes were large with anxiety.

Edmund, laughing, held up his hand, which was bleeding.

"I see I have sustained a serious injury of which I was not aware in the excitement of the crisis."

Molly examined his hand with a professional air. Edmund let her wash it with her handkerchief dipped in the glass of water, and bind it with his own. Her touch was light and skilful, and it would have been absurd to refuse to let her do it. But, as holding his wrist she raised it a little higher to turn her bandage under it, her small, lithe, thin hand was close to his face, and he gave it the slightest kiss.

Any girl who had been abroad would have taken it as little more than the merest politeness, but to Molly it came as a surprise. A glow of quick, deep joy rose within her; her cheeks did not blush, for this was a feeling too peaceful, too restful for blushes or any sort of discomfort.

"This young lady can run like a deerhound," said Edmund, "and bandage like a surgeon."

"But that's about all she can do," laughed Molly. "Ah! there"—she could not quite hide the regret in her voice—"there are Lady Groombridge and Lady Rose."

CHAPTER XII

MOLLY'S NIGHT WATCH

That night Molly could write it on the tablets of her mind that she had passed a nearly perfect day. The evening had not promised to be as happy as the rest, but it had held a happy hour. Mrs. Delaport Green had made a masterly descent just in time for dinner. Molly smiled at the thought when alone in her room. A beautiful tea-gown had expressed the invalid, and was most becoming.

"Every one has been so kind, dear Lady Groombridge; really, it is a temptation to be ill in this house—everything so perfectly done."

Lady Groombridge most distinctly grunted.

"Why is toothache so peculiarly hard to bear?" She turned to Edmund Grosse.

"It wants a good deal of philosophy certainly, especially when one's face swells; but yours, fortunately, has not lost its usual outline." And he gave her a complimentary little bow.

"Oh! there you are wrong," cried the sufferer. "My face is very much swollen on one side."

But she did not mention on which side the disfigurement was to be seen, and she ate an excellent dinner and talked very brightly to her host, who could not think why his wife had taken an evident dislike to the little woman. Edmund teased her several times, and would not let her settle down into her usual state of self-content, but after dinner she wisely took refuge with the merciful Rose.

Lady Groombridge meanwhile gave Molly a dose of good advice, kindly, if a little roughly, administered.

"I was pretty and an orphan myself, and it is not very easy work; then you have money, which makes it both better and worse. Be with wise people as much as you can; if they are a little dull it is worth while. If you take up with any bright, amusing woman you meet, you will find yourself more worried in the long run;" and she glanced significantly at Mrs. Delaport Green.

The obvious nature of the advice, of which this remark is a sample, did not spoil it. Sometimes it is a comfort to have the thing said to us that we quite see for ourselves. In to-day's unwonted mood Molly was ready to receive very ordinary wisdom as golden.

And then Lady Groombridge discovered that Molly was musical, and the older woman loved music, finding in it some of the romance which was shut out by her own limitations and by a life of over great bustle and worry.

So Molly found in her music expression for her joy in the spring, and her wistful, undefined sense of hope in life.

Lady Groombridge, sitting near her, listened almost hungrily, and asked for more. She was utterly sad to-night with the "might have been" of a childless woman. The news of the final sacrifice on the part of the heir to Groombridge, of all that meant so much to herself and her husband, had made so keen to her the sense of emptiness in their old age. And the music soothed her into a deeper feeling of submission that in reality underlay the outward unrest and discontent of to-day. Submission was, at one time, the most marked virtue of every class in our country, and it may be found sometimes in those who, having lost all other conscious religion, will still say, "He knows best," revealing thereby the bed-rock of faith as the foundation of their lives. Lady Groombridge had not lost her religious beliefs, but she was more dutiful than devout, and did not herself often reflect on what strength duty depended.

And Molly, who knew nothing of submission, yet ministered to the older woman's peace by her music. When the men came out, Lord Groombridge took a chair close to his wife's as if to share in her pleasure, and Edmund moved out of Molly's sight. She sometimes heard the voice of Rose or of Billy or of Mrs. Delaport Green, but not Sir Edmund's, and she naturally thought he was listening, whereas part of the time he was reading a review. But as the ladies were going up to bed, he said, looking into the large, grey eyes:

"Who said she could do nothing but run like a deerhound and bandage like a surgeon? And now I find she can play like an artist. What next?"

And Molly, standing in her room, said to herself that it had been the happiest day of her life.

But a moment later the maid came in, and while helping to take off her dinner dress, told her mistress that the kitchenmaid in a room near hers was groaning horribly. It seemed that Lady Groombridge had given out some medicine, and Lady Rose had sent up her hot-water bottle and her spirit-lamp, and had advised that the bottle be constantly refilled during the night.

"But I'm sure, miss, she shouldn't take that medicine. I took on myself to tell her not to till I'd spoken to you, and I'm sure I don't know who is going to sit up filling bottles to-night. Lady Groombridge's maid"—in a tone of deep respect—"isn't one to be disturbed, and the scullerymaid won't get to bed till one in the morning: this girl being ill it gives her double work."

Molly instantly rose to the situation. She knew of better appliances than the softest hot-water bottles, and soon after her noiseless entrance into the housemaid's attic the pain had been relieved. But, being a little afraid that the girl was threatened with appendicitis, she knew that if that were the case the relief from the application she had used was only temporary. However, the patient rested longer than she expected. Molly sat by the open window, while behind her on the two narrow beds lay the sick girl and the now loudly-snoring scullerymaid, who had come up a little before twelve o'clock.

"Not quite six hours' sleep that girl will get to-night," mused Molly, "and then downstairs again and two hours' work before the cook comes down to scold her. What a life!"

But, after all, Molly had noticed the blush with which the girl had put a few violets in a little pot on the chimney-piece. Was it quite sure that Miss Dexter's life would be happier than that of the snorer on the bed, who smiled once or twice in her noisy sleep?

"There is happiness in this world after all," mused Molly, soothed by thoughts of the past day, by the stillness on the face of the earth, and by a certain rest that came to her with all acts of kindness—a certain lull to those activities of mind and instinct that constantly led her out of the paths of peace.

This was a sacred time of the night to Molly. It was associated in her mind with the best hours she had ever lived, hours of sick nursing and devotion, hours of real use and help. For months now she had been living entirely for herself, to fight her own battle and make her own way in a hostile world. She had had much excitement and even real pleasure. Her imagination had taken fire with the notion that she must assert herself or be crushed in the race of life. Heavy ordinary people would find it hard to understand Molly's strange idealisation of the glories of the kingdom of this world which she meant to conquer. And if she were frustrated in her passion for worldly success, there were capacities in her which she as yet hardly suspected, but she did feel at times the stirrings of evil things, cruelty, revenge, and she hardly knew what else. How could people understand her? She shrank from understanding herself.

But to-night she knew the inspiration of another ideal; she recognised the possibility of aims in which self hardly counts. There had been indeed a stir in the minds of all at Groombridge when they knew of the final step taken by the heir. Molly, looking up at the great castle, on her homeward drive, with its massive towers and its most commanding position, had felt more and more impressed by an action on so big a scale. It was impossible to be at Groombridge and not to feel the great and noble opportunities its possession must give any remarkable man; and the man who could give up such opportunities must be a very remarkable man indeed. In Molly's self-engrossed life it had something of the same effect as a great thunderstorm among mountains would have had in the physical order.

And to-night it came over her again, and she seemed to be listening to the echoes of a far vibrating sound. And might there not be happiness for Mark Molyneux? Might it not be happiness for herself to give up the wretched, uncomfortable fight that life so often seemed to be, and to let loose the Molly who could toil and go sleepless and be happy, if she could achieve any diminution of bodily pain in man or woman, child or beast?

The dawn lightened; one or two rabbits stirred in the bracken in the near park—this was peace. Then Molly smiled tenderly at the dawn. There might come another solution in which life would be unselfish without such acute sacrifice, and in which evil possibilities would be starved for lack of temptation. And all that was good would grow in the sunshine.

And the sleeping scullerymaid smiled also.

CHAPTER XIII

SIR DAVID'S MEMORY

Lady Rose Bright was faintly disturbed on Tuesday morning, and came into Lady Groombridge's sitting-room after Mrs. Delaport Green and Molly had left the castle too preoccupied to notice the tall figure of Grosse in a far window.

This room had happily escaped all Georgian gorgeousness of decoration, and the backs of the books, a fine eighteenth-century collection, stood flush to the walls. The long room was all white except for the books, the flowered chintz covers, some fine bronze statuettes, and a few bowls of roses.

Lady Rose moved mechanically towards the empty fire-place.

It was one thing to try not to dislike Miss Dexter, and to see her in a haze of Christian love; it was another to realise that, while she herself had slept most comfortably, Molly had not been to bed at all because the little kitchenmaid was in pain. Humility and appreciation were rising in Rose's mind, as half absently she gently raised a vase from the chimney-piece, and, turning to the light to examine its mark, saw Sir Edmund looking at her from his distant window.

A little, quite a little, flush came into her cheeks; not much deeper than the soft, healthy colour usual to them. She examined the china with more attention.

The tall figure moved slowly, lazily, down the room towards her, holding the Times in one hand.

"It's not Oriental," he said, "it's Lowestoft."

"Ah!" said Rose absently. She felt the eyes whose sadness had been apparent even to Mrs. Delaport Green looking her over with a quick scrutiny.

"Why, in your general scheme of benevolence, have you not thought it fit, during the last few days, to give me the chance of talking to you alone?" The tone was full of exasperation, but ironical too, as if he were faintly amused at himself for being exasperated.

"I don't know. Have I avoided being alone with you?" Rose had turned to the chimney-piece.

Edmund Grosse sank into a low chair, crossed his legs, and looked up at her defiantly, but with keen observation.

"It has been too absurd," he said, "you have hardly spoken to me, and you know, of course, that I came here to see you. I meant to go to the Riviera until I heard that you were coming here."

"But you have been quite happy, quite amused. There seemed no reason why I should interrupt. And you know, Edmund, they said that you came here every year."

"Well, I didn't come only to see you," he said, "as you like it better that way. And now, it is about Miss Molly Dexter I want to speak to you."

This time Rose gave a little ghost of a sigh, and looked at him with unutterable kindness. She was feeling that, after all, she had come second in his consciousness—after Miss Dexter, whom she could not like, but who had sat up all night with the kitchenmaid.

"Why about Miss Dexter? what can I have to do with her?" The tone was almost contemptuous—not quite, Rose was too kind.

"Do you remember that I went to Florence?"

"Yes; I did not want you to go." There was at once a distinct note of distress in her voice. It was horribly painful to her to have to think of the things she tried so hard to bury away.

"No, but I went," he said very gently; "and it was useless, as I knew it would be. But I want to tell you one thing which I have learnt, and which I think you ought to know, as it may be inconvenient if you do not. It is that Miss Dexter——" Rose interrupted him quickly.

"Is the daughter of the lady in Florence?" She gave a little hysterical laugh. He looked at her in astonishment.

"And that is why she dislikes me so much. Do you know, Edmund, I had a feeling from the moment I first saw her that there was something wrong between us. It gave me a horrible feeling, and then I asked Mary Groombridge about her, and she told me the poor girl's story; only she said the mother lived in Paris. Of course Mary does not know, or she would never have asked us here together. But that is how I knew what you were going to say; and yet I had no notion of it till a moment ago, when it came to me in a flash. Only I wish I had known sooner!"

It was not common with Rose to say so much at a time, and there had been slight breaks and gaps in her voice, pathetic sounds to the listener. She seemed a little—just a little—out of breath with past sorrow and present pain. Edmund thought he would never come to know all the inflections in that voice.

"I wish I had known sooner. I am afraid I have not been kind to her."

"And if you had known you would have cast your pearls at her feet," he said, in tender anger. "Don't make the mistake of being too kind to her, Rose. I want you to keep her at a distance. There is something all the more dangerous about her because she is distinctly attractive. She has primitive passions, and yet she is not melodramatic; it's a dangerous species."

It was amazing how easy it was to take a severe view of poor Molly after she had gone away, and how he believed what he said.

"She has never seen her mother?" asked Rose gently.

"No, but I am sure she knows about her mother," the slowness in his voice was vindictive; "and that her mother knows what we don't know about the will."

"Edmund dear," said Rose very earnestly, "do please leave that point alone; no good can come of it. I do assure you that no good, only harm, will come of it. It's bad and unwholesome for us all—mother and you and me—to dwell on it. I do really wish you would leave it alone."

Edmund frowned, though he liked that expression, "mother and you and me."

"You needn't think about it unless you wish to," he answered.

"But I wish you wouldn't!"

"If I had banished it from my thoughts up till now, I could not leave it alone now, for I have a clue."

"Oh, don't, Edmund."

"Well, it may come to nothing; only I'm glad that it makes one thing still more clear to me though it may go no further."

He told her then of what the stud-groom had said, and ended by showing her the letter. Rose read it in silence, and then, still standing with her face turned away, she said in a very low voice:

"It is a comfort as far as it goes. But I knew it was so; he never meant things to be as they are—poor David! Edmund, it is of no use to think of it. Even if the paper then witnessed were the will, it is lost now and will never be found. I would rather—I would really rather not think too much about it."

"No, no," he answered soothingly, "don't dear, don't dwell on it."

"I like," she answered, "to dwell on the thought that David did think of me lovingly, and did not mean to leave me to any shame. I am sure he never meant to leave me poor, and to let me suffer all the publicity about that poor woman. I am sure he always meant to change the will in time, but, you see, all that mischief is done and can't be undone. I mean the humiliation and the idea that she was in Florence all the time during our married life, and all the talk, and my having to meet this unfortunate girl who has his money. All of them think he was unfaithful to me, and nothing can put that right. Nothing—I mean nothing of this world—can put any of that right. And I can't bear the idea of a quarrel and going to law with these people for money; it may be pride, but I simply can't bear it."

"But, don't you see," said Edmund, "that if we could prove there was another will, that would clear David's reputation."

"It won't prevent people knowing that there was the first will and all about the poor woman in Florence."

"No; but it will make people feel that he behaved properly in the end. It will alter their bad opinion of him."

"But it will also make them go on thinking and talking of the scandal, and if it is left alone they will forget. People forget so soon, because there is always something new to talk about. He will just take his place among the heroes who died for their country, and the rest will be forgotten."

Edmund looked at her quickly, as if taking stock of the delicate nature of the complex womanly materials he had to deal with, but her face was still averted.

"I think it's hard on David." He spoke as if yielding to her wish. "I do think it is hard. If he did make this will, and it is lost through chance or fraud, I think it is very hard that his last wishes should be disregarded, and his memory should suffer in all right-minded people's opinions. Of course, it is for you to decide, but I own I should otherwise feel it wrong to leave a stone unturned if anything could be done to restore his good name."

He felt that Rose was terribly troubled, but he could not quite realise what it was to her to disturb her hardly-won peace of mind and calm of conscience.

"If it were not for the money!" she faltered. "I shall get to long for that money; so many people become horrid when they have a lawsuit about a fortune. It has always seemed to me that if the money is only for one's self one might leave it alone, and then, after all, if we went to law and failed, things would be much worse than they were before."

"Well," said Edmund, slightly exasperated but controlling himself. "I don't mean to do anything definite yet, but we ought to find out if we can make a case of it. We can always stop in time if we can't get what we want, but it's worth while to try. It is not merely the money—the less you dwell on that the better. Seriously, I think it would be very wrong that, through any fastidiousness of yours, David's memory should not be cleared if it is possible to clear it."

The last shot had this time reached the mark. After a few minutes' silence Rose said in a very low voice:

"But then, what can I do about it?" He felt that she was hurt, but he knew he had gained his point.

"I don't think you can do anything at this moment but allow me a free hand; I could not do what is necessary without your permission and your trust—and, presently, let me compare notes with you freely. I know what your judgment is worth when you can get rid of those scruples."

"Very well."

But still she did not turn round. Indeed, the wounds in her mind were too deep and too fresh to make the subject give her anything but quivering pain. It was impossible that Edmund should suspect half of what she felt. He naturally concluded that much of her present suffering showed how unconquerably Rose's love for Sir David had outlived the strain put on it. To Rose it would have been much simpler if it had been so. But in fact part of the trial to Rose was the doubt of her own past love, and of her own present loyalty. Had she ever truly loved David while he was still her hero "sans peur et sans reproche," could that love have been killed at all? So much anxiety to be sure of having forgiven, so much self-reproach for the failure of her marriage, such an acute, overwhelming sense of shame, and such shrinking from all that was ugly and low, were intermixed and confused in poor Rose's mind that it was no wonder even Edmund, with all his tact and his tenderness, blundered at times.

They were quite silent for some moments. Edmund wanted to see her face but he could not. Presently she looked into the glass over the chimney-piece, and in the glass he saw with remorse a little tear about to fall.

"I think I've caught cold," she murmured to herself. Producing a tiny handkerchief she seemed to apply it to her nose, and so caught that one little tear. Her movements were wonderfully graceful, but the man looking at her did not think of that. What he thought was:—How exactly she was herself and no one else. How could she have that child's simplicity of hers, and her amazing power of seeing through a stone wall? How could she be a saint and have all a woman's faults? How could she live half in another world and yet with all her absurd unworldliness be so eminently a woman of this one? She was twenty-six, but she knew what many women of fifty never learn; she was twenty-six, yet she was more innocent than many a child of thirteen. What a contrast to Molly's crude ignorance and hankering after success!

All the time he looked at her in silence and she did not seem to realise it. She put her handkerchief into her belt and took it out again; she touched her hair, seeing in the glass that it was untidy. Then she sat down on a low stool, and her soft, fluffy black draperies fell round her. She pressed her elbows on her knees, and sank her face in her hands. She might have been alone; he was not quite sure she was not praying. There were some moments of silence. At last she moved, raised her head, and looked him gently full in the face.

"And you—you never talk about yourself," she said, with a thrill in her voice that he had known so long. "I always talk so much of myself when I am alone with you."

"No," he said, with a touch of lazy anger, "I'm not worth talking about, not worth thinking of, and you know it!"

For a moment she flushed.

"You always have abused yourself."

"Because I know what's in your thoughts, and when I am with you I can't help expressing them—there!" he concluded defiantly, and crossed and uncrossed his legs again.

"Edmund, that isn't one bit, one little bit true. But I do wish you were happier."

"Yes, of course," he went on sardonically, "you know that too. You know that I loathe and detest life—that I hate the morning because it begins a new day. Oh, I am bored to extinction, you know all that, you most exasperating woman. I hate"—he suddenly seemed to see that he was giving her pain, and the next words were muttered to himself—"no, I love the pity in your eyes."

The graceful figure sitting there trembled a little, and the white hands covered the eyes again.

"But," he went on quickly in a louder voice, "the pity's no good. You might as well expect me to command an army to-morrow, or become an efficient Prime Minister, or an Archbishop of Canterbury, or a Roman Catholic Cardinal, or anything else that is impossible, as become the sort of man you would like me to be. You know so perfectly well," he laughed, "how rotten I am; you are astonished if you find me do any sort of good—you can't help it, how can you, when it's just and true? Do you know I sometimes have had absurd dreams of what I might have been if you had not been so terribly clear-sighted. You stood in your white frock under the old mulberry tree—your first long skirt—and you saw that I was no good, and you were perfectly right, but, after all, what is your life to be now?"

Rose got up from the stool and rested one hand on the marble mantelpiece. She needed some help, some physical support.

"Edmund," she said, "I don't think I dwell much on the future; I leave all in God's hands. I have been through a good deal now, you must not expect too much of me." She paused. "But what you have said to me about yourself is nonsense; I wish you would not talk like that. You are only forty. You are very clever, very rich, you have the right sort of ambition although you won't say so, and you are, oh! so kind. Couldn't you do something, have some real interest?" He growled inarticulately. "Is it of no use to ask you just to think it over?"

"None whatever," he said firmly and cheerfully.

The gong sounded in the hall for luncheon.

BOOK II

CHAPTER XIV

MOLLY IN THE SEASON

"Still together?"

"Yes; and it has not turned out so badly as might be expected."

"I thought you were to have had a flat with a dear old governess?"

"I could not get Miss Carew, the governess in question, and Adela Delaport Green pressed me to stay with her for the season."

"It does credit to the amiability of both," said Edmund.

"I don't know about that," answered Molly, "we both knew what we wanted, and that we could not easily get it unless we combined, and so we combined."

"But was it quite easy to get over the slight friction at Groombridge?"

"Oh, yes; directly we got away Adela was all right. She felt stifled by the atmosphere, and she recovered as soon as she got home."

Edmund would have been less surprised at the tone of this last remark if he had seen Lady Groombridge's exceedingly offhand way of greeting Molly this same evening. That great lady, having expected to find that Molly had, acting on her advice, abandoned Mrs. Delaport Green, was quite disappointed in the girl when she met them still together in London, and so she extended her frigidity to both of them.

"And you are enjoying yourself?" Edmund went on. "Come, let us sit behind those palms. You look as if things were going smoothly."

"It is delightful."

Molly cast her grey eyes over the moving groups that were strolling about the ballroom, and over the lights and flowers and the band preparing to begin again, and then looked up into Edmund's face. It was a slow, luxurious movement, fitted to the rather unusually developed face and expression. Most debutantes are crude in their enjoyment, but Molly was beginning London at twenty-one, not at eighteen, and circumstances made her more mature than her actual experience of society warranted. Yet it seemed to Edmund that the untamed element in her was the more striking from the contrast. Molly accepted social delights and social conventions as a young and gentle tigress might enjoy the soft turf of an English lawn.

The defiance in her tone when she alluded to Groombridge faded now.

"I have six balls in the next four nights, and one opera, and we are going to Ascot, then back to London, then to Cowes, and, after that, I am going to the Italian Lakes and to Switzerland, and wherever I like."

"Is Mrs. Delaport Green so very unselfish?"

"Oh, no; I am only going to stay with Adela till the end of the season, and then I am going abroad with two girls who are quite delightful, and in October the flat and the governess are to come into existence."

"Yes; everything—everything perfect," murmured Grosse, looking at her with an expression that included her own appearance in the "everything perfect." Then, dropping his restless eyeglass, he went on.

"And you are never bored?"

"Never for one single moment."

"Amazing! and what is more amazing is that possibly you never will be bored."

"Am I to die young then?" asked Molly.

"Not necessarily, but I believe you will enjoy too keenly, and probably suffer too keenly to be bored."

"Did you ever enjoy very keenly?" asked Molly, with timid interest.

"Didn't I!" cried Grosse, with unusual animation; "until the last seven or eight years I enjoyed myself hugely, but——"

"Why did it stop?" asked Molly, her large eyes straining with eagerness.

"You look like a child who must know the end of the story at once. Do you always get so eager when you are told a story? Mine is dreadfully dull. While I had plenty of work to do, and something to look forward to, I was amused, but then——"

"Then what?"

"Well, then I became rich, and I've been dawdling about ever since. At first I enjoyed it, but now I'm bored to extinction."

"I can understand," said Molly, "when anything becomes quite easy it doesn't seem worth while to do it. But isn't there anything difficult you want to do?"

"Yes," said Edmund, "there are two things; one is plainly impossible, and the other is not hopeful, and neither of them prevents my feeling bored, for unfortunately neither of them gives me enough to do."

"Couldn't you work more at them?" asked Molly, with much sympathy.

"No," he said, as if talking to himself, "no one has the power to make a woman change her nature, and the other matter needs an expert. Good Heavens!" he stopped short, in astonishment at himself.

"Why, what's the matter?" asked Molly, while a deep flush of colour rose in her dark cheeks.

"You must be a witch," he said lightly; "you make me say things I don't in the least mean to say, and that I have never said to anyone else. And here is a distracted partner, Edgar Tonmore, coming to reproach you."

"Our dance is nearly over, Miss Dexter," said a young, fresh voice, and a most pleasing specimen of well-built and well-trained manhood stood before them. "I have been looking for you everywhere."

Molly and Edmund rose.

He stood where they left him watching her whirl past. It was as he had suspected; she had the gift of perfect movement.

And Molly, as she danced past, glanced towards the tall, loose figure, dignified with all its carelessness and with some curious trick of distinction and indifference in its bearing, and twice she caught tired eyes looking very earnestly at her.

"Good Heavens! I was talking of Rose to that girl, and of my efforts to get at her mother's money, and I never speak of either to mortal man. What made me do it?"

Slowly he turned away and left the ballroom and the house, declining with a wave of the hand various appeals to stay, and found himself in the street.

"Sympathies and affinities be hanged!" He said it aloud. "She isn't even really beautiful, and I'll be hanged, too, if I'll talk to her any more."

But, alack for Molly, he did talk to her on almost every occasion on which they met. It was from no conscious lack of royalty to Rose; it was largely because he was so full of her and her affairs that he would in an assembly of indifferent people drift towards one who was in any way connected with those affairs. Then one word or two, the merest "how d'ye do?" seemed to develop instantly into talk, and shortly the talk turned to intimate things. And for him Molly was always at her best. Many people did not like her, yet admired her, and admitted her into their houses half unwillingly. Her speech was not often kindly, and there was an element of defiance even in her quietness, for her unmistakable social ease was distinctly negative. Molly was rich and dressed well, and Mrs. Delaport Green was a very clever woman, whose blunders were rare and whose pet vice was not unfashionable. There was nothing in this life to soften and ripen the best side of Molly. But Edmund drew out whatever she had in her that was gentle and kindly.

It does not need the experience of many London seasons in order to realise that it is a condition of things in which many of the faculties of our nature are suspended. It is not as a Puritan moralist might put it, that the atmosphere of a whirlpool of carnal vice chokes higher things, for the amusements may be perfectly innocent. Only for a time the people who are engaged in them don't happen to think, or to pity, or to pray, or to condemn, or often, I believe, to love, though it may seem absurd to say so. It may, therefore, be called a rest cure for aspirations and higher ambitions and anxieties and all the nobler discontents. To Molly it was youth and fun and brightness and forgetfulness. There was no leisure to be morbid, no occasion to be bitter or combative. The game of life was too bright and smooth, above all too incessant not to suffice.

Mrs. Delaport Green might be outside the circle in which Lady Groombridge disported herself with more dignity than gaiety, but she had the entrée to some houses almost as good, if not as exclusive, and she had also a large number of acquaintances who entertained systematically and extravagantly. That the Delaport Greens were very rich, or lived as if they were very rich, had from the first surprised the "paying guest." Lately it had become evident to her that if Adela had not been addicted to cards, Molly would never have been established in her house. She had found out by now that Mr. Delaport Green was a man of very good repute in the financial world as being distinctly successful on the Stock Exchange. He struck Molly as a sturdy type of Englishman, rather determined on complete independence, and liking to pay his way in a large free fashion. She rather wondered at his having consented to the plan of the "paying guest," but he seemed quite genial when he came across her and inquired with sympathy after her amusements, and evidently wished that she should enjoy herself.

Many girls whose position was undoubtedly secure, whom no one disliked and everybody was willing to amuse, had a much less amusing summer than Molly. And Edmund Grosse, most unconsciously to himself, was a leading figure in the warm dream of delight in which Molly lived from the middle of May till the end of June. They did not meet often at dances, but at stiffer functions, at the Opera, and also twice in the country—once on the river on a Sunday afternoon, and once for a whole week-end party, which last days deserve to be treated in more detail.

The group who met under the deep shade of some historic cedars, on a hot Saturday afternoon, to spend together a Saturday to Monday with a notably pleasant host and hostess, had carried with them the electric atmosphere of the season that so fascinated Molly's inexperience, to perfume it further with the June roses and light it with the romance of summer moonlight. Of the party were Molly and her chaperone and Sir Edmund Grosse.

By this time Mrs. Delaport Green had made up her mind that Molly had decidedly better become Lady Grosse, and she felt that it would be a pleasing and honourable conclusion to the season if the engagement were announced before she and Molly parted. She had fleeced Molly very considerably, but she wanted her to have her money's worth, and go away content.

It would take long to carry conviction as to the actual good and the possibility of further good there was in Mrs. Delaport Green. Out of reach of certain temptations she might have been quoted as a positive model of goodness and unselfish brightness. If her imitative gift had found only the highest models, she might have been a happy nun, or a quiet, stay-at-home wife and mother. But she was tossed into a social whirlpool where her instincts and her ambitions and her perceptions were all confused, and out of the depths of her little spoiled soul, had crawled a vice—probably hereditary—which might otherwise have slept. It was fast becoming known that Molly's chaperone was a thorough gambler.

Sir Edmund Grosse was not unwilling to dawdle under the shade of an old wall with Mrs. Delaport Green that Saturday evening in the country.

"I feel terribly responsible," she said, in her thin eager little voice; "I am sure that boy is going to propose to my protégé!"

"What boy?" asked Edmund, in a tone of indifference.

"Edgar Tonmore."

"Is Edgar here, then?"

"Oh, no; it won't be at once. He has gone to Scotland, but he will be back before we leave London."

"Really he is an excellent fellow. I don't see why you should be anxious."

"But Molly is an orphan," she said plaintively, eyeing him quickly as she spoke.

"Even so, orphans marry and live happily ever after."

"But I'm not sure she will live happily."

"Why not?"

"I don't think she cares for him."

"Then I suppose she will refuse."

"But people so often make mistakes. I don't think dear Molly knows her own mind, and it is so natural that she should not confide in me as I am in her mother's place."

"Leave things alone. Edgar will find out if she likes him or not."

"Will he? oh well, it's a comfort that you take that view." And she then changed the topic, being of opinion that nothing more could be done with it. But no doubt the effect produced in Edmund was an increase of interest in Molly's affairs. It would be exceedingly tiresome if she should marry this attractive but penniless boy, as he knew him to be, under the impression that she possessed enough money for them both.

Edmund had only that morning received certain intelligence of the whereabouts of young Akers, the son of the old stud-groom.

From Florence had come the information that Madame Danterre was supposed to be in failing health, and that she had been seldom seen to drive out of her secluded grounds this summer, whereas last year she used to go long distances in her old-fashioned English carriage in the evenings. Thus it became a matter of thrilling interest whether the great fortune would pass to Molly before any evidence could be produced of the existence of the last will in which he so firmly believed.

"I believe the old sinner knows all about it, even if she hasn't got it," Grosse murmured to himself.

Finally he concluded that it would be better if Molly married money and not poverty, and did not smile on the penniless Edgar Tonmore. Therefore, finding himself alone with her during church time next morning, he thought no harm of trying to put a little spoke in the wheel to prevent that affair going too easily. But first he asked her why she did not go to church.

"I might say, why don't you go yourself?" said Molly, "but I don't mind telling you that I hardly ever do go."

"Why not?"

"Why not?" Molly was leaning back in a low chair under the shadow of the cedars, as still as if she would never move again, as still as the greyhound that was lying by her. "I hate going to church. None of it seems beautiful to me as it does to Adela. My aunt used to say that we were not fortunate in our clergyman, but personally I don't like any clergymen. I am anti-clerical like a Frenchwoman."

"Have you any French blood?"

"Yes; my mother was French."

"But you do good works; I remember how you nursed the kitchenmaid at Groombridge."

"I like to stop pain, but not because it is a good work. I can't stand all the fuss about good works and committees, and nonsense about loving the poor. It's a way rich people have to make themselves feel comfortable. Don't you think so?"

"No, I don't. I know people who make themselves exceedingly uncomfortable because they give away half what they possess."

"Really," said Molly, a little contemptuously. She knew that he was thinking of Rose Bright. "My opinion is that doing good works means to bustle about trying to get as much of other people's money to give away as you can, without giving any yourself."

Edmund did not like to suggest that this opinion might be the result of special experiences gained while living in the house of Mrs. Delaport Green.

"If," Molly went on, evidently glad to relieve her mind on the subject, "you got the money to pay your unfortunate dressmaker, there would be some justice in that. But," she suddenly sat up and her eyes shot fire at Edmund, "to fuss at a bazaar to show your kindness of heart while you know you are not going to pay the woman who made the very gown you have on, is perfectly sickening."

"It is atrocious," said Grosse, who wanted to change the subject. But this was effected by the most unexpected apparition of Mr. Delaport Green, whom they had both supposed to be refreshing himself by the sea at Brighton.

Mr. Delaport Green was dressed in very light grey, with a white waistcoat. His figure was curious, as it extended in parts so far in front of the rest that it gave the impression that you must pass your eyes over a great deal of substance in the foreground before you could see the face. Then again, the nose was so predominant that it checked any attempt to realise the eyes and forehead, while the cheeks were baggy and the skin unwholesome.

Edmund Grosse had only seen him on two occasions when he dined at his house, and he had liked him at once. There was something markedly masculine about him; he knew life, and had made up his mind as to his own part in it without delusions and without whining. He would have preferred to have been slim and handsome, and to have known the ways of the social world from his youth, but there were plenty of other things to be interested in, and he was not averse to the power which follows on wealth. He was a self-made Englishman, with nothing of the Jew about him, either for good or evil. But no apparition could have been more surprising to the two as he came slowly over the grass to meet them. Molly saw at once that Adela's husband was exceedingly annoyed, probably exceedingly angry, and although she had always felt his capacity for being very angry, she had never seen him in that condition before.

"I came down in the motor to get a short talk on business with Miss Dexter," he explained, "but I am sorry to disturb a more amusing conversation."

Edmund, of course, after that left them alone, and walked off by himself.

Molly looked all her astonishment at Adela's "Tim."

"Miss Dexter," he said very slowly, "I was given to understand when you came to us in the winter that you were a young lady wanting a home and some amusement in London. I thought it kindly in my wife to wish to have you with her, and, as she is young and a good deal alone" (Molly looked the other way at this assertion), "I thought it would be for the advantage of both. But I had no notion that there was any question of payment in the case, and I must now ask you to tell me exactly what you have paid to Mrs. Delaport Green since first you made her acquaintance."

Molly was not entirely astonished at discovering that Adela's husband had known nothing whatever of Adela's financial arrangements with herself. But she was so angry at this proof of what she had up to now only faintly suspected, that it was not very difficult to make her tell all that she knew of her share in Adela's expenses, only that knowledge proved to be of a very vague kind. Molly had kept no accounts, and had the vaguest notion of what her bills included. One thing she intended to conceal (but Mr. Delaport Green managed to make her confide even that) was the fact that she had given £100 to his wife's dressmaker. He made no comment of any sort, only firmly and quietly insisted on Molly giving him all the items she could. Then he got up and said—

"Good-bye for the present; I want to get back in time for lunch."

And he walked away, making one or two notes in a little book he held in his hand as to the cheque that Molly should find waiting for her next day.

Molly, left alone on the bench, did not at the first moment dwell on the thought of how far this talk with her host would affect her own plans. She could only think of the man himself. She had been for many weeks in his house, and had never done more than "exchange the weather" with him, or occasionally suffer gladly the little jokes and puns to which he was addicted. She had written to Miss Carew that his attitude towards Adela and herself was that of a busy man towards his nursery. Since that how little she had thought about him! And now she felt the strength in him, not weakened, but lit up with a kind of pathos. He might have been a true friend to any man or woman. He was really fond of Adela Delaport Green, and that position in itself was tragic enough. It was plain to Molly, although nothing had been breathed on the subject that morning, that Tim would not find it hard to forgive his Adela. Adela would pass almost scot-free from well-merited punishment; and yet her husband was strong enough to have punished effectively where he deemed it necessary. Molly was puzzled because she was without a clue to the mystery. The fact was that Tim had no wish to punish effectively. As long as Adela passed untouched by one sin, as long as he felt sure of one great virtue in her life, all such details as much gambling, much selfishness, absurd extravagance, could be easily forgiven. Molly herself would be fairly dealt with and set aside; the "paying guest" was an indignity that he would soon forget. He would have been entirely indifferent to the impression of regretful interest that he had made upon her.

That night Edmund Grosse was Molly's confidant as to the second, and evidently final, rupture between herself and Mrs. Delaport Green that had taken place in the afternoon. He could not but be kind and sympathetic as to her difficulties. It was, no doubt, very blind of him not to see that she was too quickly convinced of the wisdom of his advice, far too anxious to act as seemed well in his opinion. It never dawned on his imagination for a moment that the most serious part of the loss of the end of the season to Molly was the loss of his society during that time.

They strolled in the moonlight between the cedars and under the great wall with its alternate "ebon and ivory" of darkest evergreen growths and masses of white climbing roses, Molly's white gown rustling a little in the stillness. And Molly discovered with joy that he was trying to set her mind against marriage with Edgar Tonmore. If he only knew how little danger there was of that! And under Edmund's influence she decided to offer herself for a visit of two or three weeks to Mrs. Carteret, in the old and much disliked home of her childhood. It would look right; it would give a certain dignity to her position after the breakdown of the Delaport Green alliance, and it was always a great mistake to break with natural connections. So far Edmund Grosse; and in Molly's mind it ran something like this: "He wants me to stand well with the world, and I will do this, intolerable as it is, to please him. He likes to think that I have some nice relations, and so I must try to be friendly with Aunt Anne Carteret, though that is the hardest part. And he wants me to get away from Edgar Tonmore, and I would go away from so many more people if he wished it."

The evening passed into night, and Edmund was walking alone under the wall, dreaming of Rose.

All this foolish gambling, quarrelsome, small world of men and women made such a foil to her image. Molly and her mother, the Delaport Greens, and many others were grouped in his mind as he purled the smoke disdainfully from his cigar. Something in Molly's walk by his side just now had made him see again the old woman with her quick, alert movements in the garden at Florence; after all they were cut from the same piece, the old wicked woman and the slight, dark girl with the curious eyes. Molly must not be trusted; she must be suspected all the more because of her attractions in the moments of dangerous gentleness. And with a certain simplicity Edmund looked again at the moon above him, all the more glorious because secret and dark things were moving stealthily under the trees in the lower world.

And Molly was kneeling on her low window-seat, looking out at the same moon in a mood of joy that was transmuted half consciously into prayer by the alchemy of pure love.

CHAPTER XV

A POOR MAN'S DEATH

Early in October, Molly and Miss Carew took up their abode in a flat with quite large rooms and a pleasing view of Hyde Park.

August and September had been two of the healthiest and most normal months that Molly had ever spent or was likely ever to spend again. The weeks between the rupture with the Delaport Greens and the journey to Switzerland had been trying, although it was undoubtedly much pleasanter to be Mrs. Carteret's guest than it had ever been to be a permanent inmate of her house.

Molly—thought Mrs. Carteret—was restless, not inclined to morbid thoughts, and more gentle than of yore, but more nervous and fanciful.

It was not until after a fortnight abroad, after the revelation of mountains realised for the first time, that Molly had the courage to say to herself that she had been a fool during the visit to Aunt Anne. Was it in the least likely that a man of Edmund Grosse's kind would act romantically or hastily? Of course not. She had been as foolish as Mrs. Browning's little Effie in dreaming that a lover might come riding over the Malcot hills on a July evening.

The girls with whom Molly had travelled were of a healthy, intellectual type, and Molly, under their influence, had grown to feel the worth of the higher side of Nature's gifts. And so, vigorous in mind and body, she had come to London in October, so she said, to study music.

Miss Carew was a little disappointed when Molly expressed lofty indifference as to who had yet come to London. But that indifference did not last long when her friends of the season began to find her out. Then Miss Carew surprised Molly by her excessive nervousness and shyness of new acquaintances. "Carey" had always professed to love society, and had always been very carefully dressed in the fashion of the moment. But, as a civilian may idealise warfare and be well read in tactics, and yet be unequal to the emergency when war actually raises its grisly head, so it was with poor Miss Carew. She simply collapsed when Molly's worldly friends, as she called them with envious admiration, swept into the room, garnished with wonderful hats and fashionable furs. She had none of a Frenchwoman's gift for ignoring social differences, and she had the uneasy pride that is rare in a Celt, although she had all a Celt's taste for refinement and show and glitter. Miss Carew sat more and more stiffly at the tea-table, until she confided frankly to Molly—

"My dear, I am too old, and I am simply in the way. It is just too late in my life, you see, after all the years of governess work. Of course, if my beloved father had lived, I should never have been a governess. But as it is, I think I need not appear when you have visitors, except now and then."

Molly acquiesced after enough protest, chiefly because she had begun to wonder if it would be quite easy to have an occasional tête-à-tête with men friends without having to suggest to Miss Carew to retire gracefully. She had that morning heard that Sir Edmund Grosse was in London, but she had no reason, she told herself, to suppose that he knew where she was.

Meanwhile, she was exceedingly angry at finding that Adela Delaport Green was giving her version of her relations with Molly in the season to all her particular friends. Molly could not find out details, but she more than suspected that the fact of her being Madame Danterre's daughter made up part of Adela's story, although she could not imagine how she came to know who her mother was.

Molly would probably have brooded to a morbid degree over these angry suspicions, but that another side of life was soon pressed upon her, a new source of human interest, in the dying husband of a charwoman.

This woman, Mrs. Moloney, had cleaned out the flat before Molly and Miss Carew took possession.

High up in a small room in a block of workmen's buildings in West Kensington, Pat Moloney lay dying. He and his wife had been thriftless and uncertain, they drifted into marriage, drifted in and out of work, and, having watched their children grow up with some affection and a good deal of neglect, had now seen them drift away, some back to the old country, and some to the Colonies.

Mrs. Moloney counted on her fingers to remember their number and their ages, and spoke with almost more realisation of the personalities of three little beings that had died in infancy than of the living men and women and their children.

Moloney was far too ill by the time Molly Dexter came to see him to speak of anything distinctly. Three years ago he had fallen from a ladder and had refused to go into the hospital, in which decision he had been supported by his wife, who "didn't hold" with those institutions. A kindly, rough, clever young doctor had since treated him for growing pain and discomfort, and had prophesied evil from the first. Pat kept about and, when genuinely too ill for regular work, took odd jobs and drifted more and more into public houses. He had never been a thorough drunkard, and had been free from other vices, though lazy and self-indulgent. But pain and leisure led more and more to the stimulants that were poison in his condition. At last a chill mercifully hastened matters, and Pat, suffering less than he had for some months past, was nearing his end in semi-consciousness. Molly Dexter then descended on the Moloneys in one of her almost irresistible cravings to relieve suffering.

Ordinary human nature when not in pain was often too repugnant to Molly for her to be able to do good works in company with other people. She was, as she had told Edmund Grosse, a born anti-clerical, and she scorned philanthropists; so her best moods had to work themselves out alone and without direction. Nor was she likely to spoil the recipients of her attentions, partly from the strength of her character, partly because the poor know instinctively whether they are merely the objects on which to vent a restless longing to relieve pain, or whether they are loved for themselves.

Molly, in the village at home, had always made the expression of gratitude impossible, but she constantly added ingratitude as a large item in the account she kept running, in her darker hours, against the human race.

Late on a wet and windy October evening she went to undertake the nursing of Pat Moloney for the first part of the night. She had been visiting him constantly for several weeks, and actually nursing him for three days.

"Has the doctor been?"

"Yes, miss" (in a very loud whisper); "he says Pat is awful bad; he left a paper for you."

Molly Dexter walked across the small, bare room and took a paper of directions from the chimney-piece, and then stood looking at the old man's heavy figure on the bed. He was lying on his side, his face turned to the wall.

"You had better rest in the back room while I am here," she said.

"I couldn't, indeed I couldn't, miss, him being like that; you mustn't ask me to. Besides, I've been round and asked the priest to come, and so I couldn't take my things off. I'll just have some tea and a drop of whisky in it, and I can keep going all the night, it's more than likely he'll die at the dawn."

Molly eyed the woman with supreme contempt.

"It isn't at all certain that he's going to die, he'll make a good fight yet if you will give him a chance."

Mrs. Moloney looked deeply offended. It had been all very well to be guided by a lady at the beginning of the illness, but now it was very different. She felt half consciously that science had done its worst, and bigger questions than temperatures and drugs were at issue.

"A priest now," said Molly, in a whisper of intense scorn, "would kill him at once."

Mrs. Moloney did not condescend to reply. She had propped a poor little crucifix, a black cross, with a chipped white figure on it, against a jam pot on a shelf under the window, and she had borrowed two candlesticks with coloured candles from a labourer's wife on the floor beneath. The window had been shut, so that the wind should not blow down these objects.

Molly looked at the man on the bed and sniffed.

"He must have air—" the whisper was a snort.

At that moment there was a knock on the outer door. On the iron outer stairs was standing the priest.

"It's just the curate," said Mrs. Moloney, looking out of the window; and then she disappeared into the tiny passage.

Molly stood defiantly, her figure drawn to its full height. She felt that she knew exactly the kind of Irish curate who was coming in to disturb, and probably kill, the unhappy man on the bed. Well, she should make a fight for this poor, crushed life; she would stand between the horrible tyranny and superstition that lit those pink candles, and that would rouse a man to make his poor wretched conscience unhappy and frighten him to death. "If there is a hell," she muttered, "it must be ready to punish such brutality as that."

Mrs. Moloney opened the door as wide as possible, and the priest came in. Miss Dexter looked at him in amazement; how, and where had she seen him before?

He went straight to the bed and looked at the man in silence, while Molly looked at him. He was about middle height, with very dark hair and eyes, a small, well-formed head, and a very good forehead. It was not until he turned to Mrs. Moloney that Molly understood why she had fancied that she had seen him before. She was sure now that she had seen his photograph, but, although she was certain of having seen it, she could not remember when or where she had done so.

"Can't you open the window, Mrs. Moloney?"

"It's the only place to make into an altar, father?"

"Oh, never mind that yet; I will manage."

Molly stepped forward; whatever he was going to do, it should not be done without a protest.

"The doctor's orders are that he is not to be disturbed."

The priest did not seem aware of the exceedingly unpleasant expression on Molly's countenance.

"It would be a great mistake to wake him, of course," he said; and then, "Do you suppose he will sleep for long?"

"I haven't the faintest notion"; the uttermost degree of scorn was conveyed in those few words.

Mrs. Moloney suppressed a sob.

"He's not been to the Sacraments for three years," she murmured.

The priest leant over the bed and looked intently at the dying man.

Mrs. Moloney opened the window and put the crucifix and candlesticks in a corner on the dirty floor.

"It might kill him to wake him now," murmured Molly.

"Yes, that is just the difficulty." The young man was speaking more to himself than to her.

"Difficulty!" thought Molly with scorn. "Fiddlesticks!"

The silence was unbroken for some moments. The fresh autumn air blew into the room. A sandy coloured cat came from under the bed, looked at them, and then rubbed her arched back against the unsteady leg of the only table, which was laden with bottles and basins, finally retired into a further corner, and upset and broke one of the pink candles that belonged to the neighbour.

But Mrs. Moloney never took her eyes off the priest's pale face.

"I'll wait until he wakes," he said to her, "but is there anywhere else I could go? It's not good to crowd up this room."

"That's intended to remove me," thought Molly, "but it won't succeed."

Mrs. Moloney moved into the little back room, and pulled forward a chair. When the priest was seated she shut the door behind her and whispered to him—

"Father, you'll not let his soul slip through your fingers, will you, father dear? Just because of the poor lady who knows no better!"

"Who is she? She is not like the district visitors I've seen about in the parish."

"No, indeed; she is a lady, and I've done some work for her, and she would not be satisfied when she heard Moloney was ill but she must come herself, and yesterday, not to grudge her her due, father, the doctor said if he pulled through that I owed her his life. Well, that's proved a mistake, anyhow, but she's after spoiling his last chance, and he's not been the good man he was once, father."

"Yes, Mrs. Moloney, you must watch him carefully, and here I am if there is any change. I'm sure that lady is an excellent nurse, and we mustn't let any chance slip of keeping him alive, must we?"

She shook her head; this was only an English curate, still he must be obeyed.

Molly was profoundly irritated by Mrs. Moloney's proceeding to make a cup of tea for the priest, but he was grateful for it, as he had been out at tea-time, and had come to the Moloneys' instead of eating his dinner. He opened the window of the tiny room as far as it would go, and read his Office by the light of the tallow candle. That finished, he sat still and began to wonder about the lady with the olive complexion and the strange, grey eyes.

"I felt as if I should frizzle up in the fire of her wrath," he thought with a smile.

He took his rosary and was half through it when the door opened and Molly came in. She shut it noiselessly, and then spoke in her usual unmoved, impersonal voice.

"The new medicine is not having any effect; the temperature has gone up; the doctor said if it did so now it was a hopeless case. I must rouse him in an hour to give him another dose and take the temperature again. After that, if it is as high as I expect it to be, you can do anything you like to him."

As she said the last words, she went back into the other room.

The hour passed slowly, and she came again and let the priest know in almost the same words that he was free to act as he pleased. Then she added abruptly—

"Do you mind telling me your name?"

"My name? Molyneux."

"Then are you any relation of Lord Groombridge?"

"I am his cousin."

"I have been at Groombridge." But the priest felt that the tone was not in the least more friendly.

"Moloney won't suffer now," she went on, turning towards the door, "and I think he will be conscious for a time."

Molly was giving up her self-imposed charge; she wanted to be off. With the need for help no longer an attraction, Moloney had almost ceased to interest her; he would remain only as part of the darker background of her mind, as a dim figure among many in the dim coloured atmosphere of revolt and bitterness in which her thoughts on human life would move when she had no labour for her hands. He was another of those who suffered so uselessly, a mere half animal who had to do the rough work of the world, and then was dropped into the great charnel house of unmeaning death. As soon as the man began to show signs, faint signs of perception, she left the priest by his bedside and went back into the inner room to put on the cloak she had left there. And then she hesitated.

What would go on in the next room? She was anxious now to know more about it, because she had caught so strange a look on Father Molyneux's face. If he had only known this man before she could have understood it. But how could there be this passion of affection, this intensity of feeling, for a total stranger, a rough brutal-looking fellow who was no longer in pain, who would probably die easily enough, and probably be no great loss to those he left? She had seen a strange intensity of reverence in the way the young man had touched the wreck upon the bed. She had known thrills of curious joy herself when relieving physical agony; was it something like that which filled the whole personality and bearing of the priest?

She began to feel that she could not go away; she wanted to see this thing out. It was something entirely new to her.

Low voices murmured in the next room; she hesitated now to pass through, she might be intruding at too sacred a moment. She believed that the priest was hearing the dying man's confession. She had a half contemptuous dislike of this feeling of mystery and privacy. She felt she had been foolish not to go away at once. But she did not move for nearly half an hour, and then the door opened, and the man's wife came in and started back.

"I'm sure I thought you had gone, miss." Her manner was much more cordial than it had been before. She was tearful and excited. "I want to raise him a bit higher, and there's a cloak here. He is going off fast now, but he was quite himself when I left him with the father to make his confession; he looked his old self and the good man he was for many a year—and God Almighty knows he has suffered enough these last years to change him, poor soul."

Molly went back with her to the sick bed and helped her to raise the dying man. The dawn came in feebly now, and made the guttering candle dimmer. Death was all that was written on the grey face, and the body laboured for breath. The flicker of light in the mind, that had been roused, perhaps, by those rites which had passed in her absence, had faded; there was not the faintest sign of intelligence in the eyes now; the hands were cold and would never be warm again. The sandy cat had crept away into the other room; and outside the great town was alive again, the vast crowds were astir, each of whom was just one day nearer to death. There was nothing but horror, stale, common horror, in it all for Molly. But, kneeling as upright as a marble figure, and his whole face full of a joy that seemed quite human, quite natural, Father Molyneux was reading prayers, and there was a curious note of triumph in the clear tones. At first she did not heed the words; then they thrust themselves upon her, and her eyes fastened on the dying, meaningless face, the very prey of death, in a kind of stupefaction at the words spoken to him.

"I commend thee to Almighty God, dearest brother, and commend thee to Him whose creature thou art; that, when thou shalt have paid the debt of humanity by death, thou mayest return to the Maker, Who formed thee of the dust of the earth. As thy soul goeth forth from the body, may the bright company of angels meet thee; may the judicial senate of Apostles greet thee; may the triumphant army of white-robed Martyrs come out to welcome thee; may the band of glowing Confessors, crowned with lilies, encircle thee; may the choir of Virgins, singing jubilees, receive thee; and the embrace of a blessed repose fold thee in the bosom of the Patriarchs; mild and festive may the aspect of Jesus Christ appear to thee, and may He award thee a place among them that stand before Him for ever."

And so it went on; some of it appealing to her more, some less; some passages almost repulsive. But her imagination had caught on to the vast outlines of the prayer—the enormous nature of the claims made on behalf of the dying labourer.

Was it Pat Moloney who was to pass out of this darkness to "gaze with blessed eyes on the vision of Truth"? What a tremendous assertion made with such intensity of confidence! What a curious pageantry, too, so magnificent in its simplicity, was ordered, almost in tones of command, by the Church Militant for the reception of the charge she was giving up. The triumphant army of Martyrs was to come out to meet him; the Confessors were to "encircle him"; Michael was "to receive him as Prince of the armies of Heaven." Peter, Paul, John were to be in attendance. Nor in the rich strain was there any false ring of praise, or any attempt to veil the weakness of humanity. "Rejoice his soul, O Lord, with Thy Presence, and remember not the iniquities and excesses which, through the violence of anger or the heat of evil passion, he hath at any time committed. For, although he hath sinned, he hath not denied the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, but hath believed and hath had a zeal for God, and hath faithfully adored the Creator of all things."

Was it an immense, an appalling impertinence—this great drama? Was it a mere mockery of the impotence and darkness of man's life? Would the priest say all this at the death-bed of the drunken beggar, of the voluptuous tyrant, of the woman who had been too hard or too weak in the bonds of the flesh? Was it a last great delusion, a last panacea given by the Church to those who had consented to bandage their eyes and crook their knees in childish obedience? Vaguely in her mind there flitted half phrases of the humanitarian, the materialist, the agnostic. It seemed as if their views of the wreck on the bed pressed upon all her consciousness. But, just as they had never succeeded in silencing the voice of that great drama of faith and prayer through the ages, so she could not dull to her own consciousness the strange, spiritual vitality that poured out in this triumphant call to the powers on high to come forth in all their glory to receive the inestimable treasure of the redeemed soul of Pat Moloney.

CHAPTER XVI

MOLLY'S LETTER TO HER MOTHER

There followed after that night a quite new experience for Molly. It was the upheaval of an utterly uncultivated side of her nature. She was astonished to find that she had religious instincts, and that, instead of feeling that these instincts were foolish and irrational—a lower part of her nature,—they now seemed quite curiously rational and established in possession of her faculties. Her mind seemed more satisfied than it had ever been before. She did not know in what she believed, but she felt a different view of life in which men seemed less utterly mean, and women less of hypocrites. Externally it worked something in this way.

The day on which Pat Moloney died at dawn she could not rest so much as she intended, to make up for the short night. She wrote one or two brief notes begging to be let off engagements, and told the servants to say she was not at home. She could not keep quite still, and she did not want to go out. Gradually, as the day wore on, she worked herself into more and more excitement. Her imagination pictured what might be the outcome of such a view of life and death as seemed to have taken hold of her. In her usual moods she would have thought with sarcasm that such were the symptoms of "conversion" in a revivalist. But now there was no critical faculty awake for cynicism; the critical faculty was full of a solemn kind of joy. Next there came, after some hours of a sort of surprise at this sudden and vehement sense of uplifting, the wish for action and for sacrifice. Her mind returned to the concrete, and the circumstances of her life. And then there came a most unwelcome thought. If Molly wanted to sacrifice herself indeed, and wished to do some real good about which there could be no self-delusion, was there not one duty quite obviously in her path, her duty as a child? Had she ever made any attempt to help the forlorn woman in Florence? Perhaps Madame Danterre's assertion, when Molly came of age, that she did not want to see Molly, was only an attempt to find out whether Molly really wished to come to her mother. From the day on which her ideal of her mother had been completely shattered Molly had shrunk from even thinking of her. She now shivered with repugnance, but she was almost glad to feel how repugnant this duty might be, much as a medieval penitent might have rejoiced in his own repugnance to the leprous wounds he was resolved to dress as an expiation for sin. It did not strike her, as it never struck the noble penitents in the Middle Ages, that it might be very trying to the object of these expiatory actions. She felt at the moment that it must be a comfort to her mother to receive all the love and devotion that she would offer her. And there was real heroism in the letter that Molly proceeded to write to Madame Danterre. For she knew that if her offer were accepted she risked the loss of all that at present made life very dear, both in what she already enjoyed, and in the hope that was hidden in her heart.

Molly had pride enough to shrink utterly from the connection with her mother, and her girl's innocence shrank, too, with quick sensitiveness from what might be before her. How strange now appeared the dreams of her childhood, the idealisation of the young and beautiful mother!

The letter was short, but very earnest, and had all the ring of truth in it. She could not but think that any mother would respond to it, and, for herself, after sending it there could be no looking back. Once the letter was posted to the lawyer to be forwarded to Madame Danterre, a huge weight seemed to be lifted from Molly's mind. That night she met Edmund Grosse at dinner. He had never seen her so bright and good-looking, and he found he had many questions to ask as to the summer abroad.

For several weeks Molly received no answer from Florence, but during that time she did not repent her hasty action. And during those weeks her interest in religion grew stronger. Just as she had been unable to work with philanthropists, she was ready now to take her religion alone. She felt kinder to the world at large, but she did not at first feel any need of human help or human company. She went sometimes to a service at Westminster Abbey, sometimes to St. Paul's, sometimes to the Oratory, and two or three times to the church in West Kensington in which Father Molyneux was assistant parish priest. On the whole she liked this last much the best. Indeed, she was so much attracted by his sermons that she went to call upon him late one afternoon.

The visitor was shown into a rather bare parlour, and Father Molyneux soon came in. He was a good deal interested in seeing her there. He had never been more snubbed in his life than by this lady on their first meeting, and he had been much surprised at seeing her in the church soon afterwards. She was plainly dressed, though at an expense he would never have imagined to be possible, and she appeared a little softer than when he had seen her last. She looked at him rather hard, not with the look that puzzled Rose Bright; it was a look of sympathy and of inquiry.

"I have had curious experiences since we met," she said, "and I want to understand them better. Have you—has anybody been praying for me?"

"I have said Mass for you twice since poor Moloney died," he said.

"I thought there was some sort of influence," she murmured. "That night I was tired and excited and worried, and foolishly prejudiced. Somehow the prayers you read for Pat Moloney, the whole attitude of your Church in those prayers, caught my breath. I imagine it was something like the effect of a revivalist preacher on a Welsh miner." She paused. Father Molyneux was full of interest, and did not conceal it.

"I can't tell," he said. "Of course, it may have been——"

"Nerves," interrupted Molly so decidedly that he laughed; it was not in the least what he had meant to say.

"But," she went on, with an air of impartial diagnosis, "it has lasted. I have been very happy. I understand now what is meant by religion. I understand what you felt about that man's soul. I understand, when you are preaching, that intense sense of worth-whileness. I understand the religious sense, the religious attitude. It makes everything worth while because of love. It does not explain all the puzzles. It does not answer questions, it swallows them up alive. It makes everything so big, and at the same time so small, because there are infinite things too. Then it insists on reality; I see now it must insist on dogma for fear of unreality. Renan was quite wrong in that great sentence of his: 'Il ne faut rien dire de limitée en face de l'infini.' The infinite is a fog to us if there are no outlines in our conception of it. Don't you think so?"

There was a light in her face no one had ever seen there before.

"And the only outlines that can satisfy us are the outlines of a Personality. As a rule I have always disliked individuals. I know you are surprised. Of course, you are just the other way; you have a touch of genius, a gift for being conscious of personalities, of being attracted to them. Now I have never liked people; in fact, I've hated most of them. But since this religious experience I have known"—her voice dropped; it had been a little loud—"I have known that I want a friend, and can have one."

The priest was astonished by Molly. He had never met any one like her before. Her self-confidence was curious, and her eloquence was so sudden and abounding that his own words seemed to leave him. She was in a moment as silent as she had been talkative, her eyes cast down on the floor. Then she looked at him with an almost imperious questioning in her eyes.

"You have said so much that I expected to say myself," he said, with a faint sense of humour, "and you have not asked me a single question."

Molly laughed "Tell me," she said, "I am right; it is all true? I do understand religious experience, the religious sense at last, don't I?"

"Shall I tell you what I miss in it?" he said, suppressing any further comment on her amazing assertion. "I mean in all you have said. And, oddly enough, the Welsh miner would have had it. I mean that, seeing Our Lord as the One Friend of your life, you should also see that you have resisted and betrayed and offended Him during that life which He gave you."

"No: I have not thought much about that side of things" said Molly "I have been too happy."

"You would be far happier if you did."

"But what have I done?" said Molly, almost in a tone of injured respectability.

"Well, you have hated people—or, at least" (in a tone of apology), "you said so just now."

"Oh! yes; it's quite true. I am a great hater and an uncertain one. I never know who it is going to be, or when it will come."

"But you know you have been commanded to love them."

"Yes; but only as much as I love myself, and I quite particularly dislike myself."

"You've no right to—none whatever."

"And why not?"

"Because God made you in His own image and likeness. You can't get out of it. But, you know, I don't believe one word you say. I met you showing love to the poor."

"No, indeed," said Molly indignantly, "I did not love Pat Moloney. I wish you would believe what I say. I hate my mother; I hate the aunt who brought me up; I hate crowds of people. I don't hate one man because I want him to fall in love with me, but if he doesn't do that soon, I shall hate him too. I feel friendly towards you now, but I don't know how soon I may hate you. At least," she paused, and a gentle look came into her face, "I had all these hatreds up to a few weeks ago; now they are comparatively dormant."

Again the flood of her words seemed to check him, but he tried:

"I believe it then; I will take all you say as true. I think you are fairly convincing. Well, then, how do you suppose you can be united to Infinite Love, Infinite Mercy, Infinite Purity? God is not merely good, He is Goodness. Until you feel that His Presence would burn and destroy and annihilate your unworthiness, you have no sense of the joys of His Friendship. You stand now looking up to Him and choosing Him as your Friend, whereas you must lie prostrate in the dust and wait to be chosen. When you have done that He will raise you, and the Heavens will ring with the joy of the great spirits who never fell, and who are almost envious of the sinner doing Penance."

Molly bent her head low. "I see," she murmured, "mine have been merely the guesses of an amateur; it is useless—I don't understand."

"It isn't, indeed it isn't," he said quietly. "It is the introduction. The King is sending His heralds. Some are drawn to Him by the sense of their own sinfulness, others, as you are, by a glimpse of His beauty."

Molly was not angry, only disappointed. The very habit of a life of reserve must have brought some sense of disappointment in the result. She did not mind being told that she must lie in the dust; the abnegation was not abhorrent; she knew that love in itself sometimes demanded humiliation. But she felt sad and discouraged. She had seemed to have conquered a kingdom. Without exactly being proud of them, she had felt her religious experiences to be very remarkable, and now she saw that they only pointed to a very long road, hard to walk on. She got up quickly and was near the door before he was.

"Will you come and see me?" she said, and she gave him her card. "If you can, send me a postcard beforehand that I may not miss you. Good-bye."

He opened the front door for her and her carriage was waiting.

"The third time you have been late for dinner this week," observed the Father Rector. "Have some mutton?"

"Thanks," said the young man; "I wish I could learn the gentle art of sending people away without offending them."

"They didn't include that in the curriculum at Oxford?" The tone was not quite kind; neither was the snort with which the remark was concluded. It was no sauce to the lumpy, greasy mutton that Mark was struggling to eat. Suddenly he caught the eye of the second curate, Father Marny, who had conceived a great affection for him, and he smiled merrily with a school-boy's sense of mischief.

CHAPTER XVII

THE BLIND CANON

In a small room in a small house in a small street in Chelsea, Father Molyneux was sitting with a friend. There were a few beautiful things in the room, and a few well-bound books; but they had a dusty, uncared for look about them. It teased the young priest to see a medicine bottle and a half-washed medicine glass standing on a bracket with an exquisite statuette of the Madonna. The present occupier of these lodgings had had very true artistic perceptions before he had become blind.

Mark Molyneux had just been reading to him for an hour, and he now put down the book. The old man smacked his lips with enjoyment. The author was new to him, but he had won his admiration at the first reading.

"What people call his paradoxes," he said, "is his almost despairing attempt at making people pay attention; he has to shout to men who are too hurried to stop. The danger is that, as time goes on, he will only be able to think in contrasts and to pursue contradictions."

The speaker paused, and then, his white fingers groped a little as if he were feeling after something. His voice was rich and low. Then he kept still, and waited with a curious look of acquired patience. At last, the younger man began.

"I want to ask your advice, or rather, I want to tell you something I have decided on."

"And you only want me to agree," laughed Canon Nicholls, and the blind face seemed full of perception.

"Well, I think you will." The boyish voice was bright and keen. "I've come to tell you that I want to be a monk."

"Tut, tut," said Canon Nicholls, and then they both laughed together. "Since when?" he asked a moment later.

"It has been coming by degrees," said Mark, in a low voice. "I want to be altogether for God."

"And why can't you be that now?"

"It's too confusing," he said; "half the day I am amused or worried or tired. I've got next to no spiritual life."

Canon Nicholls did not help him to say more.

"I can't be regular in anything, and now there's the preaching."

"What's the matter with that?"

"Who was it who said that a popular preacher could not save his soul? Father Rector says that it's very bad for me that I crowd up the church. He is evidently anxious about me."

"How kind!"

"Then, since I've been preaching, such odd people come to see me."

"I know," said the Canon, "there's a fringe of the semi-insane round all churches; they used to lie in wait for me once."

"Then I simply love society. I've been to hear such interesting people talk at several houses lately. I go a good deal to Miss Dexter."

"Miss Molly Dexter."

"Yes."

"I wouldn't do that; she's a minx. She is the girl who stayed with that kind little woman, Mrs. Delaport Green, who sometimes comes to see me."

"You see," Mark went on eagerly, "I'm doing no good like this. So I have made up my mind to try and be a Carthusian."

His face lit up now with the same intense delight. "It's such a splendid life! Fancy! No more humbug, and flattery, and insincerity. 'Vous ne jouerez plus la comédie,' an old monk said to me. Wouldn't it be splendid? Think of the stillness, and then the singing of the Office while the world is asleep, like the little birds at dawn. It would be simply and entirely to live for God!"

"I do believe in a personal devil," muttered Canon Nicholls to himself, and Mark stared at him. "Now listen," he said. "There is a young man who has a vocation to the priesthood, and he comes under obedience to work in London. That is, to live in the thick of sin, of suffering, of folly and madness. If it were acknowledged that the place was full of cholera or smallpox it would be simple enough. But the place is thick with disguises. The worst cases don't seem in the least ill; the stench of the plague is a sweet smell, and the confusion is thicker because there are angels and demons in the same clothes, living in the same houses, doing the same actions, saying almost the same things. In every Babylon there have been these things, but this is about the biggest. And the most harmless of the sounds, the hum of daily work, is loud and continuous enough to dull and wear the senses. So confused and perplexed is the young man that he doesn't know when he has done good or done harm; being young, compliments appeal to him very seriously; being young, he takes too many people's opinions; and, being young, he generalises and if, for instance, I tell him not to go often to the house of a capricious woman of uncertain temper, he probably resolves at once never to lunch in an agreeable house again. Meanwhile, above this muddle, this tragicomedy, he sees the distant hills glowing with light; so, without waiting for orders, he leaves the people crying to him for help and turns tail and runs away! And what only the skill of a personal devil could achieve, he thinks in his heart that he is choosing a harder fight, a more self-denying life."

"But I could help those people more by my prayers."

"Granted, if it were God's will that you should lead the life of contemplation, but I don't believe it is. I don't see what right you've got to believe it is. As to not living altogether for God here, that's His affair. Mind you, I don't undervalue the difficulties, and it's uncommon hard to human nature. Don't think too much of other people's opinions; I know you feel a bit out of it with the priests about you. They are rough to young men like you—it's jealousy, if they only knew it. Jealousy is the fault of the best men, because they never suspect themselves of it. If they saw it, they would fight it. Face facts. You have some gifts; you will be much humbler if you thank God for them instead of trying to think you haven't got them. And be quite particularly nice to the growler sort of priest; he's had a hard time and, lived a hard life; much harder than the life of a monk. Mind you respect his scars."

He talked on, partly to give Mark time; he saw he had given him a shock.

"Mind," he said, "there is sometimes an acute personal temptation, but you've not got that now. You've got a sort of perception of what it might be. It won't be unbearable." He crossed his legs and put the long, white fingers into each other. "But I'm old now, and it's my experience that the mischief for all priests is to let society be their fun. It ought to be a duty, and a very tiresome duty too. Take your amusements in any other way, and go out to lunch in the same state of mind as you visit a hospital. Do you think the best women, whether Protestant or Catholic, think society their fun? They may like it or not, but it is a serious duty to them."

Mark sprang up suddenly. "I can't stand this!" he said. "You go on talking, and I want to be a Carthusian, and I will be one." He laughed; his voice was troubled and the clear joy of his face was clouded.

Canon Nicholls felt in his pocket for a snuff-box, and brought it out. "Go along, if you can't stand it. And don't come back till you've seen through the devil's trick. I don't mind what I bet that you won't run away."

Left alone, Canon Nicholls covered his blind eyes with his hands and heaved a deep sigh.

The man who had just left him was the object of his keenest affection, the apple of those blind eyes that craved to look upon his face. But his love was not blind, and he felt the danger there lay in the seeming perfectness of the young man. Mark's nature was gloriously sweet and abounding in the higher gifts; his love of God had the awe of a little child, and his love of men had the tenderness of a shepherd towards his lost sheep. Mark had loved life and learning, had revelled in Oxford, and would, in one sense, be an undergraduate all his days. He had known dreams of ambition, and visions of success in working for his country. Then gently—not with any shock—had come the vocation to the priesthood, and so tenderly had the tendrils that attached him to a man's life in the world been loosened, that the process hardly seemed to have hurt any of the sensitive sympathies and interests he had always enjoyed. Even in the matter of giving up great possessions, all had come so gradually as to seem most natural and least strained.

Long before the Groombridges could be brought to believe that the brilliant and favourite young cousin had rejected all that they could leave him, it had become a matter of course to the rest of the family and their friends that Mark Molyneux would be a priest, and give up the property to the younger brother.

When the outer world took up the matter, Father Molyneux always made people feel as if allusions to his renunciation of Groombridge were simply quite out of taste, and nothing out of taste seemed in keeping with anything connected with him. It was all so simple to Mark, and so perfect to Canon Nicholls, that the latter almost dreaded this very perfection as unlikely, and unbefitting the "second-rate" planet in which it was his lot to live. And to confirm this almost superstitious feeling of a man who had lived to know where the jolts and jars of life cause the acutest suffering to the idealist, had come this fresh aspiration of Mark's after a life more completely perfect in itself. Strong instincts were entirely in accord with the older man's sober judgment of the situation. And yet he wished it could be otherwise. He had no opinion of the world that Mark wanted to give up. He would most willingly have shut any cloister door between that world and his cherished son in the spirit. It was with no light heart that he wanted him to face all the roughness of human goodness, all the blinding confusion of its infirmities, all the cruelty of its vices. The old man's own service in his last years was but to stand and wait, but, even so, he was too often oppressed by the small things that fill up empty hours, small uncharitablenesses, small vanities, small irritations. Was it not a comfort at such moments to believe that in another world we should know human nature in others and in ourselves without any cause for repugnance and without any ground for fear?

CHAPTER XVIII

MADAME DANTERRE'S ANSWER

At last there came a letter to Molly from her mother.

"Carissima,—

"I thank you for your most kind intentions. I too have at times thought of seeing you. But I am now far too ill, and I have no attention to spare from my unceasing efforts to keep well. I can assure you that two doctors and two nurses spend their time and skill on the struggle. I may, they tell me, live many years yet if I am not troubled and disturbed. I had, by nature, strong maternal instincts; it was your father's knowledge of that side of my character which made his conduct in taking you from me almost criminal in its cruelty. You must have had a most tiresome childhood with his sister, and probably you gave her a great deal of trouble. Your letter affected me with several moments of suffocation, and the doctors and nurses are of opinion that I must not risk any more maternal emotions. My poor wants are now very expensive. I am obliged to have everything that is out of season, and one chef for my vegetables alone. Have you ever turned your attention to vegetable diet? Doctor Larrone, whom I thoroughly confide in, sees no reason why life should not be indefinitely prolonged if the right—absolutely the right—food is always given. I am sending you a little brochure he has written on the subject.

"I hope that your allowance is sufficient for your comfort. I should like you to have asparagus at every meal, and I trust, my dear child, that you will never become a dévote. It is an extraordinary waste of the tissues.

"As we are not likely to correspond again, I should like you to know that I have made a will bequeathing to you the fortune which was left me, as an act of reparation, by Sir David Bright.

"I wonder why an Englishman, Sir Edmund Grosse, has made so many attempts at seeing me? Do you know anything of him? I risk much in the effort to write this letter to assure you of my love.

"Your Devoted Mother.

"P.S.—There is no need to answer the question as to Sir Edmund Grosse."

Molly was so intensely disgusted with the miserable old woman's letter that her first inclination was to burn it at once. She was kneeling before the fire with that intention when Sir Edmund Grosse was announced. She thrust the paper into her pocket, and realised in a flash how astonishing it was that Sir Edmund should have tried to see Madame Danterre. The only explanation that occurred to her at the moment was that he had tried to see her mother because of his interest in herself. She did not know that he had not been in Florence since he had known her. But what could have started him in the notion that Miss Dexter was Madame Danterre's child? And did he know it for certain now? That was what she would like to find out.

Molly had on a pale green tea-gown, which fell into a succession of almost classic folds with each rapid characteristic movement. The charm of her face was enormously increased by its greater softness of expression. Although she could not help wishing to please him, even in a moment full of other emotion, she did not know how much there was to make her successful to-day. She did not realise her own physical and moral development during the past months.

Edmund's manner was unconsciously caressing. He had come, he told himself—and it was the third time he had called at the flat,—simply because he wanted to keep in touch, to get any information he could. And he had heard rumours from Florence that Madame Danterre was becoming steadily weaker and more unable to make any effort.

"A man told me the other day that this was the best-furnished flat in London, and, by Jove! I rather think he was right."

"I never believe in the man who told you things, he is far too apposite; I think his name is Harris."

Edmund smiled at the fire.

"Who was the attractive little priest I met here the other day?" he asked.

"Little! He is as tall as you are."

"Still, one thinks of him as un bon petit prêtre, doesn't one? But who is he?"

"Father Molyneux."

"Not Groombridge's cousin?"

"Yes, the same."

"I wonder if he repents of his folly now? I didn't think he looked particularly cheerful!"

"Didn't you?" said Molly. "Well, I think he is the happiest person I know! But we never do agree about people, do we?"

"About a few we do, but it's much more amusing to talk about ourselves, isn't it?"

"Much more. What do you want me to tell you about myself this time?"

Edmund looked at her with sleepy eyes and perceived that something had changed. "I should like to know what you think about me?" he said gently.

"No, you wouldn't," said Molly, and she gave a tiny sigh. "No, for some reason or other you want to know something which I have settled to tell you."

Her manner alarmed and excited him. As a matter of honourable dealing he felt that he ought to give her pause. "Are you sure you are wise?" he said.

Great Possessions