[CHAPTER I, ] [ II, ] [ III, ] [ IV, ] [ V, ] [ VI, ] [ VII, ] [ VIII, ] [ IX, ] [ X, ] [ XI, ] [ XII, ] [ XIII, ] [ XIV, ] [ XV, ] [ XVI, ] [ XVII, ] [ XVIII, ] [ XIX, ] [ XX, ] [ XXI, ] [ XXII, ] [ XXIII, ] [ XXIV, ] [ XXV, ] [ XXVI. ]

LAVINIA

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Foes in Law. Crown 8vo. 6s.

Crown 8vo. 2s. each.

• Goodbye, Sweetheart!
• Cometh up as a Flower
• Joan
• Belinda
• Dr. Cupid
• Not Wisely, but Too Well
• Red as a Rose is She
• Alas!
• Scylla or Charybdis?
• Mrs. Bligh
• Second Thoughts
• A Beginner
• Dear Faustina
• Nancy
• The Game and the Candle

Twilight Stories. Small Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d.

London: MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd.

LAVINIA

BY
RHODA BROUGHTON
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1902
All rights reserved
PRINTED BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON AND BECCLES.

LAVINIA

CHAPTER I

“I shall never get over it.”

This is a phrase that has issued from the same lips very often before; and in general Lavinia Carew listens to it silently, in the impatient confidence that at her next visit to Mrs. Prince, that lady will have got over “it” so completely as to have forgotten that “it” ever existed. She is silent now, but from an opposite reason to that which has hitherto tied her tongue. In her opinion neither Mrs. Prince nor any other Mrs. or Miss could ever get over the “it” in question.

“And coming on this joyful day too—a day, I mean, that is so joyful to every one else in England—that would have been so joyful to us, but for this!” The speaker breaks off with a whimper.

“The anniversary of Majuba Hill!” says Lavinia, with a fighting glint in a pair of uncommonly clear eyes, and uttering her ejaculation with none the less gusto for its being absolutely unoriginal, and shared by almost every pair of lips in Great and Greater Britain this triumphal day.

“After the terrible gloom of the winter—never even in the Crimean War do I remember anything comparable to it!—just when the dead weight seemed to be lifting a little from all our hearts,” pursues Mrs. Prince, raising to heaven her bangled wrists with a despairing jangle.

“The village is full of little Union Jacks,” interrupts the girl, with a good-natured effort to keep her afflicted friend on the safe track of the public rejoicing, and also because she cannot quite restrain the expression of her own jubilation. “I cannot think where they all came from.”

But the waving of no bunting before it can hide out the spectacle which is turning the national triumph to eclipse before the elder woman’s vision.

“I suppose that I ought not to have told even you,” she continues, resisting with mild doggedness her young friend’s attempt to distract her thoughts, even momentarily, from her woes—not having, indeed, a mind hospitable enough often to admit two ideas abreast within its narrow portals. “No; I suppose that I certainly ought not to have revealed our disgrace even to you; but what was I to do? I had to tell some one—to seek for sympathy somewhere. I get none at home. I suppose that Mr. Prince feels it; but he says nothing. He is like a stone.”

“I am sure that he feels it.”

Something emphatic in the low-voiced assertion of her husband’s sensibility, by one who has not the advantage of relationship to him, grates on the rasped nerves of the poor wife.

“I never said that he did not feel it!” she cries in tart wretchedness. “Of course he feels it. He would not be human if he did not!”

Lavinia assents with a motion of the head, quite as emphatic as her former asseveration of Mr. Prince’s sufferings.

“And if I had not told you”—answering the accusation of disloyalty brought by herself against herself, with as much defensive exasperation as if it had been proffered by her companion—“Féo would have done so herself! She sees nothing to be ashamed of. She glories in it!”

“Glories in it!”

“Yes, glories in it! incredible as it seems. But I wish, dear”—with a fretful relief in finding an object on which to vent her exquisite nerve-irritation—“that you would not repeat my words after me when you hear them perfectly.”

“It is a stupid trick”—speaking with absolute and effortless good temper. “I think I do it without knowing.”

“You are a good creature!” cries the other, seizing her companion’s fingers with one hand, and with the other applying a very expensive pocket-handkerchief to the eyes that are swimming in mortified tears. “To-day I can’t help snapping my best friend’s nose off!”

“Snap away! There will be plenty left when you have done,” replies Lavinia, playfully passing her fore finger down the ridge of a very handsome feature. Then, with an immediate return to gravity, “I know that she came back in a very exalté state from that ‘send off.’ She managed to get an introduction to him—to the General, I mean—didn’t she?”

Miss Prince’s mother shakes her head. “No; she had no introduction. Lady de Jones, with whom we went, did not know him; but we had tickets. We were admitted to the platform. Before I guessed what she—Féo, I mean—was going to do, she pushed her way up to him—to where he was standing with his staff, and gave him a bunch of violets.”

“Yes, I remember she told me”—trying honestly to keep out of her voice the disgusted disapprobation that the action thus recalled had inspired in her.

“He bowed and smiled, and took them. What else could he, could any gentleman, do? And we came away, and she was in the seventh heaven; and we both thought—her father and I both thought—would not you have thought?—that there was an end of it!”

“Yes, I should.”

The bareness of this assent is due to the difficulty experienced by the speaker in refraining from expressing how incredible and “beyond all whooping” it appears to her, that to such a transaction there should have been a beginning.

“She has always been rather a ‘handful,’” goes on the mother, with rueful dispassionateness—“determined to be unconventional and unlike other people, and all that sort of stuff; but it never entered our heads that she would be so lost to all decency, to all self-respect, as to do this!—throwing herself at him like a woman in Regent Street; for that is what it comes to.”

The poor lady has worked herself up into a whirlwind of tears and sobs, which her young friend charitably hopes may relieve her.

“And you neither of you had the least suspicion?”

“Not the very least mite,” replied Mrs. Prince, who, though in everyday life almost quite ladylike, is apt, under the pressure of high emotion, to lapse into homely phrases that smack of her unregenerate state before the world-wide success of “Prince’s Dropless Candle,” the Féodorovna, had lifted her into affluence and the habit of wearing her h’s every day. “She has always had a very large correspondence”—with an accent that tells of murdered pride in the fact recorded—“writing to and receiving letters from people that neither her father nor I ever heard of! It was an understood thing that we should ask no questions. I should as soon have thought of flying in the air as saying to her, ‘Whom have you heard from?’”

“Then how—how did you learn about it?”

“She gave me the letter to read. We were at breakfast—her father and I—reading our papers, in such good spirits over the surrender of Kronje; it seems a year ago”—with a transient look of bewilderment—“and in she came, holding an open letter in her hand, and said, with that odd smile she sometimes puts on—I am always uneasy when I see that smile—‘There has sometimes been a little soreness about my keeping my correspondence to myself. Here is a letter that I invite you both to read,’ and she laid it down on the table before me!” The mother pauses, her face working.

“Well?” in a breathless sympathy.

“I just glanced at the signature, and saw it was his. But even then it never struck me—I did not put two and two together. Who could have imagined such a thing about her own child? And she had not mentioned his name for weeks.”

“No?”

“I read it!” pausing to gasp, “and then her father read it!”

“Yes?”

“I—I have nothing to say against it,” speaking with twitching lips. “It was everything that was honourable and gentlemanlike!”

A longer pause. Lavinia has put her elbows on the little Empire table that interposes its fragile elegance between her and her companion, and is digging her knuckles into the cheeks that are blazing with vicarious shame.

“He said that—yes, I had rather tell you—that he was inexpressibly touched; but that in his busy life there was no room for feelings of that sort; that he was old enough to be her father; and that he had thought it right to destroy her letter.”

Probably the dumb sympathy written so redly over Lavinia’s face is a better plaister for poor Mrs. Prince’s gaping wound than would have been any of the words that so absolutely refuse to come at the girl’s invocation. There are many ointments that soften the smart of death, of parting, of estrangement; but what physician or quack alive has ever yet invented a successful unguent for shame?

“Even when I had read it, I did not take it in! I said to her, ‘Why have you shown me this? What does it mean? Where does it come from?’ ‘It came by the South African mail this morning,’ she said, looking me quite straight in the face, ‘and it is General ——’s answer to a letter I wrote him five weeks ago, offering myself to him.’”

It is the measure of Miss Carew’s view of the situation, that the nearest approach to consolation which she can produce is the question, “Don’t you think she is out of her mind?”

But the mother rejects even the extremely modest form of comfort thus offered to her.

“Not more than she has always been!” adding ruefully, “She came too late in our lives—after twenty childless years! We had wished too much for her.”

Both are silent, Lavinia throwing her eyes distressfully round the room, upon which Maple has worked his sumptuous will, in search of some phrase that may ring not too mockingly. She only succeeds in bringing home to herself the furious irony of the contrast between her companion’s upholstery and the wrinkled wretchedness of her face. Yet, after a moment of hopelessness, one of her propping hands drops down and hurries across the table to stroke the mourner’s sleeve, while her good eyes brighten at the thought that she has at last hit upon something really soothing to suggest.

“It will never go any further! With a man like him, the soul of honour, her secret is certain to be sacred. Nobody but we need ever know it, and we will let it die as soon as we can.”

“Nobody but we need ever know it!” repeats Mrs. Prince, with a shrill intonation of scornful woe. “That shows how little you know her! She herself will proclaim it on the housetops.” Then, with a sudden change of key, “She is coming this way—singing, if you please! Don’t you hear her? You must excuse me, I really can’t face her just yet.”

The mother rises hastily, and disappears, rustling, jingling, weeping through a handsome mahogany door into a Maple boudoir, just as another handsome mahogany door opens to admit the subject of the late conversation into the room whence her advent has chased her parent.

“You have been hearing of my crime?” says she, coming in and shaking hands conceitedly high up in the air.

Féodorovna Prince is a prettyish girl, long and reedy, with a skin, hair, and hands whose merits make the casual looker forgive the thumblike shape of her nose and the washiness of her foolish eyes.

“Yes, I have.”

“And what is your opinion of it?”

“I think I had rather not say.”

Miss Prince is standing before the fireplace, a hand on each side of her phenomenally long eighteen-inch waist.

“You need not be afraid of hurting my feelings,” she says, with a self-satisfied smile.

“I do not think I am at all afraid of that.”

Féodorovna ceases to smile, but continues to balance herself gracefully.

“I was born quite unlike other people! I have always been keenly conscious of that. I have a right and wrong of my own; and they are not the conventional ones.”

Lavinia listens in ireful silence; but no one glancing at the conflagration in her eyes could mistake her speechlessness for approval.

“You asked General —— to marry you?” she says, with a point-blankness that would be pitiless, were there any question of a need for compassion.

But Féodorovna does not wince. “I did not put it quite so crudely as that!”—with a slightly superior smile. “I told him that I loved and reverenced him beyond all created beings, and that I was his to do what he willed with!”

“And he did not will to do anything?” replies Lavinia, brutally.

Her stinging speech scarcely raises the colour in Miss Prince’s faint cheeks.

“He treated me with the same perfect loyalty that I had treated him!”

Lavinia’s answer is impatiently to pull open her own fur collar, as if she were choking, and to repeat, half under her breath with a species of snort—

“Loyalty!”

The other girl sits slowly down upon the Aubusson hearthrug, taking her small knees into the embrace of her lengthy arms, and looking straight before her.

“Would you like to see his letter?”—lifting one hand towards the breast of her gown.

The indication of what delicate lodging has been provided for the hard-hearted hero’s missive adds vigour to Miss Carew’s emphatic negative.

“I had far rather not.”

Féodorovna’s thin pale hand drops to her side. “I want every one to see it!” she says. “I want every one to know that if I have loved unhappily, I have loved worthily—have loved the noblest object that ever ‘swam into my ken’!”

The self-satisfied bravado has gone out of her face and manner; and as she lifts her rather colourless eyes to the ceiling, as if expecting to see her General sitting enthroned among the planets, Miss Carew realizes with enhanced consternation that she is in deadly, deadly earnest.

“I always made up my mind,” pursues Féodorovna presently, in an intense low voice, “that if ever I met a man really worth loving—no matter what his situation or circumstances in life were—I would offer myself to him. I have done so!”

“And he has refused you!” rejoins Lavinia in a strangled voice, where wonder and scorn are halt throttling each other. “And you are alive?”

This time the whip-lash does leave a slight weal in its bitter track.

“Why shouldn’t I be alive?” asks Féodorovna, as her throbbing throat rears itself out of the delicate laces and pearls that surround it. “More alive than I have ever been before. So far from being ashamed of my action, I glory in it—yes glory!” her voice rising in jubilant inspiration. “Not one girl in ten thousand would have had the courage to do as I have done!”

Miss Carew draws in her breath between two rows of excellent white teeth.

“And what do you propose to do next? To write and ask him to reconsider his decision?”

The wind is somewhat taken out of the speaker’s sails by the quiet literalness of the answer.

“No; I shall do nothing further! I bow to his will”—suiting the action to the word by a stoop of her russet head. Then, raising it again proudly—“All the rest of my life will be spent in trying not to fall below the standard to which my love for him has lifted me!”

CHAPTER II

In February light still reigns, though with uncertain sceptre, up to six o’clock in the evening, and the fact that the cold, aquamarine tinge is dying out of the west when she turns her back upon the Chestnuts, tells Miss Carew how much beyond its first scope her call has been prolonged. In the first place, she has been compelled, after all, to read General ——’s letter, and give her grudging meed of praise to its tact and humanity. Secondly—this has been the longest and hardest part of her task—she has had to reassure Mrs. Prince, who soon reappears, still tearful and jingling, as to the document having been undoubtedly penned by the hero himself, and not committed to a chuckling aide-de-camp or grinning secretary. Thirdly, she has been conducted into Mr. Prince’s sanctum, for the express purpose of cheering him up by light and general conversation, his hurt being much too deep and sore to suffer even the most distant approach to it.

She finds him sitting with his British-merchant bullet-head clutched in his hands, unable to be cheered even by the sight of the trophies, medals, and certificates—national and international—to the merits of his candle, which, to the sad mortification of his ladies, lavishly decorate the walls. At the sound of her entry—convoyed by his wife—he looks angrily up, and she realizes, with a warmer feeling of sympathy and fellow-feeling than he has ever before inspired, how very much he would have preferred that she had stayed away. His manner to women is always elaborate, and she sees him now struggling back into it with as much difficulty as a footman, in haste to answer a bell, fights his way into a tight livery coat. She longs to beg him to remain metaphorically in his shirt-sleeves. But no; he is already on his feet.

“I am afraid I am intrusive”—this is his almost invariable opening phrase where “the sex” is concerned—“but have you left Sir George and Mr. Campion quite well?”

“Miss Carew is come to have a little chat with you,” says his wife, with an air of cheerfulness “made in Germany.” “You know you and she always like a bit of fun together!”

She introduces and retreats hastily, with some misgiving, probably, as to the quality of the “fun” in question, and with clearly no desire to share it. Lavinia remains behind, to emerge, half an hour later, sorry and discouraged, with the consciousness of having been only partially successful in the attempt to be gamesome, unconcerned, and un-African. Yet the old man—oddly old to be Féodorovna’s father—has thanked her when she left him. She has not quite recovered the chokiness engendered by his gratitude when she is recaptured by Mrs. Prince, feverishly anxious to be again reassured as to the genuineness of the General’s autograph, and the certainty that her daughter’s passion for their Chief has not been given as a prey to the merriment of his staff. The fear is so preposterous that Lavinia would have had difficulty in reasoning it down with any show of patience, if pity had not come strongly to her aid—pity and a lifelong apprenticeship to answering the not-worth-answering. It takes her three quarters of an hour of solid argument, lucid exegesis, and persuasive rhetoric to convince Mrs. Prince that the commander of an Army Corps on active service has other employment for his time than the publishing to his subordinates the hysterical folly of a love-sick girl; and, moreover, that such a course would scarcely be in consonance with the creed and normal habits of an officer and a gentleman. It takes three quarters of an hour to convince Mrs. Prince, and, at the end, she is not convinced. With a slight sigh of waning endurance, Miss Carew realizes her lost labour, and turns back on another spoor.

“She has promised—indeed, there was no need to exact a promise—she volunteered it, that she is not going to take any further steps—to do anything more!”

“Do anything more!” echoes the mother, with an accent of the acutest scorn of this fresh attempt at solace. “Why, what more would you have her do? What more could she do? Unless——”

She breaks off abruptly, and both know that she has been on the brink of an utterance more suited, in its crude vernacular, to her former than to her present estate. Both feel relieved that it has remained in the domain of the implied; and, with a tactful fear lest the crestfallen fellow-creature before her may be betrayed into some outburst of which she may later repent on her return from the regions of primæval emotions to the upholstered “reception-rooms” of gentility, Miss Carew hurries over her adieux. Yet that “hurry” is scarcely the word to be applied to her visit taken as a whole is brought home to her by the look of beast-and-bird bedtime spread over the evening world as she gets out into it.

“Are you ready?” she asks, addressing the back of a man-person whom the first turn in the Park Road reveals kicking pebbles ahead of her in obvious waiting.

“Am I ready?” rejoins he, wheeling round, with good-tempered upbraiding. “You told me to be here at 5.30. It is now 7.15; and you ask, Am I ready?”

Lavinia wisely attempts no defence. “Well, are you?” she asks, smiling, but not coquettishly.

Of what use is it to be coquettish to a person in the same house, with whom you have always lived, and your engagement to be married to whom has had all the gilt taken off its gingerbread by the fact that you cannot remember the time when you were not engaged to him, and who is, to boot, your first cousin?

They walk on in silence for a few moments, she expecting and a little dreading to be questioned, and be confident that she will volunteer an explanation if he does not ask for one. But she refrains.

“Well, were they as good as usual? Have you no conversational plums to reward me with?”

Lavinia winces. Is this a moment to remind her of how often she has served up the pretensions and vulgarities of the family whom she has just quitted on such affecting terms for the joint amusement of herself and her fiancé?

“Don’t!” she answers hurriedly. “You do not know how you jar!”

He raises his eyebrows. “I know how cold I am,” he rejoins, still with perfect temper, “and I shall be very glad to know why I jar, if you will only tell me.”

“That is just what I can’t,” says she, wrinkling her forehead; “but you may take my word for it that you do. You ring dreadfully out of tune.”

“In point of fact, one of your not uncommon waves of hatred for me is going over you,” replies he, resignedly. “I know that they are never to be accounted for.”

“No; I do not feel any special hatred for you to-night,” replies she, dispassionately. “But I can’t tell you what is not my secret. In point of fact, it is not really a secret at all, as Féodorovna will certainly proclaim it to you next time you meet her; but I can’t tell it.”

“It is a secret, and it is not a secret; and you may not tell it me, though Féodorovna may! What dark sayings are these?” cries he, gaily, perfectly indifferent as to her mystery, though diverted at the pomp with which she is investing it.

But his lady-love is not to be won to any answering lightness.

“I see nothing to laugh at,” she says; and even in the rooky twilight he can perceive her frown. “I pity them from the bottom of my heart. One of the greatest misfortunes possible—yes, I really think I do not exaggerate—one of the greatest misfortunes possible has fallen upon them.”

“Has the Candle begun to drop after all these years?” asks he, still incorrigibly flippant.

She quickens her pace, as if to get away from him.

“I have always known that there was something lacking in you.”

“I have always known that there were a great many things lacking in me,” interrupts he, mending his pace too.

“Even if I had not promised, nothing would induce me to tell to any one so unsympathetic——”

“I do not want you to tell me! I do not care a button what has happened to them!” cries he, rudely, but half laughing.

Bested in the attempt to outstrip her companion, Miss Carew stops short.

“You would be sorry if you knew,” she throws out tantalizingly, unable to resist the temptation to go as near as possible to the line which she is resolved not to cross, and unworthily annoyed at the absence of pressure put upon her.

“I should not,” replies her lover, with quiet conviction. “If it were anything that would make them less beastly prosperous, I should be glad.”

“There was nothing ‘beastly prosperous’ about them to-day,” says she indignantly, as memory reconstructs the bitterly dripping tears of the one millionaire, and the stubby head clutched in short coarse hands of the other.

He receives the information in silence, not wishing to make her more angry than she already is, and being really quite without interest as to the topic which engages her.

Lavinia is obliged to give up the attempt to stimulate a curiosity which, after all, she has no right to gratify, and, thrusting her partisanship into her pocket, reluctantly changes the topic.

“Have you found out why your father was so much put out at luncheon?”

It is growing too dark to see his face, but she catches the instant change in his tone.

“Yes.”

“I told you that there must be some cause.”

“Because he exceeded even his usual ample measure of incivility to me, do you mean?”

There is very little bitterness in the voice or words, only a sort of regret mixed with some not quite ordinary quality of patience.

“I felt sure that he had had something to ruffle him.”

“He has always something to ruffle him. He has always me; but to-day, dear old chap, he had something more.”

“What?”

“Poor Bill’s things came back this morning—his watch and his cigar-case, and mother’s photograph—and with them, I think, but of course father did not show that to me, a letter from the fellow whom Bill picked up on his own horse, and brought out from the Boer fire when he himself was mortally wounded.”

There is an unresenting pain running through the whole of this narrative, but Lavinia does not notice it.

“Does the letter give any more details—say whether he suffered much?” she asks, in white eagerness. “Oh, but I forgot,” half impatiently, “you did not see it!”

“He will show it to you,” replies the young man, as if stating a perfectly natural and accountable fact.

After a pause, while they both trudge on in hushed emotion—

“Poor old fellow! if he knew how much I understood what it must be to him to see me there, who am the embodiment of everything that he despises and dislikes, eating my luncheon, well and fit, while Bill is lying in his wretched makeshift of a South African grave, he would perhaps hate me a little less than he does.”

The girl turns to him now impulsively, her fine lucid eyes shining wetly in the semi-darkness.

“And if he could but look into your heart—oh, why haven’t we windows in our breasts? how much fewer mistakes there would be if we had!—he would see how gladly, gladly you would change places with Bill!”

The appeal is not answered. Campion’s head is sunk on his breast.

“You would, wouldn’t you?” she cries urgently, as if she could not bear a moment’s delay in the assent to a proposition so obvious.

There is an instant’s pause; then her companion—they have both stopped—lifts his eyes with obvious difficulty to hers.

“No,” he says, in a low but not uncertain voice, while the moon, which has just looked over a clump of neighbouring hornbeams, lights the sincerity of his quivering face, “I would not rather change places with Bill. I would rather be alive here, walking with you, than lying cold and bloody under that hideous veldt. I have never had any opinion of what is conventionally called honour. ‘Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday.’ Well, I have no wish to have died o’ Wednesday.”

For a moment a look of terror and aversion crosses Lavinia’s face; then her brow grows clear.

“It is lucky for you that I do not believe you,” she says, with a sort of laugh—“that I know your ways.”

“Do you?” he answers, half under his breath; and again they walk on.

They are outside the Park gates, have followed the road that leads past the King’s Woods, and have reached the brow of the hill, half-way down which the village lights show their yellow points, and the church steeple tells its jackdaws, now silent in bed, to the tune of “The Last Rose of Summer,” that it is seven o’clock. Upon the silvering sky the Kentish oast-houses draw their extinguisher outline.

“I have always wondered,” says Campion, slowly, as they begin to descend the steep slope side by side, “why, feeling as you do, you did not pitch upon Bill instead of me.”

“I did not pitch upon you,” replies she, quietly. “I believe that I was born engaged to you, as I was born Uncle George’s niece. It seems to me as if the one has been as little a matter of choice as the other!”

There is, if no romance, at least so rock-like a certainty in her way of stating their relationship, that the young man feels a sudden lightening of a heart that has been heavy enough.

“That, perhaps, is why we never can decide whether I asked you or you me?”

“Oh yes, we can!” retorts she, also in a gayer vein. “As soon as I could speak I suggested our marrying when we grew up. You demurred, and asked whether we might not live together without marrying? I rejoined that that would be wicked, and that Nanna said we should go to hell if we did, whereupon you reluctantly consented.”

Both laugh, and arrive at the tree-hung entrance to their modest house in better humour with each other than had at one time seemed probable. But once inside the hall-door, the little spurt of cheerfulness dies down.

“Is he in his own room?” Lavinia asks under her breath, and the answer, “He was when I came out,” uttered with equal precaution, sends her treading lightly towards a shut door, through the old-fashioned fanlight over which a light is visible. Neither she nor her cousin-lover suggests that he shall accompany her.

As she enters the idea strikes her with a half-whimsical sadness, for what different types of sorrow she has within an hour had to provide consolation. Equally different is the setting to those sorrows. In his little Spartan room, with its large knee-hole writing-table, and its sparse decorations of old coloured stage-coach prints, portraits of departed hunters and famous jockeys, Sir George Campion sits in his leather chair, reading his Country Life with a resolutely everyday look. There is only one bit of driftwood to show the shipwreck in which his old heart went down two months ago; and that is the few little objects neatly arranged on the small table that carries his reading-lamp, within reach of that hand and eye, which yet would seem ostentatiously unaware of them. Lavinia’s action ignores the poor little pretence. She goes straight up to the sitting figure, and lays her hand gently but firmly on his shoulder.

“So they have come back!” she says, her frank ringing voice sympathetically lowered and chastened. “Thank God that the Boers have not got them!”

“Yes; they arrived this morning!” replies he, still with his disengaged air.

She touches the little articles with delicate reverence one after another.

“Yes; here are all our presents—not one missing: the poor rector’s electric bâton”—with a little half-sobbing laugh—“that we all made such fun of when it first came; and yet, if you remember, he said, in one of his first letters, how useful it had turned out.”

The father listens, still striving to maintain the look of being disturbed by irrelevant trifles in a congenial occupation; but the paper crackling slightly betrays the trembling of the fingers that hold it.

The girl sits down on the worn arm of her uncle’s chair, while her own arm passes round his neck.

“You have had a letter too?” she says, in a voice of cautious tenderness, as one drawing near to an open gash, and adding the caress of a light kiss dropped upon his grey hair.

“Who told you that I had a letter?”

“Rupert; but he said that you had not shown it to him.”

For the moment Sir George forgets to feign. “I thought it might frighten him,” he answers, with a disagreeable smile. “There is a good deal about Mausers and dynamite, and such ugly things in it.”

She does not take up the jeer, though it makes her stingingly hot, as if she herself were its object.

“Rupert thought that perhaps you might show it to me?” she suggests.

“I have no objection to your seeing it!” returns he, with significant emphasis; “that is to say, if I can find it.”

With a repetition of that poor parade of carelessness, he feigns to search in all his pockets, as of one that has mislaid something too valueless to be hoarded, and ends by bringing out from—where she had never doubted its resting—the one nearest his heart the narrative of his son’s death, penned by that dead boy’s comrade. Lavinia unfolds it, and, with head reverently bowed, begins to read. It is written in pencil, evidently by one to whom pens and stationery are non-existent, and in parts it is hard to decipher. There is absolute stillness in the room. Country Life has fallen upon the carpet, but Sir George forgets to pick it up. Lavinia pauses at last; for the excellent reason that her eyes are too thick with tears to do her any service.

“Oh, what a tribute!” she says, in a suffocated whisper. “You must never—never”—catching his hand, and raining salt drops upon it—“never again be so selfish as to grudge him such a glorious death! Oh, which of us does not envy him? which of us would not change with him?”

She breaks off suddenly, memory pouring upon the furnace of her passion the cold stream of her fiancé’s cynical question, “Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday.” It was only talk, only said to tease her; but why does it recur to her now, like a blasphemy hissed into a believer’s ear in a sanctuary? In a groundless terror lest her thought should be read, she dashes her handkerchief across her eyes, and resumes reading. But every sentence, unstudied, unliterary, plain and crude in its direct passage from heart to heart, blurs her voice afresh—

“What a tribute!” she repeats, trying to steady her broken voice so as to read aloud intelligibly snatches from the letter before her: “‘Never saw anything to equal his pluck, except his patience—his colonel quite broke down when he bid him good-bye—so cheerful—and making jokes even up to——” Again she breaks off, stayed by weeping.

“He was a promising lad!” says the father, in an iron voice. Then against his will the mask falls for a moment: “And this,” he cries, striking the table beside him with his clenched fist, in a sort of rage—“these,” pointing to the little relics tragic in their insignificance—“these are all that is left of him and his career! These are all that I have left to live on!”

With what but the awe and pity of her silence can Lavinia answer an outburst so heart-rending? Several minutes elapse before she dares to hesitate her small attempt at solace.

“Do we go quite for nothing? You have us left! We may not be much, but we are something!”

No sooner is it uttered than she sees, by the dull rage in his eyes and the sneer on his lips, how more than useless her effort has been.

“Yes; I have certainly Rupert of the Rhine left! Ha! ha! He has a whole skin at present, and I expect he will take precious good care that it keeps whole!”

Lavinia takes her arm away, and rises to her feet, in deeply wounded discouragement, reddening in her lover’s behalf even more deeply than she had with vicarious shame at Féodorovna’s immodesty.

“Are you angry with him for not being dead too?” she asks, standing before her uncle with locked hands and burning eyes. “Well, perhaps he will oblige you; he has never been very strong!” Then, with a revulsion of feeling, flinging herself on her knees beside the old man, “Do not be unkind to him! you know that, though they were so different, Bill liked him very much! Oh!”—bowing her nut-brown head on his knees—“oughtn’t we to love each other all the better, now that there are so few of us?”

CHAPTER III

The modest, low house on the Kentish hillside, with its pink, rough-cast face, its tall, narrow, eighteenth-century windows, its verandah, the alternate object of summer blessings and winter curses, has been Lavinia Carew’s home ever since her mother had crowned a foolish marriage by a perhaps less foolish death within the year. Being one of those completely unfortunate persons whom Fate seems to delight in belabouring, her husband had predeceased her by a fortnight. Upon the doubly forsaken baby’s nearest blood relation, Sir George Campion, had devolved the choice of two alternatives—that of saddling himself for life with a creature against whose entry into it he had always angrily protested, and that of sending it to the workhouse, and being called an unnatural brute for his pains. He chose the first; though, as everybody said, with a very ill grace. But the people who kindly tried to tell her this in later days could never get Sir George Campion’s niece to believe it.

Yet her life has scarcely been a bed of roses, though love has not been lacking; and her three men have had that immense opinion of her which makes up to most of her sex for any amount of bodily or mental char-ing. Of women in her home, save servants, there have, within her recollection, been none. Marriage is not an institution that seems to thrive in the Campion family, and so early in Lavinia’s history that only the faintest blur of memory of something kind and connected with cakes remains to the girl, her uncle’s wife had slipped inoffensively away to the churchyard, conveniently close to the pink-faced house. Often since she has grown up into sense and thoughtfulness, Lavinia has speculated about that dim lady, of whom no one now ever speaks—all others because they have forgotten her, and one concerning whom no one knows wherefore he is silent—speculated whether in her lifetime she had had as much buffer-work to do as has fallen to Lavinia herself, and whether, not being of so robust a constitution of mind or body, it had ended by killing her. For Lavinia is, and for several years past has been, before all things, a buffer. Has there ever been a day for so long as she can remember, when she has not been called upon to use her characteristic gifts to deaden and smooth and blunt the jars and bumps that her perpetually colliding men are always inflicting upon each other? The fault has nearly always lain with the father, gifted with that most infallible double endowment for ensuring unhappiness in life—a deep heart and an impossible temper.

She is thinking of him with tender ruth next morning as she stands under the verandah, looking across the downward slope of garden, grass, sun-dial, and snowdrop borders, to the spacious view over the Weald of Kent, Hastingswards. On her right, a towering hedge of espaliered elms parts her—it alone and a few unseen green hillocks—from the little red-roofed thirteenth-century church and its emerald God’s acre. From the top of the church tower, it is said that on a clear day you can discern the masts of ships, though not the very sea. To this kind of seeing there goes usually more of imagination than eyesight; but the belief has, since the days of King John, heightened the village’s opinion of itself. To the left the prospect is bounded by the great group of horse-chestnuts, leafless now and purple, in the Rectory garden.

It is to the Rectory that Lavinia is bound—the Rectory, where she gets her fresh eggs, and carries some of her troubles. She is dressed in black for her dead cousin; but the freshness of her cheeks and lips, and the sunshine that lives in her hair, make it always difficult for her to look in mourning. Her spirits are still tender from the emotion of last night, and her thoughts musing pityingly upon her men—the live one who is taking his punishment so deadly hard, and the dead who, though now so deified and enshrined in his father’s broken heart, had not, any more than herself, found his short life a bed of roses. Poor Bill! Never again would she have to insert the pad of her smoothing words between his sensitiveness and the sting of his father’s speech—that father who, though he would joyfully have died ten thousand deaths for him, yet could not resist venting the gibes born of adversity and constitutional ill humour upon the creature whom, “if Heaven had made him such another world of one entire and perfect chrysolite,” he would not have sold for it. Poor Bill!

With a heartfelt sigh she fetches her egg-basket and sets off through the churchyard to her goal. It is a roundabout way, since the Rectory grounds actually touch the wall at the bottom of the Campion garden; and there had once, not so long ago, been a trellised door through which Rectory and Place ran in and out at will, but in an unexplained spurt of resentment or suspicion, Sir George had had it walled up. It has been a cause of great inconvenience to himself, and he has very much repented it ever since the spurt passed; but pride forbids him to undo his deed. The Rectory regrets it too, but with wise and understanding want of resentment. Its own front gate stands hospitably open, and the shortness of its drive soon brings the visitor to the hall-door—wide open too—for the Rectory is nothing if not airy; and, indeed, since the children could never remember to shut it after them, it may as well gape legally as illegally.

“You are quite a stranger,” says the rectoress, turning with an air of relief from her pile of household books; for though she is a good woman and does her accounts, she is not of those who love them. “What became of you all yesterday?”

“I was at the Princes’ most of the afternoon,” replies Lavinia, sitting down with the air of an habitué, her egg-basket on her knees. “They were in trouble—bad trouble, of a sort; but you must not ask me what.” Then, seeing a humorous sparkle in her friend’s eye, she adds, half-laughing, “Oh, I see that you are in the secret.”

“Féodorovna has just been here to proclaim her heroic deed,” says Mrs. Darcy, drily.

“Isn’t it inconceivable?” cries Lavinia, starting up with a revival of the passion of shame that had overcome her on first hearing of Miss Prince’s exploit, while the egg-basket, happily not yet laden, rolls on the floor.

“There is no reason why it should turn you into one gigantic blush,” replies her friend, looking at her with a grave smile. “You have not the distinction of having been informed that a very successful General has no immediate use for you!”

“Did you tell her what you thought of her?” asks the other, in a low voice, and giving a start of maidenly ire at the suggested possibility.

“Why should I?” asks the clergyman’s wife, lifting her sensible, tolerant eyes to her companion’s still discoloured countenance. “Would that have undone it?”

“And you let her brag about it? You allowed her to believe——?” Lavinia breaks off.

“I do not think that she left me with the impression that I admired her,” replies the other in an exceedingly quiet key; and Miss Carew is at once appeased and silenced.

“Yesterday was painful from start to finish,” resumes the girl, presently. “Some days are like that, aren’t they? Yesterday”—with that respectful drop of the voice which is our tribute to the departed—“poor Bill’s things came back.”

The news brings a lump into the throat of the person addressed, for, like most of his acquaintances, Mrs. Darcy had been fond of fine, plucky, upstanding Bill Campion. It is a minute or two before she can dress her sympathy in enough composure to say—

“And, of course, that upset him very much?”

“No; he was not upset,” replies Lavinia, a sort of hopeless pity in voice and look. “He is never upset; it would be much better for him if he were—and for us.”

“Yes, poor fellow!”

“I was afraid that we should have a dreadful dinner,” continues Lavinia, with the relieved expansiveness of perfect intimacy addressing perfect comprehension. “I was afraid he would have one of his attacks of hating us for being alive!”

“He never hates you for being alive.”

“Well, ‘us’ means Rupert, and Rupert means ‘us;’ you know that.”

There is more of loyalty than grammar in the creed expressed; but as to the staunchness of the believer’s faith there can be no two opinions.

“Yes, I know.”

If a faint wonder tempers the acquiescence of the hearer, it does not reach her companion’s ear.

“He had called him ‘Rupert of the Rhine’ in the afternoon; that is always a very bad sign. Nothing makes Rupert wince so much as being called ‘Rupert of the Rhine.’”

Mrs. Darcy’s neck turns a little aside, so as partially to avert a face on which a scarcely sketched smile that has not much real amusement in it is dimly visible.

“But things turned out better than I expected,” pursues the girl, with a lilt of recovering spirits in her not very low but yet agreeable voice. “The dear old fellow put great constraint upon himself, and was quite civil to—us”—with a small challenging smile, as she lays an obstinate emphasis upon the plural pronoun—“and ‘we’ tried our best not to be offensive, and even asked one or two quite sporting questions, and did not make any very egregious mistakes.”

The end of her sentence is half drowned in the ringing of a very loud one-o’clock bell. The Rectory lunches half an hour earlier than the Place.

“I must be off!” cries the visitor, starting up; “and I have never got my eggs, after all. Ah, here are the children!”

As she speaks, a burst, rather than opened, door announces the entry of three young creatures between the ages of eight and fourteen, in whose faces and persons dirt and good looks strive in amicable emulation for the mastery.

“Miss Brine had to go off again to her sick sister this morning,” says the mother, in placid explanation. “I do not believe that any one ever had a governess with so many and such diseased relatives as I,” she laughs; but her amusement is not echoed by her husband, who, correct and glossy, at the moment enters the room from his study. On the contrary, he regards with a fidgety distress the vestures which some unknown quest has dyed in mud; not even sparing the rosy countenances above them. He testily orders off his son and daughters at once to change their clothes.

Six protesting eyes turn to the mother, “Need we? It is quite dry,” exhibiting their caked stockings, petticoats, and trousers.

“You might try what a brush will do,” replies she indifferently, overriding the paternal fiat.

The compromise is joyfully accepted, and the children drag off Lavinia with them, partly to aid in their purification, but chiefly to display to her the evidence of that patriotism which the joyful tidings of yesterday have called forth. For though averse from soap and water, the Misses and Master Darcy are avid of military glory, and the walls of the schoolroom, cheerful in its large shabbiness, are thick with South African heroes. Each child possesses and displays on the wall photographs of every general of any distinction; but as there are wide and envenomed differences of estimate as to the respective places occupied by those warriors in the hierarchy of fame, each has his or her special favourite enshrined in a showy frame, the centre of a circle of lesser lights, and the theme of many a wordy battle. To a stranger not acquainted with the fact that to a cult of glory the Darcy family add a taste for breeding poultry, and combine the two by naming their favourites of the farmyard after those of the battle-field, irrespective of differences of sex, it would be somewhat startling to hear that Colonel Baden-Powell has just begun to lay, and that General French is “such a good sitter that he can cover more eggs than any of the others.” But Miss Carew, since the inception of the campaign, had heard too many eye-opening facts in natural history of the kind adduced to turn a hair, and having admired the laurel wreaths beneath which disappears Lord Roberts, who alone of all his officers is allowed to keep his manhood, and is godfather to the Andalusian cock, she departs.

Her friend accompanies her to the gate, hatless, and having got rid of the children by a slight gesture of dismissal, instantly obeyed, despite the bite of February’s still bitter tooth, that makes the winter aconites in the grass sink their round yellow heads chillily into their green capes, she loiters even when the limit of the Rectory demesne is reached; and Lavinia knows that she has something difficult of utterance to say to her.

“Has Sir George spoken to you about your marriage lately?”

“About my marriage?”

“Yes, anything as to the desirability of its coming off sooner on account of—what has happened?”

“On account of poor Bill’s death, do you mean?”—looking blank and mystified. “No; why should he? What difference can that make?”

“You see that Rupert is the only one left now,” replies Mrs. Darcy, gently, but in a rather embarrassed tone; “the only one to keep up the old name—to prevent its dying out.”

Her companion is silent, staring at the humpy winter aconites with a vague feeling that they have grown into unfamiliar blossoms; that the gate-post is strange too, and the mud in the road, and the rectoress’s expressive pale face.

“I think he means to broach the subject to you before long,” continues the latter, looking away from the person whom she is addressing, and speaking with a tentative delicacy; “so I thought it best that you should not be taken unawares when he does. I must be off. There is Richard signalling madly, and saying something quite lay about my unpunctuality.” She runs off nodding; and Lavinia, much more slowly, takes her way home through the churchyard.

She feels as if some one—surely it cannot be the gentle friend made up of sense, sympathy, and esprit?—has given her a blow on the head with a cudgel. She has always known that she is to marry Rupert. The idea is perfectly familiar, and not the least unwelcome. To be his wife in the future is as inevitable a part of the scheme of life as to die. Up to five minutes ago, the one has appeared as vague and distant as the other. But to be married to him soon! To be married to him soon because the Campion family cannot be allowed to die out! It is by her union with him that it is to be preserved! It is her child, hers and Rupert’s, who is to hand on the honoured name! Her very ears tingle and glow at the unfamiliar realism and animalism of the idea. It is only such a dotting of the i’s and crossing of the t’s that could make her realize what a nebulous thing, with no foothold in the world of reality, her engagement to her cousin has hitherto been. To be married to Rupert! That she should have a child, and that it should be Rupert’s! Her feelings are as yet much too chaotic for her to know whether the prodigious fact thrown by the magic-lantern of Mrs. Darcy’s simple question upon the sheet of her imagination, belongs to the region of pleasure or pain. She knows only that she feels extraordinarily odd. The sight—normal and familiar as it is—of the person who has just been thrust upon her in so glaringly new a character, the sight of him standing, as he has stood many hundreds of times before, watching for her back-coming from the verandah, matter-of-fact and every-day as he looks, does not in the least lessen the queerness of her sensations.

“The Rectory, of course?” he says, with a sort of whimsical protest in his tone and eyebrows. Then, in an altered key of disturbed curiosity, “Why, what have they been doing to you? You look—— I declare I do not know what you look like.”

“Do not look at me, then,” says she, trying to pass him with a brusque half-laugh; and, for the first time in her life, feeling uncomfortable beneath the scrutiny of his surprised eyes.

But he catches her before she can escape. “What have they been doing to you?”

“They have been telling me that Colonel Baden-Powell has begun to lay,” replies she, deceitfully.

The confusion of sexes prevalent among the Darcy poultry is too familiar to the young man to raise a smile. He looses his detaining hold on his cousin’s sleeve, and there is an accent of resigned distaste in his next words.

“Of course yesterday’s news has brought on a frightful access of khaki? I saw the flames of their bonfire insulting the evening sky last night.”

“We ought to have had one too,” she retorts, with a sudden rush of opposition.

“Have we so much cause to rejoice?” he asks; and there is such unaffected feeling in his voice that her heart smites her.

The recent emotion and the present one mix and produce her next sentence.

“You are the only one left now?”

“Yes.” There is a faint inclination of surprise at her truism.

“If you died unmarried, at Uncle George’s death the Campion family would be extinct?”

The surprise in the next “yes” is emphasized.

“But you are very young still?” she asks, as if in appeal from some maintenance of a contrary contention to him. “No one could expect you to marry yet?”

He looks back at her in dumb astonishment. Save in yesterday’s laughing argument as to which of them had originally wooed the other, the question of their engagement has scarcely ever been referred to by her.

“And I am young too!” she goes on, in that puzzlingly pleading voice, as if still answering some invisible objector. “Most sensible people think that a woman should not marry before five and twenty!”

“Is this the Rectory?” he asks, in a tone where wonder seems to strive with a half-distrust.

“Must the Rectory supply all my ideas?” retorts she, half-laughing, yet still with that new sense of constraint. “Mayn’t I be allowed to have any of my own?”

He shakes his curly head—the head which is never shorn quite close enough to suit his father’s taste.

“The voice is the voice of Lavinia; but the words are the words of Susan,” he says, drily.

“She had an idea—built upon, I do not exactly know what”—reddening faintly at her own disingenuousness, and yet unable to break the lifelong habit of taking Rupert into her confidence—“that your father—that the change in—that poor Bill’s death, in short, might make it desirable that we should——” She stops, jibbing at the matter-of-fact word which yet has always closed the vista of her lookings into the future as a thing of course.

Her companion supplies it, “Marry;” and to her ears it seems that an awkwardness like her own has remodulated his familiar voice.

There are more crocuses this year than last, pushing their yolk-yellow goblets through the grass; two or three have even invaded the gravel walk.

“Is the idea disagreeable to you?” asks the young man, in a key to whose agitated diffidence the girl is a stranger.

“Disagreeable! why should it be?” replies she, trying vainly to shake off the oppressive absurdity of that new shyness which has laid hands on them both. “Have not I been looking it in the face all my life? Didn’t we agree yesterday that it was I who originally proposed to you?”

“You have had a good many accesses of hatred to me since then,” he says hesitatingly.

“Yes, I have,” replies she, hotly, both cheeks hanging out flame signals; “but you always know what produces them, and it lies with you to prevent them ever recurring. I hated you when I found that that wretched little pro-Boer poem in the Shipton Herald was by you; and I detested you when you said that if by any extraordinary accident you were killed on a battle-field, your wounds would certainly all be in the back!”

Her loss of self-control seems to give him back his.

“I got seven shillings and sixpence for my poem,” he says good-temperedly. “And as for the battle-field, let us hope that my legs—they are good long ones—will carry me back unpeppered to your arms.”

CHAPTER IV

Lavinia tries to frown, but the whimsical way in which her cousin utters his disgraceful aspiration, coupled with her conviction that, if put to the test, he would prove how little his claim to consummate cowardice was worth, sends her into the dining-room with a smile on her face. The tone in which Sir George asks her what the joke is at once extinguishes it.

“Nothing worth repeating,” she answers, grave, though suddenly.

“That means that I am not worth repeating it to!” he rejoins, with an injured look, and pushing away the dish that is being offered him.

“Won’t you try it?” she asks persuasively. “They are eggs dressed according to the recipe Lang got from the chef at the Carlton.”

He shakes his head. “I can’t understand any one having an appetite when they have been penned up in the house all the morning.”

Each of the three persons present, and probably the servants too, know that the remark is aimed at Rupert, whose sedentary habits are one of his father’s chiefest grievances against him. It is a besetting sin of the outdoor members of a family to look upon the indoorness of the indoor as a crime against themselves. But for once Rupert’s conscience is clear.

“Were not you out, sir?” he asks pleasantly. “How did that come about? In spite of the sting in the air, one could quite realize that spring is only just round the corner.”

“I was occupied,” replies Sir George, briefly, not lifting the eyes overhung by lowering brows to his son’s face from his own empty plate.

Both young people know what his occupation has been—the inditing, by a slow penman, of an infinitely difficult letter of thanks to the unknown soldier who had written to tell him of his dead first-born’s last moments, and the tearing wider of his own yawning wound in the process. There is a respectful silence; Lavinia regretting her smile, and Rupert his question.

An almost imperceptibly exchanged eye-query between the two juniors asks what subject it would be safest to start next; and the thought flashes across Miss Carew of how perfectly Rupert always understands. How could she have had that odd shock of misgiving half an hour ago as to a union, however immediate—even if it were to-day or to-morrow—with one who always understands? And while luncheon proceeds this reassuring confidence deepens as she notes the tact and temper with which her betrothed steers among the rocks and quicksands that beset his path. How skilfully, yet without outraging truth, he conceals the fact that he had thought the wind cold enough to justify wearing a great-coat—a garment which is always as a red rag waved before his father’s hardy eyes! With what smiling self-control he listens to that father’s side-hits at the Molly Coddle and the Little Englander, though he knows that he is expected to answer to both names! With what delicate intuition he follows each faintest hint of a dangerous trend in the talk; and, lastly, with what a masterly air of naturalness he leads up to that poaching affray in Yorkshire which he had discovered and which his father had not, lurking in the small type of the morning paper! How much more thoroughly and subtily he knows Sir George than poor Bill did!—poor Bill, who could never resist the temptation to buck and rear under the whip of his father’s jibes! In sanguine forecast she prophesies to herself that her bufferdom will soon become a sinecure. If he could but be persuaded to give up that infuriating habit of jestingly—it must be, and is jestingly—belittling physical courage, and claiming for himself an absolute lack of it, Lavinia really does not see in what respect Rupert could be improved. This stout and happy mood lasts without a break until the repast ends; and upholds her even when her uncle, with something that seems meaning in his manner, invites her to walk with him to the keeper’s cottage. Let him broach the subject at once! Thanks to Susan Darcy, she is prepared; but, even without preparation, there would be nothing to cause her fear or hesitation. She will be ready with her answer as soon as he with his question.

“Dear Rupert! That speech about ‘yelping curs’ must have made him wince; but with what admirable temper and fortitude he bore it! Sir George himself must have felt a twinge of remorse for it, since, at starting, he had put his hand kindly on the young fellow’s shoulder, and had said, ‘Do not be out of the way, my boy, when we come back, as I may want to have a talk with you.’ And poor Rupert had coloured up with pleasure. Living with him every day, it is only now and then that one realizes what charming sort of looks his are.”

For the first half-hour of that walk, to which Miss Carew has thus valiantly braced herself, it seems as if her resolution were to be wasted, since her companion’s thoughts are plainly running in a groove other than that for which Mrs. Darcy has prepared her. He stumps along, digging his stick into the muddy ground, in that perfect silence which is possible only to complete intimacy. Not till the high-road is left, and the King’s Wood entered, does the little business of putting the quivering, tantalized Dachs Geist on the chain produce a word from him, and then it is only a “Steady, old man!” to the dog, who with moist nose working and upbraiding eyes, is testifying against the inhumanity of shackling him just when the sound of the rabbit begins to be loud in the land.

“Poor Geist!” says Lavinia, stooping to pat the satin of the long, low, red back. “Wait till we get to Madeley’s, and you shall run the hens!”

This is a promise always made and never fulfilled at the entrance to the forbidden paradise; but it sends them all on in better spirits. Sir George half smiles, too, though he says disdainfully—

“Geist!”

The name has been bestowed by Rupert, in memory of Mat Arnold’s immortal favourite; but as his father is equally unacquainted with the author and the poem, he can seldom forbear some ejaculation of contempt for so senseless an appellation; and again the silence is unbroken, as they step along the ride between the undergrowth of Spanish chestnuts, through whose still adhering dead leaves the wind blows cracklingly. They are for use and beauty too, these chestnut growths. To-day they are a covert, warm and colourful; to-morrow they will be hop-poles, round which the vine of England will wind the tenderness of her green embrace.

“We must try and get him here!” says Sir George, suddenly, arriving, as often happens, at a point in his ruminations when utterance to his one confidant is a relief, and without the slightest doubt that she will have followed the wordless course of his meditations, and be able to pick up his thought, whatever it may be, at the moment when he wishes it to become oral. She is mostly equal to the occasion; and to-day divines at once that the allusion is to the young officer whom Bill had died to save.

“I am sure that he will wish to come,” she answers, in instantly ready response.

“You know, of course, to whom I am alluding?” her uncle inquires, with one of those sharp turns of suspicion, even of her, to which he is liable.

“Surely to Captain Binning,” she replies very softly.

“We have nothing to offer him when he does come,” pursues her companion, gloomily—“no sport—nothing that a fine manly chap like that would care for. Twenty years ago it would have been a different thing!”

The sigh on which this speech is wafted tells the girl that her uncle’s thoughts have gone back to the theme which had made him a sad and bitter man, even before the loss of his son—that passing of his ancestral acres into other hands, for which he has to thank his own early excesses.

“If Bobs hurries up the Union Jack over Bloemfontein and Pretoria as quickly as I expect of him!” cries she, sanguinely, with a kindling eye, “they may all be back before the summer is over!”

“All!” he repeats, with a reproachful laugh; and she shrinks back into a remorseful silence. It may be a dim regret at having choked the life out of her little effort to cheer him that makes Sir George say presently—

“If it were summer-time, he might put up with us for a day or two; and, I confess, I should like to make his acquaintance. From his letter, I should gather that he is just my sort—just what I should have liked——”

He breaks off, and her fatal facility in reading his thoughts makes her hear the unsaid half of the speech quite as plainly as the uttered one. “What I should have liked Rupert to be!” is the aspiration which he uselessly forbears to finish. As on many former occasions, her spirit rises in defence.

“Don’t you think,” she asks gently, but with an intonation in which he recognizes a familiar protest, “that it would be rather dull if we were all made on precisely the same pattern? built on exactly the same lines?”

“There you go!” retorts he, laughing not quite naturally, yet with less than his former acridness; “up in arms at once, the moment you think your precious pet lamb is going to be attacked!”

“It is well that there should be somebody to speak up for him!” she says, carrying her head rather high, and looking very handsome and plucky.

“He has a bottle-holder whom he can always count upon in you!” replies Sir George, glowering sideways at her out of an eye in which displeasure at being opposed, and admiring fondness for the opposer, are at open war.

“Always!” she answers firmly; but, at the same moment, the dignity of her attitude is compromised by Geist, who, with crooked legs madly straddling, and choking bark out of a strained-at collar, forces his conductor into a run in pursuit of some small live thing which has set the dead leaves astir not a yard from his wildly working nose. Lavinia is a strong girl, but Geist is also a strong dog, and it takes her a minute or two to re-establish her supremacy.

“Though Rupert is such a favourite of yours,” says Sir George, with a deliberation which shows that the remark is not an impromptu, “it does not strike me that you are in any violent hurry to marry him.”

The expected has come—the fully prepared and waited for, yet it must take her at an undefended angle. Possibly it is something jibing in the shape of the question that chills away her carefully pre-constructed response.

“Does whatever in the shape of an engagement once existed between you still hold good? or have you put an end to it?”

The something of hurry and apprehension that she detects in his voice, and in which she recognizes his last bid for possible happiness, affects her so strongly that she can only give a nod, which is apparently of so doubtful an interpretation that he misunderstands it.

“Do not be afraid to tell me if you have,” he goes on with what she knows to be an unusual effort at self-control and temper. “I shall be the last person to blame you. I never could quite understand what you——”

“We belong to each other still: we always shall,” she interrupts, in a low firm voice, hastening to stop the mouth that is about to utter a too familiar formula.

A sort of relief spreads over the lined face beside her; yet there is a cavilling discontent in his repetition of her phrase.

“Belong to each other! Well, you have done that, I suppose, according to your ideas, since you were both in long clothes.”

She pauses, and a cloud seems to pass before her clear strong eyes; pauses with the feeling—an unaccountably heavy one—of being about to do something absolutely irrevocable, then speaks.

“Do you wish us to marry soon?”