[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?”

He shoots a look at her to make sure that she is in earnest.

“I wish for a grandson!” he answers crudely.

Again she pauses, chiding herself as squeamish for a return of that sensation of repulsion which had assailed her when first the practical aspect of her relation to Rupert had been suggested to her by Mrs. Darcy. She has not conquered it when her uncle repeats and enlarges his phrase.

“I wish before I die to see a grandson growing up, with as much of you and as little of Rupert in him as you can make him!”

She listens with a half-shivering docility. Is it the strangeness, the something of coarse and homely in the wording of her uncle’s wish, that gives her this prudish and unreasonable sense of disrelish?

“No doubt you are laughing at the idea of wanting an heir when there is so preciously little left to be heir to,” continues Sir George, in a key half angry at her delay in acquiescence, half appealing to her mercy. “But when you have got one spot of earth into your very bones, you do not like the idea of being quite wiped off from it.”

Their steps have led them to a clearing in the low wood, and over the ground bared by the woodman’s axe the old man’s eye, mournful and yearning, wanders, embracing the pleasant swelling hills, the strawberry gardens, and cherry orchards, upon which his sire’s eyes, nay, his own boyish ones, had rested possessively. A Jew broker’s improved ploughs are furrowing yon hillside; a Half-penny Comic Journal sends the strawberries to Covent Garden; but to his own sad heart, pasture and copse and red roof-tree, are Campion’s still. Lavinia’s eye follows the direction her uncle’s has taken. The Kentish landscape, with its rustic smile is nearly as dear, though not as melancholy, to her as to him. The idea of living in any other surroundings is as unfamiliar to her as the wish. “The thing that hath been shall be.” To go on living and doing for her men—since there are now only two left, she must make the most of them—what other fate has ever occurred to her as possible? For as long as she can remember the thought of what she herself would like has been always subordinated to the wishes, divined or expressed, of her menkind. In so small a thing as the ordering of dinner, has her own palate ever in half a score of years, been asked to give an assent or a veto?

To marry Rupert! To bear and bring up his children—a transient wonder crosses her mind as to whether there is any likelihood of their being as amusing and original as the young Darcys!—for what other end was she created? There is no sting or thrill in her feeling for him; but is it the worse for that? There are women incapable of thrilling for any man—a large, cool, comfortable class, to which she does and must belong. Has her pulse ever paid any man the tribute of one quickened beat? Proudly to herself she can answer No. She is not of that kind. With Féodorovna Prince as an object-lesson, there is not much fear of her erring in the direction of passion or sentimentality. She involuntarily lifts her head a little above its usual level—though it is always handsomely carried—and, since the thought-current that has run through her brain has done so with lightning’s own speed, there is to her hearer’s ear scarcely any delay in her answer.

“I am ready to marry Rupert whenever you and he wish me to.”

Her voice is steady and serene; at least so she intends and believes it to be. Yet Sir George looks at her askance.

“Ready!” he repeats distrustfully. “A man, if he has any pluck, may be ready to go to the gallows!”

Lavinia makes a face between a laugh and a frown.

“Choose your own words,” she says, the habit of a lifetime controlling and smoothing away any outward expression of impatience.

But he will not let her off. “Are you glad to marry him? Do you feel that it is essential to your happiness?” he asks, pressing home his inquiries with a persistency that he imagines to be conscientious, but which she feels to be cruel and perverse.

“Glad!” she repeats, dragging out the word a little, to give herself time to find the right phrase of tactful truth. “Haven’t I always been glad that I was to be part and parcel of you both? My gladness is no shoddy new thing.”

He looks at her captiously, the unhappy bent of his disposition causing him to feel a half-distrust of the candid eyes and the honest voice that yet always bring a warmth about his heart.

“If Rupert does not marry you, he will probably marry some one else,” he growls. “And between you and me, I cannot quite depend on his taste!”

It is said with no wounding intention. Never would it have occurred to the father that any one could take exception against him for making disparaging comments on his own son of his body begotten; but used as she is to them, never does Lavinia fail to protest.

“I like his taste,” she answers pleasantly and gallantly. “He thinks me very good-looking.”

But her companion’s thought stumps undistracted by her playfulness along its own track, as doggedly as his feet along the bridle-path.

“I am not difficult to get on with,” he says, in a naïf unconsciousness of his own corners which makes his niece throttle a smile. “No one can deny that I am easy to live with; but I could not answer for myself if he sprang upon me some demi-rep from a music-hall or some screeching platform woman. I declare to goodness”—lashing himself up into unreasonable anger—“it seems an odd thing for a father to say, but I know so little of the fellow—of what goes on inside him—that I could not say, if I were to be shot for it, which alternative is the more likely one.”

It would be perfectly useless to tell him that it is he himself who has crushed the power of confidence out of his son; and the desire to impart the information to him is at once stamped upon by Lavinia. All that is left of it escapes in a patient sigh, and the little dry sentence—

“I should say that they were about equally probable.”

“I have a still better reason for wishing to see you coupled together,” continues Sir George, a little appeased, though not in the least, suspecting the exercise of self-control that has tightened Lavinia’s lips, and strengthened her grip upon Geist’s lead. “If you do not marry my boy, of course you will never rest till you marry some one else’s.”

“Never rest till I marry some one else’s!” repeats she, indignantly, all her virgin pride up in arms; but in a second her wrath falls, vanquished by native sweetness, and by a long and sore acquaintance with the properties of Uncle George’s jokes. To-day it is not quite a joke. It is the vehicle for a real apprehension. She is paid for her self-government in a ready money which does not often distinguish the discharge of debts to virtue.

“And then I should lose my little mosquito,” he says, employing a phrase of no visible aptness to the tall and gracious creature beside him, which she yet welcomes as a proof of peculiar favour. “No doubt my loss would be your gain, as people say when other people’s relatives die”—laughing uncontagiously. “But I do not think I could carry creditably anything more just yet. You see I have lost a good deal one way and another.”

There is pathos in his growling voice, and appeal in his shagged eyes, and Lavinia at once feels that she would gladly die for him.

“It is settled, then!” she cries with a cheerfulness concerning which she is not quite sure whether she feels it or not. “Rupert marries Lavinia to prevent her marrying any one else, and Lavinia marries Rupert to prevent his marrying any one else, and the bells ring, and we are all happy for ever after!”

Her one motive in drawing up this gay programme is to give him pleasure, to chase the hopelessness out of his gaunt face; and perhaps she overdoes the content of her tone, for he stops in his walk to send the gimlet of his suspicious eyes through her.

“It is not to please me that you are doing it,” he says with sharp contrariety: “mind that! I would be shot before I would influence you a hair-breadth one way or the other in such a matter. And between you and me”—it is the phrase which usually precedes some unflattering observation upon his son—“if I were a young woman, and Rupert were the last man in the world——”

But what Sir George’s course as a young woman would be his niece is determined for once not to hear.

“Stop!” she says, laying her firm hand in prohibition upon his arm, and speaking with an authority that for the moment seems to reverse their relative positions. “You must not run down my husband to me!”

CHAPTER V

The hall-door reveals an unwelcome sight, though no one can deny that it is a showy one, nor that the February sunlight is snobbish enough to treble itself against the brazen glories of the crests on blinker and harness and panel of the Princes’ carriage. It is a fact of disagreeable familiarity to both uncle and niece that Féodorovna Prince will never allow any of her acquaintance to be “not at home;” and that to be pursued to study, toilet-table, and bed is the penalty exacted from those upon whom she chooses to inflict her friendship. The two exchange a look.

“Do not let her come near me,” says the man, in accents of peremptory disgust, and so flings off to his den; while Lavinia, with the matter-of-fact unselfishness of the well-broken human female, goes smiling into the drawing-room.

After all, it is not Féodorovna, but her mother, who comes forward alone, and with jet-clinking apology.

“You do not mind? It is not a thing that one has any right to do? But Féodorovna would insist on getting out, so I got out too.”

At another moment this exegesis, pregnant in its unconscious brevity of the relations between mother and daughter, would have made Lavinia laugh; but at the present moment a horrible suspicion freezes all tendency to mirth.

“Féodorovna!”—looking round in bewildered apprehension. “Why, where is she?”

The visitor is so obviously in no hurry to answer, that Miss Carew’s question repeats itself with an imperativeness that drags out the reluctant and frightened response.

“Well, my dear, you must not scold me, as I see you are inclined; or, if you do, it will be grossly unjust. You know what she is when she takes a thing into her head, and I am bound to say she does feel, and has felt, very keen sympathy for him in his trouble; indeed, we all have.”

She pauses, weakly hoping for some expression of thanks or reassurance; but Lavinia only stares at her with confusing sternness in her aghast blue eyes.

“And when she heard that the things had come back—poor Bill’s things—I believe the news came through the servants—nothing would serve her but that she must see Sir George, to tell him how much she felt for him. You know that she has that curious personal feeling about the whole of our Army in South Africa, as if it belonged to her in a way, and she always rated Bill very highly.”

Again the mother pauses, with a hope—but a fainter one than its predecessor—that this tribute to the dead may have a mollifying effect upon her inconveniently silent and staring young hostess.

“And where is she now?” asks Lavinia, with an accent that makes Mrs. Prince regret her silence.

“She said she would go to Sir George’s room to wait for him; that she was sure he would prefer that there should be no witnesses to their meeting. Oh, do not go after her!”—with a despairing clutch at Lavinia’s raiment as the latter makes a precipitate movement doorwards. “It is too late now; and, after all, Sir George, poor man, is very well able to take care of himself. And if he gives her a real good snub, why, so much the better.”

Lavinia pauses, arrested by the something of sound sense that leavens her companion’s flurried speech, and with a dawning pity in her relenting eyes.

“And there is something I want so much to say to you,” goes on the poor woman, hanging on to the skirt of her advantage, though wisely relinquishing her material grasp. “You know that I always bring my troubles to you, and I am in a fresh one now.”

“About her, of course?”

“Oh yes; about her, of course. I suppose that but for her things would have gone almost too smoothly with Mr. Prince and me. I suppose that the Almighty sees we need her to prevent us getting too—too uppish.”

The adjective is scarcely on the level of refinement held before her own eyes by the poor lady, but the tear that moistens condones it.

“What is it now?” asks the girl, with a resolute banishing to the back of her mind of the intense annoyance and apprehension caused by the odious intrusion of Féodorovna, and sitting down beside her guest with resolute and patient sympathy.

“I never look at her letters,” says Mrs. Prince, lowering her voice, which has taken on a tone of eager relief. “You know I do not; but she had left it with her others for the butler to stamp. He had it in his hand; it was at the top. I could not help seeing the address.”

“Not again? She has not been writing to General —— again?”

The expression of tragic repulsion in her young companion’s face seems to get upon Mrs. Prince’s nerves.

“How you do jump down one’s throat!” she cries peevishly. “No, of course she has not!”

“It was stupid of me to suggest it! To whom, then?”

“I really could not help seeing,” continues the elder woman, mollified and apologetic for her own action. “It was no case of prying, but I could not help reading, ‘Surgeon-General Jameson, Army Medical Department, Victoria Street, Westminster.’”

There is a pregnant pause.

“Surgeon-General Jameson!” repeats Lavinia. “He is Director-General of the R.A.M.C., isn’t he?”

The plumed toque that crowns Mrs. Prince’s expensive toupet gives a dejected dip of assent.

“Does she know him?”

“Not from Adam. But that would never stop her writing to any one; no, nor speaking to them either!”

Another pause.

“She wants to go out to South Africa as a nurse, I suppose?”

Again the tall ostrich feathers wave acquiescence. This time a spoken elucidation follows.

“That is it, as far as we—her father and I—can make out.”

Lavinia draws a little nearer, and lays her hand upon the arm of her visitor’s chair, while her chin lifts itself, and then falls again in a movement of hopeless pity.

“I am very sorry indeed for you both! How does Mr. Prince take it? What does he say?”

“You can never get much out of Mr. Prince,” replies his wife, in a tone whose complaint is streaked with admiration for a verbal continence of which she feels herself quite incapable. “But he did say, in his dry way, that he should be sorry to be one of Féo’s patients.”

Lavinia smiles, but cautiously; and then, illuminated by a sudden suggestion of valid consolation, speaks.

“You may make your mind easy, they will never accept her! She has none of the qualifications.”

A slightly soothed expression comes over the visitor’s perturbed features.

“It seems an odd thing to say of one’s own child, but I must say that there is no one that I would not rather have about me than Féo when I am at all poorly; and Mr. Prince is just the same.”

“Then do not waste time in worrying!” says Lavinia, with bracing cheerfulness; herself encouraged by the success of her mode of reassurance. “She will infallibly get a polite No for her answer, and you will never hear anything more about it.”

“You are wrong there,” replies Féodorovna’s mother with rueful shrewdness. “She is sure to tell us about it. Féo has an odd way of boasting about things that other people would be ashamed of!”

“It is impossible to contradict this assertion, and with a passing wonder and pity for a love cursed with such good eyes,” Lavinia repeats, in despair of finding anything better, her already-tried-and-found-wanting anodyne.

“Well, at all events, nothing will come of it.”

“And what will her next move be? I ask you that! What will her next move be?” inquires Mrs. Prince, in dreary triumph.

The pride of having proposed an insoluble riddle kindles a funeral torch in each eye. The question, as the too clear-sighted parent had expected, stumps Miss Carew, nor can any of the hysterical indelicacies which pass through her mind as likely to illustrate Féodorovna’s future course be decently dressed enough to be presented as hypotheses to Féodorovna’s mother.

It is the occasion of her dilemma who cuts it short by an entrance a good deal less aspen-like and deliberate than is usual in her case. It is, of course, an extravagant trick of fancy, but the impression is at once conveyed to at least one of the occupants of the drawing-room that Féodorovna has been kicked into the room. The pink umbrage in her silly face confirms the idea of some propelling force behind her, as does the excessive civility of the attendant Rupert. That the deferential empressement of his manner is the cover for an inclination towards ungovernable, vexed laughter is suspected only by Lavinia. That some catastrophe has attended the visit of the young paraclete is obvious to the meanest observer; but it is not until after the Princes’ carriage has crunched and flashed away with Féodorovna reclining in swelling silence upon the cushion, and her mother casting glances of frightened curiosity at her infuriated profile that the details of the disaster reach Lavinia’s ears. Not immediately even then, since before she can besiege her cousin with terrified questions, he is summoned to his father; and it is fully half an hour before he rejoins her in the schoolroom. She has to wait again even then; since at her first allusion to the subject, he is seized with such fou rire that he has to roll on his face on the old sofa before he can master the shoulder-shaking convulsions of his uncomfortable mirth.

“What happened?” cries the girl, standing over her fiancé’s prostrate figure in a fever of apprehension. “Oh, do get up, and stop laughing! What is there to laugh at? You are too stupid to live!”

“I shall not live much longer!” replies the young man, rearing himself up into a sitting posture, and presenting a subdued but suddenly grave surface to his censor; “not if we are often to have such treats as this. I do not know why I laugh, for I never felt less hilarious in my life.”

“You are as hysterical as a woman!” says Lavinia, with a frown.

“It is not my fault, though it is my eternal regret that I am not one!” he retorts.

It is lucky for him that the fever of her preoccupation prevents Lavinia from hearing this monstrous aspiration.

“Did he do anything violent?” she asks in a voice made low by dread.

“He kept his hands off her, if you mean that!” replies Rupert, showing symptoms of a tendency to relapse into his convulsion of laughter; “but only just! If I had not appeared in the nick of time, I would not have answered for her life!” Then, as Lavinia keeps looking at him in smileless tragedy, he goes on, “I was hanging about, waiting for him, as you know he had told me that he should have something to say to me—by-the-by, he has just been saying it, but that is another story—when I heard raised voices, or rather a raised voice. You know that long, dull roar of his that always makes me call on the hills to cover me!”

“Well?”

“I felt that there was no time to be lost, so I hurried in—only just in time! I saw in his eye that the next moment he would have her by the shoulders, and be thrusting her through the door!”

“But he did not! you stopped him?”—breathlessly.

“Yes, thank the Lord!” He pauses, and his lips begin to twitch with nervous mirth. “I know what you thought: she was shot into the dining-room like a projectile; but it was not as bad as that. Only moral force propelled her.”

Lavinia brings her hands together with a sort of clap, but relief mingles with the indignant animosity of her tone.

“What had she said? What had she done?”

Rupert shrugs his shoulders. “What is our little Féo not capable of saying and doing?” he asks sarcastically. “But you must remember I came in only for the bouquet of the fireworks.” After a pause, in a key of real feeling, with no tinge of satire, “Poor old fellow! I would have done a good deal to save him from it. I think the last straw was when she began to finger the things—Bill’s poor little possessions—and to imply, if she did not exactly assert, that his death was quite as great a blow to her as to the old man.”

“And when we remember what Bill’s estimate of her was!” cries Lavinia, reddening with indignation. “Oh, if we could but tell her of his saying that he should have to put barbed wire round himself whenever he went outside the gate to prevent her getting at him!”

They both laugh—the little rueful laugh with which the jests of the departed are recalled.

“After they had gone,” pursues Rupert, “when he sent for me, I found him still in a terrible state. I have never seen him in such an ungovernable fury. Not with me—to me he was like a pet lamb.”

Again they both laugh a little grimly, conscious of the extreme audacity of the comparison.

“You will not believe it,” says Rupert, half humorously, and yet with a quiver of emotion on his sensitive face, “but he actually thanked me for coming to his rescue! Me, if you please, moi qui vous parle!”

“‘It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good,’” replies Lavinia, cheerfully, but with conscious effort, and with the feeling, often before experienced, that a good deal of physical fatigue attends living over the crater of Etna.”

“He calmed down after a while. I spent all the bad language I was master of, and wished it had been more, upon the whole Prince clan; and that did him good, so much so that he was able by-and-by to talk of something else.”

“Of what else?” The question is an idle one, and Miss Carew is conscious of it.

So is Rupert. “I expect that you know,” he answers quietly.

Never until to-day has Lavinia felt gêne in the presence of her lifelong playfellow and comrade, and that she should do so now strikes her as so monstrous an anomaly that it must be treated drastically.

“About our marriage, do you mean?” she inquires, taking the bull by the horns, and looking him full in the face.

“Yes.”

“H’m!” Struggle as she may, her lips can produce nothing more forthcoming than the monosyllable.

“He asked me whether the engagement still existed?”

“So he did me.”

“Whether we had any intention of fulfilling it?”

“Ditto!”

“Whether it was essential to our happiness?”

“Essential to our happiness,” repeats she, as if it were a dictation lesson.

“He said that we were all that he had left in the world.”

Lavinia nods, speech seeming difficult. Is Rupert going to recapitulate, in his father’s unsparing Saxon, the reason for that father’s anxiety to see them wed? She waits in rosy dread. It is a moment or two before relief comes.

“He ended by adjuring me not to marry you in order to please him. I think I was able to reassure him as to that not being my primary inducement.”

They know each other far too well for her not to be instantly aware of an alteration in his voice—not to have an instant’s flashed certainty that the playmate, the comrade, the brother-cousin, is gone, and that the lover stands full-fledged in their stead before her. Whether the conviction causes her pain or pleasure, she could not tell you. She only feels as she has done in the morning, but a thousandfold more so, that the situation is overpoweringly odd.

“Well!” she says slowly, afraid to look away from him, lest she should never again be able to lift her stupidly rebellious eyes to his.

“I suppose it was bound to come, some time or other?”

It is not an effusive mode of acquiescence.

“Have you nothing more to say about it?”

If she had had any doubt as to the final banishment out of her life of the boy-comrade, the method of this question, and a certain reproachful enterprise divined in the asker’s eye, would have banished it.

“What more is there to say?” she returns in troubled haste. “What more than we have been saying all our lives, in a way?” Then, with a sudden impulsive throwing herself on his judgment and mercy, “I suppose we do feel all right, don’t we?”

CHAPTER VI

“I love nothing so well as you!
Is not that strange?”

Rupert is “all right.” Of that there can be no question. It turns out now that he has been “all right” for as long as he can remember. The discovery that it is only his delicacy and self-command that have hitherto hindered his manifesting his “all-rightness” practically, fills Lavinia with such admiring gratitude as makes her almost certain that she is “all right” too. She has no female friend with whom to compare notes, nor would she do so if she had, her one intimate, Mrs. Darcy, being very far from belonging to that not innumerous band of matrons who enjoy revealing the secrets of their own prison-house to a selected few. Lavinia has to work out her problem for herself. Not betrothed only now, but going to be married, with a tray of engagement-rings crawling down from London by the South-Eastern for approval, with a disinterring by Sir George, from his dead wife’s presses, of wedding laces——

Lavinia wishes that Rupert did not take quite so great an interest in the latter, and did not know quite so much about Point de Venise, Point de Flanders, and Point d’Angleterre—; with interesting and illumining comparison of past feelings, and with a respectable modicum of kisses. If the candour of her nature, and the knowledge of how perfectly useless it is to lie to a person who knows her so through and throughly as Rupert, compel her to acknowledge that these latter do not cause her any particular elation, she is able truly to answer him that she does not dislike them so much as to forbid a frugal repetition. Once or twice, touched and stung to generosity by his unselfish refraining from even the dole of allowed endearments, she takes the initiative; and at other times consoles him for her want of fervour by assuring him, with emphatic words, and the crystal clearness of her kind, cold eyes, that she is “not that sort.”

She is wondering to-day whether, when she left him five minutes ago at the lych-gate, he did not look as if he were getting a little tired of the explanation. It ought to be thoroughly satisfactory to him, for, after all, you can’t give more than you have; but she has never been in the habit of crossing or discontenting her men, and to be found not up to the expected mark in the matter of endearment vexes her as much as to be convicted of neglecting their buttons or slurring their dinner.

It is a week since Miss Carew has paid the visit, usually a daily or bi-daily one, to the Rectory. The unwonted absence for three days from her monopolizing husband and boisterous brood of Mrs. Darcy, partly accounts for this omission; and not even to herself does Lavinia own that she is in a less hurry than usual to greet her returned ally. Rupert is never in any great hurry to see Susan, and has gracefully declined to accompany his fiancée on her present errand of announcement.

“You shall tell me about it when you come back. I shall like to hear how her face lights up when she hears the good news,” he says with a half-sarcastic smile; then, seeing the girl wince a little at this hitting of a nail all too soundly on the head, he laughs it off pleasantly. “Tell her, as you told me, that it was ‘bound to come.’”

“Mine was certainly a very original way of accepting an offer,” replies Lavinia, slightly flushing. Never since the decisive day has she felt quite at her ease with Rupert, and so goes off laughing too; but the laugh disappears as soon as she is out of sight.

The day is full of hard spring light, which shows up, among other revelations, the emptiness of the Rectory drawing-room, with its usual refined litter of needlework and open books, and the figures of the children in the chicken-yard, whither a spirit of search and inquiry leads Lavinia’s feet. From her friend’s young family she hears that their mother has gone up the village to bandage a cut hand; but it is with difficulty that this information is extracted from them, so vociferously preoccupied are they with their own affairs. Gloriously happy, covered with mud, hatless, dishevelled, blissful, speaking all at once, they reveal to her, in shouting unison, the solid grounds for their elation—nurse gone off at a moment’s notice, governess’s return indefinitely postponed, mother busy, father absent!

“Oh, Lavy, we are having such a good time, particularly at tea! Serena has tea with us.”

Serena’s age is two years, and detractors say that her Christian name must have been bestowed with an ironical intention.

“And no doubt you spoil her very much?”

“No,” thoughtfully; “we do not spoil her. We only try to make her as naughty as we can.”

Their visitor smiles at the nice distinction, and weakly shrinking from pointing out the immorality of the course of conduct described, judiciously changes the topic by asking why the flag on the henhouse is flying half-mast high.

She is at once informed by grave voices that there has been a court-martial, and that General Forestier Walker is to have his neck wrung for breaking his eggs.

“General —— was the presiding judge,” says Phillida, pointing to a peaceable-looking white Dorking matron, making the gravel fly behind her with the backward sweep of her scratching feet. “He is Féo Prince’s general. She told me, last time she was here, that she had asked him to marry her.”

“As if he would be thinking of such tommy-rot as marriage now!” cries Chris, more struck, apparently, by the ill-timing of the overture than its indelicacy.

“Miss Brine was shocked,” says Phillida, thoughtfully. “She said that it was putting the cart before the horse, and that Féo ought to have waited for him to speak first.”

“But if he wouldn’t?” cries little Daphne, swinging Lavinia’s hand, which she has annexed, to and fro, and staring up with the puzzled violet of her round eyes.

They all laugh.

“That is unanswerable,” says Lavinia, blushing even before the children at this new instance of Féodorovna’s monstrous candour; adding, in a not particularly elate key, as her glance takes in a recherché object nearing their little group across the white grass of the still wintry glebe, “Why, here is Féo!”

“They told me your mother was out,” says the visitor, as if this were a sufficient explanation for her appearance.

The children greet her with the hospitable warmth which nature and training dictate towards any guest, qua guest, but without the exuberant, confident joy with which they always receive Lavinia. However, they repeat the tale of General Forestier Walker’s crime and fate, and add, as peculiarly interesting to their hearer, the name of the presiding judge.

Féodorovna listens with an absence of mind and eye which she does not attempt to disguise.

“I was coming on to you,” she says, addressing Lavinia, and turning away with an expression of boredom from her polite little hosts. “I should have asked you to give me luncheon, but since I find you here, it does as well.”

Neither in voice nor manner is there any trace of the resentment that Miss Carew is guiltily feeling. Féodorovna never resents. Too well with herself often to perceive a slight, and too self-centred to remember it, Lavinia realizes with relief that all recollection of the peril Miss Prince’s shoulders had run at Sir George’s all-but ejecting hands has slidden from that fair creature’s memory.

“I went to London yesterday,” she says, turning her back upon the cocks and hens, and their young patrons, as unworthy to be her audience.

“We saw you drive past,” says Phillida, innocently; “you went by the 11.30 train. We were not looking out for you; we were watching Lavy and Rupert. From mother’s bedroom we can see right into their garden.”

“Can you, indeed?” interposes the voice of Mrs. Darcy, who has come upon the little group unperceived by the short cut from the village. “I am glad you told me, as I shall try for the future to find some better employment for your eyes.”

Her voice is quite quiet, and not in the least raised; but the children know that she is annoyed, and so does Lavinia, who, with a flushed cheek and an inward spasm of misgiving, is trying to reconstruct her own and her fiancé’s reciprocal attitudes at eleven o’clock of yesterday’s forenoon. To them all for once Féodorovna’s unconscious and preoccupied egotism brings relief.

“I was telling Lavinia that I went to London yesterday.”

“For the day? to buy chiffons? I suppose I shall have to reclothe this ragged regiment soon,” looking round ruefully at her still somewhat abashed offspring, and avoiding her friend’s eye.

“Chiffons! oh no!” a little contemptuously. “I went up to see the Director-General of the Army Medical Department.”

“Indeed! Is he a friend of yours?”

“Oh dear no; I went on business.”

“To offer your services as a nurse, I suppose?” replies Mrs. Darcy, as if suggesting an amusing absurdity, and unable to refrain from stealing a look at Lavinia, while her own face sparkles with mischievous mirth.

“Exactly,” replies Féodorovna, with her baffling literalness. “I sent up my name, and he saw me almost at once.” She pauses.

“And you made your proposal?”

“Yes.”

“He accepted it?”

Féodorovna’s pale eyes have been meeting those of her interlocutor. They continue to do so, without any shade of confusion or mortification.

“No; he refused it point-blank.”

As any possible comment must take the form of an admiring ejaculation addressed to the medical officer in question, Susan bites her lips to ensure her own silence.

“He put me through a perfect catechism of questions,” continues Miss Prince, with perfect equanimity. “Had I had any professional training?”

“You haven’t, have you?”

“I answered that I hadn’t, but that I could very easily acquire some.”

“And he?”

“Oh, he smiled, and asked me if I had any natural aptitude.”

“Yes?”

“I answered, ‘None, but that no doubt it would come.’”

The corners of Mrs. Darcy’s mouth have got so entirely beyond her control that she can only turn one imploring appeal for help to Lavinia, who advances to the rescue.

“And then?” she asks, with praiseworthy gravity.

“Oh, then he shrugged his shoulders and answered drily, ‘I have had three thousand applications from ladies, from duchesses to washerwomen, which I have been obliged to refuse. I am afraid that I must make yours the three thousand and first;’ and so he bowed me out.”

She ends, her pink self-complacency unimpaired, and both the other women look at her in a wonder not untouched with admiration. Neither of them succeeds in making vocal any expression of regret.

“It is one more instance of the red tapeism that reigns in every department of our military administration,” says Miss Prince, not missing the lacking sympathy, and with an accent of melancholy superiority. “Next time I shall know better than to ask for any official recognition.” After a slight pause, “It is a bitter disappointment, of course; more acute to me naturally than it could be to any one else.”

With this not obscure intimation of the end she had had in view in tendering her services to the troops in South Africa, Féodorovna departs. The two depositaries of her confidence look at each other with faces of unbridled mirth as soon as her long back is turned; but there is more of humorous geniality and less of impartial disgust in the matron’s than the maid’s.

“Poor thing! I wonder what it feels like to be so great a fool as that!” said Mrs. Darcy, with a sort of lenient curiosity. “I declare that I should like to try for the hundredth part of a minute!”

“She meant to nurse him!” ejaculates Lavinia, with a pregnant smile. “Poor man! If he knew what he had escaped!”

“And now, what next?” asks Susan, spreading out her delicate, hardworking hands, and shaking her head.

“‘What next?’ as the tadpole said when his tail dropped off!” cries Daphne, pertly—a remark which, calling their parent’s attention to the edified and cock-eared interest of her innocents, leads to their instant dispersal and flight over the place towards the pre-luncheon wash-pot, which they hoped to have indefinitely postponed. When they are out of sight and earshot.

“You came to tell me something?” Mrs. Darcy says, with an entire change of tone. “Though I am not in the habit of watching Rupert and Lavy from an upper chamber, like those graceless brats, I know what it is.”

“Then I may spare myself the trouble of telling you,” answers the girl, in a key of constrained and artificial playfulness.

Her friend’s kind eyes, worn, yet with the look of a deep, serene contentment underlying their surface fatigue, look at her with a compassionate interrogation.

“Are you doing it to please yourself?” she asks in a low voice, yet not hesitatingly.

“Whom else?”

“It is a motive that has so very seldom guided you,” replies the elder woman, with an enveloping look of motherly solicitude. “And in this kind of case it is the only one that is of the least value; it is the one occasion in life in which it is one’s bounden duty to be absolutely selfish!”

“Were you absolutely selfish when you married Mr. Darcy?” asks Lavinia, carrying the war into the enemy’s quarters, and with an apposite recalling of all the sacrifices that her friend—once a very smart London girl—is rumoured by the neighbourhood to have been called upon to make by her choice.

“Absolutely,” replies Susan, with the stoutness of the most unmistakable truth. “Everybody belonging to me cried, and said they could not see what I saw in Richard; but I saw what I saw in him, and I knew that that was all that mattered.”

“Perhaps I see what I see in Rupert,” replies Lavinia, plucking up her spirit, and detecting a joint in her companion’s harness, though her own voice is not assured.

“If you do, of course it is all right,” rejoins the other, unelastically.

Lavinia’s head would like to droop, so oppressive is the sense of the cold doubt infiltrated into her own acquiescent serenity; but she forces it to hold itself up against its will.

“He is quite aware that we have your disapproval,” she says with a dignity that is native to her; “so much so that he advised me to tell you it was ‘bound to come.’”

Mrs. Darcy looks at her sadly; but without either apology or contradiction.

“That is just what I do not feel.”

“You have always done him scant justice!” cries the girl, stung into hotter partisanship by the chill whisper of a traitor within her own camp. “After all, it is I, not you, that am to marry him.”

“Yes, it is you;” in downcast assent.

“When you have praised him it has always been in some damning way,” pursues Lavinia, breaking more and more into flame—“saying what a good judge of lace he is, and how well he mended your Bow teapot!”

“So he did.”

“How would you like it, if, when some one asked my opinion of Mr. Darcy as a parish priest, I answered that he did not make bad cabbage-nets?”

Susan smiles reluctantly. “Do not let us quarrel,” she says. “As long as I supply you with eggs, it would be inconvenient to you; and, as for me, why, I might break another teapot!”

* * * * *

“Well, how did she take it?” asks Rupert, who has apparently been waiting the whole time of his betrothed’s absence in contented smoking and musing under the immemorial yews of the churchyard.

“She asked me whether I am marrying you to please myself?” replies Lavinia, lifting eyes in which he notes a trouble that had not clouded them when he parted from her, in an almost doglike wistfulness of appeal to his, “Am I, Rupert?”

“Our friends ask us very indelicate questions,” he answers, turning away.

* * * * *

A day or two later Lavinia has a casual meeting with Mrs. Prince in the road.

“Whom do you think she has been writing to now?” asks Féodorovna’s parent, leaning over the side of the victoria, and whispering loudly. “The Officer Commanding Cavalry Depôt, Canterbury! What can she have to say to him?”

CHAPTER VII

Spring has come; even according to the Almanack, which is later in its sober estimate of the seasons, and also truer than the sanguine poets. But as to April 23 there can be no difference of opinion between prose and verse. To the curious observer of the English spring it may seem every year harder to decide whether the frank brutality of March, the crocodile tears of April, or the infinite treacheries of May, are the more trying to the strained planks of the British constitution? Through this course of tests, unescapable, except by flight, the village of Campion is passing like its neighbours. But in the Egypt of the east wind, there has been revealed, on this 23rd of April, the existence of a Goshen.

“‘Don’t cast a clout till May is out!’” says Lavinia, taking off her jacket and giving it to Rupert to carry. “It is impossible to act up to that axiom to-day!”

The action, in its matter-of-factness, might be taken to prove that Lavinia is still in that brief and tantalizing portion of a woman’s existence, when tyrant man is a willing packhorse; though, in Rupert’s case, the indication is worth nothing. In point of fact, they are still unwed. This is due to no jibbing on the part of Miss Carew. The engagement-ring has not crawled back to London by a South-Eastern express, the yellowed Mechlin has not returned to its camphored privacy, the cousins are still “going to be married.” The delay has come from the person whose feverish eagerness had at first seemed to brook no moment of waiting.

“Of course, I can’t expect any one else to share the feeling,” Sir George has said to the bridegroom-elect, when he has innocently alluded to the marriage as an event in the near future; “but I cannot help thinking there is some indecency in feasting and merry-making when the eldest son of the house is scarcely cold in his grave!”

Rupert is used to the sharp turnings and breakneck hills of his father’s utterances, but at this he cannot help looking a little blank.

“I thought it was your wish, sir,” he answers.

“If it is only because I wish it that you are marrying Lavinia, as I have already told you, I think the whole thing had better be off!” retorts Sir George, with another surprising caper of the temper; adding, in a voice of wounded protest that thinks it is temperate and patient, “I ask for a decent delay between an open grave and a carouse, and you fly off at once into a passion!”

“Bid the Rectory light its bonfire—the bonfire it is getting ready against the Relief of Mafeking!” says Rupert, returning to the drawing-room, where Lavinia is sitting arduously working out a new patience—it is after dinner. “Tell Susan to deck her countenance in its brightest smiles. The wedding is indefinitely postponed!”

“Is it?” she answers, looking up from her cards. “You do not say so!” Then, afraid that the colourless ejaculation is not quite up to the mark, she adds, in a tone where his too-sharp ear detects rather the wish to cheer him than any personal annoyance. “But it will be on again to-morrow. He is quite as keen about it as you—or I.”

Once again that too officious ear tells him of the almost imperceptible hiatus that parts the pronouns.

“Come and help me!” she adds, divining in him some little jarred sensitiveness; and, resting the tranquil friendliness of her eyes upon him, while her hand pulls him down to a seat beside her. “I can’t recollect whether this is red upon black, or if one follows suit.”

That was weeks ago, and Lavinia’s prophecy is fulfilled. On this 23rd of April she has the knowledge that only five weeks of maidenhood remain to her. No sooner had Sir George paid his ill-tempered tribute to his dead son, and frightened and snubbed the survivor into a hurt and passive silence upon the subject nearest to both their hearts, than the increased irritability of his temper and the misery of his look tells his two souffre-douleurs that he has repented of that delay in carrying out his passionately desired project, for which he has to thank himself.

“One more such evening, and I shall think that there is a good deal to be said in praise of parricide!” says Rupert, in groaning relief after the strain of an evening of more than ordinary gibing insult on the one side, and hardly maintained self-restraint on the other. “Of course I know what it means. Poor old chap! He would give the world to climb down; and he would die sooner than do it!”

The young man’s face is pale, and the tears of intolerably wounded feeling glisten in his eyes.

Lavinia listens in parted-lipped compassion, as so often before, for both the sinner and the sinned against.

“I will be his ladder,” she says, in a key of quiet resolve, and so leaves the room.

Half an hour later she returns. Her large eyelids are reddened, and her mouth twitching, but she is determinedly composed.

“It is all right,” she says cheerfully. “We are to be married on May the 28th; and he cried and begged our pardon.”

Thus it comes to pass that on this 23rd of April Lavinia is pacing in almost imminent bridehood—for what are five short weeks?—beside her future husband along a rustic road. They are taking a sweethearts’ ramble, like any other lad and lass. About them the charming garden of England swells and dips in gentle hills and long valleys and seaward-stretching plain. They have mounted the rise behind their house, and looked from the plough-land at the top towards the distant Sussex range. The cherry orchards still hold back their snowy secret, but the plum-blossom is whitening the brown trees; and he would be over-greedy for colour whom the dazzling grass and the generous larches and the sketchily greening thicket did not satisfy.

Their path, leading down from the hill-crest, has brought them to an old-world farm, where with its team of four strong horses, that to a London eye, used to overloading and strain, would look so pleasantly up to their work, a waggon stands by a stack, from whose top men are pitching straw into it. On the grass in front of the house sheep crop and stare with their stupid wide-apart eyes, and hen-coops stand—lambs and chickens in friendliest relation. A lamb has two little yellow balls of fluff perched confidently, one on its woolly back, one on its forehead.

Lavinia has seen it all a thousand times before; but to-day a new sense of turtle-winged content and thankful acquiescence in her destiny seems settling down upon her heart. The feeling translates itself into words.

“It is very nice to have you back.”

“It is very nice to be back,” replies her companion, with less than his usual point.

Rupert has been in London, and returned only last night. His visits to the metropolis have to be conducted with caution and veiled in mystery, despite the innocency of his objects, owing to the profound contempt felt and—it need scarcely be added—expressed by his father for his tastes and occupation. Rupert has half a dozen graceful talents, which, if the roof of the house is not to be blown off, must be hidden under a pile of bushels. Sir George must be kept in ignorance that his last surviving son stoops to singing in a Madrigal Society, draws clever caricatures of Tory statesmen for a weekly, and writes brilliant little leaders for a new Liberal daily paper.

When he has been away Lavinia has always missed her cousin. This last time has seemed more irksome than any previous one; partly because more has happened than is usually the case in the week of his absence; partly, as she tells herself with heartfelt congratulation, because she must have grown much fonder of him. There can be no question now as to its being “to please herself” that she is marrying Rupert, since she plainly cannot do without him.

They have left the farm behind them, and, dipping down into a valley-let, are passing through a hop-garden, where the eye travels through the long vista of bare poles to little blue air-pictures at the end. From a chestnut-brake near by, a nightingale, mimicked by a throstle, is whit-whitting and glug-glugging. They pause to listen.

“I wish it was over,” says Lavinia, presently, continuing a theme which Philomel had interrupted. “I dread it unaccountably; no, not unaccountably! I suppose ’twould be odd if I did not?”

“I can’t help grudging him to Féodorovna!” answers Rupert, rather sadly. “We have so much more right to him.”

“But we could not have made him a quarter as comfortable,” rejoins Lavinia. “You know how elaborate her arrangements were; and since Mr. Prince put his foot down about allowing her to have only two at a time, Captain Binning has had the benefit of almost all her attentions.”

“A doubtful good that!”

“She does not think much of the other one!” pursues Lavinia, half-laughing. “He has had a bit of his nose and half his upper lip shot away, poor fellow! but, unfortunately, it was not in action, but while he was sitting at luncheon on the veldt.”

“And Binning! Was my father much upset by the interview?”

Lavinia sighs. “At first I thought he was going to have one of those dreadful dry agonies such as he used to have at first; but, thank God, that passed off, and then he could talk a little—tell me a little about him.” With an afterthought, “He was quite nice in what he said.”

“You mean that he did not institute any comparisons!” says the young man, reading between the lines, and with that unfortunate plate-glass view into his companion’s thoughts which she often inwardly deplores.

“None. I had much rather have put off my visit a little later,” continues Miss Carew—they are strolling on again—“until the poor man had recovered his strength a little. His wound is not half healed yet, and he was much exhausted by his journey; but Féodorovna insists on my going to-day; she says that he has expressed a great wish to see me, and that, as far as her power to gratify him goes, he shall not be balked in his slightest whim.”

Rupert lifts his eyebrows. “Already, my Féo?” he says, in sarcastic apostrophe of the absent fair one.

Lavinia has indulged herself in a light mimicry of Miss Prince’s tones, which always amuses them both; and they walk on mutually pleased.

“I shall just have time to run into the Rectory before I go!” says Lavinia, an hour later, when their pleasantly sauntering steps have brought them home again.

A very slight cloud passes over the young man’s face.

“I have never yet known an action of yours which was not prefaced by that run,” he says. “If you were to be told that the last trump was to sound in ten minutes, you would answer, ‘I shall just have time to run into the Rectory first.’”

“Perhaps I should!” answers she, aggravatingly, walking off and kissing her hand.

It is in compliance with an offer from the younger Darcys to exhibit the newly hatched turkeys, that Lavinia is running counter to her lover’s prejudice. She finds them on the banks of the “Tugela River,” a somewhat duck-muddied ditch which runs under the hedge by the henhouse, and is at once led to the pen where Daphne is feeding the turkey-chicks with a mess in which chopped onion—of which, in its bulb state, she mostly carries a specimen in her pocket as a precautionary measure—predominates.

“Clergyman has brought out three more than he did last year,” says the child, triumphantly, looking up from the pipkin in her lap.

“Clergyman!” repeats Miss Carew, with a cavilling glance at the large and motherly Brahma hen under the coop. “I thought all your hens were soldiers.”

“So they are,” answers Phillida, matter-of-factly. “Clergyman is an Army chaplain.”

“Do you perceive that Daphne has become a walking onion?” asks Mrs. Darcy, joining the party, and holding her pocket-handkerchief to her nose. “The smell goes all through the house! It wakes us at night.”

She says it with humorous resignation, and they both laugh. The situation between the friends is no longer strained. Susan is almost quite silent; and Lavinia is almost quite confident on the subject upon which they know that they differ so widely. Like a generous opponent, Mrs. Darcy has thrown herself heart and soul into the clothes—not many—and the rearrangements of the house—not many either—which the approaching wedding entails.

“There never could be a marriage which made so little change in anybody’s life.”

Lavinia has said, in a tone of self-congratulation, “The thing that hath been shall be!” and Susan has answered inoffensively in appearance, “Yes?”

But the “Yes” is interrogative, and its monosyllable brings to the girl the flashed realization that what she has said is absolutely false; that though she will live within the same walls, take the same walks, look on the same windmills and oast-houses, yet the change to herself will be enormous, irrevocable, unescapable. But that it will be wholly for the better, she has so nearly convinced herself, that it is with a very stout look and high courage, that she now says—

“Rupert came back last night. I was so thankful. We had so much to talk about.”

“You have been telling him of the event of the neighbourhood, I suppose?” answers Mrs. Darcy; her eye fixed rather intentionally upon her two elder daughters, who between them are lugging a large turkey-hen, who is not intended to sit, from a primrosy nest improvised in the Tugela bank—“the opening of Féodorovna Prince’s hospital?”

“I am on my way to visit one of the patients,” replies Lavinia. “That reminds me I must be off! I wish it was over! I wonder why I dread it so much?”

“It is never pleasant to have one’s old cuts torn open,” answers Mrs. Darcy.

The explanation is rational, even to obviousness; but it is not satisfactory. Painful and tear-producing as the scene between herself and the man who was the innocent cause of poor Bill’s death must naturally be, the feeling that had existed between herself and her cousin, though warm and true, had not been of a nature to account for the state of trepidating dread with which she approaches the interview. And yet is it all dread? Is not there, too, a strong element of excited anticipation, that has no kinship with pain? Is it the spring, that incorrigible merry-maker, that is answerable for her elation? Is it the determined budding of everything about her, that makes her feel as if she were budding too? Is it because Rupert has returned? For a quarter of a mile she tries to persuade herself that this is the reason; but the negative that is given in her for intérieur is so emphatic and persistent that she has to accept it.

Passing the edge of the King’s Wood, she steps aside to pick one or two of the myriad wood anemones that, vanquishing the piled dead leaves more successfully than the primroses, floor it with their pensive poetic heads and graceful green collars. Rupert is always pleased when she presents him with a posy. They would be fresher if she waited to gather them on her way back; but some obscure instinct, which she does not in the least recognize, hints darkly to her that on her way back she will perhaps not remember to pay the little attention. As she looks at the drooped heads blushing pinkily in her hand, she tries idly to picture what her impression of Rupert would be were it he whom she were about to see for the first time. She tries to picture his head lying in patient pain upon a pillow—yes; so far imagination obeys easily: Rupert would be patient enough; he has had a good apprenticeship, poor fellow!—his cheeks hollowed with suffering—yes; fancy runs along docilely enough still: they are not too plump already; no one can accuse Rupert of superfluous flesh—his chest swathed in bandages, where the Mauser bullet took its clean course through his body, so closely shaving his heart. No!

She has gone too far! Imagination strikes work; confessing its utter inability to represent her future husband as prostrated by a wound received in battle! She walks on, quickening her pace, and vaguely irritated with herself. It was a senseless and mischievous exercise of fancy, and she had no business to indulge in it.

CHAPTER VIII

The spring—or is it the spring?—has been playing its genial game with Mrs. Prince, too, as is evident by the restored importance of her gait, as she sweeps out of the orchid-house, whither Lavinia has pursued her, and by the smoothed and satisfied visage—changed, indeed, from that which she had worn two months ago in announcing her daughter’s mysterious correspondence with the Cavalry Officer Commanding at Canterbury—which she turns towards her visitor.

“Did you walk,” she asks, “this warm day? Sir George wanted the horses, I suppose? It must be awkward having only one pair. If I had known, I should have been so delighted to send for you!”

There is sincere welcome in words and voice, coupled with that touch of patronage which—as employed towards a member of the oldest and somewhile most important family of the countryside, Mrs. Prince and Lavinia have—before the former’s parental woes had made both forget it—found respectively so agreeable and so galling.

“Thanks, but I like walking.”

“Féo will be here in a minute. I told them to let her know the moment you arrived. She is with her patients! She is never anywhere else now! Thrown up all her engagements; devotes herself wholly to them.”

It is clear that, in pre-Candle days, Mrs. Prince had said “’olly;” but the victory over the early infirmity is so complete as to be marked only by an intensity of aspirate unknown to those whose h’s have grown up with them.

“It is certainly the most unobjectionable craze she has ever had!” replies Lavinia, whose withers are still slightly wrung by the allusion to her horselessness; and who is reflecting how much less under-bred a thing adversity is than prosperity.

“When I say ‘patients,’” pursues Mrs. Prince, not in the least offended by, in fact, not hearing, Miss Carew’s observation, “I ought to put it in the singular; for I must own she does not take much notice of poor Smethurst”—pausing to laugh; then, proceeding in a tone of wondering admiration, “Isn’t it astonishing what they do in the way of surgery now? Nurse Blandy tells me that they are going—the doctors, I mean—to make him a new end to his nose, and turn his lip inside out, and I don’t know what all!”

“Poor creature! How terrible!”—shuddering.

“As for the other one, Binning, there is nothing good enough for him! At first she was all for nursing him entirely herself, not letting Nurse Blandy, no, nor Nurse Rice either, go near him; but there her father put his foot down!—you know Mr. Prince does put his foot down now and then—and he said to her, ‘No, Féo, my child, you may turn my house into a shambles’—we thought then there would have to be an operation—‘and a drug store, but I will not have my daughter lay herself open to a prosecution for manslaughter; and that is what it would come to—for as sure as ever you nurse him, he’ll die!”

Lavinia had not felt inclined to laugh before, but she now smiles broadly in pleased approval.

“She was mad at first,” continues the narrator; “but she had to give in; and I really do not see that she has much to complain of, for she is with him all day, and half the night!”

Lavinia hopes that the slight shudder with which she hears this statement—a shudder born of a compassion sharper and deeper than poor Mr. Smethurst’s ingloriously shattered features had called forth—is not visible to the eye of Miss Prince’s mother.

“Of course, at first,” pursues the latter, “the great attraction was that he had been in General ——’s Brigade—that dreadful business!”—with a distressful crease of reminiscence on her placid brow. “It seems like a horrible nightmare now! Yet, for the last day or two, I can’t help thinking it is for himself that she is so taken up with him.” After a moment’s reflection, “Well, after all, we know that he must be a fine fellow, by what he has done; and though all his people are in India, I fancy he is highly connected.”

The trend of the mother’s thoughts towards future developments is apparent. But Lavinia is spared the effort to hide how dearly, in her opinion, the wounded officer would buy his cure under the contingency glanced at, by the appearance of Féodorovna herself—Féodorovna, beautified, vivified, animated almost past recognition. It is not only that Miss Prince wears the most becoming of created garbs, whose bewitchingness many a mother of succumbing sons has cursed—the dress of a nurse; but her very features seem to have lost some of their poverty and paltriness; and gained in meaning and interest.

“Will you come at once, please? Mother, you have no right to delay Lavinia,” she says, scarcely sparing time for the curtest greeting. “He expects you, and a sick man should never be kept waiting.”

There is the authority and importance if a certificated official in voice and manner, and Lavinia would be sarcastically amused, if once again and more strongly than before, that trepidating dread of the coming interview had not laid hold of her.

“I am ready,” she answers quietly. “I was only waiting for you.” She is fighting tooth and nail with her agitation; telling herself what a Bedlamite thing it is, all the way across the tesselated marble of the pretentious sitting-hall, up the flights of the profoundly carpeted stairs, through the hot-water-warmed passages; and in outward appearance it is conquered by the time they reach and pause at a closed door.

“You must understand that he is not to be agitated in any way; that you must not approach any painful subject,” says Féodorovna, in an exasperating whisper of command.

“Wouldn’t it be better to put it off?” asks Miss Carew, in jarred recoiling from the just-opening portal; but her companion frowns her down.

The bed is in a recess of the room, and the window-blind, partly drawn down in defence against the westering blaze, confuses Miss Carew’s sight; besides which her feet have halted near the threshold to allow time for her own introduction, so that she hears the voice before she sees the face of the wounded man.

“Miss Carew has come to see you!” Féodorovna explains, in a tiresome carneying voice, leaning over the pillows. “But you must send her away the moment you are tired of her; and you must not let her talk to you about anything that is not quite pleasant and cheerful.”

Thus agreeably heralded by an implication of her own morose garrulity, Lavinia approaches the invalid, hearing his answer, “I am exceedingly grateful to her,” before she sees his face.

Often and often, in after-days, the fact that his first words concerning her were an expression of gratitude recurs to her with a sense of the keenest irony.

“Do you wish to be tête-à-tête?” asks Féodorovna, when the whole and the sick have silently touched each other’s hands; “or had you rather I would stay?” and the answer, courteous in its subtlety—

“I am sure that you ought to rest; I am ashamed to think of how much you have been doing for me to-day,” is divined by Lavinia to be not what the asker had expected.

However, without flagrant breach of her own axiom, that a sick man is not to be thwarted, she cannot avoid compliance, and with an officious parting question, “Where shall she sit? Would you like her to be beside you, or where you can see her better?” and a final fussing over phials and drinks, takes her cap, her apron, and her cuffs away.

A sense of relief at her departure, coupled with a strong, shy impulse to follow her, and that again with a far stronger one to snatch another look at the just-glanced-at face of him for whom Bill had died, join to silence Lavinia for the first moment or two. That the wish to be acquainted with each other’s features must be reciprocal, is proved by the sick man’s first words—

“Would you mind sitting in that chair?”

Her eyes first seek, then follow the direction of his, to see which chair he means; and by the time she sits down obediently in it, they both know—will know to the end of their lives—what each looks like.

He has been a strong man, will be a strong man again, thank God!

Why should she thank God for it? She flashes herself the inward question, with an already catching breath. Large-framed, and as he lies on his back in bed he looks prodigiously long, far longer than he really is; and, thanks to the falling-in of his cheeks, his eyes, which in their normal state must be of no greater size than they ought to be—and saucer-eyes are no beauty in a man—oppress her with the large intentness of their gaze. In their depths she seems to read an acquaintance with death that has yet not flinched from him; but she knows that it is not death which is looking out at her from them.

“Thank you for coming.”

“I liked to come.” She is sitting perfectly quiet; instinct and experience combining to tell her how many sick-beds have cursed the rustling gown, the meddling fingers, and the lugubriously watching eye. Her repose seems to enter like balm into his soul.

“You have been used to nursing?” he asks, though it sounds more like an assertion than a question.

“Sometimes, when they have been ill, I have nursed”—“my men,” she is going to say; but checks herself: to a perfect stranger she must not employ her silly home-phrases—“I have nursed my uncle several times, and Rupert twice, and—Bill once.” Her voice drops at framing the name which forms the one sad link between them; and she has time to reproach herself for having had the maladroitness and bad taste to introduce it before Binning speaks again.

“Thank you for mentioning him to me,” he says, physical weakness making him less master of his emotion than she divines that he would normally be. “I was afraid that you would not be able to bear it.”

A panic of remorse at having done exactly what his improvised nurse had forbidden her to do, and at once introduced a painful and agitating theme, chokes for an imperceptible moment Lavinia’s answer. It is only the reflection that, as a golden rule, whatever Féodorovna says or bids is sure to have common sense and right as its exact opposite, calms her, and gives her the power of steady and reassuring response.

“We always talk of him.”

“But to me?” he says, struggling in his agitation into what her nurse-instinct tells her to be a forbidden effort to sit up.

At once her noiseless gown and her noble still figure are beside him.

“You must not get excited!” she says, laying a capable cool hand on his gaunt shoulder; and at once he lies back, with a sudden sense of intense well-being.

“I felt that you must all hate me,” he says in almost a whisper; and she answers slow and stilly—

“I do not think we do.”

At that he lies content a while, drinking her in with the privileged directness of the sick. What hair! What a beautiful, generous, rather large mouth! What a divine sorrowful pity! What would have become of him, if the likely, the almost certain, had happened, and she had hated him?

And Lavinia! He is the first to meet her eyes of the costly wreckage with which the South African storm has strewn the shores of the motherland; he is the comrade for whose life dear brave Bill thought it a small thing to lay down his own; and as she knows that the deed which has stretched him in suffering and weakness before her was as madly gallant as the one by whose means he lived to do it, is it any wonder that she stands in a tranced silence, drinking him in, as he is drinking her?

“I felt it very strongly when his father came to see me,” says Binning, presently, still scarcely above his breath, and harking back to the fears he had expressed of being abhorred by his dead friend’s family.

“It did him good to talk to you!” After a second or two, “He did not grudge Bill—we none of us did; and it is the very death that Bill himself would have chosen.”

“Yes; I know it is.”

There is, or she thinks it, a kind of envy in the acquiescent voice.

“And we all felt that you would have changed places with him if you could, wouldn’t you?”

The surface motive of the speech is the kind and Christian one of bringing comfort to a spirit that she divines to be as sorely wounded as the brave body that holds it; but underneath there lurks another, scarcely known even to herself. It is the question she had put to Rupert two months ago—to Rupert, the unblushing candour of whose answering negative had given her one of those accesses of repulsion towards him, which for the future it will be a crime for her to indulge. A feverish and senseless curiosity prompts her to repeat it now.

“Yes, I would.”

There is no asseveration to strengthen the assent; yet it carries a conviction as deep—nay, much deeper, for she had tried not to believe the latter—than Rupert’s confession that he would much rather not have died for his brother. Retribution speedily overtakes her, in the sting of sudden pain caused by the contrast she herself has brought out, into salience; and conscious of the unworthiness of her double motive, she finds herself unable to bear the gratitude of his eyes. They are hazel, and have eagleish yellow lights in them, as one part of herself tells another part some time after she has left him.

“It was such a strange coincidence that I should be sent here!” he says presently, moving his languid head so that he may get a better view of her, for she has sat down again, a little way off; “that I, of all people, should be the first result of Miss Prince’s request to General —— at Canterbury to have some of us to nurse. When I realized what neighbourhood it was that I was to be brought to—when I heard that you were near neighbours, I had almost given it up at the last moment!”

“We should have been sorry for that.”

There is a measured reassuring kindness in her words; but he feels suddenly chilled. It must strike her own ears as too measured; for she adds—

“We should have liked to have had you ourselves; my uncle has said so repeatedly; but we have no appliances! We could not have made you nearly so comfortable as you are here!”

His eyes, large with leanness, roll round the spacious airiness of the apartment.

“I am in the lap of luxury!” he says; but though there is gratitude in his tone, enthusiasm is absent.

After that they are silent for a little space. He must be talking too much. She has been enjoined not to tire him, and if she sends up his temperature, she will not be allowed to come again! The first two are confessed apprehensions walking boldly up the front stairs of her mind. The third, on shoeless feet, is creeping up the back! To him, it appears that her last retirement to her chair has left her more distant than at first, and he marvels at the subtlety of his own ruse to bring her back to the bedside.

“Would you mind telling me the name of the flowers you are wearing?”

“Wood anemones.”

“Do they smell good?”

“I do not think they have any scent.” There is a moment’s struggle between the maiden and the nurse in her; and then the nurse prevails. “Would you like to try?” she asks, with her first smile—first epoch-making curving into dimples of her grave mouth.

She is beside him once again, and gives the blossoms into his fever-wasted hand. He holds them gratefully to his nostrils; and it is, of course, by accident that they touch his lips too.

“Not smell! Why, they have the whole blessed spring crammed into them!”

Again she smiles—her slow, rich smile—not claiming her posy—Rupert’s posy—back; but just standing by him, enjoying his enjoyment. Not, however, for long. The door opens with a fidgetingly careful turning of the handle, and a needlessly cautious foot crosses the carpet. Féodorovna, a bovril-bearing tray in her hand, stands between them.

“You are quite worn out!” she says, in a voice of mixed condolence and counsel. “Miss Carew shall not stay a moment longer! She shall go at once!”

The tone implies that Lavinia has shamelessly outstayed her welcome, and her cheek burns for a moment, then resumes its cool pink. Féodorovna means no offence. It is only her way of showing what an adept she is in her new profession. The speech’s effect upon the patient is a much stronger one.

“Oh no! Why should she?” he exclaims energetically, with another of those forbidden struggles of his to sit up.

In authoritatively compelling him into recumbence again, Miss Prince’s cap-strings somehow get into her victim’s eyes. Lavinia’s last sight of him is lying back exhausted by the remedies applied, much more than by his own imprudent movement; smiling faintly, with a patience much superior even to that which he had exhibited while lying wounded at the donga-bottom, through the endless hours of the winter night; smiling, while Féodorovna, taking it for granted that he feels faint, fans him with a vigour that makes the end of his pinched nose and his tired eyelids tremble.

CHAPTER IX

Féodorovna has ejected her so early that she need not go home at once. This is Lavinia’s first thought on getting outside the house. It is but rarely that Miss Carew is not wanted in her own little milieu; but to-day she would be superfluous. Her uncle and Rupert are busy with the lawyer, who has come down from London—busy over settlements: a settlement upon herself; provision for the younger children—her younger children, hers and Rupert’s! If she walk very fast, perhaps she may outwalk this last thought. But it is a good walker; it keeps up with her. Possibly she might lose it in the wood. The idea results in a détour, which will involve passing through a portion of it. The word “wood” is perhaps a misnomer, for the grown trees are few and sparse; and yet by what other name can you describe these silvan miles of young chestnut, oak, and birch growths, that every ten years fall beneath the hatchet, to continually renew their tireless upspringing? Where only recently amputated stumps remain, the flowers grow far the lushest.

She pauses on reaching a spot where a quarter-acre of ground is utterly given over to the innocent loveliness of the cuckoo-flower, dog-violet, primrose, “firstborn child of Ver,” and purpling wood anemone. She stands looking down at them, as if she had never seen them before; as if these lowly, lifelong friends were the new-seen blossoms of a nobler planet. What has happened to her senses, that she sees and hears and smells with such three-fold keenness? Why does she feel so startlingly alive? The wonder drives Rupert’s younger children successfully into the background of her mind. Yet this bounding new consciousness of the splendour of life—life actual, this bursting irrepressible life of the field and the woodland—and life possible—cannot answer, when the roll-call of emotions is called, to the name of pleasure.

Life possible!—it is a hooded anonymous thing, that she dare not interrogate. In its presence her thoughts draw in their antennæ, like a sea-creature’s suddenly touched. She starts away from the little woodland garden, and walks hurriedly on, down a rough cart-track, rutty and caked with the winter’s dried mud. Foolish extravagant analogies and comparisons dart through her brain—not only dart, but tarry and pitch tents there. Her life has been like this parched wintry road—a dull track for heavy-wheeled days to grind and plough along; now it has turned suddenly into a blossoming brake. Her eyes lift themselves in a frightened rapture to where the descending sun’s beams thread with evening light the lovely thin green of the birches, exquisitely breaking and shaming the tardier chestnuts.

“It is the spring!” she says to herself. “It has always made me feel drunk!”

But the long vista of branches, all brownly, redly, greenly bursting, with opulent variety of ideas, ahead of her, tells her that she lies.

* * * * *

Sir George is on the look out for her when she reaches home, and the sight of his familiar figure, coupled with a remorseful fear of having been wanted and not been within reach—an almost unparalleled occurrence in her history—pulls her down to fact and earth again, without a moment’s delay. Yet a single glance at her uncle’s face tells her that, despite her truancy, she finds him in the best possible of humours.

“And where have you been gadding, miss?” he asks, in a tone that reveals the highest complacency of which one so habitually gloomy is capable.

“I thought you were busy with Mr. Ingram,” she answers, involuntarily shirking the question.

“And so we have been,” returns he, his sombre face breaking into a smile; “both Rupert and I! And very glad you ought to be that we have.”

“Ought I?”

“I was determined that you should have no excuse for wishing to hurry me off,” continues Sir George, with rather acrid pleasantry, that has yet every intention of being agreeable. “After all, what do I want?—a crust and a glass of Marsala, an armchair and a pipe. So I have made over the whole of his mother’s money to Rupert, and he has settled every penny of it on you and your children.”

For a moment or two Lavinia is quite silent. Possibly surprise at her uncle’s flight of imagination in the matter of the exiguity of his own needs; possibly also choking gratitude; and possibly, again, the sudden confrontation with the younger children, whom she had thought to have buried in the wood, keep her dumb.

“You are very good to me,” she answers at last, in a tone which sounds to herself the ne plus ultra of thankless flatness; but in which her hearer happily recognizes only an acknowledgment, faltering from the excess of its obligation.

“Whom else have we got to be good to but our little Mosquito?” he asks, using the perfectly inappropriate pet-name which has always indicated the high-water mark of his favour. “And now that we have her safe for life—I have sometimes had my misgivings as to our doing that—we must do what we can for her; yes, we must do what we can for her!”

There is always something oppressive in the lightness of the habitually heavy, in the jollity of the habitually morose; and Sir George’s elation sits like lead upon his niece’s heart. She reproaches herself bitterly for it. Has not her whole life’s aim been to make him happy? And now that by his manner he is showing a cheerfulness higher than he had ever enjoyed even before the news of Bill’s death reached him, by what odious perversity are her own spirits dropping down to zero? Her one consolation is that he departs complacently, without the dimmest suspicion of her mental attitude. With Rupert—Rupert, who knows her like the palm of his own hand—her task will be incalculably harder. It has to be undertaken almost immediately; for her betrothed at once takes his father’s place.

“Has he told you?” asks the young man, coming up to her, as she stands slowly pulling off her gloves by the needless drawing-room fire. “Isn’t it splendid of him? He would have stripped himself even more entirely if I had let him—to the bone, in fact.”

The speaker’s eyes, sometimes gently cynical, are alive and shining with recent emotion, gratitude, and pleasure. In them she also reads the desire for an embrace. Why she does not meet it with the not particularly reluctant acquiescence that is usual to her, she could not tell you, if you had asked her. With tactful self-denial, Rupert at once resigns his pretensions to a congratulatory kiss.

“He called me ‘my boy’ over and over again!” he says, with a gratification none the less intense for being quiet. “You know that I always feel as if I could die a hundred deaths for him, when he calls me ‘my boy.’”

“You are a ‘Boy’ and I am a ‘Mosquito’!” replies she, with what she feels to be a hateful dry laugh. Hitherto one of the qualities she has most admired in her cousin has been the gentle forgivingness and self-restraint which has characterized his attitude towards his father—the filial piety, which has survived so many buffets. Now she tells herself that the sentiment which makes his voice quiver is hysterical, and that a man’s tears should not be so near his eyes. No one but Rupert, however—and she trusts that not even he—would read these harsh comments between the lines of the hastily candid “Yes, I know you would,” with which she supplements her first utterance.

Does his changing the subject mean that he comprehends? Impossible! Yet he does change it.

“Rather an unlucky thing has happened,” he says, in a voice that has altered, like his theme. “You have heard me mention Dubary Jones?”

For a moment she looks perfectly vague, then, “Of course I have! He introduced you to the editor of the Flail; and he writes poetry himself?”

It is the measure of how far her thoughts have strayed from Rupert and his group of æsthetics, that she should be so painstakingly detailed in proving that they have come back.

“His translations of Verlaine were very remarkable, if you remember,” replies Rupert, kindly jogging her memory. It needs the assistance given, presenting for the time a perfect blank as to what the bard in question’s bid for immortality consists of. “I have had a wire from him, asking me to put him up for the night. He is staying with the Tanquerays. He has been of great use to me in various ways, and I did not quite like to refuse him.”

Between each sentence the young man makes a slight pause, as if to give room for an expression of approval or acquiescence, but it is not before the full stop at the end that Lavinia is ready.

“Of course you accepted him? You were perfectly right. What else could you do?”

“It is a nuisance that it should have happened at this moment. My father will not be able to endure him; as I have often told you about him—he is like me, only more so!” Rupert smiles rather humorously, relieved at her acceptance of his news.

She gives a smile too; but there is a shudder under it—a shudder which recurs more than once during the dinner and evening that follow, when, faithful to her lifelong profession of buffer, she draws the conversation of Mr. Dubary Jones upon herself, to avert the catastrophe that must ensue if it is directed to Sir George. In a party of four it is no easy task to prevent the talk becoming general; but ably seconded by Rupert, and by the exercise of ceaseless vigilance, attention, and civility, Miss Carew succeeds in securing the couple of tête-à-têtes, by which only a thunderbolt can be warded off. But while kindly and graciously smiling, listening, and asking, Rupert’s descriptive phrase, “like me, only more so,” drips like melted lead upon her heart. Does she indeed see before her what Rupert will come to in the ten years by which his friend is richer than he? Is this his logical conclusion?—this little decadent, who is trying to fit his conversation to a hostess whom he suspects of being sporting?

“How delightful hunting must be!”

She assents, “Very.”

“And shooting! That must be so exciting!”

Again she acquiesces with creditable gravity, adding that salmon-fishing is considered by many people to be the most engrossing of sports.

For a moment he looks nonplussed, and at a loss for a suitable rejoinder; but quickly recovering himself, says brightly—

“Oh yes, it must be great fun, skipping from rock to rock.”

This evidence of how clearly he has grasped the nature of the amusement alluded to, finishes her for a while; but she presently recovers, as he has done, and for the rest of dinner they continue under the almost insuperable difficulties indicated, the class of conversation which he supposes suited to her capacity and tastes; nor does she care to undeceive him.

After all, contemptible and uncongenial as he is, and hideous as is the thought that the rudiments of him lie in Rupert, Lavinia has reason to be grateful to the translator of Verlaine. But for him she would have had to undergo a close interrogatory as to her visit of the afternoon. She catches herself up in mid-congratulation. Why should it be to undergo? Why should she mind retailing the little incidents which must be of equal interest to all three of them? What that is not good and touching is there to tell—whether it be the man’s affecting fear lest he should be unendurable in all their eyes, or the heroic patience with which he bears the cruel kindness of Féodorovna’s terrible ministrations? Yet she cannot help a feeling of discreditable relief that the tale which must be told is by the stranger’s presence deferred till next morning.

And next morning, sure enough, the demand for it comes. An early train removes Mr. Dubary Jones, and Sir George having dismissed him with the comparatively Christian observation that he wonders what Rupert can see in such a despicable little worm, and having added the still more Christian rider that he supposes all tastes are respectable, gladly changes the subject for the dreaded one—now better prepared for than it was last evening.

“So you saw Binning! Come into the study, and tell me all about him.”

She tells him all, repeats almost word for word the little talk—how little!—that had passed between them, keeping back for herself only the one tiny episode of the wood anemones. Sir George is perfectly indifferent to flowers, and could not enter into a sick man’s craving for their grace and perfume. Talk with her uncle has throughout her life meant judicious suppressions; yet this one small kept-back piece of the price of her land makes her feel like Ananias.

“He said much the same sort of thing to me,” is her hearer’s half-disappointed comment. “No doubt he will repeat it to Rupert to-day.”

“Is Rupert going to see him to-day?”

“I have made a point of it. I confess I rather wonder that the proposal did not emanate from himself! If the poor fellow has this idea in his head, that we shrink from him, we must do all we can to drive it out.”

Lavinia nods slightly. Difficulties loom vaguely ahead of her, born of this utterance, yet her heart feels suddenly light. Can it be because a vista of possible repetitions of yesterday open before her?

“And though I may not rate our society very highly,” pursues Sir George, with one of his scarce smiles, “I think it may, perhaps, compare not unfavourably with Féo’s.”

Lavinia turns to go, thinking her task ended, and relieved that it is over. But another awaits her.

“Stop!” says Sir George. “Why are you in such a hurry to run away? I have not half done with you yet.” There is great kindness, and the unwonted pleasure of being conscious that he is about to give pleasure in his voice, and in the gesture with which he draws towards him and opens one after another half a dozen obviously not new jewel-cases. “They have not seen the light for nearly twenty years,” he says, passing his hand with a movement that is almost a caress over the faded velvet of one of them. “I suppose the settings are old-fashioned, but I believe the stones are good; I know that the pearls are. Garrard took five years collecting them one by one! The—the person who last wore them was very proud of them.”

It is the nearest approach Sir George has ever made towards mentioning his departed wife to Lavinia, and she listens in reverent silence.

He has taken the string of pearls from its long-occupied bed, and, holding it between his fingers, eyes it pensively. Then, stretching hand and necklace out to her, he says, in a voice of command, whose harshness is the cover for an emotion that it angers him should have escaped from its two decades of prison in his heart—

“Put it on! Wear it always!”

She obeys; but her fingers, usually quick and clever, fumble over the diamond clasp.

“I would not give it you till I was quite sure we had really got hold of you!” continues Sir George, regarding with evident satisfaction the jewels—a little discoloured and damaged by their long incarceration, but still beautiful, as they circle his niece’s throat. “Until lately I have had my doubts, but I have been watching. I often notice things, more than you think”—with a shrewd look—“I saw how out of spirits you were in Rupert’s absence, and how you brightened up when he returned, and I said to myself, ‘It is all right.’ So don’t say anything more”—almost pushing her to the door, in obvious dread and yet expectation of the tide of her thanks that must wash over him—“but take them with you, and be off!”

“Am I to say nothing?” she stammers.

“Nothing! Actions speak louder than words! Marry Rupert, and give me a grandson as quick as you can!”

CHAPTER X

“Les joies ne sont que les afflictions en robe de fête.”

The kitchen-garden spreads itself out to the sun like a dog stretched basking before the fire. Upward it slopes; its ripe red walls, its espaliers, and wine-coloured and yellow spring flowers running up the hill; house and stables, church tower, and promise-making trees, at its foot, and with an apple-orchard, and a smaller cherry one, as a crown for its head. The apple-orchard represents, as yet, only promise too; but the hurrying cherry blossom spells performance.

Lavinia, standing on the sunny mid-path, with a bundle of bass-matting, with which she has been training a young hop round a pole, lying on the ground beside her, has just raised herself from her knees to admire the rich red look that makes the cherry trees blush. She knows it to be due to the young leaves which to-morrow will have disappeared in the storm of white. They will be bridal to-morrow. Bridal! She repeats the word over to herself. This is the 28th of April. On precisely this day month, she will be bridal too. The thought, apparently, is not one that invites dwelling upon, for she turns back to her bass-matting and her hop; and, in so doing, becomes aware of a figure—that of Mrs. Darcy—climbing the gravel walk towards her.

Mrs. Darcy’s visits to Lavinia are much rarer than Lavinia’s to Mrs. Darcy; partly because she is a good deal busier, and partly because she does not like Rupert. The first reason is naturally the only one allowed to appear in the relations between the friends.

“To what am I indebted for the honour of this visit?” asks the girl, with playful formality.

Her friend’s answer is not quite so ready as usual; yet her wiry slimness cannot be breathed by so gentle a hill.

“Miss Brine has come back. She has killed one relation, and cured another!”

“How do the children bear it?”

“They are inconsolable! The thought of having to be comparatively clean for an indefinite time has almost broken them down!”

Both laugh.

“It is an ill wind that blows nobody good; so you are able to come and change the weather with me?”

There is a little surprise and inquiry in the key used; but Mrs. Darcy accepts it as a statement apparently, for she stands, taking in, with eyes and ears and nostrils, the universal blossoming and courting in earth and air.

“Don’t you wish we could paraphrase Joshua’s command, ‘Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou moon in the valley of Ajalon,’ and say, ‘Spring, stand thou still in April’?”

“Do I?” answers the other, uneasily. “I do not think so!”

Her friend looks at her with covert observation, to verify that, despite the peaceful quality of the most soothing of all occupations, gardening, peace is not the dominant note in the concert of Miss Carew’s emotions this gaudy, sweetly clamorous April morning.

“In point of fact, I came to bring you a message.”

“From whom?”

Is it fancy that the question is jerked out with some sort of difficulty?

“From Mrs. Prince. She wants to persuade you to pay Captain Binning another visit this afternoon. She tells me”—with a faint tinge of surprise—“that you refused when she asked you two days ago.”

“I was there on Monday—that is only five days ago!” Lavinia has knelt down on the gravel again, and is busy with her hop. Her voice sounds a trifle hard.

“Five days can be pretty long to a sick man, more especially to a sick man nursed by Féodorovna Prince!”

“But he is not nursed by her!” exclaims the other, almost angrily. “Mrs. Prince herself told me that Mr. Prince had forbidden it, because he knew she would kill him!”

Mrs. Darcy shakes her head. “As long as it was a question of his life, Mr. Prince interfered; now that it is merely a matter of shaking his reason and indefinitely retarding his recovery, Féo is at liberty to work her inhuman will upon him. Only yesterday, Nurse Blandy said to me that if things were not altered, she should tell Dr. Roots that she must throw up the case.”

“And do you expect me to undertake it?” asks Lavinia, in a voice so unlike her own, so unfeeling and grating, that Susan starts. “Rupert went to see him on Tuesday,” continues the girl, not waiting for an answer to her rather brutal question.

“Rupert and you are not quite one yet, though you soon will be,” rejoins Mrs. Darcy, drily.

“My uncle has been twice, and you went yesterday. It cannot be good for a moribund to receive such a shoal of visitors!” Her voice is still hard, and there is neither compassion nor sympathy detectable in it.

“He catches at any reprieve from Féo’s importunities, poor fellow! I told him about the children and their martial ardour, and he asked me to bring them with me next time, if I was good enough to let him hope that there would be a next time—he looked at me like a lost dog, as he said it; and then Féo came in with something in a cup, and forced it down his throat, pouring half of it over the sheet. I fully expected her to hold his nose, to make him open his mouth, as Mrs. Gamp did with her patient at the Bull Inn!”

Lavinia is sitting up on her heels, the implements of her infuriated industry dropped in her lap, and listening in a silent horror that gives the lie to the callousness of her utterances of a minute ago.

Mrs. Darcy turns to go. “So I must say that you cannot spare time—that you do not see your way to it? Which sounds best?” she asks with affected carelessness.

The answer comes in the voice of Daphne, flying dishevelled, torn, and red-rosy up the walk.

“Oh, Lavy, we have had such a battle! It was between the turkey-cocks and the hen-cocks.”

* * * * *

“I will go and see,” says Féodorovna, whom, to her surprise, Lavinia finds lying on the sofa in her own luxuriously fantastic den; when, on the afternoon of the same day, a pair of hesitatingly hurrying feet carry her past the King’s Wood, through the Princes’ escutcheoned lodge, to and through their hall-door.

Miss Prince’s voice has its ex-cathedrâ importance, and her cap-strings their official wave and float, as she adds—

“It is quite likely that I may have to send you away. Half an hour ago, he said he felt inclined to sleep; I think it was partly a ruse to induce me to take a little rest; but he looked rather exhausted, and Nurse Blandy advised me to lie down till he wanted me again.”

Between the self-satisfied lines of this communication the listener reads how eternal must be the recumbency of Féodorovna, if continued until the suggested need for her arises; and how dire the sufferings of the victim.

The interval between Miss Prince’s discouraging exit and her return seems long to the feverish candidate for an interview, which, as the moments pass, she begins hotly to feel is not desired by the person with whom it is asked. Susan has misled her—in her turn deceived by the well-meaning importunities of Mrs. Prince. To be persecuting him again after an interval of only five days! Probably he will regard her as a second Féodorovna! Her uncle’s pet-name recurs ironically to her mind—his Mosquito! She is going to be some one else’s mosquito, too. For the first time in her life she merits the name!

“He will see you for a few minutes!” announces Miss Prince, reappearing at last. “Personally, I do not think it very prudent; but Nurse Blandy has made up her mind that he will be none the worse for it; and she always considers herself a Court of Final Appeal.”

There are traces of past skirmish and present ill humour in Féodorovna’s appearance; but to both Lavinia is absolutely indifferent. With an immensely relieved, but still doubting, heart—for, after all, there has been no word of his wish or will—she follows the haughtily undulating figure of her guide through the same rooms, passages, and stairs as she had traversed with a deep, but immeasurably less deep, excitement five days ago. The lowered blinds, the lavished luxury of detail, the bed in the recess,—how familiar they are! and yet how long ago her first acquaintance with them seems!

She is nearing him. Will his first glance reveal that she has been officious? that her visit adds one more nail to his wearisome martyrdom? The answer comes carried by lightning. He has dragged himself up into the forbidden attitude—at least it was forbidden five days ago; but five days is an enormous period of time—an absurdly evident joy in his caverned eyes. It cannot be more absurd than the blind elation that the recognition of that joy evokes in her. It is with relief that, when words come to her, she hears them to be temperate and rational.

“I am afraid that you were asleep, and that I woke you!’

“I never was wider awake in my life.”

His voice is stronger than it was on Monday; and Lavinia realizes that Nature has been more potent than even Féodorovna; and that he has made a perceptible step towards recovery since their last meeting.

“Are you sure that you are up to seeing me?”

“As sure as that I see you.”

Miss Prince and the nurse have retired together, but obviously at variance, towards the window, and no ear but that to which it is addressed catches the answer. For Lavinia only is the impression of the inestimable benefit conceived to be conferred by the sight of her. From one but lately lying at the point of death insincerities and conventions are apt to flee away, and she knows that straight from that heart, whose beats the bullet had so nearly stilled, rushes the response to her question.

“Come, come!” says Féodorovna, swishing up to the bedside, and speaking in that hybrid whisper with Miss Prince’s own trade-mark, warranted to en-fever the calmest invalid; “you must not hang over him. There is nothing so fatal as to exhaust the air in the immediate neighbourhood of a patient. Sit quietly down here, and do not say too much.”

The precept is easy to obey, and, in fact, compliance with an opposite one would to Miss Carew, for the first moment, be quite impossible. For those first moments the forbidden conversation is supplied by the prohibitor.

“We need not keep you, nurse,” she says, with more of command and less of grovelling deference than the official in question is accustomed to hear. “Your tea is waiting for you.”

Nurse Blandy’s answer is to take the pillows which Féodorovna is beginning, with amateurish wrong-ness, to shake up, out of that ministering angel’s hand, and with two masterly movements adapt them to the patient’s back.

“Miss Carew will ring for me before she leaves you,” she says in a restful, determined voice, and so quietly departs, with one parting glance at her foe, which explains, with telegraphic brevity and distinctness, that no attention to Miss Prince’s orders, but simply a desire for her own refreshment, takes her away.

“I shall stay as watch-dog, to ensure your not being imprudent!” says Féodorovna, emerging triumphant, and with a false sense of victory, out of the late contest, and seating herself nearer to and in much better view of the sick man than she had allowed his visitor to do.

The latter has watched, with a deep, dumb indignation, the one-sided scuffle over his helpless form; and her eyes now meet his with as profound and acute a disappointment legible in them as she reads in his own. Féodorovna, with a truer estimate than before of the side on which the balance would swing, is to-day not going to give her prey the choice of escaping her for half an hour. Féodorovna is not going to leave them for one minute alone.

And yet, did they but know it, no speech could have so quickly driven them into intimacy, as this dumb meeting on the ground of their “most mutual” vexation. At first it seems as if silence were to reign unbroken, and when a subject is at length chosen, it is Féodorovna who starts it.

“Captain Binning has had so many visitors,” she says, transgressing the most elementary rule of nursing, by discussing a patient in his own presence. “Sir George, Mrs. Darcy, Mr. Campion.”

The enumeration sounds like a reproach, and the words of self-vindication, “I was asked to come,” all but spring to Lavinia’s lips; all but, not quite. It is better that he should think her pushing and intrusive, than that his already wearied body and spirit should have the fatigue and vexation of an explanation, whose only end would be to salve her own wounded self-esteem.

“And though he enjoys it at the time,” pursues the arbiter of poor Captain Binning’s destinies, “he feels the ill effects afterwards!”

“You take more trouble about me than I deserve!” says the invalid, rather faintly, and in a voice under whose admirably patient politeness Miss Carew divines an intense nervous irritation. “You know I cannot be kept in cotton wool all my life!”

“It will not be my fault if you are not!” returns Féo, in a tone of enthusiasm as intense and overt as that with which she had formerly proclaimed her life-dedication to General ——.

There is a silence, each of the hearers probably feeling that it would be impossible to “go one better” than the last utterance. Lavinia steals a shocked glance at the object of it; but the air of civil tired endurance, untempered by either fear or surprise, with which he receives it, shows her that it is merely one of many such declarations. He only throws his head a little further back, and shuts his eyes—to reopen them, however, hastily. Lavinia follows the track of his thought. If he shows any sign of weakness, their common overseer will dismiss Miss Carew, and thrust something down his own throat.

When they reopen they reopen upon Lavinia’s; although, thanks to the seat assigned to the latter by Féodorovna, it is only by turning his head at an awkward angle, that he can get a tolerable view of her; reopen with an appeal so direct and piteous as to be impossible to misread. Can she—she with the free use of her limbs, her wits, do nothing for them? Them! She has time for a spear-thrust of conscience at the plural pronoun, followed by an equally rapid dart of self-justification. The use of it was his, not hers. She only read off his thought as a message is read off from the tape. He, in turn, must read off a negative from hers, since the appeal dies out of his eyes with disappointed revolt. It is only because a knock at the door has for an instant freed them from supervision, that they are able to exchange even these mute signals.

“I shall not be away more than a minute or two,” says Miss Prince, undulating back to the bedside, and speaking in a voice whose exasperation at the interruption and unnecessarily emphatic reassurance contend for the upper hand. “My father has chosen this not very happy moment to send for me; but I shall insist upon his not detaining me long.”

She is gone! Blessed, blessed author of the Féodorovna Candle! Long may his dropless tapers enlighten the world! For a moment, though it is daylight, he has lit up the universe for two persons! One of them apparently feels that his tether is a short one, and that he must take time by the forelock. The door has hardly closed before he says—

“You are not sitting in the same place as you did on Monday!”

“No.”

The inference that he thinks the change not one for the better is so clear that there would be prudery in ignoring it; and, besides, has not Féodorovna impressed upon her that his lightest whim is to be respected? So she moves with quiet matter-of-factness to the chair originally occupied by her. It cannot be good for his wound that he should slew himself round, as he was doing a moment ago, to get a better prospect of her.

“Thank you! Thank you also a thousand times more for coming to see me again.”

“Why shouldn’t I come to see you again?”

The question is addressed more to herself in reality than to him, and is an answer to her own misgivings rather than to his gratitude. A slight shade of surprise crosses the eager brightness of his face.

“You did not see your way to it at first, so Mrs. Prince told me.”

“I did not want to stand in the way of other visitors,” she answers—“my uncle, Rupert,” adding with difficulty, “We all claim our part in Bill’s friend.”

She looks steadily at him, and sees a sort of chill come into his eyes—at her lumping of herself and her family in a cold generalization.

“Rupert!” he says, repeating the name lingeringly, and with an involuntarily reluctant intonation. “Yes; I have heard of Rupert.”

“From Bill?”

“Yes, from Bill—and from others.”

The slight hesitation that intervenes between “Bill” and the “others” tells her that he knows. How should he not know, indeed? Is it likely that, in his state of tedious invalidhood, he should not have been told any bit of local gossip that might give him a moment’s distraction? To him, her engagement to marry Rupert is just a bit of local gossip, neither more nor less. No doubt that the news was imparted—why should it not be?—by Féodorovna.

“So you see,” she says, struggling with the senseless feeling of resentment and vexation that has invaded her heart, “my time is not always my own.”

“I see!” He lies quite silent for a minute or two, looking out of the window at a burgeoning sycamore, then adds, in a would-be cheerful voice, “It is kind of him to spare you to me for half an hour; but he seemed such a kind fellow when he came to see me the other day: one of my bandages got a little out of gear, and he put it right for me, with a touch as gentle as a woman’s.”

She repeats “as a woman’s,” like a parrot, with the bitter thought that even this generously meant encomium takes the feminine shape that all praise of Rupert must do. No one can deny that the bridegroom she has chosen can hold his own as a judge of lace, mender of china, and shaker of pillows, with any expert in either of these three branches of accomplishment in Europe. The cloud on her brow must be a visible one, for the sick man’s next remark has a note of doubt and trouble in it.

“I have often heard Bill talk of him. Though they were not alike in externals, nor, I imagine, in tastes, they meant a great deal to each other.”

The sentence is evidently intended as a statement, but takes a perverse interrogative twist at the end.

“People may mean a great deal to each other without having a single taste in common,” she replies; and the answer leaves on both their minds a painful sense of having incomprehensibly offended on the one side, and of having bristled in uncalled-for defence on the other.

The sands of their dual solitude are running out, and this is the way in which they are utilizing Féodorovna’s absence! In both their minds a feverish reckoning is going on as to how long it will take Miss Prince to send her stork-legs along the corridors and staircases that separate her from her impertinent parent, snub him, and return. Ten minutes is an ample latitude to give her, and of these five must have already fled. They cannot, cannot part upon that jarring last note. The rebellion against doing so is equally strong in both minds, but it is the woman who raises the cry of revolt. It is a cry that has no reference to anything that has passed before, it is only the unruly human heart calling out to its fellow from among the conventions.

“I am so glad that you are better!”

“And I am so glad that you altered your mind!”

They laugh a little, like two happy children, relieved and blissful at the withdrawn cloud that leaves the blue of their tiny patch of heaven for its one moment undimmed. Both feel that the exchange of those two snapped sentences has turned Miss Prince’s prospective return from an unendurable to a quite supportable ill.

“I think that you would find that chair”—directing her by an imploring look to one in closer proximity to the bedside than that which she occupies—“a more comfortable one.”

“Should I?”

She makes the change. Are not all his whims to be gratified? They can see one another admirably now. He verifies a dimple, and she a scar. He makes no comment on his discovery. She does upon hers.

“You have been wounded before?” she asks, with trembling interest.

He puts his fore finger on a white cicatrice that runs across his lower cheek and jaw.

“That bit of a cut! Oh, I got that in the Soudan. It is an old story, and it was nothing worth mentioning. It did not keep me above a week in hospital.”

It is clear that he has no wish to pursue the subject; and she refrains, partly in deference to his disinclination, partly from the aboriginal woman’s awed joy in the fighting man, partly oppressed by a sense of contrast. When Rupert cut his leg a year ago, over a fallen tree in the wood, he all but fainted at the sight of his own blood! But to Binning she leaves it to start a theme more to his liking.

“I suppose,” he says, turning his head sideways on his pillow in a way that hides his scar, and brings her still more perfectly within his range of vision, “that lying on the flat of one’s back like a cast sheep makes one see things at an odd angle. You will be surprised to hear that, a few minutes ago, I thought I had offended you.”

There is a pause before she answers, “I had offended myself. Don’t you think that that is a much worse thing to happen?”

“Do you mean that one can’t beg one’s own pardon?” he asks, laughing slightly, yet with curiosity stimulated by the gravity of her manner, and awaiting with eager interest the unriddling of her riddle.

But it remains unriddled. The impulse of each is apparently to flee away from the other’s topic. Lavinia looks out of the window, and says, with glad hopefulness—

“In another week you will be able to be carried out-of-doors. You will be too late for the cherry, but the apple blossom will be all ready for you, and then you will come in for the lilacs, the laburnums, the thorns—they are really wonderful in the Park here—the Siberian crabs, the acacias.”

“Anything more?” he asks, in tender derision of her long list.

“Plenty,” she answers, prepared to continue to bait his appetite for life with more of her joyous enumeration.

“But I shall not be here to see them,” he objects. “In a month I may go back, for Roots says so.”

The laughter behind her dancing eyes goes out, and the lilt has left the voice that asks, “Did Dr. Roots say so to you? or did you say so to him?”

If he were not bandaged in bed, and an Englishman, Binning would shrug his shoulders. There is a touch of impatience in his—

“Does it matter much which? We said it to each other.” Then, stirred by an immense gratitude for her downcast look, he adds gently, “How can I not be in a hurry to go back? Isn’t my regiment out there still, and my chief, and all my pals?”

At the sound of his voice, with the fighting ring in it vanquishing the feebleness of sickness, she lifts her head proudly—

“Of course you want to go back,” she says, with an unaccountable sense of partnership in his courage and comradeship; “and I hope you will get well quickly, and be able to do it soon!”

CHAPTER XI

“There was never anything happened so unluckily!”

This is the ejaculation with which Mrs. Prince opens one of those forenoon visits to Campion Place, discouraged by the recipients, but at least not so common in her case as in that of her unsnubable daughter. The scene of it has, as often, to be transferred to the Rectory, and in this case the object of the visit must be tracked, by a visitor too eager to await her correctly in the drawing-room, to the linen-room, where, in company with all the Darcy family except its head, she has been witnessing a presentation to the cow-man, on his approaching marriage with the schoolroom maid. The function is happily just concluded before the interruption takes place; but the wedding gifts lie displayed upon the linen-room table, and are being examined for the twentieth time with critical interest by the young Darcys, of whom both bride and bridegroom are intimate friends, and who have followed the course of their true love with breathless sympathy since Martinmas. They view the arrival of Mrs. Prince with more pleasure than usual, as giving them a fresh gallery to whom to display and enumerate the nuptial gifts; and, in any case, are far too courteous and kind-hearted not to be willing to share the elation caused by so joyful an occasion with any chance comer.

“What has happened unluckily?” asks Lavinia, starting up from her knees, on which she has been requested to descend to examine the quality of a Japanese rug displaying itself gaudily on the floor. To her own heart the question phrases itself differently, “Is he worse?”

“There is something so perverse in its occurring now of all times!” pursues Mrs. Prince, with that provoking keeping of his or her audience on tenterhooks and in the dark, by a person whose own curiosity is at rest, which one often observes.

“But what is it? What has happened?” asks Mrs. Darcy, coming to the rescue, and holding in her hand the rolling-pin, which has just been submitted to her for special admiration by her second daughter.

“Of course, it is not her fault! We cannot blame, we can only pity her!”

“Blame her! Pity her! What for?”

Once again Susan is mouthpiece; and Lavinia, herself paralyzed by apprehension, blesses her. What has Féodorovna done to him? Poisoned him with the wrong medicine? Set fire to his sheets? Undone his bandages, and let him bleed to death? To one acquainted with Miss Prince, all these suppositions come well within the range of the probable.

“She is nearly mad herself!” continues Féodorovna’s mother. “I have never seen her in such a state!”

Mrs. Darcy lays the rolling-pin quietly down; and, going over to the intruder, puts a resolute slight hand on her arm.

“I think you ought to tell us what you are talking about? You are frightening us all!”

“Didn’t I tell you!” answers the other, with vague surprise. “I thought you knew! How stupid of me! But I have quite lost my head! So have we all!”

She pauses. And there is a silence, only broken by some one—Mrs. Darcy alone knows who it is—catching her breath.

“Tell us!” says the rector’s wife, with low-voiced command, and the enragingly reticent lips obey.

“Féodorovna is ill in bed. She has developed jaundice. It declared itself last night.”

“Jaundice! Féo!” ejaculates Mrs. Darcy, in a tone of such delighted relief as is afterwards commented upon by herself with humorous severity.

“She felt ill when she went to bed last night—overpoweringly sleepy and bilious, and the whites of her eyes looked yellow; and to-day she is the colour of a guinea!”

Lavinia has subsided again upon her knees, which do not feel quite so strong as usual. The attitude may connote thankfulness as well as inspection.

“Poor Féo!” she says, trying to avoid the key of garish joy in which Susan’s utterance was pitched. “What a dreadful bore for her! How did she get it?”

Mrs. Prince lifts her handsomely dressed shoulders and her pince-nez-ed eyes to heaven, as if to refer the question there.

“We had the greatest difficulty in keeping her in bed, until we brought her a looking-glass. She saw then that it was out of the question that he should see her! But she is worrying herself to death over him—oh, not over poor Smethurst: he might die twice a day for all she cared—over Captain Binning, I mean!”

There is another pause, but of a different quality from the scared silence of five minutes ago. In Susan’s case it is filled by a cheerfully cynical wonder at the perfect clearness of vision which the sufferer’s mother can combine with her maternal tenderness; and, in Lavinia’s, with a profound gratitude that, at least, while her hue remains that of the dandelion, Féodorovna’s prey will escape her bovril, declarations, and cap-strings.

The children think that their moment has come, and civilly volunteer to show and explain the wedding gifts: to make it clear that both rolling-pin and bread-trencher emanated from the cook; the dolly-tub from Miss Brine; and clothes-pins from the “Tweeny;” that the framed and laurel-crowned “Bobs” is a joint offering from the three elder children; and the smaller “Kitchener” the outcome of the infant Serena’s worship of Bellona.

“Mother has just given him her teapot,” says Phillida, in excited explanation. “Doesn’t it look exactly like silver? It is an old Sheffield plate pattern; it was to have been presented two days ago, and Sam had his face washed twice in expectation; but we wanted Lavy to be present, and, both times, she was at the Chestnuts.”

“That is just where I want her to be again!” answers Mrs. Prince, listening with more good nature and better-feigned attention than her daughter would have done, but reverting to her own preoccupation—“the poor child”—turning back appealingly to her two grown-up auditors—“has got it into her head that he will be neglected. She and Nurse Blandy have not quite hit it off of late; that no one can look after him properly but herself; though, to tell the truth”—lowering her voice, and in a key of vexed shrewdness—“between ourselves, I think the poor man was on the high-road to be killed with kindness!”

Both matron and maid listen with sympathetic attention; but to neither of them does anything occur in the way of a response that would be meet for the ear of Miss Prince’s mother.

“I have my victoria here!” continues that lady, casting an imploring look towards Lavinia; “and I thought, if you would return in it with me, you might pacify her; come and go and take messages between them; convince her that he is having his medicine and his food at the proper hours; and so forth. She is not on speaking terms with Nurse Blandy since nurse complained to Dr. Roots of Féo’s taking the case entirely out of her hands, and I always get upon her nerves if I come near her!”

Miss Carew’s eyes are still fixed upon the Japanese rug, as if appraising its 4s. 11½d. merits. To a stranger it would seem as if she did not jump at the proposal.

“It would be a real charity!” urges the maker of the suggestion, humbly and insistently. Mrs. Prince in adversity is a more prepossessing figure than Mrs. Prince full of bounce and metaphorical oats; and, perhaps, it is the perception of this fact that squeezes that reluctant sentence out of Lavinia.

“I should like to help you,” she answers slowly; “but——”

“But what?” cries Mrs. Prince. “If you answer that your gentlemen may want you in the course of the afternoon, you know that it is only a case of sending an order to the stables!”

“Your gentlemen are going to desert you to-day, aren’t they?” puts in Mrs. Darcy, interposing for the first time; and with a very slight accent, so slight as to be perceptible only to Miss Carew, upon Mrs. Prince’s objectionable noun.

“They are obliged to go to London on business—lawyer’s business!” replies Lavinia, unwillingly making the admission of her unusual freedom.

“For the night?” cries Mrs. Prince, jumping at the acknowledgment, as its author had known that she would do. “Then why not come and stay with us?”

For a moment no one answers; only it seems to Lavinia that Mrs. Darcy’s eyes echo “Why!”

A confused sense of indignation at that look makes itself perceptible for a moment in the girl’s mind, followed immediately by a cavilling self-question as to why she should feel it? What reason assignable to any human creature is there for her refusing to perform so natural and easy an act of neighbourliness? Were it poor inglorious little Captain Smethurst to whom she had been requested to minister, would she have hesitated for one moment to comply? With the lifelong record, of which she cannot but be conscious, behind her of matter-of-course obligingnesses and good offices towards her whole entourage, is it any wonder that her present grudging attitude has spread a layer of surprised disappointment over her petitioner’s countenance?

“Of course I know that he has no claim upon any of you!” she says, with a shrug that seems to give up her cause for lost. “Quite the other way on, in fact! But he is such a lovable sort of fellow, and so disproportionately grateful for any little thing one can do for him; and you all—even Sir George—seemed to wish to make him forget; but I suppose it rankles all the same, and he is the last person not to understand that it should be so.”

She turns to go, unaware that her final words, in which she herself sees no particular virtue, have gained the cause she had abandoned as lost.

“Rankles!” repeats Lavinia, turning quite white, and in a voice of inexpressible horror. “Is it possible that you can think?—that you can imagine——?”

“I really do not know what I think,” replies Mrs. Prince, in a voice pettish from worry of mind and startled puzzledom at the dynamitic effect of her last sentence. “When you see a person, whom you have always found ready to put herself in four for you, suddenly making difficulties when you are in a tight place, and when it really would not cost her much to help you, one does not know what to think, does one, Mrs. Darcy?”

“Has Lavinia made a difficulty?” asks the person thus erected into umpire, and looking with quiet directness of inquiry into her friend’s face. “I think you have not given her time for either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ yet!”

“Which is it to be?” cries Mrs. Prince, wheeling round with revived hope upon her victim. “It may as well be yes!”—with all her tone can carry of persuasion. “You will have none of the disagreeables of nursing. What I ask of you is just to sit by his bedside and chat to him; and to keep Féo quiet by persuading her that we are not killing him by neglect in her absence.”

None of the disagreeables of nursing! It is, then, to a selfish shrinking from contact with his pain, that her hesitation is attributed. The stingingness of the injustice, which would be ludicrous in its divergence from fact, if it were not so cruel, drives back the blood to Lavinia’s cheeks, and the words to her lips.

“There are no disagreeables in this case, and if there were, I should not be afraid of them!” she says, with a quiet dignity which is felt to carry a rebuke with it, “I will gladly come.”

“You are a trump!” cries Mrs. Prince, breaking, in the excitement of her relief, into a phrase, the old-fashioned slanginess of which the elegance of her calmer moments would disapprove, and making a snatch, which meets only the empty air, at Miss Carew’s hands. “Let us be off this very instant, or we shall find Féo running about the passages, though her temperature is up at 102, and she is as yellow as a guinea!”

“I must see my uncle and Rupert first,” says Lavinia, so resolutely that her visitor recognizes it is useless to contest the point. “Hadn’t you better return without me, and I will follow as soon as I can?”

“You will not go back upon your word?” asks the other suspiciously. Then verifying a look of indignant repudiation in the girl’s eyes, she adds, “No; I am sure you will not! Well, perhaps it had better be as you say. I will send back the victoria at once for you; or would you prefer the brough-am?” Its owner gives the vehicle in question the value of two good syllables. “If it looks the least like rain, I will send the brough-am.”

She bustles off as she speaks, one rustle and jingle of gratitude, relief, and jet; but not before she has seen Lavinia speeding before her through the churchyard back to her home. Did she but know how much the hurry in the girl’s veins towards their common goal exceeds her own, her urgency would die, smothered in stupefaction.

Rupert is in his room, guiding and aiding the footman in the packing of his clothes, and of the few volumes and knick-knacks without which he never moves. At her call he at once joins her in the passage, leaving, as she notes with relief, the door ajar behind him.

“I have come to say good-bye,” she says brusquely, still breathless from her run.

“Good-bye!” he repeats. “Why, we need not start for an hour yet.”

“No,” she answers with the same short-breathed determination in her voice; “but I must. I am going to the Chestnuts for the night. Mrs. Prince has been here, and has forced me into it.”

The words are strictly and literally true; and yet their utterer feels the immenseness of the falsity their reluctance implies as she speaks them.

His face expresses surprise, but no disapproval.

“They want me to help to amuse Captain Binning,” continues Lavinia, still with that lying disinclination for the proposed occupation in her tone; “and persuade Féo that they are not killing him with neglect in her absence!”

“In her absence!” repeats Rupert, with an accent of the most acute astonishment. “Do you expect me to believe that that angel of mercy has forsaken her post?”

“She has got the jaundice!”

“The jaundice!” repeats the young man, with more of entertainment than compassion in his low laugh. “Poor Féo! The yellow danger! What on earth has given her over as a prey to it at this cruelly unpropitious moment?”

“I do not know.”

“And you are to nurse dear Binning instead of her? What a blessed, blessed change for him!”

There is not the faintest trace of jealousy in his tone, and the most unaffected friendliness in his mention of the sick man; but she wishes that he had not called him “dear.” It makes her illogically feel more of a traitor than before; and, besides, is it quite manly?

“I am to sit with him this afternoon,” she answers in a tone of caustic discontent, “and convince that idiot Féodorovna that he is not being poisoned or starved. It will only be for to-day,” she adds, more as a satisfaction to her own conscience than as an explanation in the least called for by him. “And to-morrow you will both be back!”

“Even if we are, you must not hurry home!” replies Rupert, with that complete unselfishness which his family has grown so used to as barely to be aware of. “I am so boomed just now, that I can run the show without you for an indefinite time. He actually asked my opinion this morning,” opening his eyes wide and smiling; then, growing grave again, “and I always feel that we none of us can do enough to make that poor chap feel at his ease with us!”

She looks up at him in a dumb appreciation of his delicacy and feeling, that has no pleasure, nay, a leaven of unmistakable pain in it; and looking realizes that he is paler than his never high-coloured wont. Admirably as he disguises it, is it a sacrifice that he is making? Does he divine?

“You look as white as a sheet,” she says, with a sudden impulse to know the worst. “What has happened to you?”

“You will be angry with me if I tell you that I have had a fright!” he answers, smiling again, deprecatingly this time. “But that is about what it comes to. My father made them put the young horse into the cart, when I went to Shipstone this morning. And we met one of those steam-rollers; and he took fright and bolted.”

“And you could not hold him?”

“I was not driving. You know I never do, if I can help it. I do not see the use of keeping a dog and barking one’s self!”

“Well?”

“Oh, you need not be afraid that I did anything unworthy of a man and a gentleman!” noting with slightly ironical comment the apprehension in her face. “I sat tight, and Hodson pulled him up just in time to stop him taking the gates at the level crossing. But you know that nerves are not my strong point; and it gave them a bit of a jar!”

Her face has hardened and stiffened. “A man has no business to have nerves!”

“What is he to do if God has presented him with a large bundle of them at his birth?”

The question is unanswerable, and on this unsatisfactory note they part. It sounds out of tune-ly all through her short drive, and makes a discord of it. White as a table-cloth because a horse shied!

CHAPTER XII

“Féo has given strict orders that you are to be shown up to her first.”

These are the words with which the patient’s mother receives Miss Carew, and they are wafted on a sigh of relieved gratitude, and accompanied by the admission that she has herself been ejected from the sick-room, and requested not to reappear there until further orders. The occasion is evidently considered to be one of such magnitude as to have summoned from his certificate-hung study Mr. Prince to join his acknowledgments to those of his wife; but the elaborate expression of his thanks, with its inevitable prefix of “I do not wish to be intrusive,” is cut short by a peremptory inquiry, transmitted by Féodorovna’s maid, as to the cause of the delay in showing up the visitor.

“She will give you the most minute directions,” says Mrs. Prince, hurrying Lavinia off upon this mandate, and speaking in a flurried semi-whisper. “You must consent to everything, and”—lowering her voice still further—“of course you can use your own judgment afterwards.”

“There is not a soul in the house I can trust,” says Féodorovna, clutching Miss Carew’s hand in a clasp whose feverishness her own cool palm verifies. “Do not pay the slightest attention to anything Nurse Blandy says. She is absolutely untrustworthy and incapable.”

Lavinia nods, mindful of Mrs. Prince’s directions.

“In this dreadful contretemps it is something to have a person on whose honesty at least one can rely,” continues Féodorovna, staring tragically at Lavinia out of her yellowed eyes. “You have some sympathy—some comprehension of what it must be to me to be tied down here, now of all times.”

There is no insincerity in Lavinia’s gesture of assent. Despite the absolute lack of foundation for Miss Prince’s belief in her own indispensability, and the ludicrous effect with which a solemn sentimentality gilds her already gilded features, Miss Carew’s compassion is genuine, and even acute. To be within five doors of him, and yet parted as effectually as if oceans rolled between them! A shocked flash of realization of what such a deprivation would be to herself dries up effectually any of that inclination to mirth which the preposterousness of Féodorovna’s pretensions, coupled with that of her appearance, would naturally produce.

“You must come and go between us,” continues the patient, earnestly. “Tell me how he is from hour to hour, prevent his fretting more than he can help, and ensure him against the neglect which hitherto only my own personal and incessant attention has guarded him from.”

A mechanical mandarin-like movement agitates Lavinia’s head.

“Of course you do not know anything of the technicalities of nursing—how should you?—but you can at least follow my directions.”

“Yes.”

“Do not sit too close to him.”

“No.”

“Do not talk too much.”

“No.”

“Let him choose his own topic.”

A profound sigh follows this last injunction, which somehow implies that there can be little doubt as to what that topic will be.

“Yes.”

“Make as light of my illness as you can.”

“Yes.”

“And come back to me every quarter of an hour to report progress.”

“Every quarter of an hour!” repeats Miss Carew, for once forgetful of and disobedient to her instructions as to unhesitating acquiescence in everything that might be suggested to her. “But you may be asleep!”

“And if I am!” returns Miss Prince, with such an expression of high-flown enthusiasm on her discoloured countenance as makes Lavinia’s pity almost succumb to an unpardonable inclination to laugh.

She escapes at last without having disgraced herself by any overt evidence of amusement, though her departure is delayed by the determination of Miss Prince to invest her messenger in her own cap and apron.

“He has grown used to having them about him,” says Féo, with pensive peremptoriness; while a recollection of ill-controlled cap-strings gambolling across patient eyes confirms the statement in the hearer’s mind, and she sets forth reluctantly equipped in an attire which, like David’s, she has not proved.

Admitted by Nurse Blandy with a lofty cordiality which speaks less for her own merit than for the lustre with which she shines by contrast with Féodorovna, Lavinia finds herself once more standing by that bedside whence her spirit has so rarely stirred since the day, which now seems so incomputably distant, when first her lagging feet carried her thither. Their hands lie in each other’s with the large sense of freedom that the absence of any onlooker gives; the consciousness that, as far as any one to note their clasp goes, they may remain in thrilled contact from now till night. As if in malicious acting upon the knowledge that such a course would be the most distasteful possible to her young employer, Nurse Blandy has hastened to leave them tête-à-tête. In their eyes, as they rush to meet, each reads the other’s joyous elation in the thought that not only is there no Féodorovna present to cramp and chill their greeting, but that all through the long wealth of the afternoon to be theirs no opening door need scare them with the swishing announcement of her paralyzing presence.

“So I have a new nurse!” he says, his look wandering with slow delight over the array that had made her feel like a mummer.

“Miss Prince thought that, as you were used to the dress, it would be better that I should wear it.”

“Yes; I am used to the dress.”

The implication that he is not used to the wearer is so clear to them both, as to draw a little gauzy veil of shyness between them.

“I feel rather like Jacob, having jockeyed Esau out of his occupation,” she says, talking somewhat at random; the more so for the consciousness that his eyes have done with her cap and apron, and now find employment in the string of pearls that, as both of them know, owes no ascription to Féodorovna. Involuntarily one of Lavinia’s hands goes up to her throat, with the impulse to hide the jewels, though a cold instinct tells her that he has already discovered their origin.

“It is very hard upon my predecessor, isn’t it,” she says, beginning to talk much faster than her wont, “to have developed such an enthusiasm for nursing, and then to have her course barred by so odious a form of illness?”

“Jaundice, isn’t it?” returns he, with a very respectable and even remorseful effort at regret.

“Yes; jaundice.”

“Poor soul!”

Both read in each other’s hearts that, as between them, talk of Féodorovna is sheer waste of time; yet one of them clings convulsively to her as a safe topic.

“What aggravates her vexation is that she can’t believe that you will not be starved and ill-used in her absence!”

“Poor soul!”

There is a touch of impatience that to one initiated speaks of past endurance in the repeated phrase; and the smile that sends up the corners of both their mouths, when Lavinia adds demurely, “I am to report progress every quarter of an hour,” makes them both feel rather guilty.

It is the man who instinctively breaks away from the subject, and, as one determined to have his will, rushes headforemost into another.

“Tell me how much time you are going to give me! I had rather know at once.”

His eye seeks the travelling-clock standing on the table beside him, and as he turns somewhat to get an exacter view of it, she notes with how much greater ease and freedom he can move.

“I have come to stay the night.”

“The night!”

“Yes; the night. My men have left me and gone to London.”

She answers colourlessly, looking straight before her; but through her drooped eyelids her spirit sees the almost incredulous delight of his.

There is a moment’s pause; next, in a long sigh of relief, come the words—

“Then we shall have time for everything!”

She smiles with slow relish of and acquiescence in his thought, despite the apparent protest in her—

“That is rather comprehensive, isn’t it?”

“I mean,” he continues, eagerly sitting up, and leaning on his elbow, “that after your former visits I have always felt that we—that I had not made the most of them; but that I had egotistically frittered away our time”—neither of them notes the significance of the plural pronoun—“talking of myself.”

“Did you talk of yourself?” she asks. “I think your memory plays you false then. If you had, I should,” with embarrassed playfulness, “know more about you than I do.”

“What do you know? What do you care to know?”

“I know that you have had a bullet through your left lung, and one that passed very close to your heart; and that, under these circumstances, it would be wiser not to gesticulate much,” she answers, with a pretty air of admonishment, and of recalling to both their minds her temporary function, which seems to him to sit upon her more exquisitely than any of her former expressions or gestures.

“Did I gesticulate?” he asks. “One gets rather tired of moving nothing but one’s head, and you must not be hard upon me to-day, for I am rather down on my luck. At least I was!”

“About Féodorovna?”

“Oh no! At least—of course yes. But that was not what I was alluding to. I have seen”—eyes and hands seeking among the newspapers with which the bed is strewn—“that one of my pals has been badly hit.”

In a moment she is beside him. “Let me help you. Which paper is it in?”

“In them all! It is official from Lord Roberts.” He has found the paragraph, and hands it to her, indicating it with a pale fore finger.

“On February 28th, General —— and his staff narrowly escaped being captured by a party of the enemy, and were only saved by the presence of mind and gallantry of Captain Greene of the —— Hussars. Captain Greene had been sent back by the General to order a company of infantry up to the kopje taken on the previous night by the Australian Bushmen. On his way he saw superior numbers of the enemy creeping up a donga, with the obvious intention of surprising General —— and his staff. With great presence of mind he galloped across ground in full view of the enemy, ordering up reinforcements. Having accomplished his object, Captain Greene recrossed the bullet-swept zone to inform the General of the position, in doing which he was severely wounded in the head and neck, but, though reeling in his saddle, regained the kopje, imparted his discovery, and thereby averted an otherwise inevitable disaster.”

Lavinia’s eyes race through the record, and, having done so, raise themselves to Binning’s. Passionately alive as she is to deeds of daring, at this moment the desire to find something consoling to say to the hero’s friend is even more prominent in her mind and look than admiration of the valiant act.

“It says ‘severely,’ not ‘dangerously’” is her low-voiced comment; “and even ‘dangerously’ does not always mean mortally. You were put in as ‘dangerously.’”

He thanks her with an eye-flash for the recollection; but a moment later his hands, so quiet in their patience generally, are uneasily pulling at the embroidered coverlet, which Féodorovna has contributed from her treasures to his luxury, and which Nurse Blandy will call a “bed-spread.”

“I cannot think why they do not let me get up. Roots has promised that I shall be able to return to duty by the end of May; and here we are at the beginning!”

The end of May! It is, then, to the same spot in time that his eyes and heart are directed, as are her own; but with how unimaginable a difference! To him the end of May is to bring release, liberty, return to the “bullet-swept zones,” to the cold veldt, the ambush, and the sniping. Yes, but also to the comradeship after which his soul is lusting. While to her!

“May is young yet,” she says, forcing her lips into a reassuring smile. “Dr. Roots has twenty-five days in which to keep his word.”

His hands cease their restless plucking at the counterpane, and a change passes over his face. Has he divination to read beneath the mask of her smile? she asks herself with a sort of terror.

“Twenty-five days!” he repeats softly. “They are a great many; and yet I can fancy their seeming very few.”

Her self-command does not go so far as to furnish her with a comment upon this thrilling truism; and the air upon which his next words steal out seems to have been stilled to receive them.

“I wonder upon how many of those twenty-five I shall have a sight of you?”

“Let us take short views of life, as Sidney Smith bids us,” she answers, involuntarily moving her shoulders, as if to shake off from them a load which, at the moment, seems to press as heavily as did the bursting wallet of his sins upon good Christian’s bowed back. “I will come as often as I can be spared from home.”

At that they regard one another steadily, each conveying to the other’s consciousness their knowledge of how much more than appears the phrase carries.

“You have naturally a great deal to do just now?”

“Yes.”

It is not true; but what is the use of explaining that the dull change—dull, except in the one awful main fact of her wifehood—causes little alteration in the outward framework of her life? Again the room seems irksomely still. Is it possible that to two pairs of ears even the swish of Miss Prince’s skirts would be welcome? In one respect Lavinia might meet that lady with a clear conscience, since she has undoubtedly obeyed her behest of allowing the wounded man to choose his own topic; but it can hardly be said to have agreed with him, judging by the grey shadows on his face. Yet he will not leave the theme that has brought them there.

“It is to be on the 28th?”

“Yes.”

He has leant back on the pillows, which are propped into a more convalescent slant than on the day when she had first seen him lying flat and bloodless upon them. Yet he has reusurped the privilege granted to those in extremis; and she grows restless under the insistence of his eyes.

“I should like to give you a present.”

“Oh, why should you?”

There is no mistaking her start, and the pain and dissent in her tone.

“You had rather that I did not?”

“Much rather.”

CHAPTER XIII

“No bad news, I hope?”

“None, thanks.”

It is at the breakfast-table next morning that this question and answer are exchanged. They are the result of the wire which has just been handed to Lavinia, and which she continues looking at, long after she must have mastered its contents—so long that the hostess’s curiosity conquers her good breeding, and makes her take for granted sender and subject.

“Does Mr. Rupert say by what train he and Sir George are returning?”

There is a pause, though slightly perceptible.

“They cannot get back to-day; the papers were not ready for their signature, after all.”

“The law’s delay! We all know something about that,” says Mr. Prince, looking up with a smile of elaborate sympathy from his porridge. “Will legislation ever effect anything towards——?”

“It is an ill wind that blows nobody good,” cries Mrs. Prince, cutting ruthlessly into her husband’s speculation. “Since there is nobody to go back to, what sense is there in your going back?”

* * * * *

“I have only one little hint to give you, dear,” says Mrs. Prince, escorting her visitor to the wounded man’s door, and in a tone tinged with apology; “but you know what an impracticable patient Féo is, and we must give in to sick people’s whims, as she was always impressing upon us about Captain Binning.”

“Yes?”

“Well, dear, it is too silly and exacting of her; but she complains that there were three quarters of an hour between your first and second visits to her yesterday, and forty-five minutes between your second and third.”

“Were there?” rather blankly.

“If the same thing happens to-day, she threatens to get up and go and see for herself what’s happening. Dr. Roots tells her he will not answer for the consequences if she does; but she snaps her fingers at him. However,” with reassurance, “my one confidence is in her colour!”

* * * * *

They meet without the elation of yesterday, their eyes shirking each other, and their hands taking for granted that contact is superfluous. Half a score of subjects had yesterday succeeded her refusal of his suggested gift; but the sting of that rebuff still inflames their memories.

“This is an uncovenanted mercy!” he says, with a rather strained smile. “I was afraid that I had seen the last of you.”

“I heard from my people, that they cannot get back to-day.”

“So you stay here?”

“Yes.”

There is a lifelessness in the little dialogue, she expressing no regret, and he no gladness. When the eyes, dropped upon her work—she had no work yesterday—give him an opportunity of covert observation, he sees that her large eyelids look thickened as if with tears or watching.

“The law is a very odd thing, isn’t it?” she says presently in a staccato key.

“I have never had many dealings with it.”

“It is the only vehicle to which civilization has not given C-springs and indiarubber tires. It still jolts and lumbers along as it did three hundred years ago.”

His look asks for an explanation of her forced yet commonplace analogy, and she goes on.

“In the matter of marriage settlements for instance, both sides may be perfectly at one as to the disposition of the money; and yet the law insists on finding flaws and making difficulties.”

“I suppose it does.”

“Some hitch of the kind is detaining my uncle and Rupert.”

She cannot be more uncomfortably conscious that the explanation is superfluous and uncalled for, than is he that her trite reflections and unasked-for introduction of her financial affairs are the stairs by which she is climbing to some aimed-at goal. In her next sentence she attains it.

“Talking of marriages reminds me——” Even when the door to which she has been looking is reached, it seems hard to open.

“Yes?”

“I have been thinking that I owe you an apology.”

“For what?”

“For the spirit in which I received a very kind suggestion you made.”

“What suggestion?”

It is needless to say that he knows as well as she what was the contemned overture; yet—for Love is by no means a kindly god—he cannot deny himself the luxury of seeing her run up the red pennon of shame into her cheeks. But when he notes what uphill work it is to her to give the asked-for explanation, and how conscientiously she does it, his heart smites him with an acuteness that brings its own retribution.