Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

OFF SANDY HOOK

AND OTHER STORIES

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE MAN OF IRON

ONE BRAVER THING (The Dop Doctor)

BETWEEN TWO THIEVES

THE HEADQUARTER RECRUIT

THE COST OF WINGS

OFF SANDY HOOK
AND OTHER STORIES

BY

RICHARD DEHAN

Author of “One Braver Thing” (“The Dop Doctor”), “The Man of Iron,” “Between Two Thieves,” etc.

NEW YORK

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1915, by

Frederick A. Stokes Company

All rights reserved, including that of translation

into foreign languages

CONTENTS

OFF SANDY HOOK

AND OTHER STORIES

OFF SANDY HOOK

On board the Rampatina liner, eleven days and a half out from Liverpool, the usual terrific sensation created by the appearance of the pilot-yacht prevailed. Necks were craned and toes were trodden on as the steamer slackened speed, and a line dexterously thrown by a blue-jerseyed deck-hand was caught by somebody aboard the yacht. The pilot, not insensible to the fact of his being a personage of note, carefully divested his bearded countenance of all expression as he saluted the Captain, and taking from the deck-steward’s obsequiously proffered salver a glass containing four-fingers of neat Bourbon whisky, concealed its contents about his person without perceptible emotion, and went up with the First Officer upon the upper bridge as the relieved skipper plunged below. The telegraphs clicked their message—the leviathan hulk of the liner quivered and began to forge slowly ahead, and an intelligent-looking, thin-lipped, badly-shaved young man in a bowler, tweeds, and striped necktie, introduced himself to the Second Officer as an emissary of the Press.

“Mr. Cyrus K. Pillson, New York Yeller.... Pleased to know you, sir,” said the Second Officer; “step into the smoke-room, this way. Bar-steward, a brandy cocktail for me, and you, sir, order whatever you are most in the habit of hoisting. Whisky straight! Now, sir, happy to afford you what information I can!”

“I presume,” observed the young gentleman of the Press, settling himself on the springy morocco cushions and accepting the Second Officer’s polite offer of a green Havana of the strongest kind, “that you have had a smooth passage, considerin’ the time of year?”

“Smooth....” The Second Officer carefully reversed in his reply the Pressman’s remark: “Well, yes, the time of year considered, a smooth passage, I take it, we have had.”

“No fogs?” interrogated the young gentleman, clicking the elastic band of a notebook which projected from his breast-pocket.

“Fogs?... No!” said the Second Officer.

“You didn’t chance,” pursued the young gentleman of the Press, taking his short drink from the steward’s salver and throwing it contemptuously down his throat, “to fall in with a berg off the Bank, did you?”

“Not a smell of one!” replied the Second Officer with decision.

“Ran into a derelict hencoop, perhaps?” persisted the young gentleman, concealing the worn sole of a wearied boot from the searching glare of the electric light by tucking it underneath him, “or an old lady’s bonnet-box? ... or a rubber doll some woman’s baby had lost overboard? No?” he echoed, as the Second Officer shook his head. “Then, how in thunder did you manage to lose twenty feet of your port-rail?”

“Carried away,” said the Second Officer, offering the young Press gentleman a light.

“No, thanks. Always eat mine,” said the young Press gentleman gracefully.

“Matter of taste,” observed the Second Officer, blowing blue rings.

“I guess so; and I’ve a taste for knowing how you came,” said the young Pressman, “to part with that twenty foot of rail.”

“Carried away,” said the Second Officer.

“I kin see that,” retorted the visitor.

“It was carried away,” said the Second Officer, “by an elephant.”

“A pet you had running about aboard?” queried the Pressman, with imperturbable coolness.

“A passenger,” returned the Second Officer, with equal calm.

There was a snap, and the Pressman’s notebook was open on his knee. The pencil vibrated over the virgin page, when a curious utterance, between a wail, a cough, and a roar, made the hand that held it start.

“Yarr-rr! Ohowgh! Yarr!” The melancholy sound came from without, borne on the cool breeze of a late afternoon in March, through the open ventilators.

“Might that,” queried the young gentleman of the Press, “be an expression of opinion on the part of the elephant?”

“Lord love you, no!” said the Second Officer. “It’s the leopard.” He added after a second’s pause: “Or the puma.”

“Do you happen to have a menagerie aboard?” inquired the Pressman, making a note in shorthand.

“No, sir. The beasts—elephants, leopards, and a box of cobras—are invoiced from the London Docks to a wealthy amateur in New York State. Not an iron king, or a corn king, or a cotton king, or a pickle king, or a kerosene king,” said the Second Officer, with a steady upper lip, “but a chewing-gum king.”

“If you mean Shadland C. McOster,” said the Pressman, “my mother is his cousin. They used to chew gum together in school recess, sir, little guessing that Shad would one day soar, on wings made of that article, to the realms of gilded plutocracy.”

“I rather imagine the name you mention to be the right one,” said the Second Officer cautiously, “but I won’t commit myself. The beasts shipped from Liverpool are intended as a present for the purchaser’s infant daughter on her fifth birthday.”

“Yarr-rr! Ohowgh! Ohowgh!” Again the coughing roar vibrated through the smoke-room. Then the chorus of “Hail Columbia!” rose from the promenade deck, where the lady passengers were assembled ready to wave starred and striped silk pocket-handkerchiefs and exchange patriotic sentiments at the first glimpse of land.

“It’s not what I should call a humly voice, that of the leopard,” observed the Pressman, controlling a slight shiver.

“Children have queer tastes,” said the Second Officer. “And it’s as well Old Spots is lively, as Bingo’s dead.”

“Bingo?” queried the Pressman.

“Bingo was the elephant,” said the Second Officer, passing the palm of his brown right hand over his upper lip as the Pressman made a few rapid notes. “And if the particulars of the deathbed scene are likely to be of any interest to you—why, you’re welcome to ’em!”

“You’re white!” said the Pressman warmly, licking his pencil. “What did your elephant die of?”

“Seasickness!” said the Second Officer calmly.

“I’ve seen a few things worth seeing—myself,” said the Pressman enviously, “but not a seasick elephant.”

“With a professional lady-nurse in attendance,” said the Second Officer; “all complete from stem to stern, in her print gown, white apron, fly-away cap-rigging, and ward shoes.”

The Pressman grunted, but not from lack of interest. Doubled up in the corner of the smoke-room divan, his notebook balanced on his bulging shirt-front, he made furious notes. The Second Officer waited until the pencil seemed hungry, and then fed it with a little more information.

“When that girl came aboard at Liverpool with her mackintosh and holdall and little black shiny bag,” he went on, “I just noticed her in a passing sort of way as a fresh-colored, tidy-looking young woman, rather plump in the bows, and with an air as though she meant to get her full money’s worth out of her eleven-pound fare. But our cheap tariff had filled the passenger-lists fairly full, and I’d a long score of things to attend to. A special derrick had had to be rigged to sling the elephant’s cage aboard, and a capital one it was, of sound Indian teak strengthened with steel—must have cost a mint of money. We stowed it, after a lot of sweat and swearing, on the promenade deck, abaft the funnels, bolting it to rings specially screwed in the deck, passing a wire hawser across the top, which was made fast to the port and starboard davits, and rigging weather-screens of double tarpaulin to keep Bingo warm and dry. The other beasts we shipped under the lee of the forward cabin skylight; and I’d just got through the job when a quiet ladylike voice at my elbow says:

“‘If you please, officer, with regard to my patient, I wish to know——’

“‘Ask the purser, ma’am,’ I said, rather snappishly, for I was hot and worried ... ‘or the head-stewardess.’

“‘I have asked them both,’ says the voice in a calm, determined way, ‘and have been referred to you.’

“‘Well, what is it?’ says I.

“‘By mistake,’ says the young lady—for a young lady she was, and a hospital nurse besides, neatly rigged out in the usual uniform—‘by mistake I have had allotted to me a bedroom on the ground-floor, so far from my patient that I cannot possibly hear him should he call me in the night. And,’ she went on, as the breeze played with her white silk bonnet-strings and the wavy little kinks of soft brown hair that framed her forehead, ‘and I want you to move me to the upper floor at once.’

“‘You mean the promenade deck, madam,’ says I, smoothing out a grin, though I’m well enough used to the odd bungles land-folks make over names of things at sea.”

The flying pencil stopped. The Pressman looked up, turning his shortened cigar between his teeth.

“When do we come to the elephant?” he asked.

“We’re at him now,” said the Second Officer. “‘You mean the promenade deck,’ says I. ‘Does your patient occupy one of the cabins on the port or the starboard side, and may I ask his number and name?’ Then she smiled at me brightly, her eyes and teeth making a sort of flash together. ‘He doesn’t have a cabin,’ says she; ‘he sleeps in a cage. My patient is Bingo, the elephant!’”

“Great Pierpont Morgan!” ejaculated the Pressman. His previously flying pencil became almost invisible from the extreme rapidity with which he plied it. Drops of perspiration broke out upon his sallow forehead. “Glory!” he cried. “And not another man thought it worth while to run out and tackle this wallowing old tub but me!”

“I touched my cap,” went on the Second Officer, “keeping down as professionally as I could the surprise I felt.... ‘Do I understand, madam,’ I asked, ‘that you are the elephant’s nurse?’ And at that she nodded with another bright smile, and told me that she was Nurse Amy, of St. Baalam’s Nursing Association, London, specially engaged by the American gentleman who had bought the elephant——”

“Shadland C. McOster,” prompted the Pressman, without looking up.

“To attend to the animal on the voyage. It was understood that if the principal patient’s condition permitted, Nurse Amy was to pay the leopards such attentions as they were capable of appreciating, but there was no pressure on this point.”

“Ohowgh!” coughed the voice outside. “Yarr! Ohowgh!”

“He smells the land, I guess,” said the Pressman.

“Or the niggers,” suggested the Second Officer. “You ought to have heard Bingo when we were three days out from the Mersey.... We’d had a fair wind and a smooth sea at first, and nothing delighted the ladies and children on board like feeding him with apples, and nuts, and biscuits, and things prigged from the saloon tables. The sea-air must have sharpened the beast’s appetite, I suppose, for that old trunk of his was snorking round all day, and the Purser, who was naturally wild about it, said he must have put away hogsheads of good things in addition to his allowance of hay, and bread, and beetroot, and grain, and cabbages, and sugar——”

“Was he ca’am in temper?” asked the Pressman.

“Mild as milk.... As kind a beast as ever breathed; and elephants do a lot of breathing,” said the Second Officer. “The ladies and gentlemen in the upper-deck cabins used to complain about his snoring in the night; but as Nurse Amy said, there are people who’d complain about anything. And some of ’em didn’t like the smell of elephant—which, I’ll allow, when you happened to get to wind’ard of Bingo, was—phew!”

“Pooty vociferous?” hinted the Pressman.

“Until,” went on the Second Officer, “Nurse Amy took to washing him with scented soap.”

The pencil stopped. The Pressman looked up with circular eyes. “Scented——”

“Soap,” said the Second Officer. “No expense was to be spared—and we’d several cases of a special toilet and complexion article on board. By the living Harry! if you’d seen that elephant standing up over his morning tub of hot water, swabbing away at himself with a deck-sponge Nurse Amy had soaped for him, and then squirting the water over himself to rinse off the soap, you’d have believed in the intelligence of animals. The sight drew like a pantomime.... But by the sixth day out Bingo had given up all interest in his own appearance. The weather was squally, a bit of a sea got up, hardly a passenger put in an appearance at the saloon tables, and Bingo only shook his ears when the bugle blew, and turned away from his morning haystack and mound of cabbages with disgust. Nurse Amy got him to eat some biscuits and drink a bucket of Bovril, but you could see he was only doing it to oblige her. ‘Oh, come, cheer up!’ she said in a brisk, professional way. ‘You’ll get your sea-legs on directly and the officer says we’re having a wonderfully smooth passage, considering the time of the year.’ But Bingo only sighed, and two tears trickled out of his little red eyes, as he swayed from side to side. ‘He’ll be worse before he’s better,’ says I; for somehow I was generally about when Nurse Amy was looking after her big charge. ‘He’ll be worse before he’s better,’ and he was.”

The Pressman’s face was streaked and shiny, his hair lay glued to his brow. The pencil went on, devouring page after page.

“Nurse Amy, luckily for her patient, was not upset by the pitching of the vessel, for it blew half a gale steady from the sou’-west, and the old Centipede dipped her nose pretty frequently. Nurse was as busy as a bee endeavoring by every means she could devise or adopt from the suggestions of the stewardesses, who showed a good deal of interest in her and her charge, to alleviate the sufferings of Bingo. I have seen that little woman stand for an hour on the wet planking, holding a six-foot deck-swab soaked with eau-de-Cologne to Bingo’s forehead....”

The Pressman jotted down, breathing heavily. “Deck-swab soaked in eau-de-Cologne....” he muttered. “Must have cost slathers of money, I reckon——”

“No expense was to be spared,” the Second Officer reminded him gently. “As for the brandy, Martell’s Three Star, he must have put away a dozen bottles a day.”

“No blamed wonder his head ached!” said the Pressman, moistening his own dry lips.

“Except an occasional bucket of arrowroot with port wine and a tin or so of cuddy biscuits, the animal would take no other nourishment whatever,” continued the Second Officer. “As he grew weaker and weaker, it was touching to see the way in which he clung to Nurse Amy.”

“Clung to her?” the Pressman wrote, marking the words for a headline.

“Fact,” said the Second Officer. “He would put his trunk round her waist, and lay his head on her shoulder as she stood on a ladder lashed against the side of his cage. And he would hang out his forefoot to have his pulse felt, quite in a Christian style. Then when Nurse Amy wanted to take his temperature, the docile brute would curl up his fire-hose—I mean his trunk—and open his mouth, so that the instrument might be comfortably placed under his tongue.”

“By gings, sir, this story is going to knock corners off creation!” gasped the Pressman, pausing to wipe his face with a slightly smeary cuff. “An elephant that understood the use of the therm—blame it! that beast robbed some man of a fortune when he passed in his checks!”

“We lost so many of the ordinary kind of instrument in this way,” went on the Second Officer, almost pensively, “that at last Nurse Amy was obliged to fall back upon the large thermometer and barometer combined that usually hung in the first saloon. But it recorded, to our sorrow, no improvement. The mercury steadily sank, and it became plain to Nurse Amy’s professional eye that her patient was not long for this world.”

“Say, do you believe elephants have souls?” queried the Pressman. The Second Officer deigned no reply.

“She could not leave him a moment; he trumpeted so awfully when he saw her quit his side. I forgot to tell you that from the moment he first felt himself attacked by sea-sickness his bellows of rage and agony were frightful to hear. The other animals became excited by them; they roared and snarled without cessation.”

“Raised general hell,” said the Pressman, “with trimmings.” But he wrote down with a sign that meant leaded spaces and giant capitals:

“PANDEMONIUM IN MID-OCEAN!”

“Nobody on board got a wink of sleep,” said the Second Officer—“that is, unless the devoted Nurse Amy was by the sufferer’s side. Towards the end, when, exhausted by days and nights of arduous nursing, the devoted girl had retired to her deck-cabin to snatch a few moments of much-needed rest, the entire crew vied with each other in efforts to pacify Bingo, without the slightest effect. When they tried to put his feet in hot water he mashed the ship’s buckets like so many gooseberries, and shot the Purser down with half a trunkful of hot cocoa, which had been offered as a last resource. But on Nurse Amy’s appearing he grew pacified, and from that moment until the end the heroic woman never left his side. I begged her to consider herself and those dear to her,” said the Second Officer, with a little tremble in his voice, “but she only smiled—a worn kind of smile—and said that duty must be considered first. I won’t deny it,” said the Second Officer, openly producing a very white pocket-handkerchief and unfolding it. “I kissed that woman’s hand as though she had been the Queen.” He concealed his face with the handkerchief and coughed rather loudly.

“The Rude Shellback Touched to the Quick,” wrote the Pressman. “He Sheds Tears.” “Get on with the death-scene, sir, if you don’t object!” he said, breathing through his nose excitedly. “If that elephant asked for a minister, I’d not be surprised!”

“He did make his will, after a fashion,” said the narrator. “You see, during the convulsive struggles I have described, when he broke off his right tusk—didn’t I mention that?”

“No!” denied the Pressman.

“He broke it, anyhow, right off short, as a boy might snap a carrot,” said the Second Officer. “There it lay, among the litter, in the bottom of his cage. He had suddenly ceased trumpeting, and a deathly silence had fallen on all creation, one would have said. The vessel still rolled a bit, but the wind had fallen, and the sun was going down like a blot of fire, on the——”

“Western horizon,” wrote the Pressman.

“Nurse Amy, from her ladder, still rendered the last offices of human kindness to the sinking animal, sponging his forehead with ice-water and fanning him with a bellows. As she whispered to me that the end was near, Bingo opened his eyes. With an expiring effort he lifted the broken tusk from the bottom of the cage, dropped it on the deck at his faithful Nurse’s feet, uttered a heavy groan, threw up his trunk, sank gently forward upon his massive knees, and died!”

“The editor of the opposition paper will do another die when he runs his eye over the Yeller to-morrow morning,” said the Pressman, joyfully smacking the rubber band round the filled notebook. “And the port-rail got carried away when you yanked the body overboard?”

“We couldn’t stuff him,” said the Second Officer with a sigh. “As for preserving him in spirits, we hadn’t enough spirits left to think of it. We rigged a special derrick, and heaved Bingo overboard, carrying away, as you have guessed, the port-rail in the operation. As Bingo’s tremendous carcass rose and floated buoyantly away to leeward, back and head well above the water, and the two great ears resting flat upon the surface like gigantic lily-pads, Nurse Amy uttered a faint cry and swooned in my arms.”

“Some folks get all the luck!” commented the Pressman, who, having filled his book, was now jotting down notes upon his left cuff.

“You’ve not much to complain of, it strikes me!” observed the Second Officer, with a glance at the crammed notebook.

“I guess that’s true!” said the Pressman, with a sigh of satisfaction. “Now, all I want is a photograph or a sketch of that splendid heroine of a girl, and the honor of shaking her hand, and telling her she deserves to be an American—and I’d not trade places with the President.”

The Second Officer appeared to be struggling with some emotion. The muscles of his mouth worked violently. He reddened through the red, and suspicious moisture shone in his eyes. One by one the members of the silent but not unappreciative audience of male passengers that had gradually gathered within earshot of the Second Officer and his victim, manifested the same symptoms. And glancing for the first time at those listening faces, and observing the identical expression stamped upon each, the Pressman, encircled by wet, crinkled eyes, and cheerfully-curled-back lips, fringed with teeth in all stages of preservation, grasped the conviction that he had been had. And at this crucial moment the hatch-door of the smoke-room rolled back in its brass coamings, and a pointed gray beard and kindly keen eyes, sheltered by the peak of a gold-laced cap, appeared in the aperture.

“New York Harbor, gentlemen,” said the Captain genially. “We’re running into the docks now, and the Custom House officers will board us directly.... I shouldn’t wonder,” he continued, as the majority of the occupants of the smoke-room one by one glided away, “if the newspapers made a story out of our missing port-rail!”

“Permit me to introduce myself as a reporter of the N’York Yeller,” said the young gentleman in tweeds, as he rose and touched his hat. “Perhaps, sir, you would favor me with the facts in connection with the occurrence?”

“Haven’t you had it from Murchison? Why, Murchison——” the Captain was beginning, when with a choking snort the Second Officer rushed from the smoke-room. “Though there’s nothing to tell, Mr. Reporter, worth hearing. A derrick-chain broke at Southampton Docks, and a case of agricultural machine-parts did the damage. We temporarily repaired with some iron piping, and a length of wire hawser; but, of course, it shows badly, and suggests——”

“A collision!” said a smiling stranger.

“Or an elephant,” said another.

“Yarr!” proclaimed the horrible voice outside. “Ohowgh! Yarr!”

“I understand,” said the Pressman with an effort, “that the elephant emanated from the teeming brain of Mr. Murchison. But the leopard—there is a leopard, I surmise, if hearing goes for evidence?”

The Captain’s excellent teeth showed under his gray mustache. “That noise, you mean?” he exclaimed.... “Oh, that’s one of our electric air-pumps, for forcing air into the lower-deck storage chambers, you know. She’s out of gear, and lets us know it in that way. Must have her seen to at New York. Take a drink, won’t you? Come, gentlemen, order what you please.”

“Whisky, square,” murmured the Pressman, as the long, smooth glide of the liner was checked, the engines throbbed and stopped, and the dull roar of the docks pressed upon listening ears. He drank, and as the fluid traversed the usual channel, his eye grew brighter.... “Say, Captain,” he asked, “do you know where your Second Officer was raised?”

“Murchison comes, I believe, from Yorkshire,” said the Captain. “Hey, Murchison, isn’t that the place?”

“I am not acquainted with the geology of Yorkshire,” observed the Pressman, as he passed the Second Officer on his way to the smoke-room; “but the soil grows good liars! So long!”

GEMINI
AN EMBARRASSMENT OF CHOICE

To Captain Galahad Ranking, grilling over his Musketry-Instructorship at Hounslow one arid July, came a square lilac envelope, addressed in a sprawling hand, with plenty of violet ink. The missive smelt of Rhine violets. It bore a monogram, the initials “L. K.” fantastically intertwined, and was, in fact, an invitation from his affectionate cousin Laura, dated from a pleasant country mansion situate amid green lawns and blushing rose-gardens on the Werkshire reaches of the Thames.

Laura was not Galahad’s cousin by blood, but by marriage. Laura was the still young and attractive widow of Thomson Kingdom, once a stout man on the Stock Exchange, remarkable for a head of very upright gray hair and a startling taste in printed linen. Pigs and peaches were his pet hobbies, and the apoplectic seizure from which he never rallied was induced by a weakness in “the City” caused by unprecedentedly heavy selling-orders from a nervous north-eastern European capital, about the time of the entente cordiale. So the bloom was barely off Laura’s crêpe, and the new black gloves purchased by Galahad to grace his kinsman’s obsequies had not done duty at another funeral. The scrawly postscript to her letter said: “I want to consult you very particularly, in the most absolute confidence, upon a matter affecting my whole future.”

Galahad Ranking, Junior Captain, Fourth Battalion Royal Deershire Regiment, wrinkled up his freckled little countenance into queer puckers, and rubbed his bristly cinnamon-colored hair, already getting thin on the summit of his skull, as he puzzled the brain within that receptacle as to the possible meaning of Laura’s impassioned appeal. He was a small man, whose demure and spinster-like demeanor led new acquaintances to ask him plumply how on earth he had managed to get his D.S.O.

“There were chances,” he would reply to these querists, “to be had out there,” waving his hand vaguely in the direction of South Africa, “and I saw one of them and took it—that’s all.”

Others might pump him more successfully to the effect that he—Galahad Ranking—was a poor devil of a militiaman attached to the Royal Deershires; that a small detachment of that well-known territorial regiment, garrisoned in a beastly small tin-pot fort on the Springbok River, Eastern Transvaal, were by Boers besieged; that relief was urgently necessary; and that “one of the fellows went and brought up Kitchener.” Said fellow admitted upon further cross-examination to have been himself. But for such details as that the bringing up involved a six-mile run in scorching sun over tangled bush veldt, crossing the enemy’s lines, being sniped at by Boer sharpshooters and chased by Boer pickets, the curious must refer to despatches. Stampeding Army mules would not trample the truth out of the man.

He wrung half-hearted leave of absence from the powers that were, and his orderly packed the battered tin suit-case and the Gladstone bag that had spent three days at the bottom of a water-hole, and, having had its numerous labels soaked off, bore a painfully leprous appearance.

He found Laura’s omnibus automobile, with its luggage tender, waiting at Cholsford Junction, and smiled his dry little smile, mentally comparing the dimensions of the vehicle with the size of the guest. The suit-case and the Gladstone bag made a poor show; but there were other things to come: huge packages from the Stores, and a sea-weedy hamper from Great Fishby, and some cases of champagne with the label of a first-class Regent Street firm. “Poor Kingdom’s wine-merchants!” Ranking said to himself, and he blinked in a bewildered way at a bandbox of mammoth proportions and three dressmakers’ boxes of stout cardboard with tin corners, their covers bearing the flourishing signature of Babin et Cie. Because, you know, Laura’s bereavement was so very recent, and bachelors of Galahad’s type have a somewhat exaggerated notion of the extent to which conjugal mourners are expected to bewail themselves. However, even a widow requires clothes. This handsome concession to feminine idiosyncrasy made, Galahad ousted Laura’s chauffeur from the driving-seat, and, assuming the steering-wheel, was reaching for the starting-lever when the chauffeur stopped him with—

“Beg pardon, sir, but there’s a gentleman to fetch.”

“A visitor to The Rodelands?” Galahad asked, with furrows of surprise forming below his hat-brim.

The mechanic, a gloomy young man in a gold-banded cap, with a weakness for wearing waterproofs in the driest weather, replied, without a groom’s alertness or a groom’s civility:

“It’s a gentleman staying at Eyot Cottage....” Adding, as Galahad faintly recalled the creeper-covered cot in question, modestly perched on the edge of a marshy lawn running down to the river, and usually let by the landlord of the local hotel to honeymooning couples: “And we usually give him a lift.”

As the chauffeur spoke, the gentleman emerged from the dim, echoing archway through which the down platform disgorged. The stranger was young—Galahad, who was middle-aged, saw that at a glance—and fair, while Galahad was sandy. He wore a suit of gray tweeds too short in the sleeves and trouser-legs, and his cherubically pink countenance, adorned with large, round, china-blue eyes and a little flaxen mustache, was carried at an altitude which would have been disconcerting to a Lifeguardsman of six feet high, and was simply maddening to Galahad, who could only be categorized as small. We are all human, and Galahad was secretly gratified to observe that the young giant’s shoulders boasted a graceful droop, and that his chest was somewhat narrow.

“Hullo, Watson!” observed the tall young gentleman, condescendingly; and Watson smiled faintly and actually touched his cap as the new-comer favored Galahad with a long and round-eyed stare.

“I believe you are coming with us?” said Galahad, raising his hat with punctilious politeness.

“Not inside, thanks,” was the long-legged young stranger’s reply. He stared harder than ever, and Watson murmured in Galahad’s ear that the gentleman usually drove.

“Does he?” ejaculated the astonished Galahad.

A man may hold the rank of captain in one of his Majesty’s territorial Regiments, and yet be shy; may have earned the right to adorn his thorax with the D.S.O., and yet be bashful; may be a more than efficient instructor in Musketry, and yet shrink from the gratuitous schooling of underbred youth in the amenities of good breeding. In less time than it takes to relate it, Galahad was stowed in the omnibus body of the “Runhard” where, a very little kernel in a very roomy shell, he rattled about as the familiar landscape reeled giddily by at the will and pleasure of the long-legged young gentleman, who might be described as the kind of driver that takes risks. A peculiarly steep and curving hill announced by signboards lettered, in appropriate crimson, “Dangerous!” afforded facilities for the exercise of his peculiar talent which temporarily deprived the inside passenger of breath.

The river lay at the bottom of the hill, and the dwelling of Mrs. Kingdom, described in the local guide as “an elegant riparian villa,” sat in its green meadows and sunny croquet lawns and rose-trellised gardens, on the other side.

The automobile swirled in at the lodge-gates, stopped, and Galahad got out, welcomed by the joyful barking of Dinmonts, fox-terriers, pugs, and poodles.

Knee-deep in dogs, the little man responded to the respectful greeting of Laura’s butler, a meek, gray-faced, little, elderly personage with a frill of white whiskers akin to the hirsute adornments of the rare variety of the howling ape. Then the drawing-room door swung open, letting out an avalanche of Pomeranians and some Persian cats; Laura rose from a sofa and advanced with a gushful greeting. Her outstretched hands were grasped by Galahad; he was tinglingly conscious that her widow’s weeds were eminently becoming.

“Dear Captain Ranking, how sweet of you to run down!” Laura cooed. The flash of admiration in Galahad’s weary gray eyes gave her sugared assurance that she was looking her best; his ardent squeeze confirmed the look.

“You used to call me by my Christian name,” he was saying, with a little undulating wobble of sentiment in his voice. Then his glance went past Mrs. Kingdom, and his lean under-jaw dropped. The long-legged gentleman in gray tweed, who had driven, or rather hustled, him from the station, was sitting on the sofa in a suit of blue serge. No, Galahad was not mistaken. There were the long legs, the champagne-bottle shoulders, the china-blue eyes, and the little flaxen mustache. He did not look so pink, that was all. And when Laura, with a nervous giggle, introduced him as Mr. Lasher, he began getting up from the sofa as though he never would have done.

“How do?” he said, when his yellow head had soared to the ceiling.

“Met you before,” said Galahad with some terseness. “And you frightened me abominably by the way you scorched down Penniford Hill.”

The long-legged young man stared with circular blue eyes. Laura burst into a peal of rippling laughter, which struck Galahad as being forced and beside the point.

“My dear Galahad,” Mrs. Kingdom cried, “you must have met Brosy! This is Dosy,” she added, as though all were now clear, and welcomed with a perfect feu de joie of giggles the entrance of the veritable and original young man in gray tweeds who had driven the automobile, and now came strolling into the drawing-room. Then she introduced the pair formally to Captain Ranking as Mr. Theodosius and Mr. Ambrose Lasher, and rustled away to pour out tea, leaving Galahad in a jaundiced frame of mind. For one thing, he hated to be mystified; for another, being an ordinary, though heroic, human being, he had taken at the first moment of encounter a singularly ardent and sincere dislike to the “long-legged, blue-eyed young bounder,” as he mentally termed Mr. Brosy Lasher; and the discovery that the object of his loathing existed in duplicate was not a welcome one. He was dry, stiff, and jerky in his responses to the loud and patronizing advances of the two Lashers. Fortunately the twin young gentlemen accepted as admiration, what was, in fact, the opposite sentiment. They had been used to a good deal of this since the first moment of their simultaneous entrance upon this mundane stage, and they were twenty-six.

“It is so sad,” Laura said in confidential aside to Galahad. “They have lost both parents, and have hardly a penny in the world.” She raised and crumpled her still pretty eyebrows with the old infantile air of appeal. “Two such delightful boys, and so handsome! ... though to my eye Brosy’s nose is less purely Greek in outline than Dosy’s. And they were educated at a public school, with every advantage that a rich man’s sons might naturally expect. But, of course, you recognized the cachet of Eton at once?”

“I notice,” said Ranking drily, “that they both leave the lower button of their waistcoats undone, and call men whom they don’t like ‘scugs.’” His quiet eye dwelt with dubious tenderness upon the Messrs. Lasher, who were romping with the dogs upon the sofas, and devouring cake and strawberries with infantile greed. “I have heard of the Eton manner, of course,” he added, “and I meet a good many Eton-bred men; but I can’t say that these young fellows have any—any special characteristics in common with—ah—those.”

“They belong to a grand old family,” Laura continued, with an air of proprietorship that puzzled Galahad. “The Lashers of Dropshire, you know—quite historical. And their father ran through everything before they came of age. So thoughtless, wasn’t it? And now they are looking round for an opening in life, and really, they tell me, it is dreadfully difficult to find.”

“I rather imagined as much,” said Galahad, making a little point of sarcasm all to himself, and secretly smiling over it.

“I wonder if you could suggest anything; you are always so helpful,” Laura went on. “That they must be together, of course, goes without saying. And that, of course, increases the difficulty. But nobody could be so inhuman as to part twins.” Her lips quivered, and her eyes grew misty with unshed tears.

“My dear Laura,” expostulated the puzzled Galahad, “you talk as though these two young men were six years old instead of six-and-twenty.”

“How changed you are!” Laura blinked away a tear. “You used to understand me so much better in the old days. Of course, they are grown up, that is plain to the meanest capacity. But they have such boyish, charming, confiding natures.... Toto will bite, Brosy, if you hold him in the air by the tail!... that a woman like myself.... If you would like some more cherry cake, Dosy, do ring the bell!... a woman like myself, married at eighteen to a man true and noble if you will, but incapable of awakening the deeper chords of passion and.... Of course, you are both going to dine here and help me to entertain Captain Ranking!... denied the happiness of being a mother”—Laura drooped her eyes and bit her lip, and blushed slightly—“must naturally find their company a great resource. And the distant cousin with whom they are staying, a Mrs. Le Bacon Chalmers, who has taken Eyot Cottage for the summer months, knows this and lends them to me as often as I like.”

“Upon my word, she is uncommonly kind!” said Galahad, with emphasis stronger than Laura’s italics.

“Yes, isn’t she?” responded Laura, whose sense of humor was obscured by predilection. “They ride and drive the horses, and give Holt and the gardeners advice, and they exercise the automobiles, and run the electric launch about, and play tennis and croquet——”

“And the devil generally!” were the words that Galahad bit off and gulped down.

He was very quiet at dinner, sitting in the deceased Kingdom’s place at the foot of the table. And Dosy and Brosy were very loud and very large, though looking, it must be confessed, exceedingly well in evening garb. They made themselves very much at home upon Laura’s right and left hand, recommending certain dishes to each other, criticizing more, ravaging the bonbons, reveling in the dessert, calling, with artless airs of connoisseurship, for special wines laid down by the noble man who yet had not known how to awaken the deeper chords of passion.

“Gad! what a pair of hawbucks!” Galahad mentally ejaculated as the servants ran about like distracted ants, and Laura and Laura’s inseparable though elderly companion-friend, Miss Glidding, vied with each other in encouraging Theodosius and Ambrose to renewed attacks upon the strawberries and peaches.

Left alone with Dosy and Brosy, he submitted to be patronized, offered cigars he had chosen, recommended to try liqueurs with whose liverish and headachy qualities he had been acquainted of old.

They walked with the ladies in the dewy rose-gardens after dinner, and as Galahad paused to light a cigar, behold, he was left alone. Laura with Brosy, Miss Glidding (who looked her best by bat-light) with Dosy, had vanished in the shadowy windings of the trellis-walks and arcades. And Captain Ranking, shrugging his shoulders, picked a half-seen Niphetos, glimmering among the wet, shining leaves, and walked back to the smoking-room, wondering why on earth Laura had dragged him down where he seemed least to be wanted. What was the matter “affecting her whole future” upon which she required advice? His heart gave a sickening little jog as he realized that the future of Dosy, or possibly of Brosy, might also be involved. True, Laura was thirty-nine; but what are years when the heart is young? Galahad asked himself, as peal after peal of the widow’s laughter broke the silence of the scented night. Other mental interrogations fretted his aching brain. What must the servants not have thought and said? What would the neighbors say? What would the County think of such sportive, not to say frivolous, conduct on the part of a widow but recently emancipated from weepers, whose handkerchiefs were still bordered with the inch-deep inky deposit of conjugal woe?

Kingdom was an easy-going, level-headed man, Galahad admitted, biting at one of the deceased’s Havanas and frowning; “but he would have raised the Devil over this. Possibly he’s doing it.”

The portrait of Mr. Kingdom over the mantelshelf of the smoking-room seemed to scowl confirmatively. The servants were all in bed, the promenaders in the garden showed no signs of returning. Galahad shrugged his little shoulders, and went away to bed in a charming, drum-windowed, chintz-hung bower over the front porch. And just as his little cropped head plumped down on the pillow it was electrically jolted up again. Laura was saying good-night in the porch to one—or was it both?—of the infernal twins. And before the hall-door clashed they had promised to come over to lunch to-morrow. Confound them! it was to-morrow now.

One has only to add that when, after exhausting watches, slumber visited Galahad’s eyelids, the twins in maddening iteration played dominoes throughout his dreams, to convince the reader that they had thoroughly got upon his nerves.

Laura, looking wonderfully fresh and young in a lace morning négligé of the peek-a-boo description, poured out his coffee at breakfast and sympathized with him about the headache he denied. Then, shaded by a fluffy black-and-white sunshade, the widow led Galahad out into the sunny garden to a tree-shaded and sequestered nook where West Indian hammocks hung, and, installing herself in one of these receptacles, invited her husband’s cousin to repose himself in another.

Lying on your back, counting ripening plums dangling from green branches above, oscillating at the bidding of the lightest breeze, liable to upset at the slightest movement, it is difficult to be indignant and sarcastic; but Galahad was both.

“Adopt these young men as sons, my dear Laura! Are there no parentless babies in the local workhouse that would better supply the need you express of having something to cherish and love?” exclaimed Galahad.

He sat up with an effort and stared at Laura. Laura rocked, prone amid cushions, knitting a silk necktie of a tender hue suited to a blonde complexion.

“Workhouse babies are invariably ugly, and unhealthy into the bargain,” she pouted.

“Some orphan child from a Home, that is pretty to look at and has had the distemper properly,” suggested Galahad.

“I don’t want an orphan from a Home,” objected Laura. “Besides, it wouldn’t be a twin.”

“There are such things as twin orphans, my dear Laura,” protested Galahad.

But Laura was firm.

“Dosy and Brosy are very, very dear to me,” she protested, a little pinkness about the eyelids and nostrils threatening an impending tear-shower. “They came into my life,” she continued poetically, “at a time of sorrow and bereavement, and the sunshine of their presence drove the dark clouds away. Of course, they are too old, or, rather, not young enough, to be really my sons,” she continued, “but they might have been poor Tom’s.”

“If poor Tom had fathered a brace of bounders like those,” burst out Galahad, “poor Tom would have kicked himself—that’s all I know—kicked himself!” he repeated, fuming and climbing out of his hammock.

“Pray don’t be coarse,” entreated Laura—“and abusive,” she added, as an afterthought. “Of course, as poor Tom’s trustee and executor, I am bound to make a show of consulting you, though my mind is really made up, and nobody can prevent my doing what I like with my own income. I shall allow the boys five hundred a year each for pocket money,” she added with a pretty maternal air. “And Dosy shall go into the Diplomatic Service, and Brosy——”

“You have broached the adoption plan to them then?” gasped Galahad. Laura bowed her head. “And this relative with whom I gather they are now staying,” he continued, “is she agreeable to the proposed arrangement?”

“Mrs. Le Bacon Chalmers? She couldn’t prevent it if she wasn’t!” retorted Laura, “as the boys are of age. But, as it happens, she thinks the plan an ideal one.”

“That proves the value of her judgment, certainly. And the County? Will your friends and neighbors also think the plan an ideal one?” demanded Galahad.

“My friends and neighbors,” said Laura, loftily, “will think as I do, or they will cease to be my friends.”

Galahad, usually punctiliously well-mannered, whistled long and dismally. “Phew! And when you have alienated every soul upon your visiting list, what will you do for society?”

“I shall have the boys,” said Laura, with defiant tenderness.

“And when the ‘boys,’ as you call them, marry?” insinuated Galahad.

Laura sat up so suddenly that all her cushions rolled out of the hammock. “If this is how you treat me when I turn to you for advice——” she began.

“Laura,” said Galahad firmly, “you don’t want advice.” He held up his lean brown hand and checked her, as she would have spoken. “Nor do you require twin sons of six feet three. What you want is——” He was going in his innocence to say “a sincere and candid friend,” and prove himself the ideal by some plain speaking, but Laura fairly brimmed over with conscious blushes.

“How—how can you?” she said, in vibrating tones of reproach, devoid of even a shade of anger. “So soon, too! As if I did not know what was due to poor Tom——”

The toot of a motor-horn, the scuffle of the engine, the dry whirr of the brake as the locomotive stopped at the avenue gate, broke in upon her heroics.

“Here are the boys,” she cried rapturously, and, indeed, hopped out of the hammock with the agility of girlhood as the long-legged, yellow-haired twins came stalking over the grass. She held out her hands to them with a pretty maternal gesture.

“Dosy pet, Brosy darling,” she babbled, “come and kiss Mummy! We have been telling all our little plans to Uncle Galahad, and Uncle quite agrees.”

“No! Does he, though?” was the simultaneous utterance of the long-legged twins. They twirled their yellow mustaches, stooped awkwardly and “kissed Mummy,” as Galahad uttered a yell of frenzied laughter, and, throwing himself recklessly into his recently-vacated hammock, shot out upon the other side.

He went back to Hounslow that day. Dosy and Brosy dutifully accompanied him to the station, and exchanged a fraternal wink when his train steamed out.

“What an infatuation!” he groaned. In his mind’s eye he saw the County grinning over the childless widow and her adopted twins. As for Dosy and Brosy, they would have what in America is termed “a soft snap.” Powerful jaws had both the young gentlemen, wide and greedy gullets. Still, with his mind’s eye Galahad saw their foolish, affectionate, sentimental benefactress gnawed to the bare bone. Day by day he anticipated a letter of shrill astonishment from his cotrustee, and when it came, hinting at mental weakness and the necessity of restraint, he flamed up into defense of Laura so hotly as to surprise himself.

And then, before anything decisive had been done with regard to the settlement—before Brosy and Dosy had taken up their quarters for good beneath the roof of their adopted parent—a change befell, and Galahad received an imploring note from Mrs. Kingdom soliciting his instant presence upon “an urgent matter.”

“She has thought better of it,” said Galahad to himself, as he obeyed the summons. “Her native good sense”—you will realize that the man must have been genuinely in love to believe in Laura’s native good sense—“has come to her aid!” And in his mind’s eye he beheld the long, narrow backs of the twins walking away into a dim perspective.

It was September. Dosy and Brosy were shooting the widow’s partridges, and Galahad found her alone. She was pleased and excited, with an air of one who with difficulty keeps the cork in a bottle of mystery; and when she clasped her hands round Galahad’s arm and told him what a true, true friend he was! he felt absurdly tender, as he begged her to confide her trouble to him.

“I have made such a dreadful discovery,” Laura gasped, dabbing her eyes with a filmy little square of cambric edged with the narrowest possible line of black, “about the—about the boys.”

Galahad strove to compose his features into an expression of decent regret.

“Mr. Ambrose and Mr. Theodosius Lasher.... I rather anticipated that you—that possibly there were discoveries to be made.” He turned his weary gray eyes upon Laura, and pulled at one wiry end of his little gingery mustache. “Have they done anything very bad?” he asked, and his tone was not uncheerful.

“Bad!” echoed Laura, with indignant scorn. “As though two young men gifted with natures like theirs”—she had left off calling them “boys,” Galahad noticed—“so lofty, so noble, so unselfish—and yes, I will say it, so pure!—could possibly be guilty of any bad or even doubtful action. But you do not know them, and you are prejudiced; you must admit you are prejudiced when you hear the—the truth.” The cork escaped, and the secret came with it in a gush. “It is this: I cannot be a mother to Dosy and Brosy; they, poor dears, cannot be my sons. I had not the least idea of their true feeling with regard to me, nor had they, until quite recently.” She swallowed a little sob and dabbed her eyes again. “Oh, Galahad, they are madly in love with me, both of them. What, what am I to do?”

“Send them to the devil, the impudent young beggars!” snorted Galahad. And, striding up and down between the trembling china-tables with clenched fists and angry eyes, he said all the things he had longed to say about folly, and madness and infatuation.

A woman will always submit with a good grace to masculine upbraiding when she has reason to believe the upbraider jealous. Laura bore his reproaches with saintly sweetness.

“They have behaved in the most honorable way, poor darlings!” she protested, “though the realization of the true nature of their feelings towards me, of course, came as a terrible shock. The deeds of settlement had been drawn up. We planned, as soon as everything had been sealed and signed, that the dear boys were to come and live here. I had furnished their bedrooms exactly alike, and fitted up the smoking-room with twin armchairs, twin tobacco-tables, and so on, when the blow fell.” She deepened her voice to a thrilling whisper. “Dosy, looking quite pale and tragic, asked for an interview in the conservatory; Brosy begged for a private word in the pavilion at the end of the upper croquet-lawn. And then,” said Laura, shedding abundant tears, “I knew what I had done. It did occur to me that I might—might marry Brosy and adopt Dosy as my son, or marry Dosy and regard Brosy as an heir. But no, it could not be. Dosy proposed to take poison, or shoot himself, in the most unselfish way; and Brosy suggested going in for a swim too soon after breakfast, and never rising from a dive again. But neither could endure to live to see me the bride of the other,” sobbed Laura.

“And as this is England, and not Malabar,” uttered Galahad, dryly, “the law is against your marrying both.”

“Why, of course, my dear Galahad,” cried Laura innocently, scandalized and round-eyed.

The man who really loved her looked at her and forgave her foolishness. She had set the County buzzing with the tale of her absurd infatuation; she had compromised her dignity by the tragic follies of the past few months; there was but one way of gagging the scandalmongers and regaining lost ground, one way of getting out of the impasse. Galahad pointed out that way, as Laura entreated him to suggest something.

“Why not marry me?” he said bluntly.

“Oh, Galahad!” cried Laura, bright-eyed and quite pleasantly thrilled. “And then we can both adopt the boys.”

“Whether they embrace that idea or not,” said Galahad, with his arm round the long-coveted waist, “remains to be seen. But I promise you, if occasion should arise, that I will act as a father to them.”

He went out, in his new parental character, to look for Dosy and Brosy and break the joyful news. His freckled little face was beaming with smiles, his usually weary gray eyes were alight; he smiled under his bristly little mustache as he selected a stout but stinging Malacca cane from the late Thompson Kingdom’s collection in the hall....

A DISH OF MACARONI

On the occasion of the tenth biennial visit of the Carlo Da Capo Grand Opera Combination to the musical, if murky, city of Smutchester, the principal members of the company pitched their tents, as was their wont, at the Crown Diamonds Hotel, occupying an entire floor of that capacious caravanserie, whose chef, to the grief of many honest British stomachs and the unrestrained joy of these artless children of song, was of cosmopolitan gifts, being an Italian-Spanish-Swiss-German. Here prime donne, tenors, and bassos could revel in national dishes from which their palates had long been divorced, and steaming masses of yellow polenta, knüdels, and borsch, heaped dishes of sausages and red cabbage, ragouts of cockscombs and chicken-livers, veal stewed with tomatoes, frittura of artichokes, with other culinary delicacies strange of aspect and garlicky as to smell, loaded the common board at each meal, only to vanish like the summer snow, so seldom seen but so constantly referred to by the poetical fictionist, amidst a Babel of conversation which might only find its parallel in the parrot-house at the Zoo. Ringed hands plunged into salad-bowls; the smoke of cigarettes went up in the intervals between the courses; the meerschaum-colored lager of Munich, the yellow beer of Bass, the purple Chianti, or the vintage of Epernay brimmed the glasses; and the coffee that crowned the banquet was black and thick and bitter as the soul of a singer who has witnessed the triumph of a rival.

For singers can be jealous: and the advice of Dr. Watts is more at discount behind the operatic scenes, perhaps, than elsewhere. For women may be, and are, jealous of other women; and men may be, and are, jealous of men, off the stage; but it is reserved for the hero and heroine of the stage to be jealous of one another. The glare of the footlights, held by so many virtuous persons to be inimical to the rosebud of innocence, has a curiously wilting and shriveling effect upon the fine flower of chivalry. Signor Alberto Fumaroli, primo uomo, and possessor of a glorious tenor, was possessed by the idea that the chief soprano, De Melzi, the enchanting Teresa—still in the splendor of her youth, with ebony tresses, eyes of jet, skin of ivory, an almost imperceptible mustache, and a figure of the most seductive, doomed ere long to expand into a pronounced embonpoint—had adorned her classic temples with laurels which should by rights have decked his own. The press-cuttings of the previous weeks certainly balanced in her favor. Feeble-minded musical critics, of what the indignant tenor termed “provincial rags,” lauded the Signora to the skies. She was termed a “springing fountain of crystal song,” a “human bulbul in the rose-garden of melody.” Eulogy had exhausted itself upon her; while he, Alberto Fumaroli, the admired of empresses, master of the emotions of myriads of American millionairesses, he was fobbed off with half a dozen patronizing lines. Glancing over the paper in the saloon carriage, he had seen the impertinent upper lip of the De Melzi, tipped with the faintest line of shadow, curl with delight as she scanned each accursed column in turn, and handed the paper to her aunt (a vast person invariably clad in the tightest and shiniest of black satins, and crowned with a towering hat of violet velvet adorned with once snowy plumes and crushed crimson roses), who went everywhere with her niece, and mounted guard over the exchequer. Outwardly calm as Vesuvius, and cool as a Neapolitan ice on a hot day, the outraged Alberto endured the triumph of the women, marked the subterranean chuckles of the stout Signora, the mischievous enjoyment of Teresa; pulled his Austrian-Tyrolese hat over his Corsican brows, and vowed a wily vendetta. His opportunity for wreaking retribution would come at Smutchester, he knew. Wagner was to be given at the Opera House, and as great as the previous triumph of Teresa de Melzi in the rôle of Elsa—newly added by the soprano to her repertoire—should be her fall. Evviva! Down with that fatally fascinating face, smiling so provokingly under its laurels! She should taste the consequences of having insulted a Neapolitan. And the tenor smiled so diabolically that Zamboni, the basso, sarcastically inquired whether Fumaroli was rehearsing Mephistofole?

“Not so, dear friend,” Fumaroli responded, with a dazzling show of ivories. “In that part I should make a bel fiasco; I have no desire to emulate a basso or a bull.... But in this—the rôle in which I am studying to perfect myself—I predict that I shall achieve a dazzling success.” He drew out a green Russia-leather cigarette case, adorned with a monogram in diamonds. “It is permitted that one smokes?” he added, and immediately lighted up.

“It is permitted, if I am to have one also.”

The De Melzi stretched a white, bejeweled hand out, and the seething Alberto, under pain of appearing openly impolite, was forced to comply. “No, I will not take the cigarette you point out,” said the saucy prima donna, as the tenor extended the open case. “It might disagree with me, who knows? and I have predicted that in the part of Elsa to-morrow night at Smutchester I shall achieve a ‘dazzling success.’” And she smiled with brilliant malice upon Alberto Fumaroli, who played Lohengrin. “They are discriminating—the audiences of that big, black, melancholy place—they never mistake geese for swans.”

“Ach, no!” said the Impresario, looking up from his tatting—he was engaged upon a green silk purse for Madame Da Capo, a wrinkled little doll of an old lady with whom he was romantically in love. “They will not take a dournure, some declamation, and half a dozen notes in the upper register bour dout botage. Sing to them well, they will be ready to give you their heads. But sing to them badly, and they will be ready to pelt yours. Twenty years ago they did. I remember a graceless impostor, a ragazzo (foisted upon me for a season by a villain of an agent), who annoyed them in Almaviva.... Ebbene! the elections were in progress—there was a dimonstranza. I can smell those antique eggs, those decomposed oranges, now.”

“Heart’s dearest, thou must not excite thyself,” interrupted Madame; “it is so bad for thee. Play at the poker-game, mes enfants,” she continued, “and leave my good child, my beloved little one, alone!” Saying this, Madame drew from her vast under-pocket a neat case containing an ivory comb, and, removing the fearfully and wonderfully braided traveling cap of the Impresario, fell to combing his few remaining hairs until, soothed by the process, Carlo, who had been christened Karl, fell asleep with his head on Madame’s shoulder; snoring peacefully, despite the screams, shrieks, howls, and maledictions which were the invariable accompaniment of the poker-game.

The train bundled into Smutchester some hours later; a string of cabs conveyed the Impresario, his wife, and the principal members of his company to the Crown Diamonds Hotel. Before he sought his couch that night the revengeful Alberto Fumaroli had interviewed the chef and bribed him with the gift of a box of regalias from the cedar smoking-cabinet of a King, to aid in the carrying-out of the vendetta. Josebattista Funkmuller was not a regal judge of cigars; but these were black, rank, and oily enough to have made an Emperor most imperially sick. Besides, the De Melzi had, or so he declared, once ascribed an indigestion which had ruined, or so she swore, one of her grandest scenas, to an omelette of his making, and the cook was not unwilling that the haughty spirit of the cantatrice should be crushed. His complex nature, his cosmopolitan origin, showed in the plan Josebattista Funkmuller now evolved and placed before the revengeful tenor, who clasped him to his bosom in an ecstasy of delight, planting at the same time a huge, resounding kiss upon both his cheeks.

“It is perfection!” Fumaroli cried. “My friend, it can scarcely fail! If it should, per Bacco! the Fiend himself is upon that insolent creature’s side! But I never heard yet of his helping a woman to resist temptation—oh, mai! it is he who spreads the board and invites Eve.”

And the tenor retired exultant. His sleeping-chamber was next door to that of the hated cantatrice. He dressed upon the succeeding morning to the accompaniment of roulades trilled by the owner of the lovely throat to which Fumaroli would so willingly have given the fatal squeeze. And as Fumaroli, completing his frugal morning ablutions by wiping his beautiful eyes and classic temples very gingerly with a damp towel, paused to listen, a smile of peculiar malignancy was only partly obscured by the folds of the towel. But when the tenor and the soprano encountered at the twelve o’clock déjeuner, Fumaroli’s politeness was excessive, and his large, dark, brilliant eyes responded to every glance of the gleaming black orbs of De Melzi with a languorous, melting significance which almost caused her heart to palpitate beneath her Parisian corsets. Concealed passion lay, it might be, behind an affectation of enmity and ill-will.

“Mai santo cielo!” exclaimed the stout aunt, to whom the cantatrice subsequently revealed her suspicions, “thou guessest always as I myself have thought. The unhappy man is devoured by a grand passion for my Teresa. He grinds his teeth, he calls upon the saints, he grows more bilious every day, and thou more beautiful. One day he will declare himself——”

“And I shall lose an entertaining enemy, to find a stupid lover,” gurgled Teresa. She was looking divine, her dark beauty glowing like a gem in the setting of an Eastern silk of shot turquoise and purple, fifty yards of which an enamored noble of the Ukraine had thrown upon the stage of the Opera House, St. Petersburg, wound round the stem of a costly bouquet. She glanced in the mirror as she kissed the black nose of her Japanese pug. “Every man becomes stupid after a while,” she went on. “Even Josebattista is in love with me. He sends me a little note written on papier jambon to entreat an interview.”

“My soul!” cried the stout aunt, “thou wilt not deny him?”

The saucy singer shook her head as Funkmuller tapped at the door. One need not give in detail the interview that eventuated. It is enough that the intended treachery of Fumaroli was laid bare. His intended victim laughed madly.

“But it is a cerotto—what the English call a nincompoop,” she gasped, pressing a laced handkerchief to her streaming eyes. “If the heavens were to fall, then one could catch larks; but the proverb says nothing about nightingales.”

She tossed her brilliant head and took a turn or two upon the hotel sitting-room carpet, considering.

“I will keep this appointment,” said she.

“Dio! And risk thy precious reputation?” shrieked the aunt.

“Chi sa? Chi sa?

Evviva l’opportunita!”

hummed the provoking beauty. And she dealt the cook a sparkling glance of such intelligence that he felt Signor Alberto would never triumph. Relieved in mind, Josebattista Funkmuller took his leave.

“I will return the King’s cigars,” he said, as he pressed his garlic-scented mustache to the pearly knuckles of the lady.

“Bah!” said she, “they were won in a raffle at Vienna.”

The door closed upon the disgusted chef, and reopened ten minutes later to admit a waiter carrying upon a salver a pretty three-cornered pink note with a gold monogram in the corner. The writer entreated the inestimable privilege of three minutes’ conversation with Madame de Melzi in a private apartment in the basement of the hotel. He did not propose to visit the prima donna in her own rooms, even under the wing of her aunt, for it was of supreme importance that tongues should not be set wagging. Delicacy and respect prevented him from suggesting an interview in the apartments occupied by himself. On the neutral ground of an office in the basement the interview might take place without comment or interruption. He was, in fact, waiting there for an answer.

The answer came in the person of the singer herself, charmingly dressed and radiant with loveliness.

“Fie! What an underground hole! The window barred, the blank wall of an area beyond it!” Her beautiful nostrils quivered. “Caro mio, you have in that covered dish upon the table there something that smells good. What is under the cover?”

“Look and see!” said the cunning tenor, with a provoking smile.

“I am not curious,” responded Teresa, putting both hands behind her and leaning her back against the door. “Come, hurry up! One of your three minutes has gone by, the other two will follow, and I shall be obliged to take myself off without having heard this mysterious revelation. What is it?” She showed a double row of pearl-hued teeth in a mischievous smile. “Shall I guess? You have, by chance, fallen in love with me, and wish to tell me so? How dull and unoriginal! A vivacious, interesting enemy is to be preferred a million times before a stupid friend or a commonplace adorer.”

“Grazie a Dio!” said the tenor, “I am not in love with you.” But at that moment he was actually upon the verge; and the dull, dampish little basement room, floored with kamptulicon warmed by a grudging little gas-stove, its walls adorned with a few obsolete and hideous prints, its oilcloth-covered table, on which stood the mysterious dish, closely covered, bubbling over a spirit lamp and flanked by a spoon, fork, and plate—that little room might have been the scene of a declaration instead of a punishment had it not been for the De Melzi’s amazing nonchalance. It would have been pleasant to have seen the spiteful little arrow pierce that lovely bosom. But instead of frowning or biting her lips, Teresa laughed with the frankest grace in the world.

“Dear Signor Alberto, Heaven has spared you much. Besides, you are of those who esteem quantity above quality—and, for a certain thing, I should be torn to pieces by the ladies of the Chorus.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Well, what is this mysterious communication? The three minutes are up, the fumes of a gas fire are bad for the throat—and I presume you of all people would not wish me to sing ‘Elsa’ with a veiled voice, and disappoint the dear people of Smutchester, and Messieurs the critics, who say such kind things.”

Alberto Fumaroli’s brain spun round. Quick as thought his supple hand went out; the wrist of the coquettish prima donna was imprisoned as in a vise of steel.

“Ragazza!” he gnashed out, “you shall pay for your cursed insolence.” He swung the cantatrice from the door, and Teresa, noting the convulsed workings of his Corsican features, and devoured by the almost scorching glare of his fierce eyes, felt a thrill of alarm.

“Oimè! Signor,” she faltered, “what do you mean by this violence? Recollect that we are not now upon the stage.”

A harsh laugh came from the bull throat of the tenor.

“By mystic Love

Brought from the distance

In thy hour of need.

Behold me, O Elsa!

Loveliest, purest—

Thine own

Unknown!”

he hummed. But his Elsa did not entreat to flow about his feet like the river, or kiss them like the flowers blooming amidst the grasses he trod. Struggling in vain for release from the rude, unchivalrous grasp, an idea came to her; she stooped her beautiful head and bit Lohengrin smartly on the wrist, evoking, instead of further music, a torrent of curses; and as Alberto danced and yelled in agony, she darted from the room. With the key she had previously extracted she locked the door; and as her light footsteps and crisping draperies retreated along the passage, the tenor realized that he was caught in his own trap. Winding his handkerchief about his smarting wrist, he bestowed a few more hearty curses upon Teresa, and sat down upon a horsehair-covered chair to wait for deliverance. They could not possibly give “Lohengrin” without him—there was no understudy for the part. For her own sake, therefore, the De Melzi would see him released in time to assume the armor of the Knight of the Swan. Ebbene! There was nothing to do but wait. He looked at his watch, a superb timepiece encrusted with brilliants. Two o’clock! And the opera did not commence until eight. Six hours to spend in this underground hole, if no one came to let him out. Patience! He would smoke. He got over half an hour with the aid of the green cigarette-case. Then he did a little pounding at the door. This bruised his tender hands, and he soon left off and took to shouting. To the utmost efforts of his magnificent voice no response was made; the part of the hotel basement in which his prison happened to be situated was, in the daytime, when all the servants were engaged in their various departments, almost deserted. Therefore, after an hour of shouting, Fumaroli abandoned his efforts.

What was to be done? He could take a siesta, and did, extended upon two of the grim horsehair chairs with which the apartment was furnished. He slept excellently for an hour, and woke hungry.

Hungry! Diavolo! with what a raging hunger—an appetite of Gargantuan proportions, sharpened to the pitch of famine by the bubbling gushes of savory steam that jetted from underneath the cover of the mysterious dish still simmering over its spirit-lamp upon the table! He knew what that dish contained—his revenge, in fact. Well, it had missed fire, the vendetta. He who had devised the ordeal of temptation for Teresa found himself helpless, exposed to its fiendish seductions. Not that he would be likely to yield, oh mai! was it probable? He banished the idea with a gesture full of superb scorn and a haughty smile. Never, a thousand times never! The cunning Teresa should be disappointed. That evening’s performance should be attacked by him as ever, fasting, the voice of melody, the sonorous lungs, supported by an empty frame. Cospetto! how savory the smell that came from that covered dish! The unhappy tenor moved to the table, snuffed it up in nosefuls, thought of flinging the dish and its contents out of window—would have done so had not the window been barred.

“After all, perhaps she means to keep me here all night,” he thought, and rashly lifted the dish-cover, revealing a vast and heaving plain of macaroni, over which little rills of liquid butter wandered. Parmesan cheese was not lacking to the dish, nor the bland juices of the sliced tomato, and, like the violet by the wayside, the modest garlic added its perfume to the distracting bouquet. Fumaroli was only human, though, as a tenor, divine. He had been shut up for four hours, fasting, in company with a dish of macaroni.... Ah, Heaven! he could endure no longer.... He drew up a chair, grasped fork and spoon—fell to. In the act of finishing the dish, he started, fancying that the silvery tinkle of a feminine laugh sounded at the keyhole. But his faculties were dulled by vast feeding; his anger, like his appetite, had lost its edge. With an effort he disposed of the last shreds of macaroni, the last trickle of butter; and at seven o’clock a waiter, who accidentally unlocked the door of the basement room, awakened a plethoric sleeper from heavy dreams.

“To the Opera House,” was the listless direction he gave the driver of his hired brougham; as one in a dream he entered by the stage-door, and strode to his room.

The curtain had already risen upon grassy lowlands in the neighborhood of Antwerp. Henry, King of Germany, seated under a spreading canvas oak, held court with military pomp. Frederic of Telramond, wizard husband of Ortrud, the witch, had stepped forward to accuse Elsa of the murder of her brother, Gottlieb; the King had cried, “Summon the maid!” and in answer to the command, amidst the blare of brass and the clashing of swords, the De Melzi, draped in pure white, followed by her ladies, and looking the picture of virginal innocence, moved dreamily into view:

“How like an angel!

He who accuses her

Must surely prove

This maiden’s guilt.”

Ah! had those who listened to the thrilling strains that poured from those exquisite lips but guessed, as Elsa described the appearance of her dream-defender, her shining Knight, and sank upon her knees in an ecstasy of passionate prayer, that the celestial deliverer was at that moment gasping in the agonies of indigestion!

“Let me behold

That form of light!”

entreated the maiden; and amidst the exclamations of the eight-part chorus the swan-drawn bark approached the bank; the noble, if somewhat fleshy, form of Alberto Fumaroli, clad from head to foot in silvery mail, stepped from it.... With lofty grace he waved his adieu to the swan, he launched upon his opening strain of unaccompanied melody.... Alas! how muffled, how farinaceous those once clarion tones!... In labored accents, amid the growing disappointment of the Smutchester audience, Lohengrin announced his mission to the King. As he folded the entranced Elsa to his oppressed bosom, crying:

“Elsa, I love thee!”

“She-devil, you have ruined me!” he hissed in the De Melzi’s ear.

“My hope, my solace,

My hero, I am thine!”

Teresa trilled in answer. And raising her love-illumined, mischievously dancing eyes to her deliverer, breathed in his ear: “Try pepsin!”

“FREDDY & C^IE”

It is always a perplexing question how to provide for younger sons, and the immediate relatives of the Honorable Freddy Foulkes had forfeited a considerable amount of beauty sleep in connection with the problem.

“My poor darling!” the Marchioness of Glanmire sighed one day, more in sorrow than in anger, when the Honorable Freddy brought his charming smile and his graceful but unemployed person into her morning-room. “If you could only find some congenial and at the same time lucrative post that would take up your time and absorb your spare energy, how grateful I should be!”

“I have found it,” said the Honorable Freddy, with his cherubic smile. He possessed the blonde curling hair and artless expression that may be symbolical of guilelessness or the admirable mask of guile.

“Thank Heaven!” breathed his mother. Then, with a sense that the thanksgiving might, after all, be premature, she inquired: “But of what nature is this post? Before it can be seriously considered, one must be certain that it entails no loss of caste, demands nothing derogatory in the nature of service from one who—I need not remind you of your position, or of the fact that your family must be considered.”

She smoothed her darling’s silky hair, which exhaled the choicest perfume of Bond Street, and kissed his brow, as pure and shadowless as a slice of cream cheese, as the young man replied:

“Dearest mother, you certainly need not.”

“Then tell me of this post. Is it anything,” the Marchioness asked, “in the Diplomatic line?”

“Without a good deal of diplomacy a man would be no good for the shop,” admitted Freddy; “but otherwise, your guess is out.”

Doubt darkened his mother’s eyes.

“Don’t say,” she exclaimed, “that you have accepted a Club Secretaryship? To me it seems the last resource of the unsuccessful man.”

“It will never be mine,” said Freddy, “because I can’t keep accounts, and they wouldn’t have me. Try again.”

“I trust it has nothing to do with Art,” breathed the Marchioness, who loathed the children of canvas and palette with an unreasonable loathing.

“In a way it has,” replied her son, “and in another way it hasn’t. Come! I’ll give you a lead. There is a good deal of straw in the business for one thing.”

“You cannot contemplate casting in your lot with the agricultural classes? No! I knew the example of your unhappy cousin Reginald would prevent you from adopting so wild a course ... but you spoke of straw.”

“Of straw. And flowers. And tulles.”

“Flowers and tools! Gardening is a craze which has become fashionable of late. But I cannot calmly see you in an apron, potting plants.”

“It is not a question of potting plants, but of potting customers,” said Freddy, showing his white teeth in a charming smile.

A shudder convulsed Freddy’s mother. Freddy went on, filially patting her handsome hand:

“You see, I have decided, and gone into trade. If I were a wealthy cad, I should keep a bucket-shop. Being a poor gentleman, I am going to make a bonnet-shop keep me. And, what is more—I intend to trim all the bonnets myself!”

There was no heart disease upon the maternal side of the house. The Marchioness did not become pale blue, and sink backwards, clutching at her corsage. She rose to her feet and boxed her son’s right ear. He calmly offered the left one for similar treatment.

“Don’t send me out looking uneven,” he said simply. “If I pride myself upon anything, it is a well-balanced appearance. And I have to put in an hour or so at the shop by-and-by.” He glanced in the mantel-mirror as he spoke, and observing with gratification that his immaculate necktie had escaped disarrangement, he twisted his little mustache, smiled, and knew himself irresistible.

“The shop! Degenerate boy!” cried his mother. “Who is your partner in this—this enterprise?”

“You know her by sight, I think,” returned the cherub coolly. “Mrs. Vivianson, widow of the man who led the Doncaster Fusiliers to the top of Mealie Kop and got shot there. Awfully fetching, and as clever as they make them!”

“That woman one sees everywhere with a positive procession of young men at her heels!”

“That woman, and no other.”

“She is hardly——”

“She is awfully chic, especially in mourning.”

“I will admit she has some style.”

“Admit, when you and all the other women have copied the color of her hair and the cut of her sleeves for three seasons past! I like that!”

Freddy was growing warm.

“When you accuse me of imitating the appearance of a person of that kind,” said Lady Glanmire, in a cold fury, “you insult your mother. And when you ally yourself with her in the face of Society, as you are about to do, you are going too far. As to this millinery establishment, it shall not open.”

“My dear mother,” said Freddy, “it has been open for a week.”

He drew a card from an exquisite case mounted in gold. On the pasteboard appeared the following inscription in neat characters of copperplate:—

FREDDY & C^IE

Court Milliners,

11, Condover Street, W.

“Freddy and Company!” murmured the stricken parent, as she perused the announcement.

“Mrs. V. is company,” observed the son, with a spice of vulgarity; “and uncommonly good company, too. As for myself, my talents have at last found scope, and millinery is my métier. How often haven’t you said that no one has such exquisite taste in the arrangement of flowers——”

“As you, Freddy! It is true! But——”

“Haven’t you declared, over and over again, that you have never had a maid who could put on a mantle, adjust a fold of lace, or pin on a toque as skillfully as your own son?”

“My boy, I own it. Still, millinery as a profession? Can you call it quite manly for a man?”

“To spend one’s life in arranging combinations to set off other women’s complexions. Can you call that womanly for a woman? To my mind,” pursued Freddy, “it is the only occupation for a man of real refinement. To crown Beauty with beauty! To dream exquisite confections, which shall add the one touch wanting to exquisite youth or magnificent middle-age! To build up with deft touches a creation which shall betray in every detail, in every effect, the hand of a genius united to the soul of a lover, and reap not only gold, but glory! Would this not be Fame?”

“Ah! I no longer recognize you. You do not talk like your dear old self!” cried the Marchioness.

“I am glad of it,” replied Freddy, “for, frankly, I was beginning to find my dear old self a bore.” He drew out a watch, and his monogram and crest in diamonds scintillated upon the case. His eye gleamed with proud triumph as he said: “Ten to twelve. At twelve I am due at Condover Street. Come, not as my mother, if you are ashamed of my profession, but as a customer ashamed of that bonnet” (Lady Glanmire was dressed for walking), “which you ought to have given to your cook long ago. Unless you would prefer your own brougham, mine is at the door.”

The vehicle in question bore the smartest appearance. The Marchioness entered it without a murmur, and was whirled to Condover Street. The name of Freddy & Cie. appeared in a delicate flourish of golden letters above the chastely-decorated portals of the establishment, and the plate-glass window contained nothing but an assortment of plumes, ribbons, chiffons, and shapes of the latest mode, but not a single completed article of head apparel.

The street was already blocked with carriages, the vestibule packed, the shop thronged with a vast and ever-increasing assemblage of women, amongst whom Lady Glanmire recognized several of her dearest friends. She wished she had not come, and looked for Freddy. Freddy had vanished. His partner, Mrs. Vivianson, a vividly-tinted, elegant brunette of some thirty summers, assisted by three or four charming girls, modestly attired and elegantly coiffée, was busily engaged with those would-be customers, not a few, who sought admission to the inner room, whose pale green portière bore in gold letters of embroidery the word atelier.

“You see,” she was saying, “to the outer shop admission is quite free. We are charmed to see everybody who likes to come, don’t you know? and show them the latest shades and shapes and things. But consultation with Monsieur Freddy—we charge five shillings for that. Unusual? Perhaps. But Monsieur Freddy is Monsieur Freddy!” And her shrug was worthy of a Parisienne. “Why do you ask? ‘Is it true that he is the younger son of the Duke of Deershire?’ Dear Madame, to us he is Monsieur Freddy; and we seek no more.”

“A born tradeswoman!” thought Lady Glanmire, as the silver coins were exchanged for little colored silk tickets bearing mystic numbers. She moved forward and tendered two half-crowns; and Freddy’s partner and Freddy’s mother looked one another in the face. But Mrs. Vivianson maintained an admirable composure.

And then the curtains of the atelier parted, and a young and pretty woman came out quickly. She was charmingly dressed, and wore the most exquisite of hats, and a murmur went up at sight of it. She stretched out her hands to a friend who rushed impulsively to meet her, and her voice broke in a sob of rapture.

“Did you ever see anything so sweet? And he did it like magic—one scarcely saw his fingers move!” she cried; and her friend burst into exclamations of delight, and a chorus rose up about them.

“Wonderful!”

“Extraordinary!”

“He does it while you wait!”

“Just for curiosity, I really must!”

And a wave of eager women surged towards the green portière. Three went in, being previously deprived of their headgear by the respectful attendants, who averred that it put Monsieur Freddy’s taste out of gear for the day to be compelled to gaze upon any creation other than his own. And then it came to the turn of Lady Glanmire.

She, disbonneted, entered the sanctum. A pale, clear, golden light illumined it from above; the walls were hung with draperies of delicate pink, the carpet was moss-green. In the center of the apartment, upon a broad, low divan, reclined the figure of a slender young man. He wore a black satin mask, concealing the upper part of his face, a loose, lounging suit of black velvet, and slippers of the same with the embroidered initial “F.” Round him stood, mute and attentive as slaves, some half-dozen pretty young women, bearing trays of trimmings of every conceivable kind. In the background rose a grove of stands supporting hat-shapes, bonnet-shapes, toque-foundations, the skeletons of every conceivable kind of headgear.

Silent, the Marchioness stood before her disguised son.

He gently put up his eyeglass, to accommodate which aid to vision his mask had been specially designed, and motioned her to the sitter’s chair, so constructed that with a touch of Monsieur Freddy’s foot upon a lever it would revolve, presenting the customer from every point of view. He touched the lever now, and chair and Marchioness spun slowly around. But for the presence of the young ladies with their trays of flowers, plumes, gauzes, and ribbons, Freddy’s mother could have screamed. All the while Freddy remained silent, absorbed in contemplation, as though trying to fix upon his memory features seen for the first time. At last he spoke.

“Tall,” he said, “and inclined to a becoming embonpoint. The eyes blue-gray, the hair of auburn touched with silver, the features, of the Anglo-Roman type, somewhat severe in outline, the chin——A hat to suit this client”—he spoke in a sad, sweet, mournful voice—“would cost five guineas. A Marquise shape, of broadtail”—one of the young lady attendants placed the shape required in the artist’s hands—“the brim lined with a rich drapery of chenille and silk.... Needle and thread, Miss Banks. Thank you....” His fingers moved like white lightning as he deftly wielded the feminine implement and snatched his materials from the boxes proffered in succession by the girls. “Black and white tips of ostrich falling over one side from a ring of cut steel,” he continued in the same dreamy tone. “A knot of point d’Irlande, with a heart of Neapolitan violets, and”—he rose from the divan and lightly placed the beautiful completed fabric upon the Marchioness’s head—“here is your hat, Madame. Five guineas. Good-morning. Next, please!”

Emotion choked his mother’s utterance. At the same moment she saw herself in the glass silently swung towards her by one of the attendants, and knew that she was suited to a marvel. She made her exit, paid her five guineas, and returned home, embarrassed by the discovery that there was an artist in the family.

One thing was clear, no more was to be said. The Maison Freddy became the morning resort of the smart world; it was considered the thing to have hats made while Society waited. True, they came to pieces easily, not being copper-nailed and riveted, so to speak; but what poems they were! The charming conversation of Monsieur Freddy, the half-mystery that veiled his identity, as his semi-mask partially concealed his fair and smiling countenance, added to the attractions of the Condover Street atelier.

Money rolled in; the banking account of the partners grew plethoric; and then Mrs. Vivianson, in spite of the claims of the business upon her time, in spite of the Platonic standpoint she had up to the present maintained in her relations with Freddy, began to be jealous.

“Or—no! I will not admit that such a thing is possible!” she said, as she looked through some recent entries in the day-book of the firm. “But that American millionairess girl comes too often. She has bought a hat every day for three weeks past. Good for business in one way, but bad for it in another. If he should marry, what becomes of the Maison Freddy?”

She sighed and passed between the curtains. It was the slack time after luncheon, and Freddy was enjoying a moment’s interval. Stretched on his divan, his embroidered slippers elevated in the air, he smoked a perfumed cigarette surrounded by the materials of his craft. He smiled at Mrs. Vivianson as she entered, and then raised his aristocratic eyebrows in surprise.

“Has anything gone wrong? You swept in as tragically as my mother when she comes to disown me. She does it regularly every week, and as regularly takes me on again.” He exhaled a scented cloud, and smiled once more.

“Freddy,” said Mrs. Vivianson, going direct to the point, “this little speculation of ours has turned out very well, hasn’t it?”

“Beyond dreams!” acquiesced Freddy. She went on:

“You came to me a penniless detrimental, with a talent of which nobody guessed that anything could be made. I gave this gift a chance to develop. I set you on your legs, and——”

“Me voici! You don’t want me to rise up and bless you, do you?” said Freddy, with half-closed eyes. “Thanks awfully, you know, all the same!”

“I don’t know that I want thanks, quite,” said Mrs. Vivianson. “I’ve had back every penny that I invested, and pulled off a bouncing profit. Your share amounts to a handsome sum. In a little while you’ll be able to pay your debts.”

“I shall never do that!” said Freddy, with feeling.

“Marry, and leave me—perhaps,” went on Mrs. Vivianson. A shade swept over her face, her dark eyes glowed somberly, the lines of her mouth hardened.

“Keep as you are!” cried Freddy, rebounding to a sitting position on the divan.

“Where’s that new Medici shape in gold rice-straw and the amber crêpe chiffon, and the orange roses with crimson hearts?” His nimble fingers darted hither and thither, his eyes shone, and his cheeks were flushed with the enthusiasm of the artist. “A tuft of black and yellow cock’s feathers, à la Mephistophele,” he cried, “a topaz buckle, and it is finished. You must wear with it a jabot of yellow point d’Alençon. It is the hat of hats for a jealous woman!”

“How dare you!” cried Mrs. Vivianson. But Freddy did not seem to hear her—he was rapt in the contemplation of the new masterpiece; and as he rose and gracefully placed it on his partner’s head, Miss Cornelia Vanderdecken was ushered in. She was superbly beautiful in the ivory-skinned, jetty-locked, slender American style, and she wore a hat that Freddy had made the day before, which set off her charms to admiration.

She occupied the sitter’s chair as Mrs. Vivianson glided from the room, and Freddy’s blue eyes dwelt upon her worshipingly. To do him justice, he had lost his heart before he learned that Cornelia was an heiress. Now words escaped him that brought a faint pink stain to her ivory cheek.

“Ah!” he cried impulsively, “you are ruining my business.”

“Oh, why, Monsieur Freddy? Please tell me!” asked Miss Vanderdecken, with naïve curiosity.

“Because,” said Freddy, while a bright blush showed beyond the limits of his black satin mask, “you are so beautiful that it is torture to make hats for other women—since I have seen you.”

There was a pause. Then Miss Cornelia’s silk foundations rustled as she turned resolutely toward the divan.

“I can’t return the compliment,” she said, “by telling you that it is torture to me to wear hats made by any other man since I have seen you, for other men don’t make hats, and I can’t really see you through that thing you wear over your face. But——”

Her voice faltered, and Freddy, with a gesture, dismissed his lady assistants. Then he removed his mask. Their eyes met, and Cornelia uttered a faint exclamation.

“Oh my! You’re just like him!”

“Who is he?” asked Freddy.

“I can’t quite say, because I don’t know,” returned Cornelia; “but all girls have their ideals, from the time they wear Swiss pinafores to the time they wear forty-eight inch corsets; and I won’t deny”—her voice trembled—“but what you fill the bill. My! What are you doing?”

For Freddy had grasped his materials and was making a hat. It was of palest blush tulle, with a crown of pink roses, and an aigrette of flamingo plumes was fastened with a Cupid’s bow in pink topaz.

“Love’s first confession,” the young man murmured as he bit off the last thread, “should be whispered beneath a hat like this.” And he gracefully placed it on Cornelia’s raven hair.

Mrs. Vivianson, her ear to the keyhole of a side door, quivered from head to foot with rage and jealousy. Time was when he, a penniless, high-bred boy, had implored her to marry him. Now—her blood boiled at the remembrance of the half hint, the veiled suggestion she had made, that they should unite in a more intimate partnership than that already consolidated. With her jealousy was mingled despair. As long as Freddy and his hats remained the fashion, the shop would pay, and pay royally. There had as yet occurred no abatement in the onflow of aristocratic patronage. To avow his identity—never really doubted—to become an engaged man, meant ruin to the business. The blood hummed in her head. She clung to the door-handle and entered, as Freddy, with real grace and eloquence, pleaded his suit.

“And you are really a Marquis’s second son, though you make hats for money?” she heard Cornelia say. “I always guessed you had real old English blood in you, from the tone of your voice and the shape of your finger-nails, even when you wore a mask. And it seemed as though I couldn’t do anything but buy hats. I surmised it was vanity at the time, but now I guess it was—love!”

“My dearest!” said Freddy, bending his blonde head over her jeweled hands. “My Cornelia! I will make you a hat every day when you are married. Ah! I have it! You shall wear one of mine to go away in upon the day we are wed, the inspiration of a bridegroom, thought out and achieved between the church door and the chancel. What an idea for a lover! What an advertisement for the shop!” His blue eyes beamed at the thought.

But Cornelia’s face fell.

“I don’t know how to say it, dear, but we shall never be married. Poppa is perfectly rocky on one point, and that is that the man I hitch up with shall never have dabbled as much as his little finger in trade. ‘You have dollars enough to buy one of the real high-toned sort,’ he keeps saying, ‘and if blood royal is to be got for money, Silas P. Vanderdecken is the man to get it. So run along and play, little girl, till the right man comes along.’ And I know he’ll say you’re the wrong one!”

Freddy’s complexion, grown transparent from excess of emotion and lack of exercise, paled to an ivory hue. His sedentary life had softened his condition and unstrung his nerves. He adored Cornelia, and had looked forward to a lifetime spent in adorning her beauty with bonnets of the most becoming shapes and designs. Now that a coarse Transatlantic millionaire with soft shirt-fronts and broad-leaved felt hats might step in and shatter for ever his beautiful dream of union, bitter revulsion seized him. He feared his fate. What was he? The second son of a poor Marquis, with a particularly healthy elder brother. He looked upon the chiffons, the flowers and the feathers that surrounded him, and felt that the hopes of a heart reared upon so frail a basis were insecure indeed. Then his old blood rallied to his heart, and he rose from the divan and clasped the now tearful Cornelia to his breast.

“Go, my dearest,” he said, “tell all to your father—plead for me. Do not write or wire—bring me his verdict to-morrow. Meanwhile I will compose two hats. Each shall be a masterpiece—a swan-song of my Art. One is to be worn if”—his voice broke—“if I am to be happy; the other if I am fated to despair. Go now, for I must be alone to carry out my inspiration.”

And Cornelia went. Then Freddy, sternly refusing to receive any more customers that day, set himself to the completion of his task. Before very long both hats were actualities. Hat Number One was an Empire shape of dead-leaf beaver, the crown draped with dove-colored silk, a spray of sere oak-leaves and rue in front, a fine scarf of black lace, partly to veil the face of the wearer, thrown back over one side of the brim and caught with a clasp of black pearls set in oxidized silver. It breathed of chastened woe and temperate sadness, and was to be worn if Papa Vanderdecken persisted in refusing to accept Freddy as a suitor.

But Hat Number Two! It was of the palest blue guipure straw, draped with coral silk and Cluny lace. In front was a spray of moss rosebuds and forget-me-nots, dove’s wings of burnished hues were set at either side. It was the very hat to be worn by a bringer of joyful news, the ideal hat under which might be appropriately exchanged the first kiss of plighted passion. Upon it Freddy pinned a fairy-like card, white and gold-edged.

“If I am to be happy, wear this,” was written upon it; and upon a buff card attached to the hat of rejection he inscribed: “Wear this, if I am to be unhappy.” Then he closed the large double bandbox in which he had packed the hats, breathed a kiss into the folds of the silver paper, and, ringing the bell, bade a messenger carry the box to the hotel at which Cornelia Vanderdecken was staying, and where, millionairess though she was, she was still content to dress with the help of a deft maid and the adoration of a devoted companion. Then the exhausted artist fell back on the divan. Cornelia was to come at twelve upon the morrow.

“Then I shall learn my fate,” said Freddy. He drove home in his brougham, and passed a sleepless night. The fateful hour found him again upon his divan, surrounded by the materials of his craft, waiting feverishly for Cornelia.

The curtains parted. He started up at the rustling of her gown and the jingling of her bangles. Horror! she wore the somber hat of sorrow, though under its shadow her face was curiously bright.

She advanced toward Freddy. He reeled and staggered backward, raised his white hand to his delicate throat, and fell fainting amongst his cushions. Cornelia screamed. Mrs. Vivianson and her young ladies came hurrying in. As the stylish widow noted Cornelia’s headgear, her eyes flashed and joy was in her face. Then it clouded over, for she knew that Papa Vanderdecken had been coaxed over, and Freddy was an accepted man. My reader, being exceptionally acute, will realize that the jealous woman had changed the tickets on the hats.

“Not that it was much use,” she avowed to herself, as she entered with smelling-salts and burnt feathers to restore Freddy’s consciousness. “When he revives, she will tell him the truth.” But Freddy only regained consciousness to lose it in the ravings of delirium. He had an attack of brain fever, in which he wandered through groves of bonnet shops, looking unavailingly for Cornelia. And then came the crisis, and he woke up with an ice-bandage on, to find himself in his bedroom at Glanmire House, with the Marchioness leaning over him.

“Mother, my heart is broken,” said the boy—he was really little more. “The world exists no more for me. Let me make my last hat—and leave it.”

“Oh, Freddy, don’t you know me?” gasped Cornelia in the background; but the repentant woman who had brought about all this trouble drew the girl away.

“Even good news broken suddenly to him in his weak state,” said Mrs. Vivianson in a rapid whisper, “may prove fatal. I have a plan which may gradually enlighten him.”

“I trust you,” said Cornelia. “You have saved his life with your nursing. Now give him back to me!”

“Hush!” said Mrs. Vivianson.

She had rapidly dispatched a messenger to Condover Street, and now, as Freddy again opened his eyes and repeated his piteous request, the messenger returned. Then all present gathered about the bed, whose inmate had been raised upon supporting pillows. It was a queer scene as the shaded electric light above the bed played upon Freddy’s pallid features, showing the ravages of sickness there. “Now!” said Mrs. Vivianson. She placed the milliner’s box upon the bed, and Freddy’s feeble fingers, diving into it, drew forth a spray of orange blossoms and a diaphanous cloud of filmy lace.

“Black—not white!” Freddy gasped brokenly. “It is a mourning toque that I must make. Let Cornelia wear it at my funeral.”

“Cornelia will not wear it at your funeral, Freddy,” said Mrs. Vivianson, bending over him; “for she is going to marry you, not to bury you.” And, drawing the tearful girl to Freddy’s side, she flung over her beautiful head the bridal veil, and crowned her with a wreath of orange blossoms. And as, with a feeble cry, Freddy opened his wasted arms and Cornelia fell into them, Mrs. Vivianson, her work of atonement completed, pressed the offered hand of Freddy’s mother, and hurried out of the room and out of the story. Which ends, as stories ought, happily for the lovers, who are now honeymooning in the Riviera.

UNDER THE ELECTRICS
A SHOW-LADY IS ELOQUENT

“Really, my dear, I think the man has gone a bit too far. Writes a play with a fast young lady in the Profession for the heroine—and where he got his model from I can’t imagine—and then writes to the papers to explain, accounting for her past being a bit off color—twiggez-vous?—by saying she isn’t a Chorus-lady, only a Show-lady.

“Gracious! I’m short of a bit of wig-paste, my pet complexion-color No. 2. Any lady present got half a stick to lend? I want to look my special best to-night: somebody in the stalls, don’tcherknow! Chuck it over!—mind that bottle of Bass! I’m aware beer is bad for the liver, but such a nourishing tonic, isn’t it? When I get back to the theater, tired after a sixty-mile ride in somebody’s 20 h.p. Gohard—twiggez?—a tumbler with a good head to it makes my dear old self again in a twink.

“Half-hour? That new call-boy must be spoke to on the quiet, dears. Such manners, putting his nasty little head right into the show-ladies’ dressing-room when he calls. I suggest, girlies, that when we’re all running down for the general entrance in the First Act—and that staircase on the prompt side is the narrowest I ever struck—I suggest that when we meet that little brute—he’s always coming up to give the principals the last call—I suggest that each girl bumps his head against the wall as she goes by! That’ll make twenty bumps, and do him lots of good, too!

“Miss de la Regy, dear, I lent you my blue pencil last night. Hand it over, there’s a good old sort, when you’ve given the customary languish to your eyes, love. What are you saying? Stage-Manager’s order that we’re not to grease-black our eyelashes so much, as some people say it looks fair hideous from the front? Tell him to consume his own smoke next time he’s in a beast of a cooker. Why don’t he tell her to mind her own business?—I’m sure she’s old enough! What I say is, I’ve always been accustomed to put lots on mine, and I don’t see myself altering my usual make-up at this time o’ day. Do you? Not much?—I rather thought so. What else does he say?—he’ll be obliged if we’ll wear the chin-strap of our Hussar busbies down instead of tucked up inside ’em? What I say is—and I’m sure you’ll agree with me, girls—that it’s bad enough to have to wear a fur hat with a red bag hangin’ over the top, without marking a young lady’s face in an unbecoming way with a chin-strap. Also he insists—what price him?—he insists on our leavin’ our Bridgehands down in the dressing-room, and not coming on the stage with ’em stuck in the fronts of our tunics, in defiance of the Army Regulations? Rot the Regulations, and bother the Stage-Manager! How she must have been nagging at him, mustn’t she?—because he can be quite too frightfully nice and gentlemanly when he likes. I will speak up for him that much. Not that I ever was a special favorite—I keep myself to myself too much. Different to some people not so far off. Twiggez? I’ve my pride, that’s what I say, if I am a Show-girl!

“Thirty-five shillings a week, with matinées—you can’t say it’s much to look like a lady on, can you now? No, but what a girl with taste and clever fingers, and a knack of getting what she wants at a remnant sale—and the things those forward creatures in black cashmere Princess robes try to shove down a lady-customer’s throat are generally the things she could buy elsewhere new for less money—not but that a girl with her head screwed on the right way can turn out in first-class style for less than some people would think, and get credit in some quarters we know of—this is a beastly, spiteful world, my dear—for taking presents right and left.

“Now, who has been and hung my wig on the electric light? If the person considers that a practical joke, it shows—that’s what I say!—it shows that she’s descended from the lowest circles. I won’t pretend I don’t suspect who has been up to her little games again, and, though I should, as a lady, be sorry to behave otherwise, I must caution her, unless she wishes to find her military boots full of prepared chalk one o’ these nights, to quit and chuck ’em.

“Quarter of an hour! That was clever of you, Miss Enderville dear, to shut that imp’s head in the door before he could pop it back again. Well, there! if you haven’t got another diamond ring!... Left at the stage-door office, addressed to you, by a perfect stranger, who hasn’t even enclosed a line.... Perhaps you’ll meet him in a better land, dear; he seems a lot too shy for this one. Not that I admire the three-speeds-forward sort of fellow, but there is such a thing as being too backward in coming up to the scratch—twig?

“I ought to know something about that, considering which my life was spoiled—never you mind how long ago, because dates are a rotten nuisance—by one of those hang-backers who want the young woman—the young lady, I should say—to make all the pace for both sides. It was during the three-hundred night run of——There! I’ve forgotten the name of the gay old show, but Miss de la Regy was in it with me—one of the Tall Eleven, weren’t you, Miss de la Regy dear? And we were Anchovian Brigands in the First Act—Sardinian Brigands, did you say? I knew it had something to do with the beginning of a dinner at the Savoy—and Marie Antoinette gentlemen in powdered wigs and long, gold-headed canes in the Second, and in the Final Tableau British tars in pink silk fleshings, pale blue socks, and black pumps, and Union Jacks. I remember how I fancied myself in that costume, and how frightfully it fetched him.

“Me keeping my eyes very much to myself in those days, new to the Profession as I was, I didn’t tumble to the fact of having made a regular conquest till a girl older than me twigged and gave me a hint—then I saw him sitting in the stalls, dear, if you’ll believe me!—dash it! I’ve dropped my powder-puff in the water-jug!—with his mouth wide open—not a becoming thing, but a sign of true feeling.

“He was fair and pale and slim, with large blue eyes, and lovely linen, and a diamond stud in the shirt-front, and a gardenia in the buttonhole was good form then, and the white waistcoats were twill. To-day his waistcoat would be heliotrope watered silk, and his shirt-front embroidered cambric, and if he showed more than an inch of platinum watch-chain, he’d be outcast for ever from his kind. Bless you! men think as much of being in the fashion as we do, take my word for it, dear.

“He kept his mouth open, as I’ve said, all through the evening, only putting the knob of his stick into it sometimes—silver knobs were all the go then—and never took his eyes off me. ‘You’ve made a victim, Daisy,’ says one of the girls as we did a step off to the chorus, two by two, ‘and don’t you forget to make hay while the sun shines!’ I thanked her to keep her advice to herself, and moved proudly away, but my heart was doing ragtime under my corsets, and no mistake about it. When we ran downstairs after the General Entrance and the Final Tableau, I took off as much make-up as I thought necessary, and dressed in a hurry, wishing I’d come to business in a more stylish get-up. And as I came out between the swing-leaves of the stage-door, I saw him outside in an overcoat with a sable collar, a crush hat, and a white muffler. Dark as the light was, he knew me, and I recognized him, his mouth being ajar, same as during the show, and his eyes being fixed in the same intense gaze, which I don’t blush to own gave me a sensation like what you have when the shampooing young woman at the Turkish Baths stands you up in the corner of a room lined with hot tiles and fires cold water at you from the other end of it out of a rubber hose.

“‘Well, have you found his name out yet, Daisy, old girl?’ was the question in the dressing-room next night. I felt red-hot with good old-crusted shame, when I found out that it was generally known he’d followed me down Wellington Street to my ’bus—not a Vanguard, but a gee-gee-er in those days—and stood on the splashy curb to see me get in, without offering an utterance—which I dare say if he had I should have shrieked for a policeman, me being young and shy. No, I’d no idea what his name was, nor nothing more than that he looked the complete swell, and was evidently a regular goner—twiggez?—on the personal charms of yours truly.

“If you’ll believe me, there wasn’t a line or a rosebud waiting for me at the stage-door next night, though he sat in the same stall and stared in the same marked way all through the evening. Perhaps he might for ever have remained anonymous, but that the girl who dressed on my left hand—quite a rattlingly good sort, but with a passion for eating pickled gherkins out of the bottle with a fork during all the stage waits and intervals such as I’ve never seen equaled—that girl happened to know the man—middle-aged toff, with his head through his hair and a pane in his eye—who was in the stall next my conquest the night before. She applied the pump—twiggez?—and learned the name and title of one I shall always remember, even though things never came to nothing definite betwixt us—twig?

“He was a Viscount—sable and not musquash—the genuine article, not dyed or made up of inferior skins; blow on the hairs and hold it to the light, you will not see the fatally regular line that bears testimony to deception. Lord Polkstone, eldest son of the Earl of ——. Well, there, if I haven’t been and forgotten his dadda’s title! Rolling in money, and an only boy. It was less usual then than now for a peer to pick a life-partner among the Show-girls, but just to keep us bright and chirpy, the thing was occasionally done—twig? And there Lord Polkstone sat night after night, matinée after matinée, in the same place in the stalls, with his mouth open and his large blue eyes nailed upon the features of yours truly. Whenever I came out after the show, there he was waiting, but it went no farther. Pitying his bashfulness, I might—I don’t say I would, but I might—have passed a ladylike remark upon the weather, and broken the ice that way. But every girl in my room—the Tall Eleven dressed in one together—every girl’s unanimous advice was, ‘Let him speak first, Daisy.’ Then they’d simply split with laughing and have to wipe their eyes. Me, being young and unsophis—I forget how to spell the rest of that word, but it means jolly fresh and green—never suspected them of pulling my leg. I took their crocodileish advice, and waited for Lord Polkstone to speak. My dear, I’ve wondered since how it was I never suspected the truth! Weeks went by, and the affair had got no farther. Young and inexperienced as I was, I could see by his eye that his was no Sunday-to-Monday affection, but a real, lasting devotion of the washable kind. Knowing that, helped me to go on waiting, though I was dying to hear his voice. But he never spoke nor wrote, though several other people did, and, my attention being otherwise taken up, I treated those fellows with more than indifference.

“I remember the Commissionaire—an obliging person when not under the influence of whisky—telling me that what he called a rum party had left several bouquets at the stage-door—no name being on them, and without saying who for—which seemed uncommonly queer. Afterward it flashed on me—but there! never mind!

“If I had ever said a word to that dear when his imploring eyes met mine, and lingered on the curb when I heard his faithful footsteps following me to my ’bus, the mask would have fallen, dear, and the blooming mystery been brought to light. But it shows the kind of girl I was in those days, that with ‘Good-evening,’ ready on the tip of my tongue, I shut my mouth and didn’t say it. If I had, I might have been a Countess now, sitting in a turret and sewing tapestry, or walking about a large estate in a tailor-made gown, showing happy cottagers how to do dairy-work.

“That’s my romance, dear—is there a drop of Bass left in that bottle? I’ve a thirst on me I wouldn’t sell for four ‘d.’ Spite and malice on the part of some I shall not condescend to accuse, helplessness on his part—poor, devoted dear!—and ignorance on mine, nipped it in the bud; and when he vanished from the stalls—didn’t turn up at the stage-door—appearing in the Royal Box, one night I shall never forget, with two young girls in white and a dowager in a diamond fender, I knew he’d given up the chase, and with it all thoughts of poor little downy Me.

“We were singing a deadly lively chorus about being ‘jolly, confoundedly jolly!’ and I stood and sang and sniveled with the black running off my eyes. For even to my limited capacity, and without the sneering whispers of a treacherous snake-in-the-grass, whose waist I had to keep my arm round all the time, me playing boy to her girl, first couple proscenium right, next the Royal Box, where he sat with those three women—I could see how I’d lost the prize. One glance at Lord Polkstone—prattling away on his fingers to the best-looking of those two girls, neither of ’em being over and above what I should call passable—one glance revealed the truth.

“He was deaf and dumb!—and I had been waiting a week of Sundays for him to speak out first. Hugging my happy love and my innocent hope to my heart of hearts—there’s an exercise in h’s for any person whose weakness lies in the letter—I’d been waiting for what couldn’t never come. Why hadn’t he have wrote? That question I’ve often asked myself, and the answer is that none of them who could have told Lord Polkstone my name could understand the deaf and dumb alphabet.

“Oh! it was a piercing shock—a freezing blow I’ve never got over, dear, nor never shall. He married that girl in white, that artful thing who could understand his finger language and talk back.

“Think what a blessing I lost in a husband who could never contradict or shout at me. And I feel I could have been an honor to the Peerage, and worn a coronet like one born to it. I’ll stand another Bass, dear, if you’ll tell the dresser to fetch it; or will you have a brandy-and-Polly? You’ve hit it, dear, the girls were shocking spiteful, but I was jolly well a lot too retiring and shy. I’ve got over the weakness since, of course, and now I positively make a point of speaking if one of ’em seems quite unusually hangbacky.

“‘Who knows,’ I say to myself, ‘perhaps he’s deaf and dumb!’”

“VALCOURT’S GRIN”

The lovely and high-born relict of a decrepit and enormously wealthy commoner, she had sustained her husband’s loss with a becoming display of sorrow, and passed with exquisite grace and discretion through the successive phases of the toilet indicative of connubial woe. From a lovely chrysalis swathed in crape she had changed to a dove-colored moth; the moth had become a heliotrope butterfly, on the point of changing its wings for a brighter pair, when the post brought her a letter from one of her dearest friends. It bore the Zurich postmark, and ran as follows:

“Hotel Schwert,

“Appenbad,

“June 18th.”

“I wonder, dear, whether you would mind being troubled with Val for a day? He is coming up from Seaton next Thursday on dentist’s leave, and one does not care that a boy of sixteen—one can consider Val a boy without stretching the imagination overmuch—should be drifting anchorless in town. You will find him grown and developed.... You see, I take it for granted, in my own rude way, that you have already said ‘Yes’ to my request.... The views here are divine—such miles of eye-flight over the Lake of Constance and the Rhine Valley! To quote poor Dynham, who suffered much from the whey-cure, ‘every prospect pleases, and only man is bile.’ Kiss Val for me. My dear, the thought of his future is a continual anxiety. The title to keep up, and an income of barely eight thousand pounds.... ‘Marry him,’ you will say; but to whom? American heiresses are beginning to have an exorbitant idea of their own value, and then Val’s is an open, simple nature—unworldly to a degree! Not that I, his mother, could wish him otherwise, but—you will understand and sympathize, I know! And boys are so easily molded by a woman who has charm! If you could drop a word here and there, calculated to bring him to a sense of the responsibility that rests upon his young shoulders, the duty of restoring the diminished fortunes of his house by a really sensible marriage.... I have dinned and dinned, but I fear without much result.

“Ever yours,

“G. D. E. V. T.

“Please address Val, ‘Care of Rev. H. Buntham, Seaton College, near Grindsor.’—G.

“Buntham is the house-master. V. says he ‘understands the fellows thoroughly.’ Such a tribute, I think, to a tutor from a boy.—G.”

So a dainty monogrammed and coroneted note, on heliotrope paper, with a thin but decided bordering of black, was sent off to the Marquis of Valcourt, and Valcourt’s hostess in prospective consulted a male relative over the luncheon-table as to the most approved methods of entertaining a schoolboy.

“Heaps of indigestible things to eat—sweet for choice—and a box at the Gaiety if there’s a matinée; if not, the Hippodrome. But who’s the boy?” asked the male relative.

“Lord Valcourt, Geraldine’s eldest.”

The male relative pursed up his lips into the shape of a whistle, and helped himself to a cutlet in expressive silence.

“Geraldine is devoted to him. He seems to have a delightful nature, to be quite an ideal son!”

“That young—that young fellow!”

“You have met him, haven’t you?”

“I have had that privilege. I was one of the house-party at Traye last September.”

“Geraldine asked me, but of course it was out of the question....”

“Of course, poor Mussard’s death—quite too recent,” murmured the male relative, taking green peas.

Poor Mussard’s charming relict drooped her long-lashed, brown eyes pensively, and the transparent lace, that covered the hiding-place of the heart that had been wrung with presumable anguish eighteen months before, billowed under the impulse of a little dutiful sigh.

“What a prize for some lucky beggar with a big title and empty pockets!” reflected the male relative, who happened to be a brother, and could therefore contemplate dispassionately. “Thirty—and looks three-and-twenty en plein jour, without a pink-lined sunshade.” Aloud he said: “So you are to entertain Valcourt—Tuesday, I think you said?”

“Thursday. It would be dear of you to come and help me,” murmured Mrs. Mussard plaintively.

“It would afford me delight to do so,” returned the male relative unblushingly, “had I not unfortunately an engagement to see a man about a fishing-tour in Norway.”

“Tiresome! I know so little about modern schoolboys!” murmured Mrs. Mussard.

“The less you know about ’em, my dear Vivienne, the better.”

“Having been a boy yourself,” the speaker’s sister responded, with gentle acerbity, “you are naturally prejudiced. But, going by Geraldine’s account, Valcourt is not the ordinary kind of boy at all. Indeed, I have promised her to take him in hand, and impart a few viva voce lessons in savoir faire and worldly wisdom.”

“Have you? By Jove, Vivie, you’ve taken something upon yourself! ‘Angels rush in where demons fear to tread....’ I’m mulling the quotation, but in its perfect state it isn’t complimentary. May Valcourt profit by your instructions on Thursday!”

Thursday came, and with it Valcourt. He was pleasing to view; a clean-limbed, broad-shouldered, straight-featured, pink-and-white specimen of the well-bred English youth of sixteen, with fair hair brushed into a silky sweep above a wide, ingenuous brow; sleepy gray-green eyes, with yellow and blue reflections in them, reminding the beholder of tourmaline; well-kept hands, pleasing manners, and a wide, innocent grin of the cherubic-angelic kind, never more in evidence than when Valcourt was engaged in some pursuit neither angelic nor cherubic. Mrs. Mussard, at first sight, was conscious of a brief maternal inclination to kiss him. Geraldine’s boy was, she said to herself, “a perfect duck!” She subdued the osculatory impulse, shook hands with the boy cordially, and hoped the dentist had not hurt him.

“No, thanks awfully,” said Valcourt, with his cherubic grin. The teeth revealed were exceedingly white and regular.

“But you had gas, of course?” proceeded his hostess.

“When I have teeth out I generally do,” said Valcourt carefully. “They always give you half a guinea extra allowance for gas, so most of the fellows ask to have it.” He touched his waistcoat pocket meditatively as he spoke, and smiled, or rather grinned, again so seraphically that Mrs. Mussard longed to tip him a ten-pound note. She gave her young guest a sumptuous luncheon, and, not without serious misgivings, commanded the butler to produce the exhilarating beverage of champagne.

“A little sweet, isn’t it?” said Valcourt critically.

“I thought that you—that is——” Mrs. Mussard crumpled her delicate eyebrows in embarrassment, and the butler permitted himself the shadow of a smile.

“Ladies like sweet wine,” remarked Valcourt. He refused liqueur with coffee, but considered Mrs. Mussard’s cigarettes “rather mild.”

“I—I don’t usually smoke that brand,” his hostess explained. “I—I ordered them on purpose for——” She broke off, in sheer admiration of Valcourt’s beautiful grin.

The matinée for which she had secured a stage-box did not commence until three. “Time for a little chat in the drawing-room,” she thought, and ran over in her mind a list of the things dear Geraldine would have wished her to say. She bade the boy sit in the opposite angle of her pet sofa, upholstered in shimmering lily-leaf green, billowed with huge puffy pillows of apricot-yellow, covered with cambric and Valenciennes. She thought the harmony well completed by Valcourt’s sleek fair head and inscrutable tourmaline eyes, and wished for the first time that poor dear Mussard had left an heir. Vague as the yearning was, it imparted a misty softness to her brown eyes, and caused the corners of her delicate lips to quiver. She drew a little nearer to Valcourt, and laid her white jeweled hand softly upon the muscular young arm, firm and hard beneath an uncommonly well-cut sleeve.

“My dear Valcourt,” she began.

“Your eyes are brown, aren’t they?” asked Valcourt.

“I believe they are,” murmured Mrs. Mussard. “My dear boy, I trust that——”

Valcourt shut his own sleepy tourmaline eyes and sniffed, a long rapturous sniff. “Mother uses attar of violets. It’s her pet scent. Jolly, but not so nice as yours. What is it?” He sniffed again. “I can’t guess. ’Mph! I give it up. I know!” The sleepy tourmaline eyes opened, large and round and bright, the cherubic-angelic smile suffused his features. “Why, it comes from your hair!”

“People have said that before. Oh! never mind my hair!” Mrs. Mussard was not displeased, nevertheless. “Tell me how you progress at School. You know your mother is my dearest friend. I should so much like you to remember that and confide in me, almost as you confide in her!”

A solemn, innocent expression came over Valcourt’s face.

“All right,” he said, after a pause, during which he seemed to be listening to choirs of angels chanting to the accompaniment of celestial harps. “I’ll tell you things just exactly as I tell ’em to mother!”

“You dear!” exclaimed the impulsive young widow, and kissed him. The smooth elastic skin, brownish-pink as a new-laid egg, and dotted with sunny little freckles, grew pinker under the velvet violence of the lady’s lips. Valcourt turned the other cheek, with his cherub’s smile, and less warmly, because more consciously, his mother’s dearest friend saluted that also.

“Now,” he said, in his boyish voice, “what did you want me to tell you about School? I’m not a sap at books, and I don’t spend all my time in getting up my muscles. I’m just an ordinary kind of fellow.... I say, how pretty your nails are!”

He took up one of Mrs. Mussard’s exquisitely manicured hands, and, holding it to the tempered sunlight that stole through the lace blinds, noted with appreciative, if infantile, interest the pearly hues and rosy inward radiances, the nicks and dimples of the wrist and the delicate articulations of the fingers. Then, with a droll, half-mischievous twinkle of the tourmaline eye that was next the fair widow, he bent his sleek, fair head and rubbed his cheek against the pretty hand caressingly.

“Silly boy!” breathed Mrs. Mussard.

“I believe I am an awful ass sometimes,” agreed Valcourt composedly.

“Who says so?”

“My tutor and heaps of other fellows, and the Head—not that he says so, but he looks as if he thought it!” said Valcourt.

“Does the Head see a great deal of you?” asked Mrs. Mussard, drawing away her hand and grasping at a chance of improving the languishing conversation. Then as Valcourt, with a grave air of reserve, nodded in reply, “I am so glad!” breathed Mrs. Mussard gushingly; “because, at your age, impressions received must sink in deeply. And to be brought in contact with a personality so marked must be impressive, mustn’t it?” she concluded, rather lamely.

“I suppose so,” agreed Valcourt, examining the pattern of the carpet. He looked a little sulky and a little bored, and for sheer womanly desire of seeing the illuminations rekindled Mrs. Mussard gave him her hand again.

“You are going into the Guards, aren’t you, by-and-by?” she queried.

“If I can get through,” said Valcourt, playing with her rings and smiling. “I’m in the Army Class, mathematics and swot generally. But I think our family’s too old or something to produce brainy fellows. Cads are cleverer, really, than we are.”

His tone took a reflection of the purple, his finely-cut profile looked for an instant hard as diamond and exquisite as a cameo.

Mrs. Mussard, sympathizing, said to herself: “After all, why should he be clever?”

“Still, when one hasn’t much money,” she began, reminiscent of the Duchess’s entreaty.

“We’re beastly poor, of course,” admitted Valcourt. “But as to clothes and horses and shootin’, tradespeople will tick a fellow till the cows come home, and the millionaire manufacturers who buy or rent fellows’ forests and moors and rivers and things are always glad to get the fellow himself to show with ’em; and the keepers and gillies and chaps take care that he gets the best that’s going generally. And so he does himself pretty well all round.”

“That sort of thing is too—undignified!” said Mrs. Mussard, “and too uncertain. A man of rank and title must have a solid backing, a definite entourage. You must marry, and marry well.”

“Mother always talks like that!” said Valcourt. “I think,” he added, “she has somebody in her eye for me!”

“Who is she?” asked Mrs. Mussard sharply.

“I’m not quite sure,” said Valcourt, his tourmaline eyes narrowing as he smiled his angelic smile. “Dutch Jewess, perhaps,” he added simply, “with barrels of bullion and a family all nose.”

“Horrible!” cried Mrs. Mussard, shuddering.

“Her brother’s in the Fifth,” let out Valcourt. “We call him ‘Hooky Holland.’ Their father was secretary to the Klaproths and made heaps of cash—‘cath’ Hooky calls it. He never talks about anything but ‘cath,’ and fellows punch him for it.” Valcourt doubled his right hand scientifically, thumb well down, and glanced at it with modest appreciation ere he resumed: “He has lots of it, too, Hooky, and lends at interest—pretty thick interest—to fellows who get broke at Bridge or baccarat!”

“Oh-h! You don’t play baccarat at school, surely! Such an awfully gambling game!” expostulated Valcourt’s hostess.

“We go to school to be educated, you see,” said Valcourt, in a slightly argumentative tone, “for what Buntham calls ‘the business of life,’ and cards are part of a fellow’s life, aren’t they? So they ought, instead of being forbidden, to form part of what Old Cads calls the curriculum. We call Buntham ‘Cads’ because he calls us cads when we do anything that upsets him. He’s a nervous beggar, and gets a good deal of upsetting. My dame says he weighs himself at the end of every term, and makes a note of the pounds he’s lost since the beginning. When I go to Sandhurst she thinks he’ll pick up a bit,” explained Valcourt with his angelic grin.

“I hope your dame is a nice, motherly old person!” breathed Mrs. Mussard.

“She’s nice—quite,” said Valcourt, “and awfully obliging. I don’t know about being old—unless you’d call thirty-three old.” Mrs. Mussard started slightly. “When I have a cold she makes me jellies and things. Awfully good things! And I give her concert tickets, and sometimes we go on the river and have strawberries and cream. Lots of our fellows tell her their love affairs.”

“Do you?”

“And some of ’em are in love with her,” went on Valcourt.

Mrs. Mussard breathed quickly. Never before had she realized what perils environ the young of the opposite sex, even with the chaste environment of school bounds. In her agitation she laid her hand on Valcourt’s shoulder. “I hope—you do not fancy yourself in love with her,” she uttered anxiously.

“Not much catch!” said Valcourt, with the composure of forty. “I got over that in my second year.”

“Silly boy!” Mrs. Mussard very gently smoothed down a lock at the back of his head, which erected itself in silky defiance above its fellows. “When love comes to you, Valcourt,” she went on, with a vivid recollection of the utterances of the inspired authoress of The Bride’s Babble Book, “you will find out what it really means. It is a great mystery, my dear boy, a sacred and solemn unveiling of the heart——”

She stopped, for Valcourt had turned his face up toward hers, gently smiling, and revealing two neat rows of milky white teeth. His tourmaline eyes had an odd expression.

“Did you speak, dear?” his fair Gamaliel asked. For the impression upon her was that he had uttered two words, and that they were, “Hooky’s sister!”

But Valcourt shook his head. “I was only thinking. A fellow like me ... has got to take what comes ... the best he can get ... and the better it is, so much the better for him, don’t you see? If he don’t like what he gets, he doesn’t go about grousing. He generally pretends he’s suited; and she pretends; and they get into a groove—or they get into the newspapers,” said Geraldine’s unworldly babe. “Beastly bad form to get into the newspapers. I never mean to.”

Mrs. Mussard listened breathlessly.

“I shall have a rattling time,” said Valcourt, in his soft, cooing voice, “till Hooky’s sister grows up, and mother presents her, and then I shall marry her, I suppose.”

“Dearest boy, I hope not!” exclaimed Mrs. Mussard. “Someone more suitable must be found,” she continued, rapidly putting all the moneyed girls of her acquaintance through a mental review. “Why should you not marry beauty and birth as well as a banking account? The three things are sometimes associated.”

“German princes pick up girls of that kind,” said Valcourt, his elbows upon his knees, and his round young chin cupped in his hands, “and Austrian archdukes. But why need it be a girl?” he went on, pressing up the smooth young skin at his temples with his finger-tips, so as to produce the effect of premature crows’-feet. “I don’t like girls—all red wrists and flat waists. Why shouldn’t it be a woman, say a dozen years older—an awfully pretty woman, rich, and in the best set, who’d show me the ropes? I’m a jolly ass in some things. I shall come no end of croppers when I go into society, unless there’s somebody to give me the needful tip.”

Mrs. Mussard sat very upright. She looked at Valcourt; the hand with which she had smoothed his hair remained suspended in mid-air until she recollected it and laid it over its companion in her lap.

“Most young fellows beginning life go to other men’s wives for advice,” said Valcourt. “Why shouldn’t I go to my own?”

Mrs. Mussard’s chiseled scarlet lips moved as though she had echoed, “Why not?”

“They—the chaps I’m talking of—are wild about ’em—the other men’s wives. Yet nearly all of the women are old enough to be their mothers.”

“Their grandmothers, sometimes,” said Mrs. Mussard unkindly.

“Then why shouldn’t I marry a woman who’s only old enough to be my aunt—a young aunt! I’d make a Marchioness of her, don’t you know! and she’d make—she could make anything she liked of me!” said Valcourt, turning his cherub smile and tourmaline eyes suddenly on Mrs. Mussard. “You could!” The lovely widow started violently, and flushed from the string of pearls encircling her pretty throat to the little gold hair-waves that crisped at her blue-veined temples. “You know you could!” murmured Valcourt. The strong young arm in the well-cut sleeve intercepted the retreating movement that would have placed the lovely widow in the uttermost corner of the sofa. The remonstrance upon Vivienne’s lips was stifled by a kiss, given with eloquence and decision, though the lips that administered it were soft, and unshaded by even the rudiments of a mustache. “I’m seventeen the end of this term, and five feet nine in my socks,” said Valcourt, a little breathlessly, for the kiss had not been one-sided; “and—and you’re simply awfully pretty. Marry me—I shall be of age before you know it—and——”

“You dreadfully presuming boy!” There were tears in the lovely eyes of the late Mr. Mussard’s lovely widow; an unwonted throbbing in the region of her bodice imparted a tremor to her voice that added to its charm. “I shall write to your mother!”

“Do!” said Valcourt, with his angelic smile. “She’ll be awfully pleased! I wonder the idea didn’t occur to her instead of to me, for she’s awfully clever, and I’m rather an ass.... Five o’clock!” he exclaimed, as the delicate chime of a Pompadour clock upon the mantelshelf announced the hour.

“And you have missed the matinée!” said Mrs. Mussard.

“I preferred this!” said Valcourt, getting up. She had no idea of his being taller than herself until she found the tourmaline eyes looking down into hers. “Good-bye, and thank you, Mrs. Mussard,” said the boyish, ringing voice. “I’ve had an awfully pleasant day.”

Their hands met and lingered.

“Don’t call me Mrs. Mussard any more; my—my name is Vivienne,” she said in a half-whisper.

“Jolly! Hooky’s sister’s is Bethsaba,” said Valcourt. He made a quaint grimace, as though the word tasted nasty, and Vivienne gave a little, musical, contented laugh. “And I may come again, mayn’t I?”

“This week,” nodded Mrs. Mussard.

“I’ll say it’s my tooth,” explained Geraldine’s guileless offspring.

He reached the door, the handle turned, when Mrs. Mussard beckoned, and Valcourt came back.

“I should like to ask you,” she began hesitatingly—“not that it matters to me; but still, in your own interests—— And you know your mother is my dearest friend!” ... Valcourt stood with the beautiful grin upon his face, and Mrs. Mussard found the thing more difficult to say than she had imagined. “Where did you—who taught you to make love like—like that?—at your—at your age.... I—it is——” Valcourt made no reply in words, but the expression upon his face became more celestial than before. “I hope kissing is not a feature of the curriculum. But, understand clearly,” said Mrs. Mussard, with that unusual tremor in her charming voice, “that you are not for the future to kiss anybody but me!” And as the door closed on Valcourt’s heavenly grin and tourmaline eyes, she sat down to write a letter to Geraldine.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE FAIREST

If not absolutely a nincompoop, Gerald Delaurier Gandelish, Esq., of Swellingham Mansions, Piccadilly, Undertherose Cottage, Sunningwater, Berks, and Horshundam Abbey, Miltshire, was undoubtedly a type of the genus homo recently classified by a distinguished K.C. as soft-minded gentlemen. Strictly educated by a private clerical tutor under the eye of pious parents of limited worldly experience and unlimited prejudices, it was not to be expected that Gerry, upon their dying and leaving him in undisputed command of a handsome slice of the golden cheese of worldly wealth, should not immediately proceed to make ducks and drakes of it. He essayed to win a name upon the Turf; and when I remind you that, at a huge price, the youth became possessor of that remarkable Derby race-horse, Duffer, by Staggers out of Hansom Cab, from whom eighteen opponents cantered away in the Prince’s year of ’90, leaving the animal to finish the race at three lengths from the starting-post, I have said all. Gerry dabbled “considerable,” as our American relatives would say, in stocks, and started a café chantant on the open-air Parisian plan, which was frequented only by stray cats and London blacks, and has since been roofed in and turned into tea-rooms. Sundry other investments of Gerry’s resulted in the enrichment of several very shady persons, and a consequent, and very considerable, diminution in the large stock of ready money with which Gerry had started his career. But though the edges of the slice of golden cheese had been a good deal nibbled, the bulk of it remained, and Gerry’s Miltshire acres, strictly entailed and worth eighty thousand pounds, with another twenty thousand in Consols, and about half as much again snugly invested in Home Rails, made him a catch worth angling for in the eyes of many mothers.

We have termed Gerry “soft-minded.” He was also soft-hearted, soft-eyed, soft-voiced, soft-haired, soft-skinned, and soft-mannered—the kind of youth women who own to years of discretion like to pet and bully, the kind of man schoolgirls call a “duck.” True, his neckties aroused indignation in the breasts of intolerant elderly gentlemen, the patterns of his tweeds afforded exquisite amusement to members of the Household Brigade, and his jewelry could not be gazed at without winking by the unseasoned eye; but, despite these drawbacks, Gerry was a gentleman. Without the stamp of a public school or a select club, without the tone of the best society—for, with the exception of a turfy baronet or so and a couple of sporting peers, Gerry knew nobody who was anybody—Gerry was decidedly a gentleman, whose progress to the dogs was arrested, luckily for the young prodigal, when he fell in love with the famous burlesque actress, Miss Lottie Speranza, of the Levity Theater.

Of theaters and theatrical people Gerry may be said to have known little or nothing until the enchanting Lottie blazed upon his field of vision. Gerry’s worthy parents, strict moralists both, had considered the theater as the temple of Satan, and had exacted from their only child a solemn promise that he would never enter one. This promise Gerry had actually kept, contenting himself with the entertainments offered by the music halls, which his father had omitted to stigmatize and his mother knew not of. But at the close of a festive dinner, given by Gerry to a select party of “pals,” in a private room at the Levity Restaurant, when a brief, lethargic slumber obscured the senses of the youthful host, the brilliant idea of conveying him to a box in the theater upstairs occurred to one of his guests, and was forthwith carried out. Emerging from a condition of coma, Gerry found himself staring into a web of crossing and intersecting limelights of varying hues, in which a dazzling human butterfly, entangled, was beating quivering wings. The butterfly had lustrous eyes, encircled with blue rims, a complexion of theatrical red and white, and masses of golden hair. Her twinkling feet beat out a measure to which Gerry’s pulses began to dance madly. He sent the goddess an invitation to supper, which was promptly declined. He forwarded a stack of roses, which were not acknowledged, and a muff-chain, turquoise and peridot, which were returned to the address upon his card. He felt hurt but happy at these rebuffs, which proved to him that Miss Speranza was above reproach; and when a bosom friend of his own age hinted that the prudish fair one was playing the big game, and advised him to try her with a motor-car, Gerry promptly converted the bosom friend into a stranger by the simple process of asking him to redeem a few of his I O U’s. This got about, and caused Gerry’s other friends to turn sharp round corners, or jump into hansoms when they saw Gerry coming. Gerry hardly missed them, though the man who could have afforded an introduction to his charmer would have been welcomed with open arms. He occupied the same box at the Levity nightly now, and made up, in its murkiest corner, a good deal of the nightly rest of which his clamant passion deprived him. But he awakened, as by instinct, whenever Miss Speranza tripped upon the stage; and the large-eyed, vacuous, gorgeously-attired beauties who “went on” with the Chorus—the Lotties, Maries, Daisies, Topsies of the noble houses of Montague, Talbot, De Crespigny, and Delamere,—would languidly nudge each other at the passionately prolonged plaudits of a particular pair of immaculate white gloves, and wonder semi-audibly what the man saw in Speranza, dear, to make such a bloomin’ silly fuss about?

Gerry had occupied his watch-tower at the Levity for six weeks or so, and was beginning to deteriorate in appetite and complexion (so powerful are the effects of passion unreturned), when Undertherose Cottage at Sunningwater, a charming Thames-side residence of the bijou kind, with small grounds and a capacious cellar, a boat-house, and a house-boat, a pigeon-cote and a private post-box, became suddenly vacant. The tenant, a lady of many charms and much experience, who had passed over to Gerry with the property, returned to her native Paris to open a bonnet-shop; and Gerry, as he wandered over the dwelling with the sanitary engineer and decorator, who had carte blanche to do-up the place, found himself strolling on the tiny lawn (in imagination) by the visioned side of the enchantress who had enthralled him, supping (also in imagination) with the same divine creature in the duodecimo oak dining-room, and smoking a cigarette in her delightful company upon the balcony of the boudoir. Waking from these dreams was a piquant anguish. Gerry indeed possessed the cage, one of the most ideal nests for a honeymooning pair imaginable; but in vain for the airy feminine songster might the infatuated fowler spread nets and set springs.

“If we didn’t live in this confoundedly proper twentieth century,” thought disconsolate Gerry, “a chappie might hire a coach and eight, bribe a few bruisers to repress attempts at rescue, snap her up respectfully as she came out at the stage door, and absquatulate—no! abduct’s the word. Not that I’d behave like a brute; I’d marry her to-morrow if she’d only give me a chance to ask her. Marquises do that sort of thing, and their families come round a bit and bless the young people. She must have shown the door to dozens of ’em.” He sighed, for where the possessor of a ripe old peerage had failed, how could Gerald Gandelish, Esq., hope to triumph? “And she’s so awfully proper and standoffish, too,” he reflected. He wondered how many years it had taken those privileged persons whom the lady permitted to rank as her friends to attain that enviable distinction. “I’ve never met a man who could, or would, introduce me,” he added, pulling his mustache, which from happily turning up at the corners had recently acquired a decided tendency to droop. “Seemed to shy at it, somehow; and so I shall take the initi—what-you-call—myself. She shall know from the start that my intentions are honorable, and, hang it! the name’s a good one.... There’s been a Gandelish of Horshundam ever since Henry the Eighth hanged the abbot and turned out the monks, and put my ancestor Gorbred in to keep the place warm. Gorbred was His Majesty’s principal purveyor of sack and sugar, ‘and divers dainty cates beside,’ as the Chronicle has it, and must have given the Tudor unlimited tick, I gather. Anyhow, if four centuries of landlording don’t make a tradesman a gentleman, they ought to; and I can’t see——”

Gerry climbed into his “Runhard” thirty horse-power roadster, pulled down the talc mask of his driving cap to preserve his eyes and complexion, and ran back to town. That night, as he quitted his box at the conclusion of the Levity performance (you will remember the phenomenal run of The Idiot Girl in 19—!), he turned up his coat collar with the air of a man resolved to do or die, and boldly plunged into the little entry leading to the stage door. The bemedaled military guardian of those rigid portals, who had absorbed several of Gerry’s sovereigns without winking, regarded him with a glazed eye and a stiff upper lip.

“Would you kindly——” began Gerry.

But the stage-doorkeeper paid no heed, busily engaged as he was in delivering letters from a rack on the wall, lettered S, into the hands of a slight little woman in a rather shabby tweed ulster and plain felt hat. Gerry’s heart jumped as he recognized his own handwriting upon one of the envelopes.... Surely the tiny tin gods had favored him! The little woman in the ulster and the plain felt hat must be lady’s maid to the brilliant Speranza. As she thrust the letters into her pockets, nodded familiarly to the commissionaire, and came out of the stage-door office, Gerry, his heart in his mouth and his hat in his hand, stood in her way.

“Miss—Madam——” he began. “If I might ask you——”

“What’s that?” shouted the commissionaire. As the little woman stepped quickly backwards, Cerberus emerged, purple and growling, from his den and reared his huge body as a barrier before her. “Annoying the lady, are ye?” he roared, with a fine forgetfulness of Gerry’s sovereigns. “Wait till I knock your mouth round to the back of your head, you kid-gloved young blaggyard, you! Wait till——”

“Be quiet, O’Murphy!” said the little woman in a tone and with an accent which raised her to the level of lady’s companion in Gerry’s estimation. And as the crestfallen O’Murphy retreated into his den, she said, turning a plain little clever face, irradiated by a pair of brilliant eyes, upon the crimson Gerry, “Did you wish to speak to me?”

“I certainly do, if you are any relative—or a member of the household—of Miss Speranza,” Gerry stuttered.

There was a flash of eyes and teeth in the plain, insignificant face.

“Oh, yes,” said the little woman, “I live with Miss Speranza.”

Gerry’s tongue grew large, impeding utterance, and his palate dried up. Of all creatures upon earth this little tweed-ulstered woman, in the well-worn felt hat with the fatigued feather, seemed to him the most to be envied.

“You—you’re lucky,” he said lamely, and blushed up to the roots of his hair, and down to the tips of his toes.

“I’ve known her ever since she knew herself,” said the little companion. “We were girls together.” Gerry could have laughed in her middle-aged face, but he only handed her his card. “Oh yes,” she said after she had glanced at it. “I seem to know the name. You have written to her, haven’t you?”

“Sev-several times,” acquiesced Gerry hoarsely. “I have ta-taken the privilege.”

“A great many other young gentlemen have taken it too,” observed Miss Speranza’s companion.

Then, as the swing doors behind her opened to let out a blast of hot air and several grimy stage carpenters, and the swing doors before her parted to let in a blast of cold air as the men shouldered out, “Excuse me,” she said, and shivered, and moved as though to pass. “It is very cold here, and the brougham is waiting.”

“Beggin’ pardon!” said O’Murphy, looking out of his hole, “the groom sent his jooty, an’ the pole av a ’bus had gone clane through the back panel av the broom in a block off the Sthrand.... The horse kicked wan av his four shoes off, an’ they’ve gone back wid themselves to the stables to get the landau an’ pair——”

“Call a hansom,” said the plain little woman. “I—we can’t wait here all night!”

As O’Murphy saluted and went outside, she stepped into his vacant hutch, and Gerry daringly followed.

“If I might venture to offer,” he began. “My cab—place disposal—Miss Speranza—too much honored——” He trailed off into a morass of polite intentions, rudimentarily expressed. The little companion maintained a preoccupied air; she was probably expecting her mistress, Gerry thought, but the conviction was no sooner formed than banished.

“You are very kind,” she said, “but Miss Speranza cannot avail herself of your offer. She sometimes leaves quite early, and by the private door, and, as it happens, I am going home alone.”

“Oh!” cried Gerry earnestly, “if you knew how awfully I want to speak to you, you would let me drive you there—wherever it is!”

Tears stood in the soft eyes of the somewhat soft-headed young man, and the heart of the little lady in the ulster was softened, for she looked upon him with a smile, saying:

“Here comes O’Murphy to say my hansom is waiting.... You may drive with me part of the way, and say what you have to say, if it is so very important,” she said, with a brilliant gleam of mockery in her remarkable eyes.

Need one say that the enamored Gerry jumped at the proposal, and they went out into the plashy night together.

“Give the driver the address, O’Murphy,” ordered the little ulstered woman. “Jump in!” she said to Gerry, and, presto! they were rattling together up a stony thoroughfare leading from the roaring midnight Strand, which in the present year of grace presents a smooth face of macadam.

“Will you have the glass down?” said Gerry.

“Too warm!” cried the little ulstered woman. “Now, what have you to say?”

“How this trap rattles!” shouted Gerry. “One can hardly hear oneself speak. But with regard to Miss Speranza——”

“I suppose the pith of the matter is—you are in love with her?” shrieked the little woman.

“Madly!” bellowed Gerry. “Been so for weeks. Hold up, you brute!” This to the cab-horse, a dilapidated equine wreck, which had stumbled.

“Oh, you boys! You’re all alike!” cried his companion.

“Mine is a man’s love,” roared Gerry. “I would lay the world at her feet, if I had it; and I want you to tell her so.” The rattling of the crazy cab nearly drowned his accents. “Oh! what do you think she will say?” he bellowed, his lips close to the little woman’s ear.

“She would say—Oh! do you think this man is sober?” screamed the little woman. “I mean the driver,” she added, meeting Gerry’s indignant glare.

“I don’t think he is too drunk to drive,” yelled Gerry. “Tell me, if you have a heart,” he howled, “have I any chance with her?”

“Ah! we’re off the cobblestones now!” said his companion, leaning back with an air of relief.

“And you can answer my question,” pressed Gerry. “I—I needn’t explain my views are honorable—straight as a fellow’s can be. Love like mine is——”

“So dreadfully greasy!” commented his companion anxiously, as the debilitated steed recovered himself with difficulty at the end of a long slide.

“When I have been sitting, night after night, in that box looking at her, thinking of her, worshiping her, by George!” went on Gerry, “she must have sometimes noticed me, and said to herself——”

“I knew he would go down!” cried the little woman, clutching Gerry’s arm, as the steed disappeared and the shaft-ends bumped on the asphalt. “Let’s get out!”

“Don’t be alarmed, lydy,” said a hoarse voice, through the trap overhead, as the panting steed heaved and struggled to regain his hoofs. “’E won’t do it agen this journey. One fall is ’is allowance, an’ ’e never goes beyond.”

“And we’re quite close to Pelgrave Square,” said Gerry.

“How do you know Miss Speranza lives in Pelgrave Square?” said his companion with a keen look.

“Because I’ve seen photogravings of her house in an illustrated interview,” replied Gerry.

“Ah, of course,” said the little lady, with a thoughtful smile. The steed, bearing out his driver’s recommendation, was now jogging along reassuringly enough. “And did the portraits remind you of no one?” she added, with another of those flashing smiles that invested her little fatigued features with transient youth.

“They weren’t half beautiful enough for her,” said Gerry fervently. Then a ray of light broke upon him, and he jumped. “You—you’re a little bit like her!” he exclaimed. “What a blind duffer I am! I’ve been taking you for her companion, and all the while you’re a relative.”

“Yes, I am a relative,” nodded the little lady.

“Her aunt!” hazarded Gerry.

“Her mother!” said the little lady, with a dazzling flash of eyes and teeth. “How stupid you were not to guess it before!”

“I’ve said nothing, madam, that I should not, I trust,” remarked Gerry, with quite a seventeenth-century manner. “And, therefore, when I entreat you to allow me an interview with your daughter, I trust you will not refuse to grant my—my prayer.”

“Hear the boy!” cried the little woman, with a trill of laughter, as the cab pulled up before a large lighted house in a large darkish square. “Well,” she added, “I think I can promise you that Lottie will see you at least for a minute or two to-morrow. Not here—at the theater, seven o’clock sharp. Lend me a pencil and one of your cards.” She scribbled a word or two on the bit of pasteboard, paid the cab in spite of Gerry’s protestations, and ran lightly up the solemn doorsteps, turned to the enraptured young man standing, hat in hand, below, waved her hand, plunged a Yale key into the keyhole—and instantly vanished from view.

Behind Gerry’s shirt-front throbbed tumultuous delight. To have driven in a cab with her mother—talked of her, told his tale of love—albeit with interruptions—and won the promise of an interview at seven sharp upon the morrow.... Unprecedented fortune! incomparable luck! Did Time itself cease he would not fail to keep the tryst with punctuality. He caught a passing cab, drove home to his Piccadilly chambers, and went to bed so blissfully happy that he spent a wretchedly bad night. The card he kept beneath his pillow; and true to the promise made by the mother of the enchantress of his soul—when, punctually to the stroke of seven, Gerry, dressed with the most excruciating care, and clammy with repressed emotion, presented himself at the stage door of the Levity—the scrawled hieroglyphics on the blessed piece of pasteboard admitted him behind the scenes. Led by a smartly-aproned maid, he climbed stairs, he crossed the stage, was jostled by baize-aproned men in paper caps, and begged their pardon. He followed his guide down a short passage, fell up three steps—and knocked with his burning brow against the door—her door! A voice he knew said, “Come in!” and in he went, to find, not the adored, the worshiped Lottie, but the little plainish lady of the previous night, sitting at a lace-veiled dressing-table, attired in a Japanese gown.

“Oh, I say!” murmured Gerry.

“Ah! there you are!” The little lady looked at him over her shoulder, and nodded kindly. “Don’t be too disappointed at not finding Lottie here,” she said cheerfully; “she won’t be long.”

“I’m so awfully obliged for all your kindness,” said Gerry, sheepishly smiling over a giant bouquet.

“You shall be really grateful to me one of these days, I promise you,” said the little lady. “Let my maid take that haysta—that bouquet, and sit down, do!”

Gerry took the indicated chair beside the dressing-table, and noted, as he sucked the top of his stick, how pitilessly the relentless radiance of the electric light accentuated the worn lines of the little lady’s face and the gray streaks in her still soft and pretty brown hair.

“Cheer up!” she said, turning one of her flashing smiles upon him as he sadly sucked his stick. “You won’t have long to wait for Lottie!”

“No!” said Gerry rather vacuously.

“No!” said Lottie’s mother, pulling off some very handsome rings and hanging them upon the horns of a coral lobster that adorned the dressing-table. “She takes about twenty minutes to make up.” Her pretty, white, carefully-manicured fingers busied themselves, as she talked, with various little pots and bottles and rolls of a mysterious substance of a pinky hue, not unlike the peppermint suck-stick of Gerry’s youth. “And are you as much in love with her to-day,” she continued, “as you were last night?”

“So much in love,” said Gerry, uncorking himself, “that to call her my wife I would sacrifice everything.”

“To call her your wife?” The little lady pushed her hair back from her face, twisted it tightly up behind, and pinned it flat with a relentless hairpin.

“To make her my wife,” Gerry amended, with a healthy blush.

“Ah!” said the little lady, who had covered her entire countenance, ears, and neck with a shiny mask of pinkish paste. “A word makes such a difference.” She dipped a hare’s-foot into a saucer of rouge, and with this compound impartially, as it seemed to Gerry, incarnadined her cheeks and chin. “Of course,” she went on, dipping a disemboweled powder-puff into a pot of French chalk and deftly applying it, “you are aware that she possesses in years the advantage of yourself.”

“I am twenty-three,” said Gerry proudly.

“She owns to more than that!” said the lovely Lottie’s mother. She had reddened her mouth, hitherto obliterated by the paste, into an alluring Cupid’s bow, and darkened in, above her wonderfully brilliant eyes, a pair of arch-provoking eyebrows. Now, as some inkling of the fateful revelation in store clamped Gerry’s jaws upon his stick and twined his legs in a death-grip about the supports of his chair, she rapidly, with a blue pencil, imparted to those brilliant eyes the Oriental languor, the divinely alluring, almond-lidded droop that distinguished Lottie’s, seized a tooth-brush, dipped it into a bottle, apparently of liquid soot, rapidly blackened her eyelashes, indicated with rose-pink a dimple on her chin, groped for a moment in a cardboard box that stood upon the ledge of her toilet table, produced a golden wig of streaming tresses, dexterously assumed it, pulled here, patted there, twisted a brow-tendril into shape—and turning, shed upon the paralyzed Gerry the smile that had enchained his heart.

“I told you Lottie would not be long,” said Lottie, “and I’ve made up under twenty minutes. You dear, silly, honorable, romantic boy, don’t stare in that awful way. Twenty-three indeed! And I told you I owned to more! I ought to, for I have a son at Harrow, and a daughter of seventeen besides.... Do try and shut your mouth. Why, you poor dear goose, I was making my bow to the boys in the gallery when you were playing with a Noah’s Ark. Shake hands, and go round in front and see me do my piece, as usual. I’ve got used to that nice fresh face of yours up in Box B, and applause is the breath of my nostrils, if I am old enough to be your mother. Leave your flowers; my girl at home has got quite to look out for them—and be off with you, because this”—she indicated the French chalk—“has got to go farther!” She gave Gerry her pretty hand and one of the brilliant smiles, as he blundered up from his chair, gasping apologies.

“Come and lunch with us to-morrow. You know my address, and I’ve told the Professor all about you. You’ll like the Professor—my husband. One of the best, though his wife says it. And the children——”

“Can I come in, mother?” said a clear voice outside.

“All right, pet!” called back Gerry’s late goddess, and a girl of seventeen came into the room. She was all that Gerry had dreamed.... His frozen blood began to thaw, and his tongue found words. Here was the ideal.

“But her name isn’t Lottie!” said his dethroned goddess, with a twinkle of the wondrous eyes. “However, you’re coming to lunch to-morrow, aren’t you?”

“With the greatest pleasure,” said Gerry. And as he went round to his box he carefully obliterated the name from the portrait cherished in his bosom for so many weeks, with the intention of filling it in with another to-morrow.

THE REVOLT OF RUSTLETON

A new-comer joined the circle of attentive listeners gathered round the easiest of all the easy-chairs in the smoking-room of the Younger Sons’ Club. The surrounded chair contained Hambridge Ost, a small, drab, livery man, with long hair and drooping eyelids, who, as cousin to Lord Pomphrey, enjoyed the immense but fleeting popularity of the moment. Everyone panted to hear the details of the latest Society elopement before the newspapers should disseminate them abroad. And Hambridge was not unwilling to oblige.

“The first inkling of the general trend of affairs, dear fellow,” said Hambridge, joining his long, pale finger-tips before him, and smiling at the new-comer across the barrier thus formed, “was conveyed to me by an agitated ring at the telephone in my rooms. Bucknell, my man, hello’ed. To Bucknell’s astonishment the ring-up came from 000, Werkeley Square, the town mansion of my cousin, Lord Pomphrey, which he knew to be in holland covers and the care of an ex-housekeeper. And Lady Pomphrey was the ringer. When I hello’ed her, saying, ‘Are you there, Annabella? So glad, but how unexpected; thought you were all enjoying your otium cum down at Cluckham-Pomphrey’—my cousin’s country-seat in Slowshire, dear fellow—such a verbal flood of disjointed sentences came hustling over the wire, so to speak, that I felt convinced, even in the act of rubbing my ear, which tickled confoundedly, that something was quite absolutely wrong somewhere. Pomphrey—dear fellow!—was my first thought; then the Dowager—the ideal of a fine old Tory noblewoman of ninety-eight, who may drop, so to put it, any moment, dear creature, relieving her family of the charge of paying her income and leaving the Dower House vacant for Lord Rustleton, my cousin’s heir and his—ahem!—bride. Knowing that Rustleton was to lead the Hon. Celine Twissing to the altar of St. George’s, Hanover Square, early in the Winter season, it occurred to me, so to put it, that the demise of the Dowager could not have occurred at a more auspicious moment. Thank you, dear fellow, I will smoke one of your particular Partagas, since you’re so good.”

Four men struck vestas simultaneously as Hambridge relieved the nicotian delicacy of its gold-and-scarlet cummerbund. Another man supplied him with an ash-tray. Yet another pushed a footstool under his pampered patent-leathers. Exhaling a thin blue cloud, the Oracle continued:

“Amidst my distracted relative’s fragmentary utterances I gleaned the name of Rustleton. Hereditary weak heart—circulation as limited as that of a newspaper which on strictly moral grounds declines to report Divorce Cases—and a disproportionate secretion of bile, so to put it, distinguishes him, dear fellow, from, shall I say, mortals less favored by birth and of lower rank. A vision of a hatchment over the door of 000, Werkeley Square—of the entire population of the county assisting at his obsequies, dear fellow—volted through my brain. I seized my hat, and rushed from my chambers in Ryder Street. An electric hansom had fortunately pulled up in front of ’em. I jumped in. ‘Where to?’ asked the chauffeur. ‘To a broken-hearted mother,’ said I, ‘000, Werkeley Square, and drive like the dooce!’”

Hambridge cleared his throat with some pomp, and crossed his little legs comfortably. Then he went on:

“Like the Belgian sportsman, who, in missin’ a sittin’ hare, shot his father-in-law in the stomach, mine was an effort not altogether wasted. All the blinds of the house were down, and the hysterical shrieks of Lady Pomphrey echoin’ through practically a desert of rolled-up carpets and swathed furniture, had collected a small but representative crowd about the area-railings. I leaped out of the motor-cab, threw the chauffeur the legal fare, and bein’ admitted to the house by an hysterical caretaker, ascended to my cousin’s boudoir, the sobs and shrieks of the distracted mother growing louder as I went. Dear fellows, when Lady Pomphrey saw me, heard me saying, ‘Annabella, I must entreat you as a near relative to calm yourself sufficiently to tell me the worst without delay, or to direct me to the nearest person who can supply authentic information,’ the floodgates of her sorrow were opened to such an extent that—possessing a constitution naturally susceptible to damp—I have had a deuce of a cold ever since.

“Lord Rustleton—always a nervous faddist, though the dearest of fellows—Rustleton had suddenly broken off his engagement to the Hon. Celine Twissing, only child and heiress of Lord Twissing of Hopsacks, the colossal financier figurehead, as I call him, of the Brewing Trade. Naturally, the young man’s mother was crushed by the blow. The marriage was to have been solemnized at the opening of the Winter Season—the trousseau was nearly ready, and the cake—a mammoth pile of elaborate indigestion—was bein’ built up in tiers at Guzzards’. The presents (includin’ a diamond and sapphire bangle from a Royal source) had come in in shoals. Nothing could be more confoundedly inopportune than Rustleton’s decision. For all her muscularity—and she is an unpleasantly muscular young woman—you’d marry her yourself to-morrow did you get the chance, dear fellow. Vous n’êtes pas dégoûté.

“But Rustleton’s a difficult man—always was. His personal appearance ain’t prepossessin’, but he is Somebody, and looks it; d’ye foller me? You feel at once that a long line of ancestors, more or less distinguished, must have handed down the bilious tendency from father to son. Originally—which goes to prove that first impressions are the stronger—Lady Pomphrey tells me he could not stand Celine Twissing, wouldn’t have her for nuts, or at any price; but after the disaster to the steam yacht Fifi—run down by a collier at her moorings in Southampton Water, you recollect, when by pure force of muscle Miss Twissing snatched Lord Rustleton from a watery grave, so to put it—he seemed to cave in, as it were, and the engagement was formally announced. I thought his eye unsteady and his laugh hollow, when, with the rest of the family, I proffered my insignificant congratulations. On that occasion, dear fellow, he gave me two fingers instead of one, which amounts to a grip with him, and whispered to the effect that there was no use in cryin’ over spilled milk—a familiar saw which has sprung to my own lips at the most inopportune moments.

“Celine was undoubtedly in love. Her being in love, so to put it, added immensely to Rustleton’s discomfort. For the New Girl is, as well as a muscular being, a strenuous creature, omnivorous in her appetite for mental exercise, and from the latest theories in physics to the morality of the newest Slavonic novelist Rustleton was expected to range with her hour by hour. Her mass of knowledge oppressed him, her inexhaustible fund of argument exhausted him, her fiery enthusiasm reduced him to a condition of clammy limpness which was—I may say it openly—painful to witness. A backward Lower boy and an impatient Head Master might have presented such a spectacle. Thank you, I will take a Vermouth, since you are so kind. But the boy, in getting away for the holidays, had the advantage of Rustleton, poor fellow!”

Hambridge waited till the Vermouth came, and, sipping the tonic fluid, continued:

“These details, I need not say, were not culled from Lady Pomphrey, but extracted from Rustleton, who had rushed up to town and gone to earth at his Club, to the consternation of the few waiters who were not taking holidays at the seaside. Little by little I became master of the facts of the case, which was one of disparity from the outset. From the muscular as from the intellectual point Celine Twissing had always overshadowed her fiancé. But Celine’s intimate knowledge of the mode of conduct necessary—I quote herself—to sane living and clear thinking positively appalled him. Rustleton began the day with hot Vichy water, dry toast, weak tea, and a tepid immersion. She, Miss Twissing, commenced with Indian clubs, a three-quarter-mile sprint in sweaters, coffee, eggs, cold game-pie, ham, jam, muffins, and marmalade. Did she challenge the man, to whom she was soon to pledge lifelong obedience at the altar, to a single at lawn-tennis, she quite innocently served him twisters that he could only follow with his eye, and volleyed balls that infallibly hit it. At croquet she was a scientist, winning the game by the time Lord Rustleton had got through three hoops, and coming back to stand by his side and goad him to silent frenzy by criticism of his method. She is a red-hot motorist, and insisted upon taking Rustleton, wrapped in fur coats, and protected by goggles, as passenger in the back seat of her sixty-horse-power ‘Gohard’ when she competed in the Crooklands Circular Track One Thousand Mile Platinum Cup Race, for private owners only, professional drivers barred; and upon my honor, I believe she would have pulled up the winner and heroine of the hour had not the racing diet of bananas, meat jujubes, and egg-nog created such a revolt in Rustleton’s system, poor fellow, that at the sixth hour of the ordeal he was borne, almost insensible, and bathed in cold perspiration, from the tonneau to a neighboring hotel.

“To anxiety, in combination with exploding tires, I attribute the fact of Miss Twissing’s finishing as Number Four. Dear fellow, since you are so good as to insist, I will put that cushion behind the small of my back. Lumbago, in damp weather, is my particular bane. Thankee!”

Hambridge drew forth a spotlessly white handkerchief, flourished it, and trumpeted.

“Now we come to the crux, dear fellows. The Admirable Twissing, as many call her, not content with bein’ an acknowledged expert in salmon fishin’ and a darin’ rider to hounds, set her heart on Rustleton’s being practically the same. With a light trout-rod and a tin of worms he has occasionally amoosed himself on locally-preserved waters; mounted on an easy-goin’ cob, he is, so to put it, fairly at home. Scotch and Norwegian rivers now, shall I say, claimed him as their sacrifice; highly-mettled hunters—the Hopsacks stables are famous—took five-barred gates and quickset hedges with him; occasionally even bolted with him, regardless of his personal predilections. In the same spirit his betrothed bride compelled him to fence with her; instructed him, at severe physical expense to himself, in the rules of jiu-jitsu. The final straw was laid upon the camel’s back when she insisted on his putting on the gloves with her, and standing up for half an hour every morning to be scientifically pummeled.”

The listeners’ mouths screwed themselves into the shape of long-expressive whistles. Glances of profound meaning were exchanged. One man said, with a gulp of sympathy, “Poor beggar!”

“And so the worm turned,” said Hambridge Ost, running his forefinger round inside the edge of his collar. “Smarting from upper-cuts administered by the woman who was destined ere long to become the wife of his bosom, flushed from having his head in Chancery, gravely embarrassed by body-blows, dazzled by stars and stripes seen as the result of merciless punches received upon the nose, Rustleton summoned all his courage to the effort, and declined to take any more lessons. Miss Twissing, to do her justice, was thunderstruck.

“‘Oh!’ she said, her lips quivering—like a hurt child’s, according to Rustleton—‘and you were coming on so capitally—we were getting on so well. You are really gaining a knowledge of good boxing principles, you were actually benefiting by our light little friendly spars.’ Rustleton felt his nose, which was painfully swollen. ‘Of course, you could never, never become a first-rater. Your poor little muscles are too rigid. You haven’t the strength to hit a print of your knuckles into a pound of butter, but you might come to show form enough to funk a big duffer, supposing he went for you under the impression that you were as soft as you look. But, of course, if you mean what you say’—she pulled her gloves off and threw them into a corner of the gymnasium at Hopsacks specially fitted up for her by a noted firm—‘there they go. I’ll read the Greek Anthologists with you instead, or’—her eyes brightened—‘have you ever tried polo?’ she asked. ‘We have some trained ponies in the stable, and the largest croquet-lawn could be utilized for a ground, and I’ll wire to the County Players for clubs and a couple of members to teach us the rules of the game. You’ll like that?’

“‘I’m dashed if I shall!’ were the actual words that burst, so to put it, from Rustleton. Celine drew herself up and looked him over, from the feet upwards, as though she had never, so he says, seen him before. Five feet five—his actual height—gave her an advantage of five inches and a bit over. He begged her to be seated, and, standing before her in as dignified an attitude as it is possible to assume in a light suit of gymnasium flannels, with sawdust in your hair and a painfully swollen nose, he broke the ice and demanded his release from their engagement, saying that he felt it incumbent on him to live his own life in his own way, that Celine crushed, humiliated, and oppressed him by the mere vigor of her intellect and the exuberance of her physical personality—with considerably more to the same effect.

“She looked up when Rustleton, almost breathless, reached a full stop. ‘You give me your word of honor that there is no other woman in the case,’ she murmured; ‘I can stand your not loving me, I can’t your loving somebody else better.’ As Rustleton gave the required denial—scouted the bare idea—a tear ran down her cheek and dropped on her large powerful arms, which were folded upon her bust—really amazing, dear fellow, and one of her strong points. ‘That settles it,’ she uttered. ‘It’s understood, all’s off between us; you are free. And there is a through express to London at 3:25. But I’m afraid I must detain you a moment longer.’ She rang the bell, and told a servant to tell Professor Pudsey she was wanted in the gym. ‘Tell her to come in sparring kit, and be quick about it,’ were her actual words.

“Until the Professor appeared, Miss Twissing chatted quite pleasantly with Rustleton. The Professor was a large, flat-faced woman, of remarkable muscular development, with her hair coiled in a tight knob at the back of her head, her massive form attired in a thin jersey, short serge skirt, long stockings, and light gymnasium shoes. ‘Let me introduce my friend and resident instructress in boxing, fencing, and athletics,’ says Celine, ‘and one of the best, so to put it, that ever put a novice through his paces. Celebrated as the wife and trainer of the late Ponto Pudsey, Heavy-weight Champion of England, and holder of the Hyam’s Competition Belt three seasons running until beat by Bat Collins at the International Club Grounds in ’92. Pudsey dear’—she turned to the Professor—‘you know my little way when I’ve had a set-back. Instead of playing le diable à quatre and being disagreeable and cantankerous all round, I simply send for you and say, as I say now, “Put up your hands, and do your best; I warn you I’m going in for a regular slugging match under the rules of the Amateur Boxing Association. Three rounds—the first and second of three minutes’ length, the third of four minutes’. This gentleman will act as time-keeper, and pick up whichever of us gets knocked out. He has plenty of time before he catches the express to town—and the lesson will be good for him.”’ She and the Professor shook hands, and, with heads erect, mouths firmly closed, eyes fixed, left toes straight, bodies evenly balanced, left arms workin’ loosely, rights well across mark, and so forth, started business in the most thorough-goin’ way. Such a bout of fisticuffs—accordin’ to Rustleton—you couldn’t behold outside the American prize-ring.”

“By—Jingo!” ejaculated one of the listeners.

“They led off in a perfectly scientific manner at the head, guarded and returned, retreated and advanced, ducked, feinted, countered, and cross-countered,” said Hambridge Ost, “until Rustleton grew giddy. Terrific hits were given and taken before he could command himself sufficiently to call ‘Time,’ the Professor with a black eye, Celine with a cut lip, both of ’em smilin’ and self-possessed to an astonishin’ degree; went in again at the end of the brief breathin’ space, and fairly outdid the previous round. When a smashin’ knock-out on the point of the jaw finally floored the Professor and she failed to come up to time, leavin’ Miss Twissing mistress of the gory field, Celine nodded significantly to Rustleton, and said, as she rolled down her sleeves, ‘That would have been for you, Russie, old boy, if there had been another woman in the case. As there isn’t—goodbye, and good luck go with you! I’m going to put dear old Pudsey to bed, and plaster this cut lip of mine.’”

“I like that girl!” declared the man who had said “By Jingo!” “A rattling good sort, I call her. But a punch-bag would have done as well as the Professor, I should have thought.” He tugged at his mustache and wrinkled his forehead thoughtfully. “A damaged lip is so fearfully disfiguring. Has it quite healed?”

“I know nothing of Miss Twissing,” said Hambridge, settling his necktie, “and desire to know nothing of that very unfeminine young person, who, I feel sure, would have been as good as her word and pounded Rustleton into a human jelly, had she been aware that there actually existed, if I may so put it, an adequate feminine reason for the dear fellow’s—shall I say, change of mind?”

“Of course,” said the man who had been anxious about Miss Twissing’s lip, “the little bounder—beg pardon! Of course, Rustleton was telling a colossal howler. As all the world knows, or will know when the newspapers come out to-morrow, there was another woman in the case.”

“Petsie Le Poyntz,” put in another voice, “of the West End Theater. Petsie of the lissom—ahem!—limbs, of the patent mechanical smile—mistress of the wink that convulses the gallery, and inventor of the kick that enraptures the stalls. Petsie, who has won her way into what Slump, of the Morning Gush, calls the ‘peculiar favor of the British playgoer,’ by her exquisite and spontaneous rendering of the ballad, ‘Buzzy, Buzzy, Busy Bee,’ sung nightly and at two matinées per week in The Charity Girl. Petsie, once the promised bride of a thriving young greengrocer, now——”

“Now, Viscountess Rustleton,” said Hambridge Ost. “Don’t forget that, dear fellow, pray. I can conceive, even while I condemn my cousin’s ill-considered action in taking to his—shall I say bosom? yesterday morning at the Registrar’s—a young lady of obvious gifts and obscure parentage without letting his family into the secret—that he found her a soothing change from Miss Twissing. No Greek, no athletics, no strenuousness of any kind. An appearance distinctly pleasing, even off the boards, a certain command of repartee of the ‘You’re another’ sort, an agreeable friskiness varied by an inclination to lounge languidly—and there you have Petsie, dear fellow. The weddin’ breakfast took place at the Grill Room of the Savoy Hotel, the extra-sized table, number three, at the east upper end against the glass partition havin’ been specially engaged by the management of the West End Theater. That, not bein’ an invited guest, I ascertained from the waiter who usually looks after me when I lunch there. The menu was distinctly a good ’un. Hors d’œuvres ... a bisque, follered by turban de turbot.... Birds with bread-cream sauce, chipped potatoes, tomatoes stuffed, and a corn salad. Chocolate omelette soufflée—ices in the shape of those corrugated musk melons with pink insides, figs, and nectarines. Of course, a claret figured—Château-Nitouche; but, bein’ a theatrical entertainment, the Boy washed the whole thing down. The name of the liqueur I did not get hold of.”

“Parfait Amour, perhaps?” said a feeble voice, with a faint chuckle.

“As I have said, I failed to ascertain,” returned Hambridge Ost, with a dry little cough. “But as Lord Pomphrey, justly indignant with his heir for throwing over Miss Twissing, with whose hand goes a colossal fortune, has practically reduced his income to a mere”—he elevated his eyebrows and blew a speck of cigar-ash from his coat-sleeve—“that—the stirrup-cup that sped my cousin and his bride upon their wedding journey was certainly not, shall I say, Aqua d’Oro?”

There was a faint chorus of applause. Hambridge, repressing all sign of triumph, smoothed his preternaturally sleek head and uncrossed his little legs preparatory to getting out of his chair. The circle of listeners melted away; the man who had said “By Jingo!” straightened his hat carefully, staring at the reflection of a distinctly good-looking face in the mantel-glass.

“If she had known—if that girl Celine Twissing had known—the game that bilious little rotter meant to play, he’d have had his liqueur before his soup, and it would have been punch—not Milk Punch or Turtle Punch, but the real thing, with trimmings.” He arranged a very neat mustache with care. “Sorry she got her lip split,” he murmured; “hope it’s healed all right.... Waiter, get me a dozen Sobranie cigarettes. It’s a pity, a confounded pity, that the only man who is really able to appreciate that grand girl Celine Twissing happens to be a younger son. But, anyhow, I can have a shot at her, and I will.”

A DYSPEPTIC’S TRAGEDY

“He is a constant visitor,” observed Lady Millebrook.

“And a constant friend,” said Mrs. Tollebranch. A delicate flush mantled on her otherwise ivory cheek, her great gray eyes, famed for their far-away, saintly expression, shone through a gleaming veil of tears. With the lithe, undulating movement so characteristic of her, she crossed the velvety carpets to the window, and, lifting a corner of her silken blind, peeped out over her window-boxes of jonquils as the hall-door closed, and a well-dressed man with a slight stoop and a worn, dyspeptic countenance went slowly down the doorsteps and got into his cab. As though some subtle magnetic thrill had conveyed to him the knowledge that fair eyes looked on his departure, he glanced up and bowed, for one moment becoming a younger man, as a temporary glow suffused his pallid features. Then the cab drove off, and Mrs. Tollebranch, slipping her hand within the arm of Lady Millebrook, drew her back to her cosy seat within the radius of the fire-glow, and rang for tea.

“I did not have it up while poor Cadminster was here,” she explained. “The sight of Sally Lunn is horrible to him, and he is positively forbidden tea.”

“They say,” said Lady Millebrook, nibbling the Sally Lunn, “that he lives upon gluten biscuits, lean boiled mutton, and white fish, washed down by weak Medoc, mixed with hot water.”

“It is true,” returned her friend.

“And yet he dines out. I meet him comparatively often at other people’s tables,” said Lady Millebrook. “And here—invariably.” Her eyebrows wore the crumple of interrogation.

“The servants have orders to pass him over,” explained Mrs. Tollebranch, sipping her tea. “If Jerks or Wilbraham were to offer him a made dish, one, if not both of them, would be instantly dismissed.”

“My dear Clarice! Friendship is friendship.... But Jerks and Wilbraham.... Such invaluable servants! You cannot mean what you say!”

“I do mean it,” nodded Mrs. Tollebranch. “Oh, Bettine!” she murmured, clasping Lady Millebrook’s hand, “don’t look so surprised. If you only knew how much that man has sacrificed for me!”

“If there is anything upon which I pride myself,” observed Lady Millebrook, “it is my absolute lack of curiosity. And yet people are always telling me their secrets—the most intimate, the most important! ‘Bettine,’ they say, ‘you are a Grave!’ ... So I am; it is quite true. A thing once repeated in my hearing is buried for ever! We have not known each other very long, it is true, but you must have discovered that I am absolutely reliable! Talking of sacrifices, there are so many sorts. Now perhaps in your gratitude for this service rendered you by Lord Cadminster, you overrate. Perhaps it is really not so great as you imagine! Perhaps...! But I am not curious in the least!”

“Would it surprise you to hear,” queried Mrs. Tollebranch, “that Cadminster, two years ago, was perfectly healthy! Not the cadaverous dyspeptic he is now; not the semi-invalid, but a robust, healthy, fresh-colored man of the out-of-doors, hardy English type?”

Lady Millebrook elevated her eyebrows. “Dear me,” she observed. “How very odd! And now—you know his horrid soubriquet—‘The Boiled Owl.’ He has earned it since, of course.”

“He had a splendid appetite once,” continued Mrs. Tollebranch, “an iron constitution—a perfect digestion. He gave them all three to save a woman’s honor. Oh! Bettine, can you guess who the woman was?”

“I never hazard guesses about my friends,” said the inexorable Lady Millebrook. “But I feel, somehow, that she may have been you?”

“I was weak,” admitted Mrs. Tollebranch, clasping her friend’s hand with agitated jeweled fingers. “But not wicked, Bettine. Promise me to believe that!”

“I never promise,” said Bettine, “but no one could look at you and doubt that ... whatever you might do, would be the outcome of irresistible impulse, not the result of deliberate—ahem! My dearest, you interest me indescribably,” she cried, “and if I were the least bit inclined to curiosity, I am sure I should implore you to go on.”

“You shall hear the story of Cadminster’s Great Sacrifice, Bettine,” said Mrs. Tollebranch, “and when you have heard, you will regard him——”

“As Bayard and all the other heroes of chivalry rolled into one, and dressed by a Bond Street tailor,” interrupted Lady Millebrook, with a glow of impatience in her fine dark eyes. “I think you mentioned two years ago?” she added, settling a little stray lock of her friend’s silken blonde hair, and sinking back among her cushions.

“Two years ago,” murmured Mrs. Tollebranch, “Willibrand became bitten with the Golf Spider. He is as wild about the game to-day,” she added, “as ever.”

“There is a proverb, ‘Once a golfer, always a golfer,’” put in Lady Millebrook. “I believe that to play the game successfully requires a vast amount of thought and judgment, which insensibly diverts a man’s mind from less harmless topics, and that it entails an invigorating and healthy action of the arms and legs, soothing to the nervous system, and improving in its effect upon the temper. Were I asked by any married woman of my acquaintance whether she should encourage her husband in his devotion to golf, or dissuade him from it, I should advise her to encourage the fad. The game, unlike others, can be played all the year round, in sunshine, rain, or snow.”

“Willibrand used to play it in the snow,” put in Mrs. Tollebranch, “with red balls. It was when we were spending March at Tobermuirie two years ago, that——”

“That Lord Cadminster performed the chivalrous action which resulted for him in the permanent loss of his digestion? Well?”

“Tobermuirie is the bleakest spot in North Britain,” began Mrs. Tollebranch, returning the teacups to the tray, and touching the electric bell in a manner which conveyed the intimation that she would not be at home to any caller for the next quarter of an hour. “The castle is one of the oldest inhabited residences in Europe, and, I verily believe, the coldest. If you would like to find out for yourself how easily a northern gale can penetrate walls ten feet thick in the thinnest places, come to us in July.”

“I shall make a point of it!” said Lady Millebrook, cuddling down into her warm, scented lair of cushions.

“Of course, the male division of the house-party was made up of golfing enthusiasts,” went on Mrs. Tollebranch. “Major Wharfling, Sir Roger Balcombe, Cadminster, who was as keen as Willibrand in those days, three Guardsmen, and D’Arsy Pontoise.”

“By the way, what has become of Pontoise?” queried Lady Millebrook. “One never meets him now as one used.”

“He scarcely ever leaves Paris, I believe,” returned Mrs. Tollebranch, rather constrainedly. “Since his reconciliation with the Duc, his great-uncle, and his marriage with Mademoiselle De Carapoix, who I have heard is a very strict Catholic and humpbacked——”

“Besides being a great heiress.... Of course, he is kept well within bounds. But what a fascinating creature Pontoise used to be. Bubbling with life, effervescing with spirits. Sadly naughty, too, I fear, for the names of at least half a dozen pretty married women used to be mixed up with his in all sorts of scan.... My dearest, I beg your pardon!”

“I, at least, was not wicked—only weak!” said Clarice, with icy dignity. “And as to there being five others——”

“My sweet, it was the vaguest hearsay. Nothing certain, except that Pontoise spoke perfect English and was a veritable Apollo! I can imagine the rigors of imprisonment in a Border castle in March to have been ameliorated by the fact of his being a guest under its aged roof. Did he play golf?”

Mrs. Tollebranch rose and took a dainty screen of crimson feathers from the high mantelshelf.

“He tried to learn,” she explained, holding the screen so as to shield her delicate complexion from the glowing heat of the log fire. “But the game baffled him. To play it properly, I believe, the mind must be dead to all other interests——”

“And Pontoise’s mind was unusually alive at that particular moment to things outside the sphere of golf,” mused Lady Millebrook. “Golf is a game for husbands, not for——” Her red lips closed on the unuttered word.

“Don’t say, ‘lovers’!” implored Clarice. “From beginning to end, Bettine, it was nothing but a flirtation. I will own that I was—attracted, almost fascinated. I had never met a human being whose nature was of so many colors ... whose soul....” She broke off.

“I have been informed on good authority,” observed Lady Millebrook, “that whenever Pontoise meant mischief he invariably talked about his soul. But do go on!

“Of course, you played golf also; and as one of the great advantages connected with the game is that you can choose your own partner, I may presume that Pontoise made acquaintance with it under your auspices, and that when he landed himself in the jaws of some terrific sand-bunker, you were at hand to help him out.”

“As his hostess, it was rather incumbent upon me,” explained Mrs. Tollebranch, “to make myself of use. Willibrand and Sir Roger Balcombe termed him a duffer; Major Wharfling is nothing but a professional, Cadminster and the Guardsmen were hard drivers all. And as Bluefern had made me a golfing costume which was a perfect dream——”

“You completed the conquest of Pontoise. I quite understand!” said Bettine. “In that frock, armed with a long spoon. I quite grasp it.”

“The golf course is very open at Tobermuirie,” went on Clarice, playing with the feather fan.

“But there are hillocks, and bumps and boulders, and things behind which Pontoise managed to get in a good many references to his soul. I grasp that also,” observed Lady Millebrook.

“He did mention his soul,” admitted Mrs. Tollebranch. “He said that it had always been lonely, thirsting for the sympathy of a sister-spirit until——”

“Until he met you!”

“He did say as much. And he explained how, in sheer desperation of ever meeting the affinity, the flame for whom the spark of his being had been originally kindled, a man may drift into all kinds of follies, even gain the name of a libertine and a roué.”

“Quite true.”

“He has such wonderful eyes, like moss agates, and his profile is like the Hermes of Praxiteles, or would be but for the waxed mustache and crisp, golden beard. And there is a vibrating timbre in his voice that goes to the very heart. One could not but be sorry for him.”

“I am sure you were very sorry indeed. But Pontoise, as one knows of him, would not long be content with that. Your heartfelt pity, and the tip of your little finger to kiss....” Lady Millebrook’s sleepily dark eyes smiled cynical amusement. “Those things are the hors d’œuvres of flirtation. Soup, fish, made-dishes, roast, and sweets invariably succeed, with black coffee and a subsequent indigestion.”

Clarice avoided the glance of this feminine philosopher.

“Pontoise was always respectful,” she said, with a little note of defiance in her voice. “He never forgot what was due to me save once, when——”

“When it was borne in upon him too strongly what he owed to himself. And then he kissed you, and you were furiously angry.”

“Furious!” nodded Clarice, brushing her round chin with the edge of the crimson screen. “I vowed I would never speak to him again.”

“And how long did you keep that oath?” asked Bettine.

“We met at dinner in the evening, and of course one has to be civil. And when I went to bed, and he handed me my candlestick,” said Mrs. Tollebranch—“for gas is only laid as high as the first floor of the castle, and the electric light has never been heard of—he slipped a note into my hand. It implored my pardon, and declared that unless I would meet him in the golf-house on the links next day before lunch, and receive his profound apologies, he would terminate an existence which my well-deserved scorn had rendered insupportable. He spoke of the—the——” Clarice hesitated.

“The kiss,” put in Lady Millebrook, “and——”

“Said he had dared, in a moment of insanity, to desecrate the cheek of the purest woman breathing with lips that ought to be branded for their criminal presumption. He could never atone, he ended, but he could never forget.”

“And asked you in the postscript to meet him in the golf-house. I quite understand,” observed Lady Millebrook. “Of course, you didn’t go?”

Clarice’s lovely gray-blue eyes opened. Her sensitive lips quivered.

“Oh! but I am afraid....” She heaved a little regretful sigh over her past folly. “That is where I was weak, Bettine. I went. Oh, don’t laugh!”

“My child, this is hysteria,” explained Lady Millebrook, removing the filmy handkerchief from her lovely eyes. “Well—you went. You popped your head into the lion’s mouth—and somehow or other Cadminster played the deus ex machina, and got it out for you again.”

“The golf-house was a queer shanty, with a tarred roof,” said Mrs. Tollebranch retrospectively. “It held a bunker of coals, and stands for clubs, and a fireplace, and a folding luncheon-table, and camp-stools, and hampers. We used to lunch outside when it didn’t rain or snow, and inside when it did. Well, when Willibrand and Sir Roger Balcombe, Major Wharfling, the Guardsmen, and Cadminster were quite out of sight, Pontoise and I somehow found ourselves back at the golf-house. I was cold, and there was a fire there, and he looked so handsome and so miserable as he stood bare-headed by the door, waiting for me to enter, that——”

“The fly walked in. And then the spider——”

“He disappointed me, I will own,” said Clarice, with a little gulp. “After all his penitent protestations! I have never trusted men with agate-colored eyes since, and I never will. They have only one idea of women, and that is—the worst. But when I ordered him to let go my hands and get up from his knees, something in my face or voice seemed to tell him that I was really, really, in earnest, and he obeyed me, and moved suddenly away as I went to the door. The latch rattled as I lifted my hand, the door opened; Cadminster stood there, white from head to foot, for a sudden blizzard had swept down from the hills, and the links were four inches deep in snow. Oh! I shall never forget how tactful he was! ‘You have got here before the rest of us!’ he said, quite in a cheery, ordinary way. ‘Lucky for you! Tollebranch and the others are coming after me as hard as they can pelt, and we shall have to put out the “House Full” boards in a minute.’ And he began to rattle out the flaps of the luncheon-table, and get out things from the hamper, and then he looked at me, and said, as he lifted the lid from a great kettle of Irish stew that had been simmering over the fire, ‘Suppose you were to take the ladle and give this mess a bit of a stir, Mrs. Tollebranch! The fire will burn your face, I’m afraid, but what woman wouldn’t sacrifice her complexion in the cause of duty?’ Oh, Bettine, I could have blessed Cadminster as I seized that iron ladle, for seeming so natural and at ease. And then—almost before I had begun to stir the stew—while I was bending over the pot, Willibrand and the other men came in. What followed I can never forget!”

“Now we come to Cadminster’s great act of heroism?” interrogated Lady Millebrook.

“Willibrand came in stamping the snow off,” went on Mrs. Tollebranch. “So did all the other men. Willibrand sniffed the odor of the oniony stew with rapture. All the other men sniffed too.”

“The tastes of the male animal are extraordinarily simple,” observed Lady Millebrook, “in spite of the elaborate pretense carried on and kept up by him, of being a gourmand and a connoisseur. The coarsest dishes are those which appeal most irresistibly to his palate, and when I find it necessary for any length of time to chain Millebrook to his home, I order a succession of barbaric plats. By the time we have reached tripe and onions, served as an entrée, there is not a more domesticated husband breathing. But pray continue.”

“They all assembled round the stewpot,” went on Clarice, “and watched with absorbed interest the operation of turning its steaming contents into the dish that awaited them. Cadminster and Willibrand undertook this duty. Well——”

“Well?”

“Just as they heaved up the steaming cauldron, Willibrand called out, ‘Hulloa, what the deuce is that?’ His hands were occupied—he could not get at his eyeglass,” said Mrs. Tollebranch, “and so he peered and exclaimed, while I leaned over his shoulder and glanced into the stewpot. There, floating upon the surface of the muttony, oniony, carroty, potatoey mass, was”—she shuddered—“the letter Pontoise had given me with my candlestick on the preceding night!”

“My dear, how awful!” gasped Lady Millebrook.

“I had had it in my pocket,” explained Mrs. Tollebranch, “when I arrived at the golf-house. When I began to stir the stew I found the handle of the ladle too hot to be pleasant, and I pulled out my handkerchief to wrap round it.”

“Whisking Pontoise’s effusion out with it! How reckless not to have burned it!” cried Lady Millebrook.

“Imagine my feelings!” said Clarice. “There was the letter in the stewpot. As the contents were turned by Cadminster into the dish, I lost sight of the envelope beneath a greasy avalanche of fat mutton and vegetables. I remembered that Pontoise had referred to that unlucky kiss; I recalled Willibrand’s unfortunate tendency to outbursts of jealous rage without reason; I shuddered at the thought of the amount of reason that envelope contained. Self-control abandoned me—my brain spun round, I thought all lost ... and then—I caught Cadminster’s eye. There was encouragement in it—and hope. ‘Trust to me,’ it said, ‘I will save you!’”

“And——?”

“We sat down to table, and that stew was distributed, in large portions, to all those men. Cadminster assumed control of the ladle. He gravely asked me whether I cared about stew, and I gasped out something—what I don’t know, but I believe I said I didn’t. When the words were out, I knew that I had lost my only chance—that Cadminster had intended to help me to that fatal envelope. My fate hung in the balance as he filled plate after plate.... Who would get my letter in his gravy, amongst his vegetables? What would happen then? Would it be rendered illegible by grease, or would it not? I scarcely breathed, the suspense was so awful!” said Mrs. Tollebranch, clutching Lady Millebrook’s sleeve. “And then—Relief came. I grasped that man’s heroic motive—I understood the full nobility of his nature when——”

“When Cadminster helped himself to the letter! But, good heavens! you don’t mean to tell me,” cried Lady Millebrook, “that he ate it?”

“He did, he did!” cried Mrs. Tollebranch, throwing herself into her friend’s sympathetic embrace. “Now you know why I call him a Bayard, and look upon him as my truest, noblest friend. Now you know....”

“Why he is a cadaverous dyspeptic! Of course. That document must have completely wrecked his constitution.”

“It has,” interrupted Clarice, with a little shower of tears.

“I shall never say again,” remarked Lady Millebrook, as she took an affectionate leave of her dearest friend but four, “that Romance and Chivalry have no existence in these modern times. To jump into a den full of lions and things to get a lady’s bracelet or save a lady’s glove may sound finer, though I am not sure. But to eat another man’s love-letter, envelope and all, to save a woman’s reputation ... there is the true ring of heroism about it, the glow that ennobles an ordinary, commonplace action into something superb. And, unless I mistake, Pontoise invariably penned his amatory effusions upon the very stiffest of parchment wove.... Darling, Lord Cadminster must dine with us.... Next Thursday; I will not take No!” ended Lady Millebrook; “and he may rely upon it that if either Jedbrook or Mills presume to offer him anything rich or oleaginous, either or both of them will be dismissed next day!”

RENOVATION

The hands of the Dresden clock upon the white travertine mantelshelf of Lady Sidonia’s boudoir pointed to the small hours. There was a discreet knock at the door. The maid, a pale, pretty young woman, who was wielding the hair-brush, laid the weapon down, and answered the knock.

“Who is it, Pauline?” asked Pauline’s mistress, with her eyes upon the mirror, which certainly framed a picture well worth looking at.

“Her Grace’s maid, my lady, asking whether you are too tired for a chat?”

“Say that I shall be delighted, and give me the blue Japanese kimono instead of this pink thing. Will my hair do? Because, if it needs no more brushing, you can go to bed.”

“Thank you, my lady.”

The door opened; trailing silks swept over the carpet....

“I can’t kiss you through all this brown-gold silk,” said the Duchess’s voice. “Stop, though! You shall have it on the top of your head.” And the kiss descended, light as a puff of thistle-down. “I kiss Cull there sometimes, when I want him to be in a good temper. He says it thrills right down to the tips of his toes.... You’re smiling! I guess you think the stock of thrills ought to be exhausted by this time—three years since we stood up together on the deck of Cluny F. Farradaile’s anchored airship, a posse of detectives from Blueberry Street guarding the ends of the fore and aft cables, where they were anchored three hundred feet below in the grounds of the N’York Æther Club, just to prevent any one of the dozens of Society girls who’d tried their level best to catch Cull and failed, from coming along with a bowie and cutting ’em.... You remember the pars. in all the papers, headed, ‘A Marriage Made in Heaven,’ I guess?”

“Of course, of course,” said the Duchess’s hostess and dearest friend.

“My invention,” said her Grace, “and mighty smart, I reckon. I’d always said I’d be married in a real original way—and I was. The only drawback to the affair was that she pitched—I mean the airship—and the Minister, and Cull, and Poppa, and the inventor—that’s Cluny F. Farradaile—were taken poorly before the close of the cer’mony. As for my sex, I’m proud to say that Amurrican women can rise superior even to air-sickness when Paris frocks are in question. But when they wound us down we were glad enough to get back to dry land. We found a representative of the Customs waiting for us, by the way; and if Poppa hadn’t gone to law about it, and proved that we were really fixed on to the States by our cables, we’d have had to plank down the duty on every jewel we’d got on. Say, pet, I’m perishing for a smoke!”

The Duchess was supplied with cigarettes. Pauline placed upon a little table the materials that “factorize,” as the Duchess would have said, towards the composition of cognac and soda, and glided out.

“Now I call that a real pretty, meek-looking creature,” said her Grace, blowing a little flight of smoke rings in the direction of the door. “If she’s as clever as she’s nice, Siddie, you’ve got a treasure!”

“She is a good maid,” responded Lady Sidonia. “For one thing, she knows a great deal about the toilette, and on the subject of the complexion she’s really quite an authority. She knows something of massage, too—on the American system—for, though an English girl, she has lived in your country——”

“Oh!” said the Duchess, with an accent of interest. “Has she, indeed?”

“She’s reasonable, too,” went on the maid’s mistress; “and not a limpet in the way of sticking to one mode of doing the hair and refusing to learn any other. Then she can wave——”

“It is an accomplishment,” said the Duchess thoughtfully. “Now, my woman either frizzes you like a Fiji, or leaves you dank and straight like a mermaid. Why does hair never wave naturally—out of a novel? It’s a question for a Convention. And men—dear idiots!—are such believers in the reality of ripples. There! I’ve been implored over and over again for ‘just that little bit with the wave in it’ to keep in a locket—hundreds and hundreds of times. I guess Cull’s wiser now; but once you’ve seen your husband’s teeth in a tumbler, you’ve entered into a Conjugal Reciprocity Convention: ‘Believe in me—not as much of me as really belongs to me, but as much as you see—and I’ll return the compliment!’ Yes, I guess I’ll take some S. and B. It’s an English accomplishment, and I’ve mastered it thoroughly. We Amurricans rinse out with Apollinaris or ice-water, which isn’t half so comforting, especially in trouble.”

And the Duchess heaved a butterfly’s sigh, which scarcely stirred her filmy laces, and smoothed her prettiest eyebrow with one exquisite finger-tip.

“Trouble!” exclaimed her friend. “My dear, you’re the happiest of women. Don’t try to persuade me that you’ve got a silent sorrow!”

“Not exactly a silent one, because I’m going to confide in you; but still it is a sorrow.” The Duchess confided one hand to her dearest friend’s consoling clasp, and wiped away a tear with a minute handkerchief that would not have dried half a dozen. “Perhaps Amurrican blood is warmer than English; but, anyhow, our family affections are vurry much more strongly developed over in the States than yours are here. And I had a letter from Momma by yesterday’s mail that would have melted a heart of rock.” She dried a second tear. “If Momma lives till the end of Creation,” she said, “she will never, never get over it. And I don’t wonder!”

“Darling, if it would really do you any good to tell me——” breathed Lady Sidonia.

“I tell all my friends,” said the Duchess with a sigh; “and they’re invariably of one opinion—that Momma was cruelly victimized.”

“She is——”

“Call her forty, dear. It would be just cruel to say anything more. People call me lovely and all those things,” said the Duchess candidly, “and I allow they’re correct. Well, compared with what Momma was at my age, I’m real ordinary.”

“Oh!”

“Frozen fact! And you can grasp the idea that when—in spite of every effort—Momma began to lose her figure and her looks, she felt it!”

“Every woman must!”

“But the more she felt it, the more she seemed to expand.... Grief runs to fat, I do believe,” said the Duchess. “Of course, Poppa’s allowance to Momma being liber’l—even for a Corn King—she had unlimited funds at her disposal. To begin with, she rented a medical specialist.”

“Who dieted her?”

“My dear, for a woman accustomed to French cookery, and with the national predilection for cookies and candy, it must have been——”

“Torture!”

“One gluten biscuit and the eye of a mutton cutlet for dinner. Think of it! Beef-juice and dry toast for breakfast, ditto for supper. And she used to skip—a woman of that size, too—for hours! And her trainers came every morning at five o’clock, and they’d make her just put on a sweater and take her between them for a sharp trot round Central Park, just as if she’d been a gentleman jockey sworn to ride at so many stone for a Plate. And the number of stone Momma got off——”

“She got them off?”

“I guess she got them off,” said the Duchess. “Poppa talked of having an elegant tombstone set up in Central Park to commemorate the greater portion of a wife buried there! then he gave up the notion. And then Momma made handsome presents to her specialist and her trainers, and contracted with the cleverest operator in N’York to make a face.”

“To make a face?” repeated Lady Sidonia.

“To make a face for Momma that matched her youthful figure,” said the Duchess composedly. “My! the time that man took in creating a surface to work on! She slept for a fortnight with her countenance covered with slices of raw veal.”

“Horrible!” shuddered the listener.

“And the massaging and steaming that went on!”

“I can imagine!”

“The foundations being properly laid——” continued the Duchess, lighting another cigarette.

Lady Sidonia went into a little uncontrollable shriek of laughter. “As though ... she had been a house!... Ha, ha, ha!”

“My dear,” returned the Duchess, shaking her beautiful head, “the terms employed in the contract were precisely those I have quoted.... The specialist laid the foundations, and carried the contract out. Momma’s appearance delighted everyone, except Poppa, who has old-fashioned notions, and complained of feeling shy in the presence of a stranger. Fortunately their Silver Wedding eventuated just then, and his conscience—Poppa’s conscience is, for a corn speculator’s, wonderfully sensitive—ceased to annoy him.”

“And your mother?”

“Momma wore her new face for six months with the greatest satisfaction,” said the Duchess. “Of course, she had to lay up for repairs pretty often, but the specialist was there to carry them out. Unluckily, he contracted a severe chill in the N’York winter season and died. His wife put his tools and enamels and things in his coffin. She said she knew business would be brisk when he got up again, and she didn’t wish any other speculator to chip in before him.” The Duchess sighed. “Then came Momma’s great trouble.”

“There was no other operator to—take up the—the contract?” hinted Lady Sidonia.

“There were dozens,” said the Duchess, “and Momma tried them all. My dear, you may surmise what she looked like.”

“A heterogeneous mingling of styles.”

“It was impossible to conjecture,” said the Duchess confidentially, “to what period the original structure belonged. By day Momma resorted to a hat and voile.”

“Even in the house?”

“Even in the house. By night—well, I guess you’ve noticed that a human work of art, illuminated by electric light, isn’t seen under the most favorable conditions.”

“There is a pitiless accuracy!”

“An unmerciful candor about its revelations. After one unusually brilliant reception, Momma retired from society and took to spiritualism. She persevered until she had materialized that demised face-specialist, and extracted some definite raps in the way of advice.”

“And what did he advise?”

“He suggested, through the medium, that Momma should apply to the Milwaukee Mentalists.”

“A Society of Faith Healers?”

“‘Occult Operatists,’ they call themselves on the prospectuses. As for the cult of the Society,” said the Duchess pensively, “one might call it a mayonnaise of Freemasonry, Theosophy, Hypnotism, Humbug, and Hoodoo. But the humbug, like salad oil in the mayonnaise, was the chief ingredient.” The Duchess stopped to draw breath.

“And into this vortex Mrs. Van Wacken was drawn?” sighed Lady Sidonia.

“Sucked down and swallowed,” said the Duchess, who had been Miss Van Wacken. “They undertook to make Momma right over again, brand new, by prayer and faith and—a mentally electrified bath. For which treatment Momma was to pay ten thousand down.”

“Pounds!” shrieked the horrified Lady Sidonia.

“Dollars,” corrected the Duchess.

“In advance?” cried the listener.

“In advance, after a demonstration had been given which was practically to satisfy Momma that the Milwaukee Mentalists were square,” said the Duchess. “My word! when I remember how they bluffed that poor darling—I should want to laugh, if I didn’t cry.” She dried another tear.

“Do go on!” entreated her friend.

“The High Priestess of the Community was a woman,” went on the Duchess, “just as cool and ca’am and cunning as they make ’em.”

“I guessed as much,” said Lady Sidonia.

“It takes a woman to know and work on another woman’s weak points,” rejoined the Duchess. “The High Priestess pretended to be in communication with a spirit. ‘The Mystikos,’ they called him, and he resided, when he was at home, in a crystal ball; but bullion was the real totem of the tribe. Well—but it’s getting late——”

“I shall not sleep a wink until I have heard the whole story,” said Lady Sidonia.

“And Cull and your husband are comparing notes about their wives in the smoking-room,” said the Duchess.

“Well, the Theologa——”

“The—the—what?”

“The Theologa—that was the professional title of the High Priestess—whose or’nary name was Mrs. Gideon J. Swale,” her Grace went on, “talked a great deal to Momma, and made some passes over her, and got the poor dear completely under her thumb. Momma wasn’t the only victim, you must know. There were four other ladies, all wealthy, and each one, like Momma, the leader of a fashionable society set——”

“And—no longer young?”

“And past their first bloom,” amended the Duchess. “And each of ’em had agreed to plank down the same sum in cold dollars.”

“Fifty thousand in all,” said Lady Sidonia with a sigh. She could have done so much with fifty thousand dollars, even though American money was such beastly stuff. “Worth——”

“Worth riskin’ a term in a N’York State prison for—I guess so!” said the Duchess. “Well, Momma and the other ladies signed on to the terms, and went through a cer’mony of purification—which included learnin’ a kind of catechism used in admittin’ a new member into the Occult Operatists’ Community—an’ several hymns. That was to make them worthy to receive the Revelation from the Mystikos, I guess. At least, the Theologa——”

“Mrs. Gideon J. Swale?”

“The same. The Theologa said so. In a week or so—durin’ which period they lived at the house of the Community—chiefly on nuts an’ spring-water——”

“For which entertainment they paid——” Lady Sidonia hinted.

“Delmonico rates!” said the Duchess. “Well, it was settled that the Demonstration was to come off, with the Mystikos’ consent.”

“What sort of——”

“Demonstration? Cur’us,” said the Duchess, “and interesting. There was a woman—a Mrs. Gower, English by birth, Amurrican naturalized—who was to be the Subject. She was a widow—her husband having met his death in an explosion at an oil-gas producin’ factory. Stoker to the gas-generator he was, and his wife had brought him his dinner—fried steak in a tin pail—when the hull kitboodle blew up. Husband was killed—wife was saved, though so scarred and disfigured about the face as to be changed from a pretty woman into a plain one.”

“And she—this scarred, disfigured woman—was to be made pretty again by the Occult Operatists?” hazarded Lady Sidonia.

“Guessed it first time,” nodded the Duchess. “The cer’mony took place in a temple belonging to the Community, all painted over red and yellow triangles and things like T-squares. At the upper end was an altar, raised on three steps, and on this was the ground glass ball in which the Mystikos lived when he wasn’t somewhere else, and an electric light was fixed over it, so that it just dazzled your eyes to look at. Below the altar was a seat for the Theologa, and, you bet, Mrs. Gideon J. Swale came out strong in the costume line. Momma was reminded of Titiens in Norma, she said.”

“I want to hear about the Demonstration,” pleaded Lady Sidonia plaintively.

“My! you’re in a hurry,” said the Duchess. “But it was to be brought off in a bath—if you must know!”

“A bath?”

“A bath that was full of water and boiled herbs, and had been properly incanted over by the Theologa,” explained the Duchess. “There were incense-burners all round, and not far off a kind of tent of white linen, all over red triangles and T’s. And the five candidates for renovation—I mean Momma and the other ladies—sat on a form, in bloomers, each with a little purse-bag containing bills for ten thousand dollars, and her heart full of hope and joy.”

“Oh! go on,” cried Lady Sidonia.

“The temple was circular, something like the Mormon Tabernacle at Salt Lake City,” said the Duchess, “and the Occult Operatives—a round hundred of ’em—occupied the forms, to assist with the prayers and hymn-singin’. Of course, the proceedings began with a hymn sung in several different keys. I surmise the effect was impressive.”

Lady Sidonia elevated her eyebrows.

“Momma said it was wailful, and made her feel as though live clams were crawling up and down her back. But then the bloomers may account for that,” said the Duchess, “and I guess the temple registers were out of order. Then—the lights were suddenly turned out!”

“O-oh!” shivered Lady Sidonia.

“Except the electric stars over the Mystikos’ crystal ball,” went on the Duchess, “so that all the light in the temple seemed to come from the altar. Momma said that made her feel those crawling clams worse than ever.”

“Could one see plainly what was going on?” asked Lady Sidonia.

“It was a religious kind of dimness,” said the Duchess, “but most everything showed plainly. For instance, when the hideous woman who was to be the Subject of the Demonstration came out of the linen tent in a suit of bloomers like Momma’s and the others, she appeared to be plain enough. Do you keep a cat, dear?” whispered the Duchess.

“Why? No!” said Lady Sidonia.

“I thought I heard a scratching at the door,” explained the Duchess, with her mouth close to Lady Sidonia’s ear. “Don’t open it.... I’d rather—— Where was I?”

“The Subject was in bloomers,” said Lady Sidonia.

“Oh, well! Momma and the other ladies were asked to look at her earnestly, to fix her features in their minds, so that they couldn’t but recognize her again if they saw her. She was a slight woman, Momma said, about thirty-five, and but for her scarred face would have been pretty, with her pale complexion, brown wavy hair, and large gray eyes with black lashes.... She had one peculiarity about the left hand, which no one who ever saw it could forget. What are you listening for?”

“I hear something at the door,” faltered Lady Sidonia in a nervous undertone.

“Fancy. You don’t keep a cat. Well, the Subject went up to the altar and knelt, and the Theologa—Mrs. Gideon J. Swale—invoked the Mystikos in a solemn kind of conjuration, and the crystal ball on the altar began to hop up and down.”

“No!”

“Fact! Then it rose right off the altar and hung suspended in the air, and the hymn broke out worse than ever, and the Theologa led the Subject down the altar steps and put her into the bath.”

“Well?” gasped Lady Sidonia.

“The Theologa threw incense on the burners round the bath, and perfect clouds rose up all round it, completely hiding the Subject,” explained the Duchess.

“Then she——”

“She began to scream.”

“To scream?”

“As if she was in absolute agony; and Momma and the four other ladies nearly fainted off their form, they were so perfectly terrified.”

“And—what happened?”

“There was a scream more piercing than any of the others.”

“Oh!”

“The clouds of incense became so thick that you couldn’t see your hand.”

“And——”

“The Occult Operatives sang more loudly and less in tune than ever, and the crystal ball kept on jumping up and down. Then the clouds of smoke cleared away, and the lights went up, and——” The Duchess paused provokingly.

“Go on, go on!”

“And the Subject got out of the bath.... And she had been ugly and scarred when she went in, but now she was young and pretty!”

“Impossible!”

“It was the same woman to all appearances, but changed—wonderfully changed. The same pretty brown hair, the same eyes, gray, with long curly black lashes, and the same strange malformation of one finger of the left hand. But no cicatrices, none of the seams and marks that made the other frightful.”

“The other!”

“Did I say the other?”

“Certainly!”

“Then I guess I let the cat out of the bag.”

“Ah, I begin to understand!”

“I thought you’d tumble.”

“There were two women—exactly alike!”

“No, goosey! One woman younger than the other, and looking exactly like her, as she looked before the injury to her face.”

“Sisters?”

“No. Mother and daughter.”

“And the change in the bath?”

“Managed with a false bottom and trap exit. The sort of trick one sees exposed at the Egyptian Hall.”

“And the daughter took the mother’s place?”

“Under cover of the incense—and the singing. The tent held two, you understand.”

“But Mrs. Van Wacken?”

“Momma and the other ladies—once the thing had been proved genuine—were only too anxious to plank down their money and hop into the wonderful bath. So they went up to the Theologa, and she blessed them and laid the five money-bags on the altar, and then——”

“Then——”

“Then all the lights went out,” said the Duchess, “and there was a kind of stampede, and Momma and the four other ladies found themselves alone in the temple. The Theologa and the Subject and the hundred members of the Community who’d sat round on the seats and helped with the hymns were gone—and the dollar bags had vanished. The doors of the temple were locked, and Momma and the four other victims had to stop there until the morning. An express man heard their cries for help, broke in the door, and took them to an hotel in his wagon. Dear, I’m going to toddle to by-by!”

“It was an awful—awful swindle,” said Lady Sidonia, as she and the Duchess kissed good-night.

“And the exposure!” The Duchess shrugged her shoulders. “Momma and the other ladies wanted it hushed, but the police went into the matter.”

“Were the swindlers arrested?”

“The Theologa was caught at Amsterdam, and extradited. The Community got off. Nobody could prove any of them had had any of the money. I guess,” said the Duchess, yawning, “Mrs. Gideon J. Swale knows where it is. But she’s in prison, now, dear. And I hope she likes it. As for the woman and her daughter, whose likenesses to each other had been made use of by Mrs. Gideon—they’re still at large. Good-night.”

“Do tell me,” pressed Lady Sidonia. “That peculiarity of one finger of the left hand possessed by both mother and daughter—what was it?”

“It was,” said the Duchess, “a double nail.”

“How odd!” said Lady Sidonia. “My maid has the same queer deformity, and it is the only thing I don’t like about her.... She hates to have it noticed.”

“I guess she does,” said the Duchess.

“Look at her hand to-morrow,” said Lady Sidonia. “It’s awfully queer. Don’t forget.”

“I won’t,” said the Duchess. “But she won’t be here to-morrow!”

Lady Sidonia’s eyes opened to their widest extent. “Won’t—be here?”

“No. She is the girl who got out of the bath!”

“Good heavens!” cried Lady Sidonia. “How do you——Are you——”

“I had been shown her photograph by the police—recognized her the moment I saw her,” said the Duchess. “I’m not mistaken any, you may be sure. But you needn’t trouble about her. She’s gone!”

“Gone!”

“She was listening at the door, and heard the whole story. When you spoke about the cat, she made tracks. She’s clear of this house by now, you may bet your back teeth. Don’t worry about her,” said the Duchess. “I’ll send my own maid to you in the morning. Good-night!”

THE BREAKING PLACE

Being a letter from Miss Tossie Trilbina, of No. 000, Giddingham Mansions, W., to the Editor of “The Keyhole,” an illustrated Weekly Journal of Caterings for the Curious.

Dear Sir,

Since reserve and reticence can be carried too far by a lady, I drop the present line of explanation, the newspapers having took so kind a interest in the differences between me and Lord Wretchingham. And if poets ask what’s in a name, the experience of me and many another young lady whose talent for the Stage, developed by application and go-aheadness, not to say good luck—for that there is such a thing must be plain to the stubbornest person—has made her friends from the Orchestra—(you’d never guess how the Second Violin can queer you in an accomp. if you hadn’t experienced it!)—to the highest row in the Threepenny Gallery at The Druids, or the shilling one at The Troc.—would answer, more than people think for!

My poor dear mother, who has been pretty nearly crazy about the affair, in that shrinking from publicity which is natural to a lady, told the young gentleman from The Keyhole, who dropped in on her at her little place at Brixton, to fish and find out for himself why the marriage-engagement between her daughter and his lordship should have been broken off on the very verge of the altar.

Of course, I don’t assume his lordship’s proposal wasn’t a compliment to a young lady in the Profession; but lordly roofs and music halls may cover vice or shelter virtue, as one of the serio characters so beautifully said in the autumn show at dear old Drury Lane, the name of which has slipped me. And I don’t pretend that my deepest and holiest feelings were not wrenched a bit by me having to say in two words, after mutual vows and presents of the solemnest kind had been exchanged between me and Lord Wretchingham: “All is over between you and me for ever, Hildebrand; and if you possess the mind as well as the manners and appearance of a gentleman, you will not force me to give you the definite chuck.”

He went on awfully, grinding the heels of his boots into a brand-new Wilton carpet, and telling me over and over that I had no heart and never loved him, concerning which I prefer to keep myself to myself. There are those that make as much noise when things go wrong with ’em as a one-and-fourpenny sparking-plug, and there are others that keep theirselves to theirselves and suffer in silence, of which I hope I am one. Even supposing my ancestry did not toddle over with Edward the Conkeror, which they may, for all I know.

It was on the very first night of the production of The Pop-in-Taw Girl, by the Trust or Bust Theatrical Syndicate, at the Hiram P. Goff Theatre, W., that Lord Wretchingham caught my eye. Musical Comedy is my strongest weakness, for though a principal boy’s part, with heaps of changes, and electro-calcium with chromatic glasses for every song and dance touches the spot, pantomime is not so refined. Perhaps you may recall the record hits I made in “Freddy’s Flannel Waistcoat Wilted in the Wash,” and “Lay Your Head on My Shoulder, Dear.” Not that it’s my habit to refer to my successes, but the street organs alone will rub it in when you happen to be the idol of the hour.

He sat with his mouth wide open—of course, I refer to Lord Wretchingham—all the time yours truly was on the stage, and I will say no gentleman could have a more delicate regard for a young lady’s feelings than his lordship did in sending a perfect haystack of the most expensive hothouse flowers addressed to Miss Tossie Trilbina, with a diamond and turquoise muff-chain twined round the moss handle of the basket, and not a speck of address on the card for my poor dear mother to return the jewelry to, her being over and above particular, I have often thought, in discouraging attentions that only sprang from gentlemen’s appreciation of the performance, and masked nothing the smallest objections could be taken to.

She quite warmed to Lord Wretchingham, I will say, when him being respectfully presented by the Syndicate, and me being recommended fresh country air by the doctors when suffering from tonsils in the throat, his lordship placed his motor-car at my disposal. With poor dear mother invariably in the glass compartment behind, the tongue of scandal could not possibly find a handle, and her astonishment when she discovered that Hildebrand regarded me with a warmer feeling than that of mere admiration gave her quite a turn.

We were formally engaged—me and Lord Wretchingham. We kept the thing so dark I cannot think how the newspapers managed to get hold of it. But a public favorite must pay the price of popularity in having her private affairs discussed by the crowd. My poor dear mother felt it, but there! what can you do? With interviewers calling same time as the milk, and Press snap-shotters lurking behind the laurel bushes in the front garden, is it to be wondered at that Hildebrand’s family were apprised of our betrothal not only by pars., but by the publication of our photographs, taken hand-in-hand on my poor dear mother’s doorstep, with a vine climbing up behind us, Hildebrand’s motor car, an 18.26 h. p. “Gadabout,” at the bottom of the doorsteps, with the French chofore parley-vousing away a good one to the three Japanese pugs, and poor dear mother, looking a perfect lady, at her fancy-work, in the front parlor window. How the negative was obtained, and how it found its way into all the Illustrated Papers, and particularly how it got upon the postcards, I don’t pretend to guess. It’s one of those regular mysteries you come across in real life.

Hildebrand, or, possibly, as all is over, I should say Lord Wretchingham’s family, went into perfect fits when the news of our betrothal leaked out. The Earl of Blandish, his father, raged like a mad bull; and the Countess, his mother, implored him on her knees to break the engagement.

“Oh,” she said, with the tears in her eyes, “my own boy,” she said, “do not, I beg of you,” she said—for, of course, I got it all out of Hildebrand afterwards—“show yourself to be of so weak and unoriginal a cast of mind as to follow the example of the countless other young men of rank and property,” she said, “who have contracted unequal and unhappy unions with young women on the boards,” she said—and like her classy cheek! Upon which Lord Wretchingham calmly up and told her that his word was his bond, and that I had got both; my poor dear mother having insisted from the beginning that things should be set down in black and white, which the spelling of irrevokable almost proved a barrier the poor dear could not tackle, his education having been neglected at Eton to that extent.

Me and my poor dear mother being—I don’t mind telling you on the strict—prepared for a struggle with Wretchingham’s family, was more than surprised when, after a Saturday to Monday of anxious expectancy, a note on plain paper with a coronet stamped in white from Lady Blandish informed us that her ladyship had made up her mind to call. And she kept the appointment as punctual as clockwork, driving up in a taxi, and perfectly plainly dressed; and when I made my entrance in the dearest morning arrangement of Valenciennes lace and baby ribbon you ever saw, I will say she met me like a lady should her son’s intended, and said that Lord Blandish and her had come to the determination to make the best of their son’s choice, and invited me down to stay at Blandish Towers, in Huntshire, when the run of The Pop-in-Taw Girl broke off for the autumn holidays.

“Oh,” I said, “Lady Blandish,” I said, “of course, I shall be perfectly delighted,” and let her know how unwilling I felt as a lady to make bad blood between Lord Wretchingham and his family. “But, of course,” I said, “my duty to the man who I have vowed to love and honor leaves me no choice.”

“My dear Miss Tossie Trilbina,” she said, “your sentiments towards Wretchingham do you the utmost credit,” she said, and I explained to her that though the surname sounds foreign, there is nothing of the Italiano-ice-creamo about yours truly.

“Oh!” she said, in that sweetly nasty way that the Upper Ten do seem to have the knack of, “do not trouble to explain, my dear Miss Trilbina. Lord Blandish and myself are quite prepared,” she said, “to accept the inevitable,” she said, and kissed me, and smiled a great deal at my poor dear mother, who was explaining to her ladyship that her family did not regard an alliance with the aristocracy as anything but a match between equals, and that my education had been of the most expensive and classy kind you can imagine. And smiled herself into her taxi, and motored away.

That was in the middle of the summer season, and I bespoke my costumes for my visit to my new relations next day. Of course, I expected a house-party of really hall-marky, classy swells, and meant to do the honors and help Lady Blandish to entertain as was my duty bound. And my shooting and golfing and angling costumes, and motoring get-up and riding-habit, and tea-gowns and dinner-dresses and ball-confections, were a fair old treat to see, and did Madame Battens credit.

Wretchingham drove me down in his 18.26 h.p. “Gadabout,” with my dresser-maid in the glass case behind, and an omnibus motor from the garage behind us with my dressing-baskets, and I thought of poor dear mother at home, I don’t mind telling you, when the Towers rose up at the end of an oak avenue longer than Regent Street, and Wretchingham’s two sisters came running down the steps to hug their brother and be presented to their new sister, and the white-headed family butler threw a glass door open and Wretchingham led me in between six footmen, bowing, three on each side.

What price poor little me when I heard there wasn’t any House-Party? Cheap wasn’t the word, with all those costumes in my dress-baskets. However, I faked myself up in a frock that I really felt was a credit to a person of my rank and station, and swam down to what her ladyship called a “quiet family dinner.”

The Earl of Blandish came in, leaning on his secretary’s arm, with a gouty foot, and did the heavy father, calling me “my dear.” I sat on his lordship’s right hand, and certainly he was most agreeable, telling me the black oak carvings in the great hall were by Jacob Bean, and that the walled garden with a separate division for every month in the year and a bowling alley in the middle had been made by a lady ancestor of his who lived in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and was a friend of the person who wrote Shakespeare.

“Oh!” I said, “I suppose,” I said, “in those days bowls were not considered a low form of amusement. Though if ever my poor dear mother and father did have to call words, it would be over his weakness for bowls and skittles as a waste of time and leading to betting and drink. And as for Shakespeare, I call it all very well for literary swells with nothing else to do,” I said, “but what the Halls cater for is the business gentleman who drops in with a pal to hear the popular favorite in a ten-o’clock turn over a cigar and a small Scotch. And gardening never was much in my line,” I said, “though when a child it was my favorite amusement to grow mustard and cress on damp flannel. Hunting is my passion,” I said, “and as Wretchingham has told me you keep a first-class stable of hunters and hacks, besides carriage beasts, I hope to show your lordship that I shan’t disgrace you,” I said, and asked him when the next meet would be?

The Earl’s old eyebrows went up to the top of his aristocratic bald forehead as he said not until October, and then only for cubbing, and the two girls flushed up red, trying not to laugh, and wriggled in their chairs, and Lady Blandish said in her nice nasty way that every day brought innovations, and one might as well ride to hounds in August as skate on artificial ice in May.

“And if you are fond of sport,” Lord Blandish said, “we could possibly find you some fishing. Don’t you think so, my dear?” and he looked at his wife.

“I have my salmoning costume with me,” I said, just to let them know, “and a rod, and everything. And I suppose Wretchie won’t object,” I said, giving the poor thing a smile, “to prompt me if I am fluffy in the business.”

“Dear me!” said Lady Blandish, “how stupid of me not to have explained before,” she said, “that this is a trouting County and not a salmon County, and that such trout as there are run very small.” And the two girls choked again in the most underbred way I ever.

I said I’d fall back on golf, having a killing get-up in my basket, but there wasn’t a links within miles, Lady Blandish said, and how sorry she was. All the hot-weather entertainment she had it in her power to offer me in their quiet country home, she said, was an occasional flower-show, or County cricket-match, or a garden-party, or a friendly dinner with people who were not too exacting. In September there would be the birds, but then I would not be there. It was too unfortunate, she said. Not that her saying so took me in much.

I thought the top of my head would have come off with yawning that evening, I really did; and when I remembered that there were three weeks more of it before me I could have screamed out loud. Me and Wretchingham went for a spin in his T-cart next morning before lunch, and that drive settled me in deciding to off it on the next chance.

“Tossie darling,” said the poor dear thing, “it has gratified my father exceedingly to ascertain,” he said, “that you are fond of the country; because a condition of the provision he is willing to make for us when we are married,” he said—and he would have put his arm round my waist only the trotter shied—“is that we reside at the Dower House,” he said, “twenty miles from here, and lead a healthy life in accordance with his views as regards what is appropriate for future land-owners who will one day hold a solid stake in the County. Of course, you will leave the Stage forever, my darling,” he said, “as a future Countess of Blandish cannot figure upon the Lyric Boards,” he said, “without in some degree compromising her reputation and bringing discredit upon the family of which,” he said, “she has become a member. My father will allow us two thousand a year at first,” he said, “which will enable us to keep a couple of motor-cars and a hack or two, and with an occasional week-end in Town, I have no doubt,” he said, “that our married life will be,” he said, “one of ideal happiness for both of us. You observe,” he said, pointing with his whip straight over the trotter’s ears, “that rather low-pitched stone building of the Grange description down in that wooded hollow there? The house is quite commodious,” he said. “You will appreciate the exceptional garden; and as there is a good deal of arable land comprised,” he said, “in the estate, I shall take up farming,” he said, “with enthusiasm.”

“You may take up farming,” I said haughtily, “with enthusiasm, dear old boy; but what I say is, you will not take it up with yours truly! Do you suppose in cold blood that Tossie Trilbina is the sort of girl to sit down in the middle of a ploughed field and lead a life of ideal happiness with a farming husband in gaiters,” I said, tossing my head, “telling me how the turnips are looking every evening at dinner, and taking me up to Town for a week-end,” I said, “every now and then as a treat? No, Hildebrand,” I said, “clearly understand, much as I regret to say it, that I am not taking any; and unless the old gentleman can be brought to see the reason,” I said, “of a flat in Mayfair, all is over betwixt me and you, and I shall go back to my poor dear mother by to-night’s express,” I said, “if the lacerated state of your feelings does not permit,” I said, “of your taking the steering-wheel.”

Of course, the poor dear thing was dreadfully upset, and did his little best to bring Lord Blandish to weaken on his spiteful old determination; and Lady Blandish said heaps of nice-sounding nasty things, and the two girls tried to be sympathetic and not to look as if they were really ready to jump for joy. But the Earl remained relentless, and Lord Wretchingham is free. I must now close. Hoping you will accept this explanation in the spirit in which it is made,

I remain, dear Sir, yours respectfully,

Tossie Trilbina.

A LANCASHIRE DAISY

One of the giant police-constables on duty outside the Cotton Hall, Smutchester, upon the occasion of the Conference of the National Union for the Emancipation of Women Workers, was seized with the spirit of prophecy when he saw Sal o’ Peg’s borne in, gesticulating, declaiming, carried head and shoulders above an insurging wave of beshawled and rampant factory-girls.

“Theeaw goes th’ Stormy Pettrill, Tum!” he roared to a fellow guardian of the public peace. “Neeaw us be sewer to ha’ trooble wi’ theeay——” He did not add “tykes.”

“Thee mun be misteeawken, mon,” urged Tum, who had newly joined the Smutchester City Division. “’Tis boh a lil’ feer-feaced gell aw cud braak between ma finger an’ thoomb lig a staalk o’ celery.” The great blue eyes of the “lil’ feer-feaced gell” had done execution, it was plain, and the first speaker, who was a married man, snorted contemptuously. Sal o’ Peg’s had completely earned the disturbing nickname bestowed on her. The courts and alleys of the roaring black city would vomit angry, white-gilled, heavy-shod men and women at one shrill, summoning screech of hers. The police-constable upon whose features she had more recently executed a clog war-dance was not yet discharged from the Infirmary, though the seventeen years and fragile proportions of his assailant had, for the twentieth time, softened “th’ Beawk” into letting Sal o’ Peg’s off with the option of a fortnight or a fine, and the threat of being bound over to keep the peace next time, if she insisted in being “so naughty.”

With these blushing honors thick upon her, Sal o’ Peg’s attended the Conference, and became, before the close of the presidential address, an ardent convert to the cause of Female Suffrage. During the debate she climbed a pillar and addressed the meeting, and when, with immense difficulty, dislodged from her post of vantage, she took the platform by storm.

“Why, it’s a child!” chorused the delegates from the different branches of the Union, whose ramifications extend over the civilized globe, as the small, slim, light-haired young person in the inevitable shawl, print gown, and clogs climbed over the brass platform-rail, and, folding cotton-blouse-clad arms upon a flat, girlish bosom, stood motionless, composed, even cheerful, in the full glare of the electric chandelier, and under the full play of a battery of some two thousand feminine eyes.

“Do let the little darling speak,” begged the Honorary Secretary of the Chairwoman, who, as a native of Smutchester, had her doubts. But Sal o’ Peg’s had not the faintest intention of waiting for permission.

“Ah’m not bit o’ good at long words, gells,” said Sal o’ Peg’s. “Mappen ah’ll be better ondersteawd wi’oot ’em.”

The thunder of clogs in the body of the hall said “Yes!” She went on: “Wimmin sheawd ha’ th’ Vote. ’Tis theear roight.” (Tremendous clogging, mingled with shrieks of “Weel seayd, lass! Gie us th’ Vote!”) She hitched her shawl about her with the factory-girl’s movement of the shoulders, and went on. “Yo’ll noan fleg me wi’ yo’re din. Ah’m boh a lil’ un, boh af ha’ got spunk. If you doubt thot——” A hundred strident voices from the body of the hall sent back the refrain, “Ask a pleeceman!” A roar of laughter shook the roof.

“Ought we to interfere?” whispered the Honorary Secretary.

“My dear, why should we?” said a London delegate, leaning forward to answer. “The girl has got them in the hollow of her hand. A born leader of women—a born leader. She voices in her untaught speech the heart-cry of thousands of her dumb and helpless sisters. She——”

The born leader of women continued:

“Ah dunno whoy ah niver thout o’ it before, but ’tis a beawrfeaced robbery neawt to gie us th’ Vote. Oor feythers has it, an’ sells it fur braass.” (Screams, shrieks, and clogging.) “Oor heawsbands has it, an’ sells it fur braass.” (Tempestuous applause.) “Oor lads, theay has it, an’ sells it fur braass. Whoy shouldna’ we ha’ it, an’ sell it for braass tew?”

The enthusiasm with which this brilliant peroration was received nearly wrecked the Cotton Hall. No more speeches were heard that night, though several were delivered in dumb show, and Sal o’ Peg’s awakened upon the morrow to find her utterances reported in the newspapers. To the sarcasm of the leader-writer Sal o’ Peg’s was impervious. She “mun goo t’ Lunnon neixt,” she said, “an’ leawt them tykes at the Hoose o’ Commeawns knaw a bit” of her mind. She wasn’t afraid of Prime Ministers—not she. She called at the branch office of the Union twice a day, imperatively requesting to be forwarded as a delegate to the Metropolis. When her services were declined with thanks, she harangued the populace from the doorstep. When politely requested to move on, she broke a window with one clog, and patted the office-boy violently upon the head with the other. Then she burst into tears and retired, supported by a dozen or so of sympathizing comrades of the factory.

“’Tis a beeawrnin’ sheame!” they said, as they fastened up their chosen representative’s loosened flaxen coils with hairpins of the patent explosive kind, contributed from their own solid braids. “But donnot thee fret, Sal o’ Peg’s, us’ll ha’ nah dollygeat but thee, sitha lass!” And they sent the hat round among themselves with right goodwill. They were not quite sure what a “dollygeat” was, but thought it was something that could walk into the House of Commons, defy a Minister to his nose, dance a clog-dance in the gangway of the Upper House, and receive in chests and bagsful all the good money that women had been defrauded of since the masculine voter first plumped for a consideration; of that they were “as sure as deeawth.”

So Sal o’ Peg’s gave notice at the factory that, being thenceforth called to figure upon the arena of political life, she could not tend frames any longer. She bought a black sailor straw hat with a portion of the subscribed fund, and tied up the most cherished articles of her wardrobe in a blue-spotted handkerchief bundle. She traveled express to London, choosing a “smoking third,” as affording atmospherical and social conditions less remote from her lifelong experience.... The journey was purely uneventful: a young man of unrestrained amorous proclivities receiving a black eye, and a young woman who sneered too openly at the blue-spotted handkerchief bundle suffering the wreck of a bandbox and sustaining a few scratches. The guard—alas! for the frailty of man—being all upon the side of the blue eyes and flaxen coils of hair....

I suppose the reader knows Pelham’s Inn, W. C., where are the headquarters of the National Union for the Emancipation of Working Women? There is no padding to the armchairs, cocoanut matting of a severe and rasping character covers the Committee-room boards; the Committee inkstand is of the zinc office description (the Committee are not there to be comfortable—just the reverse). They are busy women of small spare time and narrow spare means; but when they found Sal o’ Peg’s sitting on the doorstep, they found leisure to be kind. They looked at the clogs with pity, unaware of the pas seul they had performed upon the countenance of a policeman still in bandages, and the great blue eyes yearning out of the small pale face, and the ropes of fair hair tumbling over the shabby shawl that enfolded the childish figure of the little factory-girl who had traveled up to London for the sake of the Cause, won them to practical expression of the sympathy they felt.

“So different a type to the brawling, violent creature,” they said, “who nearly caused a riot at the Smutchester Conference. Her one dream is to see the House of Commons and speak a word in public for her toiling sisters of the factories.” And those of them who wore glasses found them dimmed with the dews of sympathetic emotion. It was such a touching story, they said, of faith and enthusiasm and courage.

It is upon the Records of the Nation that the events I have to relate took place in the Central Hall of the sacred fane of Westminster between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, when twenty or thirty ladies, well-known adherents of the Cause, appeared upon the scene and asked for Suffrage. It was an act of presumption, almost of treason, bordering on blasphemy. Still, the arguments that were not drowned were sound. They were all householders, taxpayers, earners, and owners of independent incomes one daring female said, and as the drunken husband of her charwoman possessed a vote, she thought she had a right to have one also. The Sergeant-at-Arms instantly directed a constable to quell her. Another audacious creature asked for the Vote Qualified. She demanded that the Suffrage should indeed be given to women, but only to those women who should, by passing a viva voce examination on the duties of citizenship, prove themselves fit to discharge them.... She was listened to with some attention until she suggested that male voters should be subjected to a similar weeding-out process; upon which a portly inspector bore down upon her, clasped her in a blue embrace, and carried her, protesting loudly, down the hall, amidst demonstrations of intense excitement. Members cried, “Shame!” Members cried, “Serve her right!” Passing peers put up eyeglasses and stayed to see the fun. Hustled women shrieked, “Cowards!” Pushed women cried, “Let us alone!” Punched women only said, “Owch!” ... It was freely translated “Wretch!” for the occasion. The middle-aged and advanced in years met the same treatment as the younger and more excitable.... All were unceremoniously expelled by the stalwart beings in blue from the sacred precincts where such inviolable order is habitually maintained, and where all the Proprieties find their permanent home. Crushed headgear, scattered handbags, and strange derelict fragments of feminine attire bestrewed the scene of the one-sided fray; the crowds of sympathizers outside cried, “Boo!” and waved white flags in defiance as a dozen arrests were made in a dozen seconds.... And a young woman in a brown plaid shawl and brass-bound clogs danced with shoutings upon the pavements of St. Stephen’s Porch, and while her long, light coils of hair came down and her hairpins were scattered to the winds of Westminster, she asked, in the Lancashire dialect, for admittance to the Bar of the House; for justice for the oppression and downtrodden; for the blood of Ministers, Peers, and Members; and for the viscera of the officials who were their tools. She told the Chancellor of the Exchequer to come out and bring the Treasury with him; and when he did not come, she knocked off one policeman’s helmet and smote another with one of her clogs—toujours those clogs!—upon the nose. Also she relieved a third of half a whisker, bit another in the hand, kicked them all in the shins, and generally made history as six police-constables bore her, shrieking at the full pitch of excellent lungs, to Blunderbuss Row Police Station.

There were newspaper headlines next day—“Bedlam Let Loose!” “The Shrieking Sisterhood!” “The Termagant Spirit!” “No Choice but to Use Force!” The arrested demonstrators were paraded at the police-court; the damaged policemen made an imposing show. Tears choked the utterance of Mr. Vincent Squeers, presiding magistrate, as he asked: “Were thee, indeed, women who had abraded the features, discolored the eyes, bruised the shins, and plucked the whiskers from the gallant constables who stood before him? Nay, but Mænads, Bacchantes, priestesses of savage rites, unsexed Amazons—in two words, emancipated females!” He found a melancholy relief in imposing a fine that had no precedent in cases of brawling, or fourteen days’ imprisonment. He should not be surprised to hear that these hunters after vulgar notoriety preferred to go to Holloway, to luxuriate on prison fare, enjoy calm, undeserved repose on straw beds, and clothe their unregenerate limbs with the drab garments generously provided by the nation.

“But there is one among you,” cried Mr. Vincent Squeers, “who has been innocently led away by your pernicious example, but whom the spirit of Justice, that dwells in the bosom of every Englishman, that hovers, genius-like, above this Bench to-day”—the chief clerk hastily produced a white handkerchief, and the reporters shook freedom into the flow of their Geyser pens—“will stretch forth a hand to protect and to aid. I speak of this simple, artless child....” A police-constable felt his nose, and another groped for his missing whisker as Sal o’ Peg’s stood up in the dock. “Lured from her humble home, from her laborious employment, from her upright-minded, honest associates, by these immodest and unwomanly women, cast a stranger upon the streets of London, this simple country blossom, wilting in the atmosphere tainted by habitual vice and common crime, appeals to the chivalry of every honest man who ever had a mother”—the chief clerk was carried from the court in hysterics—“ay, to the pity of every woman who is not bereft of that heavenly attribute.”

“Sheawt opp, thee donowt owd hosebird!” said Sal o’ Peg’s. “Dosta think ah niver weur in a teawzle in th’ streeawts or a skirmidge wi’ th’ police afeore? Dustha see th’ pickle theam girt big cheawps is in? If theay saay theay got theawee scratts an’ sogers fra’ eany wench but Sal o’ Peg’s, they be leears aw! Sitha? An’ as to yon weumen an’ lasses, yo ca’ baad neams, I ha’ nowt o’ truck wi’ they. I coom to Lunnon as a dollygeat fra myseln. Sitha?”

“The child speaks only the roughest dialect of her native Lancashire,” continued Mr. Vincent Squeers, “which, I own, I am unable to comprehend. How could the hapless young creature understand the poisonous shibboleth poured into her ears by the abandoned sisterhood whose leading evil spirits are now before me? They have denied all knowledge of or connection with her”—(as indeed they had)—“her who stands here—oh, shame and utter disgrace!—in the dock of a police court as a result of their vile and treacherous usage in dragging her from her home. She is sufficiently punished by this outrage upon that innate modesty which is as the bloom upon the peach, the—er, ah!—dew upon the daisy. Fined three-and-sixpence, and I will order that the same be discharged out of the Court poor-box. The Missionary will now take charge of the poor young creature, who will, I trust—ah!—be returned to her sorrowing family in the course of the next twenty-four hours. Good-day, my dear child—good-day!”

A clog whizzed from the dock and hit the paneling behind the Bench. The Magistrate looked another way, the constables coughed behind their large white gloves as Sal o’ Peg’s, weeping bitterly, was led away by the Court Missionary, a bearded person in rusty black, with a felt pudding-basin hat and a soiled white necktie. Robbed of the glory of battle, denied her meed of acknowledgment for doughty deeds achieved, bereft of her Amazonian reputation, Sal o’ Peg’s felt that life was “scarcelin’s weath livin’.” And the afternoon newspapers administered the final blow. Every leader-writer shed tears of pure ink over the child lured from home, the “daisy with the dew upon it” sprouted in a dozen paragraphs. Only in Smutchester there was Homeric jest and uproarious laughter. The girls of the cotton-mills, the policemen of the Lower Town—these knew their Sal o’ Peg’s, and were loud in their appreciation of the satiric humor of the London newspapers. The Missionary did not see his precious charge into the train for Smutchester; a clergyman’s daughter, who had come into accidentally compromising relations with an American gentleman’s diamond evening solitaire and “wad” of bank-notes, urgently required his ministrations. So a burly police-constable, with one whisker and a sore place on the denuded cheek, performed the charitable office. In the four-wheeler, turning into the Euston Road, Sal o’ Peg’s said suddenly:

“Thoo wastna’ sheaved this mearnin’, lad?”

“I ’adn’t no time, for one thing,” said the police-constable sulkily; “an’ for another, I ’ad to keep this whisker on as evidence that you’d pulled out the other. And a lot o’ good evidence does when Old Foxey”—this was the nickname bestowed upon Mr. Vincent Squeers by the staff of the Court—“’as made up ‘is mind not to listen to it.” He rubbed the remaining whisker thoughtfully.

“Eh, laad, laad!” cried Sal o’ Peg’s, bursting into tears and falling upon the neck of the astonished police-constable, “but theaw knows ah did it. Theaw said sa just neaw. Eh, laad, laad!”

“Are you a-crying?” asked the police-constable, over whose blue tunic meandered the heavy twists of fair hair which invariably tumbled down under stress of Sal o’ Peg’s emotion. “Are you a-crying because you’re sorry you pulled out my whisker, or glad as that you did it? Which?”

Sal o’ Peg’s lifted radiant, tearful blue eyes to the burly police-constable’s, which were little and piggish, but twinkling with something more than mere reproof.

“Ah be gleawd,” said Sal o’ Peg’s simply.

“Very well,” said the police-constable, who was not only a man after all, but a bachelor. He put a large blue arm round the slim little figure of the war-goddess. “You’ve ’ad my whisker; I’ll ’ave a kiss.”

“Teawk it, laad,” said Sal o’ Peg’s.

Hitherto, in her short but vivid experience of life, policemen had occupied a different plane, moved in another sphere. They were beings to dodge, defy, jeer at, and punch when you could get them down. Flowerpots were kept on window-sills of upper floors expressly for dropping on their helmets. She had danced upon the upturned face of one, given another a swollen nose, distributed bites and shin-kicks impartially among others. This Lunnon one had kissed her for pulling out his whisker. She looked at him with melting eyes. The hitherto impregnable bastion of her heart was taken—and by a member of the Force.

“When tha dost sheave, laad, send tha whisker to Ah by peawst. Th’ address be Sal o’ Peg’s, Briven’s Buildin’s, Clog Ceawrt, East Side, Smutchester!”

“I won’t send it, you pretty little bit o’ frock,” said the enamored police-constable. “I’ll wait till my next leave an’——”

“Breng it then, laad,” sighed Sal o’ Peg’s.

A PITCHED BATTLE

The great Maestro sat at the piano, a small, square instrument. Upon it were piles of music, a bottle of Rhine wine, half emptied, a cup of black coffee, a plate of sliced garlic sausage, and a roll of black bread, peppered outside with aniseed. A bottle of ink was balanced on the music-desk, a blotted scroll of paper obscured the yellowed keyboard. As the great composer worked at the score of his new opera, he breakfasted, taking draughts from the bottle, bites of sausage and bread, and sips of coffee at discretion. He was a quaint, ungainly figure, with vivacious eyes, and his ill-fitting auburn wig had served him, like the right lapel of his plaid dressing-gown, for a pen-wiper for uncounted years.

The Maestro was not alone in the dusty studio to which so many people, both of the great and little worlds, sought entrance in vain. An olive-skinned youth, shabbily dressed in a gray paletot over a worn suit of black—a young fellow of sixteen, with a square, shaggy black head and a determined chin, the cleft in which was rapidly being hidden by an arriving beard—leaned against a music-stand crammed with portly volumes, his dark eyes anxiously fixed upon the old gentleman at the piano, who dipped in the ink and wrote, and wrote, and dipped in the ink, occasionally laying down the pen to strike a chord or two, in seeming forgetfulness of his visitor.

Suddenly the Maestro’s face beamed with a cheerful smile.

“There, mon cher Gladiali!” He handed the newly-written sheet of music to the boy, and spread his wrinkled fingers above the keys. “This is the great aria-solo I spoke of. Sing that at sight—your training should make such a task an easy one—and let us see what stuff you are made of. Allons!” And he struck the opening chord.

Carlo Gladiali turned pale and then red. He crossed himself hastily, grasped the sheet of paper, cast his eyes over it anxiously, and, meeting with a smiling glance the glittering old eyes of the Maestro, he inflated his deep chest and sang. A wonderful tenor voice poured from his boyish throat; heart and soul shone in his eyes and thrilled in his accents. Tears of delight dropped upon the piano-keys and upon the hands of the composer, and when the last pure note soared on high and swelled and sank, and the song ceased, the old musician cried: “Thou art a treasure! Come, let me embrace thee!” and clasped the young singer to his breast. “Once more, mon fils—once more!”

And as he seated himself at the piano, sweeping the plate of sausage into the wastepaper-basket with a flourish of the large, snuff-stained yellow silk handkerchief with which he wiped his eyes, the door, which had been left ajar, was flung open, and a little dark-eyed, fair-haired girl, who carried a Pierrot-doll, ran quickly into the room.

“Marraine brought me; she is panting up the stairs because she is so fat and they are so steep. Oldest Papa——” she began; but the Maestro held up his hand for silence as the song recommenced. More assurance was in Carlo’s phrasing; the flexibility and brilliancy of his voice were no longer marred by nervousness. As the solo reached its triumphant close, the Maestro said, slapping the boy on the back and taking a gigantic pinch of snuff:

“The Archangel Gabriel might have done better. Aha!” He turned, chuckling, to the little girl, who stood on one leg in the middle of the narrow room, pouting and dangling her Pierrot. “La petite there is jealous. Is it not so?”

“Oldest Papa, you make a very big mistake!” returned the little maiden, pouting still more. “I am not jealous of anybody in the world—least of all, a boy like that!” Her dark eyes rested contemptuously on the big, shy, square-headed fellow in the gray paletot.

“A boy, she calls him!” chuckled the Maestro. “Ma mignonne, he is sixteen—six years older than thyself! Hasten to grow up, become a great prima donna, and he shall sing Romeo to thy Juliette—I predict it!”

“I had rather sing with my cat!” observed the little lady rudely.

Carlo flushed crimson; the Maestro chuckled; and a stout lady who had followed her, panting, into the room, murmured, “Oh! la méchante!” adding, as the Maestro rose to greet her: “But she grows more incorrigible every day. This morning she pulled the feathers out of Coco’s tail because he whistled out of tune.”

The elfin face of the small sinner dimpled into mischievous smiles.

“But that was not being as wicked as the Maestro, who got angry at rehearsal, and hit the flute-player on the head with his bâton, so that it raised a hump. You told me that yourself, and how the Maestro——”

“Quite true, petite; I did fetch him a rap, I promise you, and afterwards I put bank-notes for a hundred francs on the lump for a plaster. But come, now, sing to me, and we will give Signor Carlo here something worth hearing. Écoutez, mon cher!”

“Very well, I will sing; but, first, Pierrot must be comfortably seated. That little armchair is just what he likes!” And, as quick as thought, the willful little lady tilted a pile of music out of the little armchair upon the floor. Then she placed Pierrot very carefully in his throne, and, bidding him be very good and listen, because his bonne petite Maman was going to sing him something pretty, she tripped to the piano, and demurely requested the aged musician to accompany her in the Rondo of “Sonnambula.”

Ah! what a miraculous voice proceeded from that small, willful throat! Stirred to the depths by the extraordinary power and beauty of the child’s delivery, Carlo Gladiali listened enthralled; and when the last notes rippled from the pretty red lips of the now demure little creature, the big boy, forgetting her rudeness and his own shyness, started forward, and, sinking on one knee and seizing the small hand of the child-singer, he kissed it impulsively, crying: “Ah, Signorina, you were right, a thousand times! Compared with you, I sing like a cat!”

“Oh, no! I did not mean to say that!” the tiny lady was beginning graciously, when the Maestro broke in:

“You both sing like cherubs and say civil things to one another. One day you will sing like angels—and quarrel like devils! Please Heaven, you will both make your début under my bâton, and then, if I crack a flute-player’s head, it will be for joy.”

Ten years had elapsed. Carlo Gladiali had risen to pre-eminence as a public singer, had attained the prime of his powers and the apogee of his fame. Courted, fêted, and adored, the celebrated tenor, sated with success, laden with gifts, blasé with admiration, retained a few characteristics that might remind those who had known and loved him in boyhood of the ingenuous, honest, simple Carlo of ten years ago.

Certainly Carlo’s jealousy of the prima donna who should dare to usurp a greater share of the public plaudits than he himself received was childish in its unreasonableness, and Othello-like in its tragic intensity.

At first, he would join in the compliments, and smile patronizingly as he helped the successful débutante to gather up the bouquets. Then his admiration would cool; he would tolerate, endure, then sneer, and finally grind his teeth. He would convey to the audience over one shoulder that they were idiots to applaud, and wither the triumphant cantatrice with a look of infinite contempt over the other. He had been known to feign sleep in the middle of a great soprano aria which, against his wish, had been encored. He had—or it was malevolently reputed so—bribed the hotel waiter to place a huge dish of macaroni, dressed exquisitely and smoking hot, in the way of a voracious contralto who within two hours was to essay for the first time the arduous rôle of Brynhild. The macaroni had vanished, the contralto had failed to appear. Numerous were the instances similar to these recorded of the tenor Gladiali, and repeated in every corner of the opera-loving world.

But it was in London, where the great singer was “starring” during the Covent Garden Season of 19—, that the haughty and intolerant Carlo was to meet his match.

At rehearsal one morning, Rebelli, the famous basso, said to Gladiali, with a twinkle: “A new ‘star’ has dawned on the operatic horizon. La Betisi, the pretty little soprano with the fiend’s temper and the seraph’s voice, has created a furore at Rome and Milan. She will ‘star’ over here in her successful rôles. I have it from the impresario himself.”

“Ebbene!” Carlo shrugged his shoulders and smiled with superb patronage. “We shall be very glad to welcome the little one.... Artists should know how to value genius in others.”

“How well you always express things!” said Rebelli, grinning. “She is to sing Isolina in ‘Belverde’ on the 10th. The Spanish prima donna has broken her contract. As Galantuomo, you will have an excellent opportunity of judging of her talents,” he added, as he turned away, “and scowling at the lady.”

But Carlo did not scowl at first. He was all engaging courtesy and cordial welcome at the first rehearsal, when he was presented ceremoniously to a tiny little lady with willful dark eyes, pouting scarlet lips, and hair as golden as her own Neapolitan sunshine. She vaguely reminded the tenor of somebody he had seen before.

“The Maestro is coming from Naples to conduct,” he heard Rebelli say. “He vowed that La Betisi should make her début under no bâton save his own. Her rôle will be Isolina in his ‘Belverde,’ in which, you know, she created such a sensation at La Scala.”

“And you, Signor, are to sing the great part of Galantuomo in the ‘Belverde’?” said the Betisi demurely to Gladiali. “This time I will not say, ‘I had rather sing with my cat!’”

Carlo started. Yes; there was no mistaking the willful mouth and the flashing defiant eyes. The little girl who had sung so divinely in the Maestro’s dusty room ten years ago was the new operatic “star.” But he was not jealous of the Betisi as yet. He said the most exquisite things—as only an Italian can say them—and bowed over her hand.

“The Signorina has fulfilled the glorious promise of her childhood and the prophecy of the Maestro,” he said. “She who once sang like a cherub now sings like an angel. I am dying to hear you!” he added.

“Ah!” cried the Betisi with a little trill of laughter, “if you are dying now, what will you do afterwards?” The speech might have meant much or nothing, and, though Carlo Gladiali winced a little, he made no comment.

A few rehearsals later a cloud of snuff enveloped him, and he was clasped in the arms of a brown great-coat of antique design. Add, above, a gray woolen comforter and a traveling cap with ear-pieces, and, below, a pair of green trousers, ending in cloth boots with patent-leather toecaps, and you have the portrait of the Maestro in traveling costume.

“Heaven be praised, my dear Carlino, that I have lived to see this day!... Have you renewed acquaintance with my little witch, my enchanted bird, my drop of singing-water? Embrace, my children; your Maestro wishes it!”

And Gladiali touched the cheek of Emilia Betisi with his lips. Her sparkling eyes looked mockingly into his. Then the Maestro, who spoke not a word of English, scrambled to the conductor’s chair, and commenced to harangue the musicians who constituted the orchestra in a fluent conglomeration of several other languages, and the rehearsals of “Belverde” began.

The new soprano and the new opera made an instantaneous and unparalleled “hit.” Carlo helped to pick up La Betisi’s bouquets, and made a pretty speech to her at the final descent of the curtain. But his heart was not in his eyes or on his lips.

Upon the second representation, he yawned in the middle of Isolina’s great aria, and he openly sneered at the audience for encoring the song three times. In the last Act, in the Garden Scene, which offered the principal opportunity for the display of the new prima donna’s art, Carlo sucked jujubes, and openly wore one in his cheek while receiving, as Galantuomo, from the maddened Isolina the most feverish protestations of love. He noted something more than feigned frenzy in the flaming black eyes of the Betisi at this juncture, and, somewhat unwisely, permitted himself to smile. Next moment he received a deep scratch upon the cheek, which tingled for a moment, then bled copiously, obliging the tenor to sing the final Romanza with a handkerchief to his face.

“Convey to Signor Gladiali my profoundest apologies,” said the Betisi to her dresser. “He will really think that he was singing a duet with a cat! But the next performance goes better.” Her dark eyes gleamed, her red lips smiled. She thirsted for the second representation.

So did Carlo. He had thought out a few little things calculated to drive a cantatrice to the pitch of desperation. For instance, at the second encore of her great song, separated only by a duet from his great song in the First Act, he would fetch a chair and sit down. Aha!

But—whether his intention had leaked out through Rebelli, to whom in a moment of champagne he had confided it, or whether the Betisi was in league with demons, let it be decided—it was she who fetched, not a chair, but a three-legged stool, and sat down on it in the middle of his first encore. And so charming an air of patience did she assume, and so genuine seemed her pity for the deluded public who had redemanded the song, that Signor Carlo, who wore a strip of black Court plaster on one cheek, nearly had an apoplexy. He meant to eat jujubes through her great song, but the Betisi was prepared. She produced a box and offered them to him, singing all the while more brilliantly than she had ever sung before; and when the house rose at her in rapture and demanded an encore, she tripped and fetched the three-legged stool and gave it, with a triumphant curtsey, to the foaming Galantuomo. And the crowded house roared with delight.

But the punishment of Carlo came in the Second Act. In the celebrated Garden Scene, where slighted love drives Isolina into temporary madness, she not only scratched her Galantuomo on the other cheek, but pulled his wig off. And in the crowning scene, where Isolina reveals herself as the daughter of the King, and summons the Court to witness the humiliation of Galantuomo by beating on a gong which is suspended from a tree, came the Betisi’s great opportunity. Running through the most difficult passages of the arduous scena with the greatest nonchalance, disposing of octaves, double octaves, and ranging from sol to si-flat in the violin-clef with the utmost ease, she electrified and enthralled her hearers; and, in the gusto of singing, when the moment arrived for striking on the gong previously referred to, she missed the instrument, and struck the tenor violently upon the nose. The unfortunate organ attained pantomimic dimensions within the few minutes that ensued subsequently to the delivery of the blow and previous to the falling of the curtain, and I have heard was favored by the gallery with a special call.

“Alas, Signor Carlo, I know not how to express my regret!... I was carried away...” faltered the Betisi, as with secret triumph and feigned remorse she looked upon the tenor’s swollen nose.

Carlo gave her a passionate glance over it. As it had enlarged, so had his heart and his understanding; he saw his enemy beautiful, triumphant—a Queen of Song. He was conquered and her slave.

“Never mind my nose,” he said generously. “I am beaten, fairly beaten, and with my own weapons. You are a clever woman, Signora, and a great singer. Permit me to take your hand.”

“There,” she said, and gave it. “And you, Signor, are a magnificent artist, though I have sometimes thought you a stupid man. What is it but stupidity—Dio!” she cried, “to be jealous of a woman of whom one is not even the lover or the husband?”

“Give me the right to be jealous,” said Carlo the tenor. “Make me one and the other! Marry me, Emilia. I adore you!”

An atmosphere of snuff and mildew enveloped them, as the Maestro, the date and design of whose evening dress-suit baffled the antiquarian and enraptured the caricaturist, embraced both the tenor and the soprano in rapid succession.

“Aha! Mes enfants, am I not a true prophet?” he cried. “Hasten to grow up, I said to the little one ten years ago, and Carlo there shall one day sing Romeo to thy Juliet.” He embraced them again. “You sing like angels—you quarrel like devils! Heaven intended you for one another. Be happy!” And the Maestro blessed the betrothed lovers with a sprinkling of snuff.

THE TUG OF WAR

Men invariably termed her “a sweet woman.” Women called her other things.

What was she like? Of middle height and “caressable,” with a rounded, supple figure, exquisitely groomed and got up! Her golden hair would have been merely brown, if left to Nature. It came nearly to her eyebrows in the dearest little rings, and was coaxed into the loveliest of coils and waves and undulations. Her eyes were lustrous hazel, her eyelashes and eyebrows as nearly black as perfect taste allowed. Her cheeks were of an ivory pallor, sometimes relieved with a faint sea-shell bloom. Her features were beautifully cut, inclining to the aquiline in outline. Her voice was low and tender, especially when she was saying the sort of thing that puts a young fellow out of conceit with the girl he is engaged to, and makes the married man wonder why he threw himself away. Why he was such an infuriated ass, by George! as to beg and pray Clara to marry him ten years ago, and buy a new revolver when she said it was esteem she felt for him, not love. Why Fate should ordain just at this particular juncture that he should encounter the one woman, by jingo! the only woman in the world who had ever really understood and sympathized with him! It was Mrs. Osborne’s vocation to make men of all grades, ranks, and ages ask this question. She had followed her chosen path in life with enthusiasm, let us say, collecting scalps, with here and there a little shudder of pity, and here and there a little smart of pain. Fascination, exercised almost involuntarily, was to her, as to the cobra, the means of life. Not in a vulgar sense, because the late Colonel Osborne had left his widow handsomely provided for. But the excitement of the sport, the keen delight of capturing new victims—bringing the quarry boldly down in the open, or setting insidious snares, pitfalls, and traps for the silly prey to blunder into—these joys the huntress knows who sharpens her arrows and weaves her webs for Man.

I have said—or hinted—that other women did not love Mrs. Osborne. Knowing, as they did, that the lovely widow frankly despised them, her own sex responded by openly declaring war. They knew her strength, and never attacked her save in bands. Yet, strange to say, the invincible Mrs. Osborne was never so nearly worsted as in a single-handed combat to which she was challenged by a mere neophyte—“a chit”—as, had she lived in the eighteenth instead of the twentieth century, the fair widow would have termed Polly Overshott.

Polly’s real name was Mariana, but, as everyone in the county said, Polly seemed more appropriate. Sir Giles Overshott had no other child, and sometimes seemed not to regret this limitation of his family circle. Lady Overshott had been dead some five years when the story opens, and Sir Giles was beginning to speak of himself as a widower, which to experienced ears means much.

The estate of Overshott Foxbrush was a fine one, unencumbered, and yielding a handsome rent-roll. It was understood that Polly would have nearly everything. She had consented in the most daughterly manner to become engaged to the eldest son of a county neighbor, a young gentleman with whom she was very much in love, Costebald Ianson Smithgill, commonly known as “Cis” Smithgill, his united initials forming the caressing little name. He was six feet high, and had a bass voice with treble inflections, which he was training for a parliamentary career. He had, until the demise of an elder brother removed him from the service of his country, held a lieutenancy in the Guards. As to his family, who does not know that the Smithgills are a family of extreme antiquity, descended from that British Princess and daughter of Vortigern who drank the health of Hengist, proffering the Saxon General the mead-horn of welcome when he first set his conquering foot on British soil? Who does not know this, knows nothing. The mead-horn is said to be enclosed in the masonry of the eldest portion of Hengs Hall, the family seat in the country of Mixshire, where, of course, the scene of our story is laid. And Polly and Cis had been engaged about two months when Mrs. Osborne took The Sabines, and was called on by the county, because Osborne had been the cousin of an Earl, and she herself came of a very good family. You don’t want any name much better than that of Weng. And Mrs. Osborne came of the Wengs of Hollowshire.

She took The Sabines for the sake of her health, which required country air. It was an old-fashioned, square Jacobean house of red brick faced with stone, and it boasted a yew walk, the yews whereof had been wrought by some long-moldered-away tree-clipper into arboreal representatives of the Rape of the Sabines. That avenue was one of the lions of the county, and every fresh tenant of the place had to bind him or herself, under fearful penalties, to keep the Sabine ladies and their abductors properly clipped.

Mrs. Osborne was destitute of the faculty of reverence, Lady Smithgill of Hengs said afterwards. Because early in June, when she drove over to call—it would not become even a Smithgill to ignore a Weng of Hollowshire—upon turning a curve in the avenue so as to command the house, the lawn, and the celebrated Yew Tree Walk, the new tenant of The Sabines, exquisitely attired in a Paris gown and carrying a marvelous guipure sunshade, appeared to view; Sir Giles Overshott was with her, and the lady and the baronet were laughing heartily.

“Mrs. Osborne simply shrieked,” Lady Smithgill said afterwards, in confidence to a few dozen dear friends; “and Sir Giles was quite purple—that unpleasant shade, don’t you know?

“It turned out that they were amusing themselves at the expense of The Sabines. I looked at her, and I fancy I showed my surprise at her want of taste.

“‘We think a great deal of them in the county,’ I said, ‘and Sir Giles can tell you how severe a censure would be pronounced by persons of taste upon the tenant who was so audacious as to deface or so careless as to neglect them, or even, ignorantly, to make sport of them.’

“At that Sir Charles became a deeper shade, almost violet, and she uncovered her eyes and smiled. I think somebody has told her she resembled Bernhardt in her youth.

“‘Dear Lady Smithgill,’ she said, or rather cooed (and those cooing voices are so irritating!), ‘depend on it, I shall make a point of keeping them in the most perfect condition. To be obliged to pay a forfeit to my landlord would be a nuisance, but to be censured by persons of taste residing in the county, that would be quite insupportable.’ Then she rang for tea, and there were eight varieties of little cakes, which must have been sent down from Buszard’s, and a cut-glass liqueur bottle of rum upon the tray. ‘Do you take rum?’ she had the audacity to ask me. I did not stoop to decline verbally, but shook my head slightly, and she gave me another of those smiles and passed on the rum. Sir Charles brought it me, and I waved it away, speechless, absolutely speechless, at the monstrosity of the idea.

“She overwhelmed me with apologies, of course.

“And both Sir Giles—who, I regret to see, is constantly there—and Sir Costebald, who has once called—consider her a sweet woman. But—think me foreboding if you will—I cannot feel that county Society has an acquisition in Mrs. Osborne.”

“Papa goes to The Sabines rather often,” said Polly Overshott, when it came to her turn to be the recipient of Lady Smithgill’s confidence. “He does say that Mrs. Osborne is a sweet woman, and he is helping her to choose some brougham horses. He says the pair she brought down are totally unfit for country roads. And as for the rum, she offered it to me. Colonel Osborne held a post in the Diplomatic Service at Berlin, and Germans drink it in tea, and I rather like it, though a second cup gives you a headache afterwards.”

“Mary!” screamed Miss Overshott’s mamma-in-law elect, who had effected this compromise between Polly and Mariana.

“As regards The Sabines,” Polly went on, “we have bowed down before them for years and years, and we shall go on doing it, but they are absurd all the same. So are our lead groups and garden temples at Overshott—awfully absurd——”

“I suppose you include our Saxon buttress and Roman pavement at Hengs in the catalogue of absurdities,” said Lady Smithgill icily. “Fortunately, Sir Costebald is not a widower, or they might stand in some danger of being swept away. At the present moment, let me tell you, Mary, your lead figures and garden temples are far from secure. That woman leads your father by the nose—twines him round her little finger. Cis tells me——”

“What does Cis know about it?” said Polly, flushing to the temples.

“Cis is a man of the world,” said Lady Smithgill. “But at the same time he is a dutiful son. He tells everything to his mother. It seems—Cis personally vouches for the truth of this—that Sir Giles is constantly at The Sabines—in fact, every day.... He is dressed for conquest, it would appear.”

“Cis or Papa?” asked Polly, with feigned innocence.

“Sir Giles wears coats and neckties that would be condemned as showy if worn by a bridegroom,” said Lady Smithgill rapidly. “He is perfumed with expensive extracts, and his boots must be torture, Cis says, knowing all one does know of the Overshott tendency to gout. He never removes his eyes from Mrs. Osborne, laughs to idiocy at everything she says, and simply lives in the corner of the sofa next her. He monopolizes the conversation. Nobody else can get in a word, Cis tells me.”

“Since when did Cis begin to be jealous?” said Polly under her breath.

“I did not quite catch your remark,” returned Lady Smithgill. “By the way, Mary, I hope you will wear those pearls as often as you can. They require air, sunshine, and exercise.... I contracted my chronic rheumatic tendency thirty years ago through sitting in the garden with them on. For days together Sir Costebald’s mother used to skip in them upon the terrace, but I never went as far as that.”

“The pearls—what pearls?” asked Polly vaguely.

“Dear Mary, when a fiancé makes a gift of such beauty—to say nothing of its value—and the strings were originally purchased for two thousand pounds—it is customary for the recipient to exhibit a little appreciation,” Lady Smithgill returned.

“Appreciation!”

“Of course you thanked Cis, my dear. I never doubted that. But there, we will say no more....”

Polly’s blue eyes flashed. She rose up; she had ridden over to the Hall alone, and her slight upright figure looked its best in a habit.

“I should like to say a little more.” She put up her hand and unpinned her hat from her close braids of yellow-gold, and tossed the headgear into a neighboring chair. “Dear Lady Smithgill, Cis has not given me any pearls. Perhaps he has sent them to Bond Street to be cleaned——”

“Cleaned! They are in perfect condition.”

“Or—or perhaps he has given them to some one else. I have seen very little of Cis lately,” Polly ended. “But Papa tells me that he is a good deal at The Sabines. Papa seemed to find him as much in the way as ... as Cis found Papa. And—her new kitchenmaid is the sister of our laundrywoman, and a report reached me that she had lately been wearing some magnificent pearls.... I thought nothing of it at the time, but now....”

There was a snorting gasp from Lady Smithgill. All had been made clear. Her double chin trembled, and her eyes went wild.