Memoirs of a Midget

Memoirs of a Midget

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE THREE
MULLA-MULGARS

Illustrated by Dorothy P. Lathrop.

"The story concerns the adventures of three monkeys of royal blood ... a tale of strange creatures and strange landscapes, of adventures and misadventures in faery forests. One of those rare books that everyone will love.

"Miss Lathrop's illustrations have placed her, at a bound, in the first rank of American imaginative illustrators."

—Chicago Evening Post.

Boxed, $4.00 net at all bookshops

NEW YORK: ALFRED A. KNOPF

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
WALTER DE LA MARE

Published, January, 1922

Set up and printed by the Veil-Ballon Co., Binghamton, N. Y.
Paper furnished by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York, N. Y.
Bound by the Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER

A wild beast there is in Ægypt, called orix, which the Ægyptians say, doth stand full against the dog starre when it riseth, looketh wistly upon it, and testifieth after a sort by sneesing, a kind of worship....

Philemon Holland.

'Did'st thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little turf of grass; and the heaven o'er our heads, like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison....'

John Webster.

'Provoke them not, fair sir, with tempting words; the heavens are gracious....'

Thomas Kyd.

Contents

Memoirs of a Midget

Introduction

A few introductory and explanatory remarks are due, I think, to the reader of the following Memoirs. The Memoirs themselves will disclose how I became acquainted with Miss M. They also refer here and there to the small part I was enabled to take in straightening matters out at what was a critical juncture in her affairs, and in securing for her that independence which enabled her to live in the privacy she loved, without any anxiety as to ways and means. At the time, it is clear that she considered me a dilatory intermediary. I had not realized how extreme was her need. But she came at last to take a far too generous view of these trifling little services—services as generously rewarded, since they afforded me the opportunity of frequently seeing her, and so of becoming, as I hope, one of her most devoted friends.

One of the duties devolving on me as her sole executor—certain unusual legal proceedings having been brought to completion—was the examination of her letters and papers. Amongst these were her Memoirs—which I found sealed up with her usual scrupulous neatness in numerous small, square, brown-paper packages, and laid carefully away in a cupboard in her old nursery. They were accompanied by a covering letter addressed to myself.

Miss M.'s handwriting was even more minute than one might naturally, though not perhaps justifiably, have anticipated. Her manuscript would therefore have been difficult enough for aging eyes to decipher, even if it had not been almost inextricably interlined, revised and corrected. Literary composition to this little woman-of-letters was certainly no "primrose path." The packages were therefore handed over to a trustworthy typist; and, at my direction, one complete and accurate copy was made of their contents.

After careful consideration, and after disguising the names of certain persons and places to preclude every possibility of giving offence—even Mrs Percy Maudlen, for instance, if she ever scans these pages, may blush unrecognized!—I concluded that though I was under no absolute obligation to secure the publication of the Memoirs, this undoubtedly had been Miss M.'s intention and wish. At the same time, and for similar reasons, I decided that their publication should not take place until after my death. Instructions have therefore been left by me to this effect. Here then my editorial duties begin and end. Nothing has been altered; nothing suppressed.

Even if such a task were within my province, I should not venture to make any critical estimate of Miss M.'s work. I am not a writer: and, as a reader, have an inveterate preference to be allowed to study and enjoy my authors with as little external intervention as possible. The perusal of the Memoirs has afforded me the deepest possible pleasure. The serious-minded may none the less dismiss a midget's lucubrations as trifling; and no doubt—it could hardly be otherwise—a more practised taste than mine will discover many faults, crudities, and inconsistencies in them, though certain little prejudices on Miss M.'s side may not be so easily detectable. Whatever their merits or imperfections may be, I should be happy to think that the following pages may prove as interesting to other readers—however few—as they have been to myself.

My own prejudices, I confess, are in Miss M.'s favour. Indeed, she herself assured me in the covering letter to which reference has been made, that a chance word of mine had been her actual incentive to composition—the remark, in fact, that "the truth about even the least of things—e. g., your Self, Miss M.!—may be a taper in whose beam one may peep at the truth about everything." I cannot recall the occasion, or this little apophthegm. Indeed, only with extreme reluctance would I have helped to launch my small friend on her gigantic ordeal. As a matter-of-fact, she had a little way of carrying off scraps of the conversation of the "common-sized," as a bee carries off a drop of nectar, and of transforming them into a honey all her own.

As characteristic of her is the fact that during the whole time she was engaged on her writing (and there is ample evidence in her manuscript that, whether in fatigue, disinclination, or despair, she sometimes left it untouched for weeks together) she never made the faintest allusion to it. Authors, I believe—if I may take the elder Disraeli for my authority—are seldom so secretive concerning their activities. No less characteristically, her letter to me was dated February 14th. Her Memoirs were to be my Valentine.

"'Little drops of water ...' my dear Sir Walter," she wrote; "you know the rest. Nevertheless, if only I had been given but one sharp spark of genius, what 'infinite pains' I should have been spared. Yet what is here concerns only my early days, and chiefly one long year of them. I might have written on—almost ad infinitum. But I did not, because I feared to weary us both—of myself. The years that have followed my 'coming of age' have been outwardly uneventful; and other people's thoughts, I find, are not so interesting as their experiences. There's much to forgive in what I have written—the rawness, the self-consciousness, the vanity, the folly. I am older now; but am I wiser—or merely not so young?

"Just as it stands, then, I shall leave my story to, and for, you.... Again and again, as I have pored over the scenes of my memory, I have asked myself: What can life be about? What does it mean? What was my true course? Where my compass? How many times, too, have I vainly speculated what inward difference being a human creature of my dimensions really makes. What is—deep, deep in—at variance between Man and Midget? You may discover this; even if I never shall. For after all, life's beads are all on one string, however loosely threaded they may seem to be.

"I have tried to tell nothing but the truth about myself. But I realize that it cannot be the whole truth. For while so engaged (just as when one peers into a looking-glass in the moonlight) a something has at times looked out of some secret den or niche in me, and then has vanished. Supposing, then, my dear Sir W., my story convinces you that all these years you have unawares been harbouring in your friendship not a woman, scarcely a human being, but an ASP! Oh dear, and oh dear! Well, there are three and-thirty ingredients (ingrediments as I used to call them, when I was a child) in that sovran antidote, Venice Treacle. Scatter a pennyweight of it upon my tombstone; and so lay my in-fi-ni-te-si-mal ap-pa-ri-ti-on!

"Maybe though, there are not so very many vital differences between 'midgets' and people of the common size; no more, perhaps, than there are between them and 'the Great.' Even then it is possible that after reading my small, endless story you may be very thankful that you are not a Midget too.

"Whether or not, I have tried to be frank, if not a Warning. Keep or destroy what I have written, as you will. But please show it to nobody until nobody would mind. And now, good-bye.

"M."

There was a tacit compact between Miss M. and myself that I should visit her at Lyndsey about once a month. Business, indisposition, advancing age, only too frequently made the journey impracticable. But in general, I would at such intervals find myself in her company at her old house, Stonecote; drinking tea with her, gossiping, or reading to her, while she sat in her chair beside my book, embroidering her brilliant tiny flowers and beetles and butterflies with her tiny needle, listening or day-dreaming or musing out of the high window at the prospect of Chizzel Hill.

At times she was an extremely quiet companion. At others she would rain questions on me, many of them exceedingly unconventional, on a score of subjects at once, scarcely pausing for answers which I was frequently at a loss to give. In a mixed company she was, perhaps, exaggeratedly conscious of her minute stature.

But in these quiet talks—that shrill-sweet voice, those impulsive little gestures—she forgot it altogether. Not so her visitor, who must confess to having been continually convicted in her presence of a kind of clumsiness and gaucherie—and that, I confess, not merely physical. To a stranger this experience, however wholesome, might be a little humiliating.

When interested, Miss M. would sit perfectly still, her hands tightly clasped in her lap, her eyes fixed with a piercing, yet curiously remote, scrutiny. In complete repose, her features lost this keenness, and she became an indescribably beautiful little figure, in her bright-coloured clothes, in the large quiet room. I can think of no comparison that would not seem fanciful. Her self is to some extent in her book. And yet that unique volatile presence, so frail, yet so vigorous, "so very nearly nothing," in her own whimsical phrase, is only fitfully manifest.

Naturally enough, she loved solitude. But I am inclined to think she indulged in it to excess. It was, at any rate, in solitude that she wrote her book; and in solitude apparently that her unknown visitor found her, in the following mysterious circumstances.

The last of our reunions—and one no less happy than the rest—was towards the end of the month of March. On the morning of the following 25th of April I received a telegram summoning me to Lyndsey. I arrived there the same afternoon, and was admitted by Mrs Bowater, Miss M.'s excellent, but somewhat Dickensian, housekeeper, then already a little deaf and elderly. I found her in extreme distress. It appeared that the evening before, about seven o'clock, Mrs Bowater had heard voices in the house—Miss M.'s and another's. Friendly callers were infrequent; unfamiliar ones extremely rare; and Mrs Bowater confessed that she had felt some curiosity, if not concern, as to who this stranger might be, and how he had gained admission. She blamed herself beyond measure—though I endeavoured to reassure the good woman—for not instantly setting her misgivings at rest.

Hearing nothing more, except the rain beating at the basement window, at half-past seven she went upstairs and knocked at Miss M.'s door. The large, pleasant room—her old nursery—at the top of the house, was in its usual scrupulous order, but vacant. Nothing was disarranged, nothing unusual, except only that a slip of paper had been pinned to the carpet a little beyond the threshold, with this message: "I have been called away.—M."

This communication, far from soothing, only increased Mrs Bowater's anxiety. She searched the minute Sheraton wardrobe, and found that a garden hat and cape were missing. She waited a while—unlike her usual self—at a loss what to be doing, and peering out of the window. But as darkness was coming on, and Miss M. rarely went out in windy or showery weather, or indeed descended the staircase without assistance, she became so much alarmed that a little before eight she set out to explore the garden with a stable lantern, and afterwards hurried off to the village for assistance.

As the reader will himself discover, this was not the first occasion on which Miss M. had given her friends anxiety. The house, the garden, the surrounding district, her old haunts at Wanderslore were repeatedly submitted at my direction to the most rigorous and protracted search. Watch was kept on the only gipsy encampment in the neighbourhood, near the Heath. Advertisement failed to bring me any but false clues. At length even hope had to be abandoned.

Miss M. had been "called away." By whom? I ask myself: on what errand? for what purpose? So clear and unhurried was the writing of her last message as to preclude, I think, the afflicting thought that her visitor had been the cause of any apprehension or anxiety. An even more tragic eventuality is out of the question. After the events recorded in her last chapter not only had she made me a certain promise, but her later life at Lyndsey had been, apparently, perfectly serene and happy. Only a day or two before she had laughed up at her housekeeper, "Why, Mrs Bowater, there's not room enough in me for all that's there!" Nor is it to be assumed that some "inward" voice—her own frequent term—had summoned her away; for Mrs Bowater immovably maintains that its tones reached her ear, though she herself was at the moment engaged in the kitchen referred to in the first chapter of the Memoirs.

Walter Dadus Pollacke.

Brunswick House,
Beechwood.

Lyndsey

Chapter One

Some few years ago a brief account of me found its way into one or two country newspapers. I have been told, that it reappeared, later, in better proportion, in the Metropolitan Press! Fortunately, or unfortunately, very little of this account was true. It related, among other things, that I am accustomed to wear shoes with leaden soles to them to keep me from being blown away like thistledown in the wind, that as a child I had narrowly escaped being scalded to death in a soup tureen, that one of my ancestors came from Poland, that I am an expert painter of miniatures, that I am a changeling and can speak the fairy tongue. And so on and so forth.

I think I can guess where my ingenuous biographer borrowed these fables. He meant me no harm; he was earning his living; he made judicious use of his "no doubts" and "it may be supposed"; and I hope he amused his readers. But by far the greater part of his account was concerned with mere physical particulars. He had looked at me in fancy through spectacles which may or may not have been rosy, but which certainly minified. I do not deserve his inches and ounces, however flattering his intentions may have been. It is true that my body is among the smaller works of God. But I think he paid rather too much attention to this fact. He spared any reference not only to my soul (and I am not ungrateful for that), but also to my mind and heart. There may be too much of all three for some tastes in the following pages, and especially, perhaps, of the last. That cannot be helped. Finally, my anonymous journalist stated that I was born in Rutlandshire—because, I suppose, it is the smallest county in England.

That was truly unkind of him, for, as a matter of fact, and to begin at the (apparent) beginning, I was born in the village of Lyndsey in Kent—the prettiest country spot, as I believe, in all that county's million acres. So it remains to this day in spite of the fact that since my childhood its little church with its decaying stones and unfading twelfth—or is it thirteenth?—century glass has been "restored," and the lord of the manor has felled some of its finest trees, including a grove of sweet chestnuts on Bitchett Heath whose forefathers came over with the Romans. But he has not yet succeeded in levelling the barrow on Chizzel Hill. From my window I looked out (indeed, look out at this moment) to the wave-like crest of this beloved hill across a long straggling orchard, and pastures in the valley, where cattle grazed and sheep wandered, and unpolled willows stooped and silvered in the breeze. I never wearied of the hill, nor ever shall, and when, in my girlhood, my grandfather, aware of this idle, gazing habit of mine, sent me from Geneva a diminutive telescope, my day-dreams multiplied. His gift, as an old Kentish proverb goes, spread butter on bacon. With his spyglass to my eye I could bring a tapping green woodpecker as close as if it were actually laughing at me, and could all but snuff up the faint rich scent of the cowslips—paggles, as we called them, in meadows a good mile away.

My father's house, Stonecote, has a rather ungainly appearance if viewed from across the valley. But it is roomy and open and fairly challenges the winds of the equinoxes. Its main windows are of a shallow bow shape. One of them is among my first remembrances. I am seated in a bright tartan frock on a pomatum pot—a coloured picture of Mr Shandy, as I remember, on its lid—and around me are the brushes, leather cases, knick-knacks, etc., of my father's dressing table. My father is shaving himself, his chin and cheeks puffed out with soapsuds. And now I look at him, and now at his reflection in the great looking-glass, and every time that happens he makes a pleasant grimace at me over his spectacles.

This particular moment of my childhood probably fixed itself on my mind because just as, with razor uplifted, he was about to attack his upper lip, a jackdaw, attracted maybe by my gay clothes, fluttered down on the sill outside, and fussing and scrabbling with wing and claw pecked hard with its beak against the glass. The sound and sight of this bird with its lively grey-blue eyes, so close and ardent, startled me. I leapt up, ran across the table, tripped over a hairbrush, and fell sprawling beside my father's watch. I hear its ticking, and also the little soothing whistle with which he was wont to comfort his daughter at any such mishap. Then perhaps I was five or six.

That is a genuine memory. But every family, I suppose, has its little pet traditions; and one of ours, relating to those early years, is connected with our kitchen cat, Miaou. She had come by a family of kittens, and I had crept, so it was said, into her shallow basket with them. Having, I suppose, been too frequently meddled with, this old mother cat lugged off her kittens one by one to a dark cupboard. The last one thus secured, she was discovered in rapt contemplation of myself, as if in debate whether or not it was her maternal duty to carry me off too. And there was I grinning up into her face. Such was our cook's—Mrs Ballard's—story. What I actually remember is different. On the morning in question I was turning the corner of the brick-floored, dusky passage that led to the kitchen, when Miaou came trotting along out of it with her blind, blunt-headed bundle in her mouth. We were equally surprised at this encounter, and in brushing past she nearly knocked me over where I stood, casting me at the same moment the queerest animal look out of her eyes. So truth, in this case, was not so strange as Mrs Ballard's fiction.

My father was then a rather corpulent man, with a high-coloured face, and he wore large spectacles. His time was his own, for we were comfortably off on an income derived from a half-share in the small fortune amassed by my grandfather and his partner in a paper mill. He might have been a more successful, though not perhaps a happier, man if he had done more work and planned to do less. But he only so far followed his hereditary occupation as to expend large quantities of its best "handmade" in the composition of a monograph: The History of Paper Making. This entailed a vast accumulation of books and much solitude. I fancy, too, he believed in the policy of sleeping on one's first thoughts.

Since he was engaged at the same time on similar compilations with the Hop and the Cherry for theme, he made indifferent progress in all three. His papers, alas, were afterwards sold with his books, so I have no notion of what became of them or of their value. I can only hope that their purchaser has since won an easy distinction. These pursuits, if they achieved little else but the keeping of "the man of the house" quiet and contented, proved my father, at any rate, to be a loyal and enthusiastic Man of Kent; and I have seen to it that a fine Morello cherry-tree blossoms, fruits, and flourishes over his grave.

My father was something of a musician too, and could pizzicato so softly on his muted fiddle as not to jar even my too sensitive ear. He taught me to play chess on a little board with pygmy men, but he was apt to lose interest in the game when it went against him. Whereas it was then that our old friend, Dr Grose, played his hardest. As my father's hands were rather clumsy in make, he took pains to be gentle and adroit with me. But even after shaving, his embrace was more of a discipline than a pleasure—a fact that may partly account for my own undemonstrativeness in this direction.

His voice, if anything, was small for his size, except when he discussed politics with Dr Grose; religion or the bringing up of children with my godmother, Miss Fenne; or money matters with my mother. At such times, his noise—red face and gesticulations—affected one of his listeners, as eager as possible to pick up the crumbs, far more than ever thunder did, which is up in the clouds. My only other discomfort in his company was his habit of taking snuff. The stench of it almost suffocated me, and at tap of his finger-nail on the lid of his box, I would scamper off for shelter like a hare.

By birth he came of an old English family, though no doubt with the usual admixtures. My mother's mother was French. She was a Daundelyon. The blood of that "sweet enemy" at times burned in her cheek like a flag; and my father needed his heaviest guns when the stormy winds did blow, and those colours were flying. At such moments I preferred to hear the engagement from a distance, not so much (again) because the mere discord grieved me, as to escape the din. But usually—and especially after such little displays—they were like two turtle-doves, and I did my small best to pipe a decoy.

My father had been a man past forty when he married my mother. She about fifteen years younger—a slim, nimble, and lovely being, who could slip round and encircle him in person or mind while he was pondering whether or not to say Bo to a goose. Seven years afterwards came I. Friends, as friends will, professed to see a likeness between us. And if my mother could have been dwindled down to be of my height and figure, perhaps they would have been justified.

But in hair and complexion, possibly in ways, too, I harked back to an aunt of hers, Kitilda, who had died of consumption in her early twenties. I loved to hear stories of my great-aunt Kitilda. She sang like a bird, twice ran away from her convent school, and was so fond of water that an old gentleman (a friend of Mr Landor's, the poet) who fell in love with her, called her "the Naiad."

My mother, in her youth at Tunbridge Wells, had been considered "a beauty," and had had many admirers—at least so Mrs Ballard, our cook, told Pollie: "Yes, and we know who might have turned out different if things hadn't been the same," was a cryptic remark she once made which filled two "little pitchers" to overflowing. Among these admirers was a Mr Wagginhorne who now lived at Maidstone. He had pocketed his passion but not his admiration; and being an artist in the same sense that my father was an author, he had painted my mother and me and a pot of azaleas in oils. How well I remember those interminable sittings, with the old gentleman daubing along, and cracking his beloved jokes and Kentish cobbs at one and the same time. Whenever he came to see us this portrait was taken out of a cupboard and hung up in substitution for another picture in the dining-room. What became of it when Mr Wagginhorne died I could never discover. My mother would laugh when I inquired, and archly eye my father. It was clear, at any rate, that author was not jealous of artist!

My mother was gentle with me, and had need to be; and I was happier in her company than one might think possible in a world of such fleetingness. I would sit beside her workbox and she would softly talk to me, and teach me my lessons and small rhymes to say; while my own impulse and instinct taught me to sing and dance. What gay hours we shared. Sewing was at first difficult, for at that time no proportionate needles could be procured for me, and I hated to cobble up only coarse work. But she would give me little childish jobs to do, such as arranging her silks, or sorting her beads, and would rock me to sleep with her finger to a drone so gentle that it might have been a distant bee's.

Yet shadows there were, before the darkness came. Child that I was, I would watch gather over her face at times a kind of absentness, as if she were dreaming of something to which she could give no name, of some hope or wish that was now never to be fulfilled. At this I would grow anxious and silent, doubting, perhaps, that I had displeased her; while, to judge from her look, I might not have been there at all.

Or again, a mischievousness and mockery would steal into her mood. Then she would treat me as a mere trivial plaything, talking small things to me, as if our alphabet consisted of nothing but "little o"—a letter for which I always felt a sort of pity: but small affection. This habit saddened my young days, and sometimes enraged me, more than I can say. I was always of a serious cast of mind—even a little priggish perhaps; and experience had already taught me that I could share my mother's thoughts and feelings more easily than she could share mine.

Chapter Two

When precisely I began to speculate why I was despatched into this world so minute and different I cannot say. Pretty early, I fancy, though few opportunities for comparison were afforded me, and for some time I supposed that all young children were of my stature. There was Adam Waggett, it is true, the bumpkin son of a village friend of Mrs Ballard's. But he was some years older than I. He would be invited to tea in the kitchen, and was never at rest unless stuffing himself out with bread-and-dripping or dough-cake—victuals naturally odious to me; or pestering me with his coarse fooling and curiosity. He was to prove useful in due season; but in those days I had a distaste for him almost as deep-rooted as that for "Hoppy," the village idiot—though I saw poor Hoppy only once.

Whatever the reason may be, except in extremely desperate moments, I do not remember much regretting that I was not of the common size. Still, the realization was gradually borne in on me that I was a disappointment and mischance to my parents. Yet I never dared to let fall a question which was to be often in my young thoughts: "Tell me, mamma, are you sorry that your little daughter is a Midget?" But then, does any one ask questions like that until they cannot be answered?

Still, cross-examine her I did occasionally.

"Where did I come from, mamma?"

"Why, my dear, I am your mother."

"Just," I replied, "like Pollie's mother is her mother?"

She cast a glance at me from eyes that appeared to be very small, unless for that instant it was mine that I saw reflected there.

"Yes, my dear," she replied at length. "We come and we go." She seemed tired with the heat of the day, so I sate quietly, holding her finger, until she was recovered.

Only, perhaps, on account of my size was there any occasion for me to be thoroughly ashamed of myself. Otherwise I was, if anything, a rather precocious child. I could walk a step or two at eleven months, and began to talk before the Christmas following the first anniversary of my birthday, August 30th. I learned my letters from the big black capitals in the Book of Genesis; and to count and cipher from a beautiful little Abacus strung with beads of silver and garnets. The usual ailments came my way, but were light come, light go. I was remarkably sinewy and muscular, strong in the chest, and never suffered from snuffling colds or from chilblains, though shoes and gloves have always been a difficulty.

I can perfectly recall my childish figure as I stood with endless satisfaction surveying my reflection in a looking-glass on the Christmas morning after my ninth birthday. My frock was of a fine puffed scarlet, my slippers loose at heel, to match. My hair, demurely parted in the middle, hung straight on my narrow shoulders (though I had already learned to plait it) and so framed my face; the eyebrows faintly arched (eyebrows darker and crookeder now); the nose in proportion; the lips rather narrow, and of a lively red.

My features wore a penetrating expression in that reflection because my keen look was searching them pretty close. But if it was a sharp look, it was not, I think, a bold or defiant; and then I smiled, as if to say, "So this is to be my companion, then?"

It was winter, and frost was on the window that day. I enjoyed the crisp air, for I was packed warm in lamb's-wool underneath. There I stood, my father's round red face beaming on one side of the table, my mother's smiling but enigmatic, scrutinizing my reflection on the other, and myself tippeting this way and that—a veritable miniature of Vanity.

Who should be ushered at this moment into the room, where we were so happy, but my godmother, Miss Fenne, come to bring my father and mother her Christmas greetings and me a little catechism sewn up in a pink silk cover. She was a bent-up old lady and a rapid talker, with a voice which, though small, jangled every nerve in my body, like a pencil on a slate. Being my godmother, she took great liberties in counselling my parents on the proper way of "managing" me. The only time, indeed, I ever heard my father utter an oath was when Miss Fenne was just beyond hearing. She peered across at me on this Christmas morning like a bird at a scorpion: "Caroline, Caroline," she cried, "for shame! The Shrimp! You will turn the child's head."

Shrimp! I had seen the loathsome, doubled-up creatures (in their boiled state) on a kitchen plate. My blood turned to vinegar; and in rage and shame I fell all of a heap on the table, hiding from her sight my face and my hands as best I could under my clothes, and wishing that I might vanish away from the world altogether.

My father's voice boomed out in protest; my mother took me into her arms to soothe and scold me; but long after the ruffled old lady had taken her departure I brooded on this affront. "Away, away!" a voice seemed to cry within; and I listened to it as if under a spell. All that day I nursed my wounded vanity, and the same evening, after candle light, I found myself for a moment alone in the kitchen. Pollie had gone to the wood-shed to fetch kindling, leaving the door into the garden ajar. The night air touched my cheek. Half beside myself with desire of I know not what, I sprang out from the doorstep into an inch or so of snow, and picking myself up, ran off into the darkness under the huge sky.

It was bitterly cold. Frost had crusted the virgin surface of the snow. My light footsteps can hardly have shattered its upper crystals. I ran on and on into the ghostly world, into this stiff, marvelous, gloating scene of frozen vegetation beneath that immense vacancy. A kind of stupor must have spread over my young mind. It seemed I was transported out of myself under the stars, in the mute presence of the Watchman of Heaven. I stood there lost in wonder in the grey, luminous gloom.

But my escapade was brief and humiliating. The shock of the cold, the excitement, quickly exhausted me. I threw myself down and covered my face with my hands, trying in vain to stifle my sobs. What was my longing? Where its satisfaction? Soft as wool a drowsiness stole over my senses that might swiftly have wafted me off on the last voyage of discovery. But I had been missed. A few minutes' search, and Pollie discovered me lying there by the frozen cabbage stalks. The woeful Mænad was carried back into the kitchen again—a hot bath, a hot posset, and a few anxious and thankful tears.

The wonder is, that, being an only child, and a sore problem when any question of discipline or punishment arose, I was not utterly spoiled. One person at least came very near to doing so, my grandfather, Monsieur Pierre de Ronvel. To be exact, he was my step-grandfather, for my mother's charming mother, with her ringlets and crinoline, after my real grandfather's death, had married a second time. He crossed the English Channel to visit my parents when I was in my tenth year—a tall, stiff, jerky man, with a sallow face, speckled fur-like hair that stood in a little wall round his forehead, and the liveliest black eyes. His manners were a felicity to watch even at my age. You would have supposed he had come courting my mother; and he took a great fancy to me. He was extremely fond of salad, I remember: and I very proud of my mustard and cress—which I could gather for him myself with one of my own table-knives. So copiously he talked, with such a medley of joys and zests and surprises on his face, that I vowed soon to be mistress of my stepmother tongue. He could also conjure away reels and thimbles, even spoons and forks, with a skill that precluded my becoming a materialist for ever after. I worshipped my grandfather—and yet without a vestige of fear.

To him, indeed—though I think he was himself of a secular turn of mind—I owe the story of my birthday saint, St Rosa of Lima in Peru, the only saint, I believe, of the New World. With myself pinnacled on his angular knee, and devouring like a sweetmeat every broken English word as it slipped from his tongue, he told me how pious an infant my Saint had been; how, when her mother, to beautify her, had twined flowers in her hair, she had pinned them to her skull; how she had rubbed quicklime on her fair cheeks to disenchant her lovers ("ses prétendants"), and how it was only veritable showers of roses from heaven that had at last persuaded Pope Clement to make her a saint.

"Perhaps, bon papa," said I, "I shall dig and sow too when I am grown up, like St Rosa, to support my mamma and papa when they are very old. Do you think I shall make enough money? Papa has a very good appetite?" He stared at me, as if in consternation.

"Dieu vous en garde, ma p'tite," he cried; and violently blew his nose.

So closely I took St Rosa's story to heart that, one day, after bidding my beauty a wistful farewell in the glass, I rubbed my cheek too, but with the blue flowers of the—brooklime. It stained them a little, but soon washed off. In my case a needless precaution; my prétendants have been few.

It was a mournful day when my grandfather returned to France never to be seen by me again. Yet he was to remember me always; and at last when I myself had forgotten even my faith in his fidelity. Nearly all my personal furnishings and belongings were gifts of his from France, and many of them of his own making. There was my four-post bed, for instance; with a flowered silk canopy, a carved tester and half a dozen changes of linen and valance. There were chairs to match, a wardrobe, silk mats from Persia, a cheval glass, and clothes and finery in abundance, china and cutlery, top-boots and sabots. Even a silver-hooped bath-tub and a crystal toilet set, and scores of articles besides for use or ornament, which it would be tedious to mention. My grandfather had my measurements to a nicety, and as the years went by he sagaciously allowed for growth.

I learned to tell the time from an eight-day clock which played a sacred tune at matins and vespers; and later, he sent me a watch, the least bit too large for me to be quite comfortable, but an exquisite piece of workmanship. As my birthdays (and his) drew near, I could scarcely sleep for thinking what fresh entrancing novelty the festive morning would bring. The only one of his gifts—by no means the least ingenious—which never, after the first flush of excitement, gave me much pleasure, was a two-chambered thatched summer-house, set up on a pole, and reached by a wide, shallow ladder. The roof opened, so that on very hot days a block of ice could be laid within, the water from its slow melting running out by a gutter. But I loved sunshine. This was a plaything that ridiculously amused chance visitors; it attracted flies; I felt silly up in it: and gladly resigned it to the tits, starlings, and sparrows to quarrel over as they pleased.

My really useful furniture—of plain old Sheraton design—was set out in my bedroom. In one half of the room slept Pollie, a placid but, before her marriage, rather slow-witted creature about six years my senior. The other half was mine and had been made proportionate to my needs by a cabinet-maker from London. My father had had a low stone balcony built on beyond my window. This was fenced with fine trellis work to screen it from the colder winds. With its few extremely dwarf trees set along in green Nankin tubs, and the view it commanded, I could enjoy this eyrie for hours—never wearied of it in my youth, nor shall if I live to be a hundred.

I linger over these early recollections, simply because they are such very happy things to possess. And now for out-of-doors.

Either because my mother was shy of me, or because she thought vulgar attention would be bad for me, she seldom took me far abroad. Now and then Pollie carried me down to the village to tea with her mother, and once or twice I was taken to church. The last occasion, however, narrowly escaped being a catastrophe, and the experiment was not repeated. Instead, we usually held a short evening service, on Sundays, in the house, when my father read the lessons, "like a miner prophet," as I wrote and told Miss Fenne. He certainly dug away at the texts till the words glittered for me like lumps of coal. On week-days more people were likely to be about, and in general I was secluded. A mistake, I think. But fortunately our high, plain house stood up in a delightful garden, sloping this way and that towards orchard and wood, with a fine-turfed lawn, few "cultivated" flowers, and ample drifts of shade. If Kent is the garden of England, then this was the garden of Kent.

I was forbidden to be alone in it. But Pollie would sometimes weary of her charge (in which I encouraged her) and when out of sight of the windows she would stray off to gossip with the gardener or with some friend from the village, leaving me to myself. To judge from the tales which I have read or have been told about children, I must have been old for my age. But perhaps the workings of the mind and heart of a girl in her teens are not of general interest. Let me be brief. A stream of water ran on the southern side all the length of the garden, under a high, rocky bank (its boundary) which was densely overhung with ash and willow, and hedges of brier and bramble looped with bindweed, goose-grass, and traveller's joy. On the nearer bank of this stream which had been left to its wild, I would sit among the mossy rocks and stones and search the green tops of my ambush as if in quest of Paradise.

When the sun's rays beat down too fiercely on my head I would make myself an umbrella of wild angelica or water parsnip.

Caring little for playthings, and having my smallest books with me chiefly for silent company, I would fall into a daydream in a world that in my solitude became my own. In this fantastic and still world I forgot the misadventure of my birth, which had now really begun to burden me, forgot pride, vanity, and chagrin; and was at peace. There I had many proportionate friends, few enemies. An old carrion crow, that sulked out a black existence in this beauty, now and then alarmed me with his attentions; but he was easily scared off. The lesser and least of living things seemed to accept me as one of themselves. Nor (perhaps because I never killed them) had I any silly distaste for the caterpillars, centipedes, and satiny black slugs. Mistress Snail would stoop out at me like a foster-mother. Even the midges, which to his frenzy would swarm round my father's head like swifts round a steeple, left me entirely unmolested. Either I was too dry a prey, or they misliked the flavour of my blood.

My eyes dazzled in colours. The smallest of the marvels of flowers and flies and beetles and pebbles, and the radiance that washed over them, would fill me with a mute, pent-up rapture almost unendurable. Butterflies would settle quietly on the hot stones beside me as if to match their raiment against mine. If I proffered my hand, with quivering wings and horns they would uncoil their delicate tongues and quaff from it drops of dew or water. A solemn grasshopper would occasionally straddle across my palm, and with patience I made quite an old friend of a harvest mouse. They weigh only two to the half-penny. This sharp-nosed furry morsel would creep swiftly along to share my crumbs and snuggle itself to sleep in my lap. By-and-by, I suppose, it took to itself a wife; I saw it no more. Bees would rest there, the panniers of their thighs laden with pollen: and now and then a wasp, his jaws full of wood or meat. When sunbeetles or ants drew near, they would seem to pause at my whisper, as if hearkening. As if in their remote silence pondering and sharing the world with me. All childish fancy, no doubt; for I proved far less successful with the humans.

But how, it may be asked, seeing that there must have been a shrill piping of birds and brawling of water among the stones, how could Mademoiselle's delicate ear endure that racket? Perhaps it is because the birds being loose in the hollow of space, it carried away into its vacancy their cries. It is, too, the harsh, rather than the shrill, that frets me. As for the noise of the water, it was so full and limpid, yet made up of such infinitely entangled chimings and drummings, that it would lull me into a kind of trance, until to a strange eye I must have appeared like a lifeless waxen mammet on my stone.

What may wholly have been another childish fancy was that apart from the silvery darting flies and the rainbow-coloured motes in the sunbeams, fine and airy invisible shapes seemed to haunt and hover around me when all was still. Most of my fellow creatures to my young nose had an odour a good deal denser than the fainter scented flowers, and I can fancy such a fog, if intensified, would be distressing to beings so bodiless and rare. Whereas the air I disturbed and infected with my presence can have been of but shallow volume.

Fairies I never saw—I had a kind of fear and distaste for them even in books. Nor for that matter—perhaps because the stream here was too tumbling and opaque—a kingfisher. But whatever other company may have been mine, I had the clouds and the water and the insects and the stones—while pimpernel, mousetail, tormentil, the wild strawberry, the feathery grasses seemed to have been made expressly for my delight. Ego-centric Midget that I was!

Chapter Three

Not that in an existence so passive riddles never came my way. As one morning I brushed past a bush of lads' love (or maidens' ruin, as some call it), its fragrance sweeping me from top to toe, I stumbled on the carcass of a young mole. Curiosity vanquished the first gulp of horror. Holding my breath, with a stick I slowly edged it up in the dust and surveyed the white heaving nest of maggots in its belly with a peculiar and absorbed recognition. "Ah, ha!" a voice cried within me, "so this is what is in wait; this is how things are"; and I stooped with lips drawn back over my teeth to examine the stinking mystery more closely. That was a lesson I have never unlearned.

One of a rather different kind had another effect. I was sitting in the garden one day watching in the distance a jay huffling and sidling and preening its feathers on a bit of decrepit fencing. Suddenly there fell a sharp crack of sound. In a flash, with a derisive chattering, the jay was flown: and then I saw Adam Waggett, half doubled up, stealing along towards the place. I lay in wait for him. With catapult dangling in one hand, the other fist tight shut, he came along like a thief. And I cried hollowly out of my concealment, "Adam, what have you there?"

Such a picture of foolish shame I have never seen. He was compelled none the less to exhibit his spoil, an eye-shut, twinkle-tailed, needle-billed Jenny Wren crumpled up in his great, dirty paw. Fury burnt up in me like a fire. What I said to him I cannot remember, but it was nothing sweet; and it was a cowed Adam Waggett that loafed off as truculently as he could towards the house, his catapult and victim left behind him. But that was his lesson rather than mine, and one which he never forgot.

When in my serener moods Pollie's voice would be heard slyly hallooing for me, I would rouse up with a shock to realize again the little cell of my body into which I had been confined. Then she and I would eat our luncheon, a few snippets of biscuit, a cherry or two, or slice of apple for me, and for her a hunch of bread and bacon about half my size in length and thickness. I would turn my back on her, for I could not endure to see her gobble her meal, having an abhorrence of cooked flesh, and a dainty stomach. Still, like most children I could be greedy, and curious of unfamiliar foods. To a few forbidden black currants which I reached up and plucked from their rank-smelling bush, and devoured, skin and all, I owe lesson Number 3. This one, however, had to be repeated.

Childhood quickly fleets away. Those happy, unhappy, far-away days seem like mere glimpses of a dragon-fly shimmering and darting over my garden stream, though at the actual time they more closely resembled, perhaps, a continuous dream broken into bits of vivid awakening.

As I grew older, my skirts grew longer, my desire for independence sharper, and my wits more inquiring. On my seventeenth birthday I put up my hair, and was confirmed by a bishop whom my godmother persuaded to officiate in the house. It was a solemn occasion; but my mother was a good deal concerned about the lunch, and I with the ballooning lawn sleeves and the two square episcopal finger-tips disposed upon my head. The experience cast a peaceful light into my mind and shook my heart, but it made me for a time a little self-conscious of both my virtue and my sins. I began to brood not only on the deplorable state of my own soul, but also on Pollie's and Mrs Ballard's, and became for a time a diminutive Miss Fenne. I suppose innocence is a precarious bliss. On the other hand, if one's mind is like a dead mole's belly, it is wise, I think, to examine it closely but not too often, and to repeat that confirmation for one's self every morning and evening.

As a young child I had been, of course, as naturally religious as a savage or an angel. But even then, I think, I never could quite believe that Paradise was a mere Fenne-land.

Once I remember in the midst of my multiplication table I had broken out unannounced with, "Then God made the world, mamma?"

"Yes, my dear."

"And all things in the forests and the birds in the sky and—and moles, and this?" I held down my limp, coral-coloured arithmetic.

"Yes," said she.

I wondered a while, losing myself, as if in wanderings like Ariel's, between the clouds. "What, mamma, did He make them of?" my voice interrupted me.

"He made them," said my mother steadily, "of His Power and Love."

Rapidly I slid back into her company. "And can we, can I, make things of my power and love?"

"I suppose, my dear," replied my mother reflectively and perhaps thinking of my father in his study, over his Paper and Hops, "it is only that in life that is really worth doing."

"Then," I said sagely, "I suspects that's how Mullings does the garden, mamma."

Long before Miss Fenne's and the bishop's visitation my mother had set about teaching me in earnest. A governess—a Miss Perry—was our first experiment. Alas, apart from her tendency to quinsy, it was I who was found wanting. She complained of the strain on her nerves. My mother feared that quinsy was catching; and Miss Perry had no successor. Reading was always a difficulty. My father bought me as tiny old books as could be found, including a dwarf Bible, a midget Pickering Shakespeare, and a grammar (with a menagerie for frontispiece) from which I learned that "irony is a figure which intends the reverse of what it speaks, and under the masque of praise, conceals the most biting satyr"; and the following stanza:—

Hail Energeia! hail my native tongue

Concisely full, and musically strong;

Thou with the pencil hold'st a glorious strife,

And paint'st the passions equal to the life.

My mother agreed that strung would be preferable to "strong," and explained that "the passions" did not signify merely ill-temper; while, if I pecked over-nicely at my food, my father would cry "Hail Energeia!" a challenge which rarely failed to persuade me to set to.

My grandfather sent me other pygmy books from Paris, including a minute masterpiece of calligraphy, Une Anthologie de Chansons pour une Minuscule Aimante et Bien-aimée par P. de R. These I could easily carry about with me. I soon learned to accustom my arms and shoulders to bulkier and more cumbrous volumes. My usual method with a common-sized book was to prop it up towards the middle of the table and then to seat myself at the edge. The page finished, I would walk across and turn over a fresh leaf. Thus in my solitude I studied my lessons and read again and again my nursery favourites, some of them, I gather, now undeservedly out of fashion.

Perhaps even better than fiction or folk-tales, I liked books of knowledge.

There were two of these in particular, The Observing Eye; or Lessons to Children on the Three Lowest Divisions of Animal Life—The Radiated, Articulated, and Molluscous, and The Childhood of the World. Even at nine I remarked how nimbly the anonymous author of the former could skip from St Paul to the lobster; and I never wearied of brooding on Mr Clodd's frontispiece. This depicts a large-headed and seemingly one-legged little girl in a flounced frock lying asleep under a wall on which ivy is sprawling. For pillow for herself and her staring doll there lies on the ground a full-sized human skull, and in the middle distance are seen the monoliths of Stonehenge. Beyond these gigantic stones, and behind the far mountains, rises with spiky rays an enormous Sun.

I was that child; and mine her sun that burned in heaven, and he a more obedient luminary than any lamp of man's. I would wonder what she would do when she awoke from sleep. The skull, in particular, both terrified and entranced me—the secret of all history seemed to lie hidden in the shadows beneath its dome. Indeed I needed no reminder from Mr Clodd that "Children (and some grown-up people too) are apt to think that things are wonderful only when they are big, which is not true."

I knew already, out of nowhere, that "the bee's waxen cell is more curious than the chimpanzee's rough hut" (though I should have dearly liked to see the latter); and that "an ant is more wonderful than the huge and dull rhinoceros." Such is childishness, however: I pitied the poor rhinoceros his "dull." Over such small things as a nut, a shell, a drop of rain-water in a buttercup, a frond of frost (for there were cold winters at Lyndsey in those days), I would pore and pore, imbibing the lesson that the eye alone if used in patience will tell its owner far more about an object than it can merely see.

Among my few framed pictures I cannot resist mentioning one by a painter of the name of Bosch. Below the middle of it kneeled naked Adam and Eve with exquisite crimped hair on their shoulders; and between them stood God. All above and beneath them, roamed the animals, birds, insects, and infinitesimals of Eden, including a long-tailed monkey on an elephant, a jerboa, a dancing crocodile, and—who but our cat Miaou, carrying off a mouse! An astonishing, inexhaustible piece of thoughtfulness. I loved Mynheer Bosch.

Shameful dunce Miss M. may remain, but she did in her childhood supremely enjoy any simple book about the things of creation great or small. But I preferred my own notions of some of them. When my father of a dark, clear night would perch me up at a window to see the stars—Charles's Wain and the Chair; and told me that they were huge boiling suns, roaring their way through the vast pits of space, I would shake my head to myself. I was grateful for the science, but preferred to keep them just "stars." And though I loved to lave my hands in a trickle of light that had been numberless years on its journey to this earth, that of a candle also filled me with admiration, and I was unfeignedly grieved that the bleak moon was naught but a sheer hulk, sans even air or ice or rain or snow.

How much pleasanter it would be to think that her shine was the reflection of our cherry orchards, and that her shadows were just Kentish hay-ricks, barns, and oast-houses. It was, too, perhaps rather tactless of my father to beguile me with full-grown authors' accounts of the Lives of the Little. Accomplished writers they may be, but—well, never mind. As for the Lives of the Great, I could easily adjust Monsieur Bon Papa's spyglass and reduce them to scale.

My father taught me also to swim in his round bath; and on a visit to Canterbury purchased for me the nimblest little dun Shetland pony, whom we called Mopsa. I learned to become a fearless rider. But hardy though her race may be, perhaps I was too light a burden to satisfy Mopsa's spirit. In a passing fit of temper she broke a leg. Though I had stopped my ears for an hour before the Vet came, I heard the shot.

My mother's lessons were never very burdensome. She taught me little, but she taught it well—even a morsel of Latin. I never wearied of the sweet oboe-like nasal sound of her French poems, and she instilled in me such a delight in words that to this day I firmly believe that things are at least twice the better and richer for being called by them. Apart from a kind of passionate impatience over what was alien to me—arithmetic, for instance, and "analysis"—and occasional fits of the sulks, which she allowed to deposit their own sediment at leisure, I was a willing, and, at times, even a greedy scholar. Apparently from infancy I was of a firm resolve to match my wits with those of the common-sized and to be "grown-up" some day.

So much for my education, a thing which it seems to me is likely to continue—and specially in respect of human nature—as long as I keep alive. With so little childish company, without rivalry, I was inclined to swell myself out with conceit and complacency. "It's easy holding down the latchet when nobody pulls the string." But whatever size we may be, in soul or body, I have found that the world wields a sharp pin, and is pitiless to bubbles.

Though inclined to be dreamy and idle when alone, I was, of course, my own teacher too. My senses were seven in number, however few my wits. In particular I loved to observe the clustering and gathering of plants, like families, each of a shape, size, and hue, each in their kind and season, though tall and lowly were intermingled. Now and then I would come on some small plant self-sown, shining and flourishing, free and clear, and even the lovelier for being alone in its kind amid its greater neighbours. I prized these discoveries, and if any one of them was dwarfed a little by its surroundings I would cosset it up and help it against them. How strange, thought I, if men so regarded each other's intelligence. If from pitying the dull-witted the sharp-witted slid to mere toleration, and from toleration to despising and loathing. What a contest would presently begin between the strong-bodied stupid and the feeble-bodied clever, and how soon there would be no strong-bodied stupid left in the world! They would dwindle away and disappear into Time like the mammoth and the woolly bear. And then I began to be sorry for the woolly bear and to wish I could go and have a look at him. Perhaps this is putting my old head on those young shoulders, but when I strive to re-enter the thoughts of those remote days, how like they seem to the noisy wasting stream beside which they flowed on, and of whose source and destination I was unaware.

All this egotism recalls a remark that Mrs Ballard once made apropos of some little smart repartee from Miss M. as she sat beside her pasteboard and slapped away at a lump of dough, "Well I know a young lady who's been talking to the young man that rubbed his face with a brass candlestick."

Chapter Four

In the midst of my eighteenth year fortune began to darken. My mother had told me little of the world, its chances and changes, cares and troubles. What I had learned of these came chiefly from books and my own speculations. We had few visitors and from all but the most familiar I was quickly packed away. My mother was sensitive of me, for both our sakes. But I think in this she was mistaken, for when my time came, Life found me raw, and it rubbed in the salt rather vigorously.

My father had other views. He argued for facing the facts, though perhaps those relating to fruit and paper are not very intimidating. But he seldom made his way against my mother, except in matters that concerned his own comfort. He loved me fondly but throughout my childhood seems to have regarded me as a kind of animated marionette. When he came out from his Mills and Pockets it amused him to find me nibbling a raspberry beside his plate. He'd rub his round stubbly head, and say, "Well, mamma, and how's Trot done this morning?" or he would stoop and draw ever so heedfully his left little finger down my nose to its uttermost tip, and whisper: "And so to Land's End, my love." Now and then I would find his eyes fixed on me as if in stupefaction that I was actually his daughter.

But now that I was getting to be a young woman and had put up my hair, and the future frowned near, this domestic problem began seriously to concern him. My mother paled at the very mention of it. I remember I had climbed up on to his writing desk one morning, in search of a pair of high boots which I had taken off in his study the evening before. We had been fishing for sticklebacks. Concealed from view, while the wind whined at the window, I heard a quarrel between my father and mother about me which I will never repeat to mortal ear. It darkened my mind for days, and if ... but better not.

At this time anxiety about money matters must have begun its gnawing in my poor father's brains. And I know what that means. He had recommended to others and speculated himself in some experiment in the cultivation of the trees from which the Chinese first made paper, and had not only been grossly cheated, but laughed at in the press. The Kentish Courier—I see his ears burning now—had referred to him as "the ingenious Mr Tapa"; and my mother's commiseration had hardly solaced him: "But, my dear, you couldn't have gone to Canton by yourself. We must just draw in our horns a little." The ingenious Mr Tapa patted the hand on his shoulder, but his ears burned on.

"Besides," my mother added, with a long, sighing breath, as she seated herself again, "there are the books." He plucked his spectacles off, and gazed vaguely in her direction: "Oh, yes, yes, there are the books."

Nor was he long daunted by this attack. He fell in love with some notion of so pickling hop-poles that they would last for ever. But the press was no kinder to his poles than to his mulberries.

And then befell the blackest misfortune of my life. I had been ill; and for a few days had been sleeping in one of the spare bedrooms in a cot beside my mother, so that she should be near me if I needed her. This particular evening, however, I had gone back to my own room. We cannot change the past, or foresee the future. But if only Pollie had not been a heavy sleeper; if only I had escaped that trivial ailment—how tangled is life's skein! It was the May after my eighteenth birthday and full moonlight.

Troubled in mind by my illness and other worries and mortifications, my mother, not fully aroused perhaps, got up in the small hours and mounted the stone staircase in order to look in on me. I was awake, and heard the rustling of her nightdress and the faint touch of her slippered feet ascending from stone to stone. I guessed her errand, and in my folly thought I would pretend to be asleep and give her a "surprise." I drew my curtains and lay motionless on my back as if I were dead. With eyes closed, listening, I smilingly waited.

Then suddenly I heard a muffled, gasping cry; and all was utterly, icily still. I flung aside the silk curtains and leapt out of bed.

The moonlight was streaming in a lean ray across the floor of my room. I ran down this luminous pathway into the dusk at the open door. At the stair-head beyond, still and silent, I saw my poor dear. On through the cold dark air I ran, and stood in her loosened hair beside her head. It lay unstirring, her cheek colourless, her hand stretched out, palm upward, on the stone. I called into her ear, first gently and pleadingly, then loud and shrill. I ran and chafed her fingers, then back again, and stooped, listening with my cheek to her lips. She exhaled a trembling sigh. I called and called; but my shrillness was utterly swallowed up in the vast night-hung house. Then softly in the silence her lids unsealed and her eyes, as if wonderful with a remote dream, looked up into my face. "My dear," she whispered, wakefulness gathering faintly into her gaze, "my dear, is it you?" There was an accent in her voice that I had never heard before. Perhaps her tranceful eyes had magnified me. Then once more the lids closed down and I was alone. I fell on my knees beside her and crouched, praying into her heedless ear.

It was my first acquaintance with calamity, and physically powerless to aid her, I could think of nothing for a moment but to persuade her to speak to me again. Then my senses returned to me. To descend that flight of stairs—down which hitherto I had always been carried—would waste more precious time than I could spare. There seemed to be but one alternative—to waken Pollie. I ran back into my bedroom and tugged violently at the slack of her bedclothes. A mouse might as well have striven to ring Great Paul. She breathed on with open mouth, flat on her back, like a log. Then a thought came to me.

There was a brass-bound box under my bed, a full fifteen inches long, though shallow, in which my grandfather had lately sent me some gowns and finery from Paris. With some little difficulty I lugged and pushed this all across the room, and out on to the staircase. My strength seemed to be superhuman. One moment I flew to my mother, but now she lay in a profound sleep indeed, her cheek like marble. With a last effort I edged my box on its side between the balusters, and at some risk of falling after it, shoved it over into the moon-silvered dusk below. The house echoed with its resounding brazen clatter as it pitched from stair to stair. Then quiet. Clutching with either hand the baluster I leaned over, listening. Then a voice cried sleepily: "Hah!" then a call, "Caroline!" and a moment afterwards I discerned my father ascending the staircase....

For weeks I lay desperately ill. The chill, the anguish, and horror of that night had come upon a frame already weakened. Life was nothing but an evil dream, a world of terrifying shadows and phantoms. But our old friend Dr Grose was familiar with my constitution, and at last I began to mend. Pollie, stricken with remorse, nursed me night and day, giving my small bed every hour she could spare in a house stricken and disordered. I was never told in so many words that my mother was dead. In my extreme weakness I learned it of the air around me, of every secret sound and movement in the house.

Morning and evening appeared my father's great face in the doorway, his eyebrows lifted high above his spectacles. To see his misery I almost wished that I might die to spare him more. When Dr Grose gave him permission, he sat down beside my bed and stooping low, told me that my mother had remembered our last speech together on the staircase, and he gave me her last message. A thousand and one remembrances of her patience and impulsiveness, of our long hours of solitude together, of her fits of new life as if she were a tree blossoming in the Spring, of her voice, her dignified silence with Miss Fenne, her sallies with my grandfather, her absent musings—these all return to me.

Alas, that it was never in my power, except perhaps at that last moment, to be to her a true comfort and companion, anything much better, in fact, than a familiar and tragic playmate. Worse beyond words; how little I had done for her that I might have done!

But regret must not lead me into extremes. That is not the whole truth. There were occasions, I think, when she almost forgot my disabilities, when we were just two quiet, equal spirits in the world and conversed together gravely and simply, not as children, but as fellow-women. It is these I treasure dearest, while thanking her for all. Why, in the whirligig of time, if my authorities are trustworthy, and my life had fallen out differently, the problem might now have been reversed! I myself might have had natural-sized children and they a pygmy mother. The strangeness of the world.

Out of the listlessness of convalescence my interests began to renew themselves. Across the gulf that separated us I could still commune with my mother's quiet spirit. Her peace and the peace of her forgiveness began to descend on me; and her grave in my imagination has now no more sorrow than the anticipation of my own. From my windowsill loggia I could command a full "Hundred" of Kent. Up there on the barrowed hill-top it was said that on fine days a keen eye could descry the sea to north and south; though Dr Grose dismissed it as a piece of local presumption. Now that my mother was gone the clouds were stranger, the birds more sweetly melancholy, the flowers more fleeting. Something of youth had passed away to return no more.

Half my thoughts were wasted in futile resentment at my incapacities. Yet it was a helplessness that in part was forced on me from without. Still less now could my father take me seriously. We shared our silent meals together. He would sit moping, pushing his hand over his whitening hair, or staring over his spectacles out of the window to the low whistling of some endless, monotonous tune that would haunt him for days together and fret me to distraction. Now and again he would favour me with a serious speech, and then, with a glance, perhaps hurry away to his study before I could answer. To his half-completed dissertations on Hop, Cherry, and Paper, I learned he had added another, on the Oyster. Many of his letters were now postmarked Whitstable. He even advertised in his old enemy, the Courier, for information: and would break out into furious abuse at the stupidity of his correspondents. Meanwhile his appetite increased; he would nod in his chair; his clothes grew shabby; his appearance neglected. Poor dear, he missed my mother.

But I made a struggle to take her place. Every morning Pollie would carry me off to the kitchen for a discussion with Mrs Ballard over the household affairs of the day. With her fat, floury hand, she would hide her mouth and gravely nod her head at my instructions. But I knew she was concealing her amusement. "Oh, these men!" she once exclaimed at some new caprice of "the master's," "they are never happy unless they can be where they bain't." With my own hand I printed out for her a list of my father's favourite dishes. I left off my black and wore bright colours again, so that he might not be constantly reminded of the past. But when after long debate I took courage one day to propose myself as his housekeeper—I shall never forget the facial expression which he quickly rubbed off with his hand.

He fetched out of his trousers pocket a great bunch of keys, and jangled them almost ferociously in the air at me for a full minute together with tears of amusement in his eyes. Then he tossed down the last gulp or two of his port and went off. A moment after he must have realized how cruel a blow he had dealt my vanity and my love. He returned, seated himself heavily in his chair, and looked at me. Then stretching out his hand he dropped his face on to his arm. A horrible quietness spread over the room. For the first time I looked with a kind of terror at the hairy fingers and whitening head, and could not stir.

How oddly chance repeats itself. The door opened and once more, unannounced, Miss Fenne appeared in our midst. My father hastily rose to greet her, pretending that nothing was amiss. But when she held out her clawlike hand to me to be kissed, I merely stared at her. She screwed up her countenance into a smile; mumbled that I was looking pale and peaked again; and, with difficulty keeping her eyes from mine, explained that she had come for a business talk with my father.

A few days afterwards I was standing up at the window of my mother's little sewing-room—always a favourite refuge of mine, for there the afternoon sun and the colours of evening used to beat into the corner. And I saw a small-sized woman with a large black bonnet come waddling up the drive. She was followed by a boy wheeling a square box on a two-wheeled trolley. It was Mrs Sheppey come to be housekeeper to the widower and his daughter.

Mrs Sheppey proved to be a harassed and muddling woman, and she came to a harassed home. My father's affairs had gone from bad to worse. He was gloomy and morose. A hunted look sometimes gleamed in his eyes, and the spectacled nose seemed to grow the smaller the more solemn its surroundings were. He spent most of the day in his dressing-gown now, had quarrelled with Dr Grose, and dismissed Mrs Ballard. The rooms were dirty and neglected. Pollie would maunder about with a broom, or stand idly staring out of the window. She was in love. At least, so I realize now. At the time I thought she was merely lumpish and stupid.

Only once in my recollection did Mrs Sheppey pay my own quarters a visit. I was kneeling on my balcony and out of sight, and could watch her unseen. She stood there—tub-shaped, a knob of dingy hair sticking out from her head, her skirts suspended round her boots—passively examining my bed, my wardrobe, and my other belongings. Her scrutiny over, she threw up her hands and the whites of her eyes as if in expostulation to heaven, turned about in her cloth boots, and waddled out again. Pollie told me, poor thing, that her children had been thorns in her side. I brooded over this. Had I not myself, however involuntarily, been a thorn in my mother's side? I despised and yet pitied Mrs Sheppey.

She was, if anything, frightened of me, and of my tongue, and would address me as "little lady" in a cringing, pursed-up fashion. But I am thankful to say she never attempted to touch me or to lift me from the floor. Her memory is inextricably bound up with a brown, round pudding with a slimy treacle sauce which she used to send to table every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. My father would look at it with his nose rather than with his eyes; and after perhaps its fiftieth appearance, he summoned Mrs Sheppey with a violent tug at the bell. She thrust her head in at the door. "Take it away," he said, "take it away. Eat it. Devour it. Hide it from God's sight, good woman. Don't gibber. Take it away!"

His tone frightened me out of my wits and Mrs Sheppey out of the house. Then came the end. At the beginning of August in my twentieth year, my father, who had daily become stranger in appearance and habits, though steadfastly refusing to call in his old friend, Dr Grose, was found dead in his bed. He was like a boy who never can quite succeed in pleasing himself or his masters. He had gone to bed and shut his eyes, never in this world to open them again.

Chapter Five

Am I sorry that almost beside myself with this new affliction, and bewildered and frightened by the incessant coming and going of strangers in the house, I refused to be carried down to bid that unanswering face good-bye? No, I have no regret on that score. The older I grow the more closely I seem to understand him. If phantoms of memory have any reality—and it is wiser, I think, to remember the face of the living rather than the stony peace of the dead—he has not forgotten his only daughter.

Double-minded creature I was and ever shall be; now puffed up with arrogance at the differences between myself and gross, common-sized humanity; now stupidly sensitive to the pangs to which by reason of these differences I have to submit. At times I have been tempted to blame my parents for my shortcomings. What wicked folly—they did not choose their only child. After all, too, fellow creatures of any size seem much alike. They rarely have nothing to blame Providence for—the length of their noses or the size of their feet, their bones or their corpulence, the imbecilities of their minds or their bodies, the "accidents" of birth, breeding, station, or circumstance. Yet how secure and perhaps wholesome is Man's self-satisfaction. To what ideal does he compare himself but to a self-perfected abstraction of his own image? Even his Venus and Apollo are mere flattering reflections of his own he- or she-shapes. And what of his anthropomorphic soul?

As for myself, Dame Nature may some day take a fancy to the dwarf. "What a pretty play it would be"—I have clean forgotten where I chanced on this amusing passage—"What a pretty play it would be if, from the next generation onwards, the only humans born into the world should be of mere pygmy stature. Fifty years hence there would remain but few of the normal-sized in the land. Imagine these aged few, miserably stalking through the dwarfed streets, picking up a scanty livelihood in city or country-side, where their very boots would be a public danger, their very tread would set the bells in the steeples ringing, and their appetites would be a national incubus. House, shop, church, high road, furniture, vehicles abandoned or sunken to the pygmy size; wars and ceremonies, ambitions and enterprises, everything but prayers, dwindled to the petty. Would great-grandfather be venerated, cherished, admired, a welcome guest, a lamented emigrant? Would there be as many mourners as sextons at his funeral, as many wreaths as congratulations at his grave?" And so on and so forth—like Jonathan Swift.

But I must beware. Partly from fatigue and partly from dislike of the version of Miss M. that stared out of his picture at me, I had begun, I remember, to be a little fretful when old Mr Wagginhorne was painting my portrait. And I complained pertly that I thought there were far too many azaleas on the potted bush.

"Ah, little Miss Finical," he said, "take care, if you please. Once there was a Diogenes whom the gods shut up in a tub and fed on his own spleen. He died.... He died," he repeated, drawing his brush slowly along the canvas, "of dyspepsia."

He popped round, "Think of that."

I can think of that to better purpose now, and if there is one thing in the world whose company I shall deplore in my coffin, that thing is a Cynic. That is why I am trying as fast as I can to put down my experiences in black and white before the black predominates.

But I must get back to my story. My poor father had left his affairs in the utmost disorder. His chief mourners were his creditors. Apart from these, one or two old country friends and distant relatives, I believe, attended his funeral, but none even of them can have been profoundly interested in the Hop, the Oyster, or the Cherry, at least in the abstract. Dr Grose, owing to ill-health, had given up his practice and was gone abroad. But though possibly inquiry was made after the small creature that had been left behind, I stubbornly shut myself away in my room under the roof, listening in a fever of apprehension to every sinister movement in the house beneath.

Yet if a friend in need is a friend indeed, then I must confess that my treatment of Miss Fenne was the height of ingratitude.

In my grief and desolation, the future seemed to be only a veil beyond the immediate present, which I had neither the wish nor the power to withdraw. Miss Fenne had no such illusions. I begged Pollie to make any excuse she could think of to prevent her from seeing me. But at last she pushed her way up, and doubtless, the news and the advice she brought were the best tonic that could have been prescribed for me.

As a child I had always associated my godmother with the crocodile (though not with Mr Bosch's charming conception of it, in his picture of the Creation). Yet there were no tears in her faded eyes when she explained that of my father's modest fortune not a pittance remained. In a few days the house, with everything in it except my own small sticks of furniture, was to be sold by auction. I must keep my door locked against intruders. All that would be left to me was a small income of about £110 per annum, derived from money bequeathed to me by a relative of my mother's whom I had never seen.

"I fancy your father knew nothing about it," she concluded, "at least so your dear mother seemed to imply. But there! it's a sad business, a sad business. And that Tapa scandal; a lamentable affair." Having thus prepared the way, my godmother proposed that I should take up my residence in her house, and commit my future entirely to her charge.

"You cannot be an expensive guest," she explained, "and I am sure you will try to be a grateful one. No truly conscientious godparent, my dear child, ever relinquishes the soul committed to her care. I sometimes wonder whether your poor dear mother realized this."

But it was my soul, if that is brother to the spirit and can be neighbour to pride, that revolted against her proposition. I had to shut my eyes at the very remembrance of Miss Fenne's prim and musty drawing-room. Every intimation, every jerk of her trembling head, every pounce of her jewelled fingers only hardened my heart. Poor Miss Fenne. Her resentment at my refusal seemed to increase her shortness of sight. Looking in on her from my balcony, I had the advantage of her, as she faced me in the full light in her chair, dressed up in her old lady's clothes like a kind of human Alp among my pygmy belongings. I tried to be polite, but this only increased her vexation. One smart tap of the ivory ball that topped her umbrella would have been my coup de grâce. She eyed me, but never administered it.

At last she drew in her lips and fell silent. Then, as may happen at such moments, her ill-temper and chagrin, even the sense of her own dignity drooped away, and for a while in the quietness we were simply two ill-assorted human beings, helpless in the coils of circumstance. She composed her mouth, adjusted her bonnet strings, peered a moment from dim old eyes out of the window, then once more looked at me.

"It must be, then, as God wills," she said in a trembling voice. "The spirit of your poor dear mother must be judge between us. She has, we may trust, gone to a better world."

For a moment my resolution seemed to flow away like water, and I all but surrendered. But a rook cawed close overhead, and I bit my lip. Little more was said, except that she would consider it her duty to find me a comfortable and God-fearing home. But she admonished me of the future, warned me that the world was a network of temptations, and assured me of her prayers. So we parted. I bowed her out of my domain. It was the last time we met. Two days afterwards I received her promised letter:—

"My Dear Godchild,—Mr Ambrose Pellew, an old clergyman friend of mine, in whose discretion and knowledge of the world I have every confidence, has spoken for you to an old married, respectable servant of his now living a few miles from London—a Mrs Bowater. For the charge of thirty shillings a week she has consented to give you board, lodging, and reasonable attendance. In all the circumstances this seems to me to be a moderate sum. Mr Pellew assures me that Mrs B. is clean, honest, and a practising Christian. When this dreadful Sale is over, I have arranged that Pollie shall conduct you safely to what will in future be your home. I trust that you will be as happy there as Providence permits, though I cannot doubt that your poor dear mother and your poor father, too, for that matter, would have wished otherwise—that the roof of her old friend who was present at your Baptism and insisted on your Confirmation, should have been your refuge and asylum now that you are absolutely alone in the world.

"However, you have rejected this proposal, and have chosen your own path. I am not your legal guardian, and I am too deeply pained to refer again to your obstinacy and ingratitude. Rest assured that, in spite of all, I shall remember you in my prayers, and I trust, D. V., that you will escape the temptations of this wicked world—a world in which it has pleased God, in spite of self-sacrificing and anxious friends, to place you at so distressing a disadvantage. But in His Sight all men are equal. Let that be your continual consolation. See Amos vii. 2; Prov. xxxi. 24-28; Eccles. xii. 1.

"I remain, your affectionate godmother,

"Emma E. Fenne.

"PS.—I reopen this letter to explain that your financial affairs are in the hands of Messrs Harris, Harris, and Harris, respectable solicitors of Gray's Inn. They will remit you on every quarter day—Christmas Day, Lady Day, June 25th and September 29th—the sum of £28 10s. 0d. Of this you will pay £19 10s. at once to Mrs Bowater, who, I have no doubt, will advise you on the expenditure of what remains on wearing apparel, self-improvement, missions, charity, and so on. It grieves me that from the wreckage of your father's affairs you must not anticipate a further straw of assistance. All his money and property will be swallowed up in the dreadful storm that has broken over what we can only trust is a tranquil resting place. R. I. P.—E. E. F."

So sprawling and straggling was my godmother's penmanship that I spelled her letter out at last with a minifying glass, though rather for forlorn amusement's sake than by necessity. Not that this diminishment of her handwriting in any sense lessened the effect upon me of the sentiments it conveyed. They at once daunted me and gave me courage. For a little I hesitated, then at last I thought out in my heart that God might be kinder to me than Miss Fenne wished. Indeed I was so invigorated by the anticipation of the "wicked world," that I all but called her a crocodile to her phantasmal face. Couldn't I—didn't I—myself "mean well" too? What pictures and prospects of the future, of my journey, of Mrs Bowater and the "network" pursued each other through my brain. And what a darkness oppressed me when a voice kept repeating over in my mind—Harris and Harris and Harris, as if it were a refrain to one of my grandfather's chansons. Messrs Harris and Harris and Harris—I saw all three of them (dark men with whiskers), but trusted profoundly they would never come to see me.

Nor from that day to this, through all my giddying "ups" and sobering "downs" have I ever for a moment regretted my decision—though I might have conveyed it with a little better grace. My body, perhaps also my soul, would have been safer in the seclusion of my godmother's house. But my spirit? I think it would have beaten itself to death there like a wasp on a window-pane. Whereas—well, here I am.

Chapter Six

Those last few days of August dragged on—days of a burning, windless heat. Yet, as days, I enjoyed them. On some upper branch of my family tree must have flourished the salamander. Indeed I think I should have been a denizen of Venus rather than of this colder, darker planet. I sat on my balcony, basking in the hot sunshine, my thoughts darting hither and thither like flies under a ceiling—those strange, winged creatures that ever seem to be attempting to trace out in their flittings the starry "Square of Pegasus." In spite of my troubles and forebodings, and fleeting panics, my inward mind was calm. I carefully packed away my few little valuables. The very notion of food gave me nausea, but that I determined to conquer, since of course to become, at either extreme, a slave to one's stomach, is a folly.

The noise and tramplings of the men in the rooms beneath never ceased, until Night brought quiet. The Sale lasted for two days. A stale and clouded air ascended even into my locked bedroom from the human beings (with their dust and tobacco and perfumes and natural presences) collected together in the heat of the great dining-room. A hum, a murmur, the scuffling of feet toiling downstairs with some heavy and cumbrous burden, the cries of the auctioneer, the coarse voices and laughter, the tinkle of glass—the stretching hours seemed endless; and every minute of them knelled the fate of some beloved and familiar object. I was glad my father couldn't hear the bidding, and sorry that perhaps he did not know that the most valuable of his curios—how valuable I was to learn later—was safely hidden away in an upper room. So passed my birthday—the twentieth—nor tapped me on the shoulder with, "Ah, but, my dear, just you wait till I come again!"

None the less I thought a good deal about birthdays that afternoon, and wondered how it was that we human beings can bear even to go on living between two such mysteries as the beginning and the end of life. Where was my mother now? Where was I but two-and-twenty years ago? What was all this "Past," this "History," of which I had heard so much and knew so little? Just a story? Better brains than mine have puzzled over these questions, and perhaps if I had studied the philosophers I should know the answers. In the evenings, wrapped up in a shawl, Pollie carried me downstairs, and we took a sober whispering walk in the hush and perfumes of the deserted garden. Loud rang the tongues of the water over the stones. The moths were fluttering to their trysts, and from some dark little coign the cricket strummed me a solo. Standing up there in the starry night the great house looked down on me like an elder brother, mute but compassionate.

By the second day after the conclusion of the Sale, the removers' vans and carts should have gutted the rooms and be gone. It had, therefore, been arranged that Pollie should as usual share my bedroom the last night, and that next day we should set off on our journey. After luncheon—the flavour of its sliced nectarine (or is it of one that came later?) is on my tongue at this moment—all the rest of the house being now hollow and vacant, Pollie put on her hat, thrust the large door key into her pocket, and went off to visit her mother in the village and to fetch a clean nightdress. She promised to return before dark. Her shoes clattered down the stone stairs, the outer door boomed like a gun. I spread out my hands in the air, and as if my four-poster could bear witness, cried softly, "I am alone." Marvel of marvels, even as I sit here to-day gazing at my inkpot, there in its original corner stands that same old four-poster. Pollie is living down in the village with her husband and her two babies; and once more: I am alone. Is there anything in life so fascinating, so astonishing, as these queer, common little repetitions? Perhaps on the Last Day—but I anticipate.

I read a little; wrote on the flyleaf of my diminutive Johnson, "September 1st, Lyndsey for the last time.—M."; arranged my morrow's clothes on a chair, then sat down in my balcony to do nothing, to be nothing, merely to dream. But nature decreed otherwise. Soon after six by my grandfather's clock—it struck the hour out of its case, as if out of a sepulchre—a storm, which all the afternoon had been steadily piling its leaden vapours into space, began to break. Chizzel Hill with its prehistoric barrow was sunk to a green mound beneath those lowering cloudy heights, pooling so placid and lovely a blue between them. The very air seemed to thicken, and every tree stood up as if carved out of metal. Of a sudden a great wind, with heavy plashing drops of rain, swept roaring round the house, thick with dust and green leaves torn from the dishevelled summer trees. There was a hush. The darkness intensified, and then a vast sheet of lightning seemed to picture all Kent in my eyes, and the air was full of water.

One glance into the obscure vacancy of the room behind me persuaded me to remain where I was, though the rain drove me further and further into the corner of my balcony. Cold, and a little scared by the glare and din, yet not unhappy, I cowered close up against the glass, and, shading my eyes as best I could from the flames of the lightning, I watched the storm. How long I sat there I cannot say. The clamour lulled and benumbed my brain into a kind of trance. My only company was a blackbird which had flown or been blown into my refuge, and with draggled feathers stared black-eyed out of the greenery at me. It was gathering towards dark when the rain and lightning began to abate, and the sullen thunder drew away into the distance, echoing hollowly along the furthest horizons. At last, with teeth chattering, and stiff to my bones, I made my way into the room again, and the benighted blackbird went squawking to his nest.

Slipping off my gown and shoes, and huddling myself in the blankets and counterpane of my bed, I sat there pondering what next was to be done. It would soon be night; and Pollie seemed unlikely to appear until all this turmoil was over. I was not only alone, but forsaken and infinitely solitary, a mere sentient living speck in the quiet sea of light that washed ever and again into the gloomiest recesses of the room. And that familiar room itself seemed now almost as cold and inhospitable as a neglected church. I could hear the dark, vacant house beneath echoing and murmuring at every prolonged reverberation of thunder, and sighing through all its crannies and keyholes. My bedhangings softly shook in the air. Gone beyond recovery were my father and mother: and I now realized how irrevocably. I was no longer a child; and the responsibilities of life were now wholly on my own shoulders.

Yet I was not utterly forlorn. The great scene comforted me, and now and then I prayed, almost without thinking and without words, just as a little tune will keep recurring in the mind. And now, darkness being spread over the garden, in the east the moon was rising. Moreover, a curious sight met my eyes; for as the storm settled, heavy rain in travelling showers was still occasionally skirting the house; and when, between the heaped-up masses of cloud, the distant lightning gleamed a faint vaporous lilac, I saw motionless in the air, and as if suspended in their falling between earth and sky, the multitudinous glass-clear, pear-shaped drops of water. At sight of these jewels thus crystalling the dark air I was filled with such a rapture that I actually clapped my hands. And presently the moon herself appeared, as if to be my companion. Serene, remote, she glided at last from cover of an enormous bluff of cloud into the faint-starred vault of space, seemed to pause for an instant in contemplation of the dark scene, then went musing on her way. Beneath her silver all seemed at peace, and it was then that I fell asleep.

And while I slept, I dreamed a dream. My dreams often commit me to a quiet and radiant life, as if of a reality less strange to me than that of waking. Others are a mere uneasiness and folly. In the old days I would sometimes tell my dreams to Mrs Ballard; and she would look them up in a frowsy book she kept in the dresser drawer, a brown, grease-stained volume entitled Napoleon's Book of Fate. Then she would promise me a prince for a husband, or that I would be a great traveller across the sea, or that I must beware of a red-haired woman, and nonsense of that kind. But this particular dream remains more vividly in my memory than any.

Well, I dreamed that I was walking in a strange garden—an orchard. And, as it seemed, I was either of the common human size, or this was a world wherein of human beings I was myself of the usual stature. The night was still, like the darkest picture, yet there must have been light there, since I could see as I walked. The grasses were coarse and deep, but they did not encumber my feet, and presently I found myself standing beneath a tree whose branches in their towering sombre heaviness seemed to be made of iron. Dangling here and there amid the pendulous leaves hung enormous fruits—pears stagnant and heavy as shaped lumps of lead or of stone. Why the sight of these fruits in the obscure luminosity of the air around them laid such a spell upon me, I cannot say. I stood there in the dew-cold grass, gazing up and up into those monstrous branches as if enchanted, and then of a sudden the ground under my feet seemed faintly to tremble as if at a muffled blow. One of the fruits in my dream, now come to ripeness, had fallen stone-like from above. Then again—thud! Realization of the dreadful danger in which I stood swept over me. I turned to escape, and awoke, shivering and in a suffocating heat, to discover in the moonlight that now flooded my room where in actuality I was.

Yet still, as it seemed, the dying rumour of the sound persisted, and surely, I thought, it must be poor, careless Pollie, her key forgotten, come back in the darkness after the storm, and hammering with the great knocker on the door below. Hardly a minute had passed indeed before the whole house resounded again with her thumping. One seldom finds Courage keeping tryst on the outskirts of sleep, and there was a vehemence in the knocking as if Pollie was in an extremity of fear at finding herself under the vacant house alone in the night. The thought of going to her rescue set my teeth chattering. I threw back the bedclothes and gazed at the moon, and the longer I sat there the more clearly I realized that I must somehow descend the stairs, convey to her that I was safe, and, if possible, let her in.

Three steep stone flights separated us, stairs which I had very rarely ascended or descended except in her arms. I thrust my foot out; all was still; I must go at once. But what of light? The moon was on this side of the house. It might be pitch dark on the lower landings and in the hall. On the stool by her bedside stood Pollie's copper candlestick, with an inch or two of candle in it and a box of matches. It was a thick-set tallow candle and none too convenient for me to grasp. With this alight in my hand, the stick being too cumbersome, I set out on my errand. The air was cool; the moon shone lustily. Just waked from sleep my mind was curiously exalted. I sallied out into the empty corridor. A pace or two beyond the threshold my heart seemed to swell up in my body, for it seemed that at the head of the staircase lay stretched the still form of my mother as I had found her in the cold midnight hours long ago. It was but a play of light, a trick of fantasy. I recovered my breath and went on.

To leap from stair to stair was far too formidable a means of progression. I should certainly have dashed out my brains. So I must sit, and jump sitting, manipulating my candle as best I could. In this sidling, undignified fashion, my eyes fixed only on the stair beneath me, I mastered the first flight, and paused to rest. What a medley of furtive sounds ascended to my ear from the desolate rooms below: the heavy plash of raindrop from the eaves, scurry and squeak of mouse, rustle of straw, a stirring—light as the settling of dust, crack of timber, an infinitely faint whisper; and from without, the whistle of bat, the stony murmur of the garden stream, the hunting screech of some predatory night-fowl over the soaked and tranquil harvest fields. And who, Who?—that shape?... I turned sharply, and the melted tallow of the guttering candle welled over and smartly burned the hand that held it. The pain gave me confidence. But better than that, a voice from below suddenly broke out, not Pollie's but Adam Waggett's, hollaing in the porch. Adam—the wren-slaughterer—prove me a coward? No, indeed. All misgiving gone, I girded my dressing-gown tighter around me, and continued the descent.

It was a jolting and arduous business, and as I paused on the next landing, I now looked into the moon-bathed vacancy of my father's bedroom. Dismantled, littered with paper and the fragments of wood and glass of a picture my mother had given him, a great hole in the plaster, a broken chair straddling in the midst—a hideous spectacle it was. An immense moth with greenly glowing eyes, lured out of its roosting place, came fluttering round my candle, fanning my cheek with its plumy wings. I shaded the flame and smiled up at the creature which, not being of a kind that is bent on self-slaughter, presently wafted away. The lower I descended the filthier grew my journey. My stub of candle was fast wasting; and what use should I be to Pollie's messenger? When indeed in the muck and refuse left by the Sale, I reached the door, it was too late. He was now beating with his fists at the rear of the house; and I must needs climb down the last flight of the back wooden staircase used by the servants. When at last the great stagnant kitchen came into view, it was my whole inward self that cried out in me. Its stone flags were swarming with cockroaches.

These shelled, nocturnal, sour-smelling creatures are among the few insects that fill me with horror. By comparison the devil's coachman may be worse-tempered, but he is a gentleman. The very thought of one of them rearing itself against my slippered foot filled me with disgust; and the males were winged. They went scurrying away into hiding, infants seemingly to their mothers, whisper, whisper—I felt sick at the sight. There came a noise at the window. Peering from round my candle flame I perceived Adam's dusky face, with its long nose, staring in at me through the glass. At sight of the plight I was in, he burst into a prolonged guffaw of laughter. This enraged me beyond measure. I stamped my foot, and at last he sobered down enough to yell through the glass that Pollie's mother had sent him to see that I was safe and had forgotten to give him the house-key. Pollie herself would be with me next morning.

I waved my candle at him in token that I understood. At this the melted grease once more trickled over and ran scalding up my arm. The candle fell to the floor, went out; the pale moonshine spread through the air. I could see Adam's conical head outlined against the soft light of the sky; though he could no longer see me. Horror of the cockroaches returned on me. Instantly I turned tail, leaving the lump of tallow for their spoil.

How, in that dark, high house, I managed to remount those stairs, I cannot conceive. Youth and persistency, I suppose. I doubt if I could do it now. Utterly exhausted and bedraggled I regained my bedroom at last without further misadventure. I sponged the smoke and grime from face and hands in my washbowl, hung my dressing-gown where the morning air might refresh it, and was soon in a dead sleep, from which I think even the Angel Gabriel would have failed to arouse me.

Chapter Seven

When I awoke, the morning sky was gay with sunshine, there was a lisping and gurgling of starlings on the roof, the roar of the little river in flood after the rains shook the air at my window, and there sat Pollie, in her outdoor clothes, the rest of the packing done and she awaiting breakfast. Unstirringly from my pillow I scrutinized the plump, red-cheeked face with its pale-blue prominent eyes dreaming out of the window; and sorrow welled up in me at the thought of the past and of how near drew our separation. She heard me move, and kneeling and stooping low over my bed, with her work-roughened finger she stroked the hand that lay on my coverlet. A pretty sight I must have looked—after my night's experiences. We whispered a little together. She was now a sedater young woman, but still my Pollie of the apples and novelettes. And whether or not it is because early custom is second nature, she is still the only person whom my skin does not a little creep against when necessity calls for a beast of burden.

Her desertion of me the night before had been caused by the untimely death of one of her father's three Alderney cows—a mild, horned creature, which I had myself often seen in the meadows cropping among the buttercups, and whose rich-breathed nose I had once had the courage to ask to stroke with my hand. This ill-fated beast at first threat of the storm, had taken shelter with her companions under an oak. Scarcely had the lightnings begun to play when she was struck down by a "thunderbolt." It was a tragedy after Pollie's heart. She had (she said) fainted dead off at news of it—and we bemoaned the event in concert. In return I told her my dream of the garden. Nothing would then content her but she must fetch from under her mattress Napoleon's Book of Fate, a legacy from Mrs Ballard.

"But, Pollie," I demurred; "a dream is only a dream."

"Honest, miss," she replied, thumbing over the pages, "there's some of 'em means what happens and comes true, and they'll tell secrets too if they be searched about. More'n a month before Mrs Ballard fell out with master she dreamed that one of the speckled hens had laid an egg in the kitchen dresser. There it was clucking among the crockery. And to dream of eggs, the book says, is to be certain sure of getting the place you are after, and which she wrote off to a friend in London and is there now!"

What more was there to say? So presently Pollie succeeded in turning to "Pears" in the grease-grimed book, and spelled out slowly:—

"Pears.—To dream of pears is in-di-ca-tive of great wealth (which means riches, miss); and that you will rise to a much higher spear than the one you at present occupy. To a woman they denote that she will marry a person far above her in rank (lords and suchlike, miss, if you please), and that she will live in great state. To persons in trade they denote success and future prosperity and eleviation. They also indi- indicate constancy in love and happiness in the marriage state."

Her red cheeks grew redder with this exertion of scholarship, and I burst out laughing. "Ah, miss," she cried in confusion, "laugh you may, and that's what Sarah said to the Angel. But mark my words if something of it don't hap out like what the book says."

"Then, Pollie," said I, "there's nothing for it but to open a butcher's shop. For live in great state I can't and won't, not if the Prince of Wales himself was to ask me in marriage."

"Lor, miss," retorted Pollie in shocked accents, "and him a married man with grown-up sons and all." But she forgave me my mockery. As for the Dream Book, doubtless young Bonaparte must often have dreamed of Pears in Corsica; and no less indubitably have I lived in "great state"—though without much eleviation.

But the day was hasting on. My toilet must be made, and the preparations for our journey completed. Now that the dawn of my new fortunes was risen, expectancy filled my mind, and the rain-freshened skies and leaves of the morning renewed my spirits. Our train—the first in my experience—was timed to leave our country railway station at 3.3 p.m. By one o'clock, all the personal luggage that I was to take with me had been sewn up in a square of canvas, and corded. The rest of my belongings—my four-poster, etc.—were to be stowed in a large packing-case and sent after me. First impressions endure. No great store of sagacity was needed to tell me that. So I had chosen my clothes carefully, determined to show my landlady that I meant to have my own way and not be trifled with. My dear Mrs Bowater!—she would be amused to hear that.

Pollie bustled downstairs. I stood in the midst of the sunlit, dismantled room, light and shadow at play upon ceiling and walls, the sun-pierced air a silvery haze of dust. A host of memories and thoughts, like a procession in a dream, traversed my mind. A strangeness, too—as if even this novel experience of farewell was a vague recollection beyond defined recall. Pollie returned with the new hat in the paper bag in which she had brought it from home: and I was her looking-glass when she had put it on. Then from top to basement she carried me through every room in the house, and there on the kitchen floor, mute witness of the past, lay the beetle-gnawn remnant of my candle-stub. We wandered through the garden, glinting green in the cool flocking sunbeams after the rain; and already vaunting its escape from Man. Pollie was returning to Lyndsey—I not! My heart was too full to let me linger by the water. I gazed at the stones and the wild flowers in a sorrowful hunger of farewell. Trifles, soon to be dying, how lovely they were. The thought of it swallowed me up. What was the future but an emptiness? Would that I might vanish away and be but a portion of the sweetness of the morning. Even Pollie's imperturbable face wore the appearance of make-believe; for an instant I surprised the whole image of me reflected in her round blue eye.

The Waggetts' wagonette was at the door, but not—and I was thankful—not my Adam, but the old Adam, his father. My luggage was pushed under the seat. I was set up, to be screened as far as possible from the wind, beside Pollie and behind Mr Waggett—no stranger to me with his neat, dark whiskers, for in the old days, at dinner parties, he would wait at table. I see him now—as gentlemanlike as a Devil's Coachhorse—entering the kitchen with his little black bag. Only once I swiftly turned my head over my shoulder toward the house. Then we were outside the iron gates, and bumping along through the puddles between the bowery hedges towards the station.

I thought of my father and mother lying side by side, beyond the sullen drift of nettles, under the churchyard wall. Miss Fenne had taken me there many weeks before in her faded barouche with the gaunt white mare. Not a word had I breathed to her of my anguish at sight of the churchyard. The whole afternoon was a nightmare. She regaled the journey with sentiments on death and the grave. Throughout it, I was in danger of slipping out of her sight; for the buttons on the sage-green leather seat were not only a discomfort but had failed to aid me to sit upright; and nothing would have induced me to catch at the trimmings of her dolman to save myself from actually falling off into the pit of her carriage. There sat her ancient coachman; clutter-clutter plodded the hoofs; what a monstrous, monstrous world—and she cackling on and on—like a hen over its egg.

But now the novelty of this present experience, the flowery cottages, Mr Waggett's square, sorrel nag, the ballooning northwesterly clouds, the aromatic rusty hedgerows, the rooks in the cornfields—all these sights and sounds called joy into my mind, and far too soon the bright-painted railway station at the hill-bottom hove into sight, and our drive was over. I was lifted down into Pollie's arms again. Then followed a foolish chaffering over the tickets, which Mr Waggett had volunteered to purchase for us at the rounded window. The looming face beyond had caught sight of me, and the last words I heard bawled through for any to hear were: "Lor, Mr Waggett, I'd make it a quarter for 'ee if it was within regulations. But 'tain't so, the young lady's full natural size in the eye of the law, and I couldn't give in to 'ee not even if 'twas a honeymooning you was after." No doubt it was wholesome to learn as quickly as possible how easy a butt I was to be for the jests of the good-humoured. On that occasion it was a bitter pill. I felt even Pollie choke down a laugh into her bosom. My cheek whitened, but I said nothing.

An enormous din at the moment shattered around me, ten thousand times harsher to my nerves than any mere witticism could be. My first "steam-monster" was entering the station. All but stunned by its clatter, I barely had the presence of mind to thank Mr Waggett for the little straw basket of three greengages, and the nosegay of cherry-pie which he had thrust into my arms. My canvas-wrapped package was pushed in under the seat, the door was slammed to, the guard waved his green flag, Mr Waggett touched his hat: and our journey was begun.

Fortunately Pollie and I found ourselves in an empty carriage. The scream of the whistle, the grinding jar of the wheels, the oppressive odour of Mr Waggett's bouquet—I leaned back on her to recover my wits. But the cool air blowing in on my face and a far-away sniff from a little glass bottle with which her mother had fortified her for the journey, quickly revived me, and I was free to enjoy the novelties of steam-travel. My eyes dizzied at the wide revolving scene that was now spread out beneath the feathery vapours. How strange it was to see the green country world—meadow and stream and wooded hill—thus wheel softly by. If Pollie and I could have shared it alone, it would have been among my pleasantest memories.

But at the next stopping places other passengers climbed into the carriage; and five complete strangers soon shared the grained wood box in which we were enclosed. There was a lady in black, with her hair smoothed up under her bonnet, and a long pale nose; and up against her sat her little boy, a fine fair, staring child of about five years of age. A black-clothed, fat little man with a rusty leather bag, over the lock of which he kept clasped his finger and thumb, quietly seated himself. He cast but one dark glance about him and immediately shut his eyes. In the corner was an older man with a beard under his chin, gaiters, and a hard, wide-brimmed hat. Besides these, there was a fat countrywoman on the same side as Pollie and I, whom I could hear breathing and could not see, and a dried-up, bird-eyed woman opposite in a check shawl, with heavy metal ear-rings dangling at her ears. She sat staring blankly and bleakly at things close as if they were at a distance.

My spirit drank in this company. So rapt was I that I might have been a stock of wood. Gathered together in this small space they had the appearance of animals, and, if they had not been human, what very alarming ones. As long as I merely sat and watched their habits I remained unnoticed. But the afternoon sun streamed hot on roof and windows: and the confined air was soon so dense with a variety of odours, that once more my brain dizzied, and I must clutch at Pollie's arm for support. At this movement the little boy, who had more than once furtively glanced at me, crouched wriggling back against his mother, and, edging his face aside, piped up into her ear, "Mamma, is that alive?"

The train now stood motionless, a fine array of hollyhocks and sunflowers flared beyond the window, and his voice rang out shrill as a bird in the quiet of afternoon. Tiny points of heat broke out all over me, as one by one my fellow passengers turned their astonished faces in my direction. Even the man with the leather bag heard the question. The small, bead-brown eyes wheeled from under their white lids and fixed me with their stare.

"Hush, my dear," said the lady, no less intent but less open in her survey; "hush, look at the pretty cows!"

"But she is, mamma. It moved. I saw that move," he asseverated, looking along cornerwise at me out of his uptilted face.

Those blue eyes! a mingling of delight, horror, incredulity, even greed swam in their shallow deeps. I stood leaning close to Pollie's bosom, breathless and helpless, a fascinating object, no doubt. Never before had I been transfixed like this in one congregated stare. I felt myself gasp like a fish. It was the old farmer in the corner who at last came to my rescue. "Alive! I warrant. Eh, ma'am?" he appealed to poor Pollie. "And an uncommon neat-fashioned young lady, too. Off to Whipham Fair, I'll be bound."

The bag-man turned with a creeping grin on his tallowy features and muttered some inaudible jest out of the corner of his mouth to the gipsy. She eyed him fiercely, drawing her lips from her bright teeth in a grimace more of contempt than laughter. Once more the engine hooted and we glided on our way.

"I want that, mamma," whispered the child. "I want that dear little lady. Give that teeny tiny lady a biscuit."

At this new sally universal merriment filled the carriage. We were jogging along in fine style. This, then, was Miss Fenne's "network." A helpless misery and bitterness swept through me, the heavy air swirled; and then—whence, from whom, I know not—self-possession returned to me. Why, I had chosen my fate: I must hold my own.

My young admirer, much against his mother's inclination, had managed to fetch out a biscuit from her reticule—a star-shaped thing, graced with a cone of rose-tinted sugar. Still crouching back like a chick under her wing, he stretched his bribe out at arm's length towards me, in a pink, sweat-sparked hand. All this while Pollie had sat like a lump beside me, clutching her basket, a vacant, flushed smile on her round face. I drew myself up, and supporting myself by her wicker basket, advanced with all the dignity at my command to the peak of her knees, and, stretching out my hand in return, accepted the gift. I even managed to make him an indulgent little bow, feigned a nibble at the lump of food, then planted it on the dusty ledge beneath the carriage window.

A peculiar silence followed. With a long sigh the child hid his face in his mother's sleeve. She drew him closer and smiled carefully into nothingness. "There," she murmured, "now mother's treasure must sit still and be a good boy. I can't think why papa didn't take—second-class tickets."

"But nor did that kind little lady's papa," returned the child stoutly.

The kindly old farmer continued to gloat on me, gnarled hands on knees. But I could not bear it. I quietly surveyed him until he was compelled to rub his face with his fingers, and so cover its retreat to his own window. The gipsy woman kept her ferocious, birdlike stare on me, with an occasional stealthy glance at Pollie. The bag-man's lids closed down. For the rest of the journey—though passengers came and went—I kept well back, and was left in peace. It was my first real taste of the world's curiosity, mockery, aversion, and flattery. One practical lesson it taught me. From that day forward I never set out on any such journey unless thickly veiled. For then, though the inquisitive may see me, they cannot tell whether or not I see them, or what my feelings may be. It is a real comfort; though, from what I have read, it appears to be the condition rather of a ghost than of a normal young lady.

But now the sun had begun to descend and the rays of evening to stain the fields. We loitered on from station to station. To my relief Pollie had at last munched her way through the pasties and sweetmeats stowed in her basket. My nosegay of cherry-pie was fainting for want of water. In heavy sleep the bag-man and gipsy sat woodenly nodding and jerking side by side. The lady had delicately composed her face and shut her eyes. The little boy slumbered serenely with his small red mouth wide open. Languid and heavy, I dared not relax my vigilance. But in the desolation that gathered over me I almost forgot my human company, and returned to the empty house which seemingly I had left for ever—the shadows of yet another nightfall already lengthening over its flowers and sward.

Could I not hear the silken rustle of the evening primrose unfolding her petals? Soon the cool dews would be falling on the stones where I was wont to sit in reverie beside the flowing water. It seemed indeed that my self had slipped from my body, and hovered entranced amid the thousand jargonings of its tangled lullaby. Was there, in truth, a wraith in me that could so steal out; and were the invisible inhabitants in their fortresses beside my stream conscious of its presence among them, and as happy in my spectral company as I in theirs?

I floated up out of these ruminations to find that my young pasha had softly awakened and was gazing at me in utter incredulity from sleep-gilded eyes. We exchanged a still, protracted, dwelling smile, and for the only time in my life I actually saw a fellow-creature fall in love!

"Oh, but mamma, mamma, I do beseech you," he called up at her from the platform where he was taking his last look at me through the dingy oblong window, "please, please, I want her for mine; I want her for mine!"

I held up his biscuit in my hand, laughing and nodding. The whistle knelled, our narrow box drew slowly out of the station. As if heartbroken, he took his last look at me, petulantly flinging aside his mother's hand. He had lost me for ever, and Pollie and I were alone again.

Beechwood

Chapter Eight

Still the slow train bumped on, loath to drag itself away from the happy harvest fields. Darkness was near when we ourselves alighted at our destination, mounted into a four-wheeled cab, and once more were in motion in the rain-laid dust. On and on rolled Pollie and I and our luggage together, in such ease and concealment after the hard wooden seats and garish light that our journey began to seem—as indeed I wished for the moment it might prove—interminable. One after another the high street lamps approached, flung their radiance into our musty velvet cabin, and went gliding by. Ever and again the luminous square of a window beyond the outspread branches of a tree would float on. Then suddenly our narrow solitude was invaded by the bright continuous flare flung into it from a row of shops.

Never before had I been out after nightfall. I gazed enthralled at the splendours of fruit and cakes, silks and sweetmeats packed high behind the glass fronts. Wasn't I myself the heiress of £110 a year? Indeed I was drinking in Romance, and never traveller surveyed golden Moscow or the steeps of Tibet with keener relish than I the liquid amber, ruby, and emerald that summoned its customers to a wayside chemist's shop. Twenty—what a child I was! I smile now at these recollections with an indulgence not unmixed with envy. It is Moscow survives, not the artless traveller.

After climbing a long hill—the wayside houses steadily thinning out as we ascended—the cab came to a standstill. The immense, shapeless old man who had so miraculously found our way for us, and who on this mild August evening was muffled up to his eyes in a thick ulster, climbed down backwards from his box and opened the door. At the same moment, as if by clockwork, opened another door—that of the last house on the hill. I was peering out of the cab, then, at my home; and framed in that lighted oblong stood Mrs Bowater. All utterly different from what I had foreseen: this much smaller house, this much taller landlady, and—dear me, how fondly I had trusted that she would not for the first time set eyes on her lodger being carried into her house. I had in fancy pictured myself bowing a composed and impressive greeting to her from her own hearthrug. But it was not to be.

Pollie lifted me out, settled me on her arm, and my feet did not touch terra firma again until she had ascended the five stone steps and we were within the passage.

"Lor, miss; then here we are," she sighed breathlessly, then returned to the cabman to pay him his fare. Even dwarfed a little perhaps by my mourning, there I stood, breathed upon by the warm air of the house, in the midst of a prickly doormat, on the edge of the shiny patterned oilcloth that glossed away into the obscurity from under the gaslight in front of me; and there stood my future landlady. For the first time, with head thrown back, I scanned a countenance that was soon to become so familiar and so endeared. Mrs Bowater's was a stiff and angular figure. She, too, was in black, with a long, springside boot. The bony hands hung down in their peculiar fashion from her elbows. A large cameo brooch adorned the flat chest. A scanty velvet patch of cap failed to conceal the thin hair sleekly parted in the middle over the high narrow temples. The long dark face with its black, set eyes, was almost without expression, except that of a placid severity. She gazed down at me, as I up at her, steadily, silently.

"So this is the young lady," she mused at last, as if addressing a hidden and distant listener. "I hope you are not over-fatigued by your journey, miss. Please to step in."

To my ear, Mrs Bowater's was what I should describe as a low, roaring voice, like falling water out of a black cloven rock in a hill-side; but what a balm was its sound in my ear, and how solacing this dignified address to jaded nerves still smarting a little after my victory on the London, Chatham, and Dover Railway. Making my way around a grandfather's clock that ticked hollowly beside the door, I followed her into a room on the left of the passage, from either wall of which a pair of enormous antlers threatened each other under the discoloured ceiling. For a moment the glare within and the vista of furniture legs confused my eyes. But Mrs Bowater came to my rescue.

"Food was never mentioned," she remarked reflectively, "being as I see nothing to be considered except as food so-called. But you will find everything clean and comfortable; and I am sure, miss, what with your sad bereavements and all, as I have heard from Mr Pellew, I hope it will be a home to you. There being nothing else as I suppose that we may expect."

My mind ran about in a hasty attempt to explore these sentiments. They soothed away many misgivings, though it was clear that Mrs Bowater's lodger was even less in dimensions than Mrs Bowater had supposed. Clean: after so many months of Mrs Sheppey's habits, it was this word that sang in my head. Wood, glass, metal flattered the light of gas and coal, and for the first time I heard my own voice float up into my new "apartment": "It looks very comfortable, thank you, Mrs Bowater; and I am quite sure I shall be happy in my new abode." There was nothing intentionally affected in this formal little speech.

"Which being so," replied Mrs Bowater, "there seems to be trouble with the cabman, and the day's drawing in, perhaps you will take a seat by the fire."

A stool nicely to my height stood by the steel fender, the flames played in the chimney; and for a moment I was left alone. "Thank God," said I, and took off my hat, and pushed back my hair.... Alone. Only for a moment, though. Its mistress gone, as fine a black cat as ever I have seen appeared in the doorway and stood, green-eyed, regarding me. To judge from its countenance, this must have been a remarkable experience.

I cried seductively, "Puss."

But with a blink of one eye and a shake of its forepaw, as if inadvertently it had trodden in water, it turned itself about again and disappeared. In spite of all my cajoleries, Henry and I were never to be friends.

Whatever Pollie's trouble with the cabman may have been, Mrs Bowater made short work of it. Pollie was shown to the room in which she was to sleep that night. I took off my bodice and bathed face, hands, and arms to the elbow in the shallow bowl Mrs Bowater had provided for me. And soon, wonderfully refreshed and talkative, Pollie and I were seated over the last meal we were to share together for many a long day.

There were snippets of bread and butter for me, a little omelette, two sizes too large, a sugared cherry or two sprinkled with "hundreds and thousands," and a gay little bumper of milk gilded with the enwreathed letters, "A Present from Dover." Alack-a-day for that omelette! I must have kept a whole family of bantams steadily engaged for weeks together. But I was often at my wits' end to dispose of their produce. Fortunately Mrs Bowater kept merry fires burning in the evening—"Ladies of some sizes can't warm the air as much as most," as she put it. So at some little risk to myself among the steel fire-irons, the boiled became the roast. At last I made a clean breast of my horror of eggs, and since by that time my landlady and I were the best of friends, no harm came of it. She merely bestowed on me a grim smile of unadulterated amusement, and the bantams patronized some less fastidious stomach.

My landlady was a heavy thinker, and not a copious—though a leisurely—talker. Minutes would pass, while with dish or duster in hand she pondered a speech; then perhaps her long thin lips would only shut a little tighter, or a slow, convulsive rub of her lean forefinger along the side of her nose would indicate the upshot. But I soon learned to interpret these mute signs. She was a woman who disapproved of most things, for excellent, if nebulous, reasons; and her silences were due not to the fact that she had nothing to say, but too much.

Pollie and I talked long and earnestly that first evening at Beechwood. She promised to write to me, to send me all the gossip of the village, and to come and see me when she could. The next morning, after a sorrowful breakfast, we parted. Standing on the table in the parlour window, with eyes a little wilder than usual, I watched her pass out of sight. A last wave of her handkerchief, and the plump-cheeked, fair-skinned face was gone. The strangeness and solitude of my situation flooded over me.

For a few days, strive as she might, Mrs Bowater's lodger moped. It was not merely that she had become more helpless, but of far less importance. This may, in part, be accounted for by the fact that, having been accustomed at Lyndsey to live at the top of a high house and to look down on the world, when I found myself foot to foot with it, so to speak, on Beechwood Hill, it alarmingly intensified the sense of my small stature. Use and habit however. The relative merits of myself and of the passing scene gradually readjusted themselves with a proper respect for the former. Soon, too, as if from heaven, the packing-case containing my furniture arrived. Mrs Bowater shared a whole morning over its unpacking, ever and again standing in engrossed consideration of some of my minute treasures, and, quite unaware of it, heaving a great sigh. But how to arrange them there in a room already over-occupied?

Chapter Nine

A carpenter of the name of Bates was called in, so distant a relative of Mrs Bowater's apparently that she never by nod, word, or look acknowledged the bond. Mr Bates held my landlady in almost speechless respect. "A woman in a thousand," he repeatedly assured me, when we were grown a little accustomed to one another; "a woman in ten thousand. And if things hadn't been what they was, you may understand, they might have turned out different. Ah, miss, there's one looking down on us could tell a tale." I looked up past his oblong head at the ceiling, but only a few flies were angling round the chandelier.

Mrs Bowater's compliments were less indirect. "That Bates," she would say, surveying his day's handiwork after he was gone, "is all thumbs."

He was certainly rather snail-like in his movements, and spent most of his time slowly rubbing his hands on the stiff apron that encased him. But I minded his thumbs far less than his gluepot.

Many years have passed, yet at the very whisper of his name, that inexpressible odour clouds up into my nose. It now occurs to me for the first time that he never sent in his bill. Either his memory failed him, or he carpentered for love. Level with the wide table in the window recess, strewn over with my small Persian mats, whereon I sat, sewed, read, and took my meals, Mr Bates constructed a broad shelf, curtained off on three sides from the rest of the room. On this wooden stage stood my four-poster, wardrobe, and other belongings. It was my bedchamber. From table to floor he made a staircase, so that I could easily descend and roam the room at large. The latter would have been more commodious if I could have persuaded Mrs Bowater to empty it a little. If I had kept on looking at the things in it I am sure I should have gone mad. Even tact was unavailing. If only there had been the merest tinge of a Cromwell in my character, the baubles that would have been removed!

There were two simpering plaster figures—a Shepherd and Shepherdess—nearly half my height on the chimney-piece, whom I particularly detested; also an enlarged photograph in a discoloured frame on the wall—that of a thick-necked, formidable man, with a bush of whisker on either cheek, and a high, quarrelsome stare. He made me feel intensely self-conscious. It was like a wolf looking all day into a sheep-fold. So when I had my meals, I invariably turned my back on his portrait.

I went early to bed. But now that the autumnal dusks were shortening, an hour or two of artificial light was necessary. The flare of the gas dazzled and stupefied me, and gave me a kind of hunted feeling; so Mrs Bowater procured for me a couple of fine little glass candlesticks. In bed I sometimes burned a wax-light in a saucer, a companionable thing for night-thoughts in a strange place. Often enough I sat through the evening with no other illumination than that of the smouldering coals, so that I could see out of the window. It was an endless source of amusement to withdraw the muslin curtains, gaze out over the darkened fields beyond the roadway, and let my day-dreams wander at will.

At nine o'clock Mrs Bowater would bring me my supper—some fragments of rusk, or of bread, and milk. My food was her constant anxiety. The difficulty, as she explained, was to supply me with little enough to eat—at least of cooked food: "It dries up in the winking of an eye." So her cat, Henry, fared more sumptuously than ever, though the jealous creature continued to reject all my advances, and as far as possible ignored my existence. "Simple victuals, by all means, miss," Mrs Bowater would admit. "But if it don't enjoy, the inside languishes; and you are not yet of an age that can fall back on skin and bone."

The question of food presently introduced that of money. She insisted on reducing her charges to twenty shillings a week. "There's the lodging, and there's the board, the last being as you might say all but unmentionable; and honesty the best policy though I have never tried the reverse." So, in spite of all my protestations, it was agreed. And I thus found myself mistress of a round fifty-eight pounds a year over and above what I paid to Mrs Bowater. Messrs Harris, Harris, and Harris were punctual as quarter-day: and so was I. I "at once" paid over to my landlady £13 and whatever other sum was needful. The "charity" my godmother had recommended began, and, alas, remained at home. I stowed the rest under lock and key in one of my grandfather's boxes which I kept under my bed. This was an imprudent habit, perhaps. Mrs Bowater advocated the Penny Bank. But the thought of my money being so handy and palpable reassured me. I would count it over in my mind, as if it were a means to salvation; and became, in consequence, near and parsimonious.

Occasionally when she had "business" to transact, Mrs Bowater would be off to London. There she would purchase for me any little trifle required for the replenishment of my wardrobe. Needing so little, I could afford the finest materials; my sovereign was worth at least sixty shillings. Rather than "fine," Mrs Bowater preferred things "good"; and for this "goodness," I must confess, she sometimes made rather alarming sacrifices of appearance. Still, I was already possessed of a serviceable stock of clothes, and by aid of one of my dear mother's last presents to me, a shiny Swiss miniature workbox with an inlaid picture of the Lake of Geneva on the lid, I soon became a passable needlewoman.

I love bright, pure colours, and, my sweeping and dusting and bedmaking over, and my external mourning for my father at an end, a remarkably festive figure would confront me in my cheval glass of an afternoon. The hours I spent in dressing my hair and matching this bit of colour with that. I would talk to myself in the glass, too, for company's sake, and make believe I was a dozen different characters. I was young. I pined for life and companionship, and having only my own—for Mrs Bowater was rather a faithful feature of the landscape than a fellow being—I made as much, and as many, of myself as possible.

Another question that deeply engaged my landlady was my health. She mistrusted open windows, but strongly recommended "air." What insidious maladies she spied around me! Indeed that September was unusually hot. I sat on my table in the window like a cricket in an oven, sorely missing my high open balcony, the garden, and the stream. Once and again Mrs Bowater would take me for a little walk after sunset. Discretion to her was much the better part of valour; nor had I quite recovered from my experiences in the train. But such walks—though solitary enough at that hour of the day—were straggly and irksome. Pollie's arm had been a kind of second nature to me; but Mrs Bowater, I think, had almost as fastidious a disinclination to carrying me as I have to being carried. I languished for liberty. Being a light sleeper, I would often awake at daybreak and the first call of the birds. Then the hill—which led to Tyddlesdon End and Love (or Loose) Lane—was deserted. Thought of the beyond haunted me like a passion. At a convenient moment I intimated to Mrs Bowater how secure was the street at this early hour, how fresh the meadows, and how thirsty for independent outings her lodger. "Besides, Mrs Bowater, I am not a child, and who could see me?"

After anxious and arduous discussion, Mr Bates was once more consulted. He wrapped himself in a veritable blanket of reflection, and all but became unconscious before he proposed a most ingenious device. With Mrs Bowater's consent, she being her own landlady and amused at the idea, he cut out of one of the lower panels of her parlour door a round-headed opening just of an easy size to suit me. In this aperture he hung a delicious little door that precisely fitted it. So also with the door into the street—to which he added a Brahmah lock. By cementing a small square stone into the corner of each of the steps down from the porch, he eased that little difficulty. May Heaven bless Mr Bates! With his key round my neck, stoop once, stoop twice, a scamper down his steps, and I was free—as completely mistress of my goings-out and of my comings-in as every self-respecting person should be.

"That's what my father would have called a good job, Mr Bates," said I cordially.

He looked yearningly at me, as if about to impart a profound secret; but thought better of it. "Well, miss, what I say is, a job's a job; and if it is a job, it's a job that should be made a job of."

As I dot the i's and cross the t's of this manuscript, I often think—a little ruefully—of Mr Bates.

As soon as daybreak was piercing into my region of the sky, and before Mrs Bowater or the rest of the world was stirring, I would rise, make my candlelit toilet, and hasten out into the forsaken sweet of the morning. If it broke wet or windy, I could turn over and go to sleep again. A few hundred yards up the hill, the road turned off, as I have said, towards Tyddlesdon End and Loose Lane—very stony and steep. On the left, and before the fork, a wicket gate led into the woods and the park of empty "Wanderslore." To the verge of these deserted woods made a comfortable walk for me.

If, as might happen, any other wayfarer was early abroad, I could conceal myself in the tussocks of grass and bushes that bordered the path. In my thick veil, with my stout green parasol and inconspicuous shawl, I made a queer and surprising figure no doubt. Indeed, from what I have heard, the ill fame of Wanderslore acquired a still more piquant flavour in the town by reports that elf-folk had been descried on its outskirts. But if I sometimes skipped and capered in these early outings, it was for exercise as well as suppressed high spirits. To be prepared, too, for the want of such facilities in the future, I had the foresight to accustom myself to Mrs Bowater's steep steps as well as to my cemented-in "Bateses," as I called them. My only difficulty was to decide whether to practice on them when I was fresh at the outset of my walk, or fatigued at the end of it. Naturally people grow "peculiar" when much alone: self plays with self, and the mimicry fades.

These little expeditions, of course, had their spice of danger, and it made them the more agreeable. A strange dog might give me a fright. There was an old vixen which once or twice exchanged glances with me at a distance. But with my parasol I was a match for most of the creatures which humanity has left unslaughtered. My sudden appearance might startle or perplex them. But if few were curious, fewer far were unfriendly. Boys I feared most. A hulking booby once stoned me through the grass, but fortunately he was both a coward and a poor marksman. Until winter came, I doubt if a single sunshine morning was wasted. Many a rainy one, too, found me splashing along, though then I must be a careful walker to avoid a sousing.

The birds renewed their autumn song, the last flowers were blossoming. Concealed by scattered tufts of bracken where an enormous beech forked its roots and cast a golden light from its withering leaves, I would spend many a solitary hour. Above the eastern tree-tops my Kent stretched into the distance beneath the early skies. Far to my left and a little behind me rose the chimneys of gloomy Wanderslore. Breathing in the gentle air, the dreamer within would stray at will. There I kept the anniversary of my mother's birthday; twined a wreath for her of ivy-flowers and winter green; and hid it secretly in a forsaken blackbird's nest in the woods.

Still I longed for my old home again. Mrs Bowater's was a stuffy and meagre little house, and when meals were in preparation, none too sweet to the nose. Especially low I felt, when a scrawling letter was now and then delivered by the postman from Pollie. Her spelling and grammar intensified my homesickness. Miss Fenne, too, had not forgotten me. I pored over her spidery epistles till my head ached. Why, if I had been so rash and undutiful, was she so uneasy? Even the texts she chose had a parched look. The thought of her spectacling my minute handwriting and examining the proof that I was still a child of wrath, gave my pride a silly qualm. So Mrs Bowater came to my rescue, and between us we concocted replies to her which, I am afraid, were not more intelligible for a tendency on my landlady's part to express my sentiments in the third person.

This little service set her thinking of Sunday and church. She was not, she told me, "what you might call a religious woman," having been compelled "to keep her head up in the world, and all not being gold that glitters." She was none the less a regular attendant at St Peter's—a church a mile or so away in the valley, whose five bells of a Sabbath evening never failed to recall my thoughts to Lyndsey and to dip me into the waters of melancholy. I loved their mellow clanging in the lap of the wind, yet it was rather doleful to be left alone with my candles, and only Henry sullenly squatting in the passage awaiting his mistress's return.

"Not that you need making any better, miss," Mrs Bowater assured me. "Even a buttercup—or a retriever dog, for that matter—being no fuller than it can hold of what it is, in a manner of speaking. But there's the next world to be accounted for, and hopes of reunion on another shore, where, so I understand, mere size, body or station, will not be noticeable in the sight of the Lamb. Not that I hold with the notion that only the good so-called will be there."

This speech, I must confess, made me exceedingly uncomfortable.

"Wherever I go, Mrs Bowater," I replied hastily, "I shall not be happy unless you are there."

"D. V.," said Mrs Bowater, grimly, "I will."

Still, I remained unconverted to St Peter's. Why, I hardly know: perhaps it was her reference to its pew rents, or her description of the vicar's daughters (who were now nursing their father at Tunbridge Wells), or maybe even it was a stare from her husband which I happened at that precise moment to intercept from the wall. Possibly if I myself had taken a "sitting," this aura of formality would have faded away. Mrs Bowater was a little reassured, however, to hear that my father and mother, in spite of Miss Fenne, had seldom taken me to church. They had concluded that my absence was best both for me and for the congregation. And I told her of our little evening services in the drawing-room, with Mrs Ballard, the parlourmaid, Pollie, and the Boy on the sofa, just as it happened to be their respective "Sundays in."

This set her mind at rest. Turn and turn about, on one Sunday evening she went to St Peter's and brought back with her the text and crucial fragments of Mr Crimble's sermon, and on the next we read the lessons together and sang a hymn. Once, indeed, I embarked upon a solo, "As pants the hart," one of my mother's favourite airs. But I got a little shaky at "O for the wings," and there was no rambling, rumbling chorus from my father. But Sunday was not my favourite day on Beechwood Hill. Mrs Bowater looked a little formal with stiff white "frilling" round her neck. She reminded me of a leg of mutton. To judge from the gloom and absentmindedness into which they sometimes plunged her, quotations from Mr Crimble could be double-edged. My real joy was to hear her views on the fashions and manners of her fellow-worshippers.

Well, so the months went by. Winter came with its mists and rains and frosts, and a fire in the polished grate was no longer an evening luxury but a daily need. As often as possible I went out walking. When the weather was too inclement, I danced for an hour or so, for joy and exercise, and went swimming on a chair. I would entertain myself also in watching through the muslin curtains the few passers-by; sorting out their gaits, and noses, and clothes, and acquaintances, and guessing their characters, occupations, and circumstances. Certain little looks and movements led me to suppose that, even though I was perfectly concealed, the more sensitive among them were vaguely uneasy under this secret scrutiny. In such cases (though very reluctantly) I always drew my eyes away: first because I did not like the thought of encroaching on their privacy, and next, because I was afraid their uneasiness might prevent them coming again. But this microscopic examination of mankind must cease with dusk, and the candle-hours passed rather heavily at times. The few books I had brought away from Lyndsey were mine now nearly by heart. So my eye would often wander up to a small bookcase that hung out of reach on the other side of the chimney-piece.

Chapter Ten

One supper-time I ventured to ask Mrs Bowater if she would hand me down a tall, thin, dark-green volume, whose appearance had particularly taken my fancy. A simple enough request, but surprisingly received. She stiffened all over and eyed the bookcase with a singular intensity. "The books there," she said, "are what they call the dead past burying its dead."

Spoon in hand, I paused, looking now at Mrs Bowater and now at the coveted book. "Mr Bowater," she added from deep down in herself, "followed the sea." This was, in fact, Mr Bowater's début in our conversation, and her remark, uttered in so hollow yet poignant a tone, produced a romantic expectancy in my mind.

"Is——" I managed to whisper at last: "I hope Mr Bowater isn't dead?"

Mrs Bowater's eyes were like lead in her long, dark-skinned face. She opened her mouth, her gaze travelled slowly until, as I realized, it had fixed itself on the large yellowing photograph behind my back.

"Dead, no"; she echoed sepulchrally. "Worse than."

By which I understood that, far from being dead, Mr Bowater was still actively alive. And yet, apparently, not much the happier for that. Instantaneously I caught sight of a rocky, storm-strewn shore, such as I had seen in my Robinson Crusoe, and there Mr Bowater, still "following the sea."

"Never, never," continued Mrs Bowater in her Bible voice, "never to darken these doors again!" I stole an anxious glance over my shoulder. There was such a brassy boldness in the responsive stare that I was compelled to shut my eyes.

But Mrs Bowater had caught my expression. "He was, as some would say," she explained with gloomy pride, "a handsome man. Do handsome he did never. But there, miss, things being as they must be, and you in the green of your youth—though hearing the worst may be a wholesome physic if taken with care, as I have told Fanny many a time...." She paused to breathe. "What I was saying is, there can be no harm in your looking at the book if that's all there's to it." With that she withdrew the dry-looking volume from the shelf and laid it on the table beside my chair.

I got down, opened it in the middle (as my father had taught me, in order to spare the binding), opened it on a page inky black as night all over, but starred with a design as familiar to me as the lines on the palm of my hand.

"But oh! Mrs Bowater!" I cried, all in a breath, running across, dragging back the curtain, and pointing out into the night; "look, look, it's there! It's Orion!"

There, indeed, in the heavens beyond my window, straddling the dark, star for star the same as those in the book, stood the Giant, shaking his wondrous fires upon the air. Even Mrs Bowater was moved by my enthusiasm. She came to the table, compared at my direction chart with sky, and was compelled rather grudgingly to admit that her husband's book was at least true to the facts. Stooping low, I read out a brief passage. She listened. And it seemed a look of girlhood came into the shadowy face uplifted towards the window. So the stars came into my life, and faithful friends they have remained to this day.

Mrs Bowater's little house being towards the crest of the hill, with sunrise a little to the left across the meadows, my window commanded about three-fifths of the southern and eastern skies. By day I would kneel down and study for hours the charts, and thus be prepared for the dark. Night after night, when the weather was fair, or the windy clouds made mock of man's celestial patternings, I would sit in the glow of the firelight and summon these magic shiners each by name—Bellatrix, huge Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, and the rest. I would look at one, and, while so doing, watch another. This not only isolated the smaller stars, but gradually I became aware that they were one and all furtively signalling to me! About a fortnight later my old Lyndsey friend, the Dogstar, topped the horizon fringe of woodland. I heard myself shout at him across the world. His sudden molten bursts of crimson betwixt his emeralds and sapphires filled me with an almost ridiculous delight.

By the middle of December I had mastered all the greater stars in my region, and with my spyglass a few even of the Gammas and Deltas. But much of the zenith and all the north was closed to me, and—such is human greed—I began to pine beyond measure for a sight of Deneb, Vega, and the Chair. This desire grew unendurable, and led me into a piece of genuine foolhardiness. I determined to await the first clear still night and then to sally out and make my way, by hook or crook, up to my beech-roots, from which I should be able to command a fair stretch of the northern heavens. A quiet spell favoured me.

I waited until Mrs Bowater had gone to her bedroom, then muffled myself up in my thickest clothes and stole out into the porch. At my first attempt, one glance into the stooping dark was enough. At the second, a furtive sighing breath of wind, as I breasted the hill, suddenly flapped my mantle and called in my ear. I turned tail and fled. But never faint heart won fair constellation. At the third I pressed on.

The road was deserted. No earthly light showed anywhere except from a lamp-post this side of the curve of the hill. I frisked along, listening and peering, and brimming over with painful delight. The dark waned; and my eyes grew accustomed to the thin starlight. I gained the woods unharmed. Rich was my reward. There and then I begged the glimmering Polestar to be true to Mr Bowater. Fear, indeed, if in a friendly humour, is enlivening company. Instead of my parasol I had brought out a curved foreign knife (in a sheath at least five inches long) which I had discovered on my parlour what-not.

The whisperings of space, the calls of indetectable birds in the wastes of the sky, the sudden appearance of menacing or sinister shapes which vanished or melted themselves into mere stocks or stones as I drew near—my heart gave many an anguished jump. But quiet, and the magnificence of night, vanquished all folly at last. It seemed to me that a Being whom one may call Silence was brooding in solitude where living and human visitants are rare, and that in his company a harmless spirit may be at peace. Oblivious of my ungainly knife, yet keeping a firm arm on it, self seemed to be the whole scene there, and my body being so small I was perhaps less a disturber than were most intruders of that solemn repose.

Why I kept these night-walks secret, I cannot say. It was not apprehension of Mrs Bowater. She would have questioned my discretion, but would not, I think, have attempted to dissuade me from them against my will. No. It may be that every true astronomer is a miser at heart, and keeps some Lambda or Mu or lost nebula his eternal friend, named with his name, but unrecorded on any chart. For my part I hoarded the complete north for a while.

A fright I got one night, however, kept me indoors for the better part of a week. In my going out the little house door had been carelessly left unlatched. Algol and the red planet Mars had been my quarry among the floating woolpack clouds. The wind was lightly blowing from the north-west after the calm. I drew down my veil and set off briskly and lightheartedly for home.

The sight of the dark-looking hole in the door quickly sobered me down. All was quiet, however, but on entering my room, there was a strangeness in the air, and that not due to my landlady's forlorn trumpetings from above. Through the floating vaporous light I trod across to my staircase and was soon in bed. Hardly had my eyes closed when there broke out of the gloom around me a dismal, appalling cry. I soon realized that the creeping horror this caused in me was as nothing compared with that of the poor beast, lured, no doubt, into the house by Henry, at finding itself beneath a strange roof.

"Puss, puss," I pleaded shakenly; and again broke out that heart-sick cry.

Knife in hand, I descended my staircase and edging as far as possible from the baleful globes greenly burning beneath a mahogany chair, I threw open both doors and besought my unwelcome visitor to take his departure. The night wind came fluttering; there was the blur of a scuttering, shapeless form, and in the flash of an eye I was sprawling on the floor. A good deal shaken, with a nasty scratch on my thigh, but otherwise unharmed, I waved my hand after the fugitive and returned to bed.

The blood soon ceased to flow. Not daring to send my blood-stained nightgown to the wash, I concealed it behind my dresses in the wardrobe, and the next fine morning carried it off with me and buried it as deeply as I could in a deserted rabbit-burrow in the woods. Such is an evil conscience that, first, I had the fancy that during my digging a twig had inexplicably snapped in the undergrowth; and next, for "burnt offering," I made Mrs Bowater the present of an oval handglass set in garnets (one of my grandfather's gifts). This she took down to a local jeweller's to be mounted with a pin, and wore it on Sundays in place of her usual cameo depicting the Three Graces disporting themselves under a Palm-tree beside a Fountain.

Meanwhile I had heard a little more about the "Fanny" whom Mrs Bowater had mentioned. My landlady was indeed a slow confider. Fanny, I gathered, had a post as mistress at a school some forty miles away. She taught the little boys "English." The fleeting Miss Perry returned to mind, and with a faint dismay I heard that Fanny would soon be returning home for the Christmas holidays. Mrs Bowater's allusions to her were the more formidable for being veiled. I dreaded the invasion. Would she not come "between us"?

Then by chance I found hidden in my star-book the photograph of an infant in arms and of a pensive, ringleted woman, who, in spite of this morsel in her lap, seemed in her gaze out of nowhere to be vaguely afraid. On the back was scrawled in pencil: "F.: six weeks"—and an extremely cross six weeks "F." looked. For some inexplicable reason I pushed back this lady's photograph into the book, and said nothing about it. The suspicion had entered my mind that Fanny was only a daughter by marriage. I sank into a kind of twilight reflection at this. It seemed, in an odd fashion, to make Mrs Bowater more admirable, her husband more formidable, and the unknown Fanny more mysterious and enigmatical. At the first opportunity I crept my way to the subject and asked my landlady if she could show me a portrait of her daughter.

The photograph she produced from upstairs had in fading almost become a caricature. It had both blackened and greyed. It depicted herself many years younger but hardly less grim in appearance in full flounced skirts, Fanny as a child of about five or six standing at her knee, and Mr Bowater leaning with singular amenity behind her richly-carved chair, the fingers of his left hand resting disposedly on her right shoulder. I looked anxiously at the child. It was certainly crosspatch "F.", and a far from prepossessing little creature with that fixed, level gaze. Mr Bowater, on the other hand, had not yet adopted the wild and rigid stare which dominated the small parlour.

Mrs Bowater surveyed the group with a lackadaisical detachment. "Fractious!—you can see the tears on her cheeks for all what the young man could do with his woolly lamb and grimaces. It was the heyday."

What was the heyday, I wondered. "Was Mr Bowater—attached to her?" seemed a less intrusive question.

"Doted," she replied, polishing the glass with her apron. "But not to much purpose—with an eye for every petticoat."

This seemed a difficult conversation to maintain. "Don't you think, Mrs Bowater," I returned zealously, "there is just the faintest tinge of Mr Bowater in the chin? I don't," I added candidly, "see the faintest glimpse of you."

Mrs Bowater merely tightened her lips.

"And is she like that now?" I asked presently.

Mrs Bowater re-wrapped frame and photograph in their piece of newspaper. "It's looks, miss, that are my constant anxiety: and you may be thankful for being as you might say preserved from the world. What's more, the father will out, I suppose, from now till Day of Judgment."

How strangely her sentiments at times resembled my godmother's, and yet how different they were in effect. My thoughts after this often drifted to Mrs Bowater's early married life. And so peculiar are the workings of the mind that her husband's star-chart, his sleek appearance as a young father, the mysterious reference to the petticoats, awoke in me an almost romantic interest in him. To such a degree that it gradually became my custom to cast his portrait a satirical little bow of greeting when I emerged from my bedroom in the morning, and even to kiss my hand to his invisible stare when I retired for the night. To all of which advances he made no reply.

My next bout of star-gazing presaged disaster. I say star-gazing, for it is true that I stole out after honest folk are abed only when the heavens were swept and garnished. But, as a matter of fact, my real tryst was with another Self. Had my lot been different, I might have sought that self in Terra del Fuego or Malay, or in a fine marriage. Mine was a smaller world. Bo-peep I would play with shadow and dew-bead. And if Ulysses, as my father had read me, stopped his ears against the Sirens, I contrariwise unsealed mine to the ethereal airs of that bare wintry solitude.

The spectral rattle of the parched beechleaves on the saplings, the faintest whisper in the skeleton bracken set me peeping, peering, tippeting; and the Invisibles, if they heeded me, merely smiled on me from their grave, all-seeing eyes. As for the first crystal sparking of frost, I remember in my folly I sat down (bunched up, fortunately, in honest lamb's-wool) and remained, minute by minute, unstirring, unwinking, watching as if in my own mind the exquisite small fires kindle and flit from point to point of lichen and bark, until—out of this engrossment—little but a burning icicle was left to trudge along home.

It was December 23rd. I remember that date, and even now hardly understand the meaning or intention of what it brought me. Love for the frosty, star-roofed woods, that was easy. And yet what if—though easy—it is not enough? I had lingered on, talking in my childish fashion—a habit never to leave me—to every sudden lovely morsel in turn, when, to my dismay, I heard St Peter's clock toll midnight. Was it my fancy that at the stroke, and as peacefully as a mother when she is alone with her sleeping children, the giant tree sighed, and the whole night stilled as if at the opening of a door? I don't know, for I would sometimes pretend to be afraid merely to enjoy the pretending. And even my small Bowater astronomy had taught me that as the earth has her poles and equator, so these are in relation to the ecliptic and the equinoctial. So too, then, each one of us—even a mammet like myself—must live in a world of the imagination which is in everlasting relation to its heavens. But I must keep my feet.

I waved adieu to the woods and unseen Wanderslore. As if out of the duskiness a kind of reflex of me waved back; and I was soon hastening along down the hill, the only thing stirring in the cold, white, luminous dust. Instinctively, in drawing near, I raised my eyes to the upper windows of Mrs Bowater's crouching house. To my utter confusion. For one of them was wide open, and seated there, as if in wait for me, was a muffled figure—and that not my landlady's—looking out. All my fine boldness and excitement died in me. I may have had no apprehension of telling Mrs Bowater of my pilgrimages, but, not having told her, I had a lively distaste of being "found out."

Stiff as a post, I gazed up through the shadowed air at the vague, motionless figure—to all appearance completely unaware of my presence. But there is a commerce between minds as well as between eyes. I was perfectly certain that I was being thought about, up there.

For a while my mind faltered. The old childish desire gathered in me—to fly, to be gone, to pass myself away. There was a door in the woods. Better sense, and perhaps a creeping curiosity, prevailed, however. With a bold front, and as if my stay in the street had been of my own choosing, I entered the gate, ascended my "Bateses," and so into the house. Then I listened. Faintly at last sounded a stealthy footfall overhead; the window was furtively closed. Doubt vanished. In preparation for the night's expedition I had lain down in the early evening for a nap. Evidently while I had been asleep, Fanny had come home. The English mistress had caught her mother's lodger playing truant!

Chapter Eleven

If it was the child of wrath in me that hungered at times after the night, woods, and solitude to such a degree that my very breast seemed empty within me; it was now the child of grace that prevailed. With girlish exaggeration I began torturing myself in my bed with remorse at the deceit I had been practising. Now Conscience told me that I must make a full confession the first thing in the morning; and now that it would be more decent to let Fanny "tell on me." At length thought tangled with dream, and a grisly night was mine.

What was that? It was day; Mrs Bowater was herself softly calling me beyond my curtains, and her eye peeped in. Always before I had been up and dressed when she brought in my breakfast. Through a violent headache I surveyed the stooping face. Something in my appearance convinced her that I was ill, and she insisted on my staying in bed.

"But, Mrs Bowater...." I expostulated.

"No, no, miss; it was in a butt they drowned the sexton. Here you stay; and its being Christmas Eve, you must rest and keep quiet. What with those old books and all, you have been burning the candle at both ends."

Early in the afternoon on finding that her patient was little better, my landlady went off to the chemist's to get me some physic; I could bear inactivity no longer, and rose and dressed. The fire was low, the room sluggish, when in the dusk, as I sat dismally brooding in my chair, the door opened, and a stranger came in with my tea. She was dressed in black, and was carrying a light. With that raised in one hand, and my tea-tray held between finger and thumb of the other, she looked at me with face a little sidelong. Her hair was dark above her clear pale skin, and drawn, without a fringe, smoothly over her brows. Her eyes were almost unnaturally light in colour. I looked at her in astonishment; she was new in my world. She put the tray on my table, poked the fire into a blaze, blew out her candle at a single puff from her pursed lips, and seating herself on the hearthrug, clasped her hands round her knees.

"Mother told me you were in bed, ill," she said, "I hope you are better."

I assured her in a voice scarcely above a whisper that I was quite well again.

She nestled her chin down and broke into a little laugh: "My! how you startled me!"

"Then it was you," I managed to say.

"Oh, yes; it was me, it was me." The words were uttered as if to herself. She stooped her cheek over her knees again, and smiled round at me. "I'm not telling," she added softly.

Her tone, her expression, filled me with confusion. "But please do not suppose," I began angrily, "that I am not my own mistress here. I have my own key——"

"Oh, yes, your own mistress," she interrupted suavely, "but you see that's just what I'm not. And the key! why, it's just envy that's gnawing at the roots. I've never, never in my life seen anything so queer." She suddenly raised her strange eyes on me. "What were you doing out there?"

A lie perched on my lip; but the wide, light eyes searched me through. "I went," said I, "to be in the woods—to see the stars"; then added in a rather pompous voice, "only the southern and eastern constellations are visible from this poky little window."

There was no change in the expression of the two eyes that drank me in. "I see; and you want them all. That's odd, now," she went on reflectively, stabbing again at the fire; "they have never attracted me very much—angels' tin-tacks, as they say in the Sunday Schools. Fanny Bowater was looking for the moon."

She turned once more, opened her lips, showing the firm row of teeth beneath them, and sang in a low voice the first words, I suppose, of some old madrigal: "'She enchants me.' And if I had my little key, and my little secret door.... But never mind. 'Tell-tale Tit, her tongue shall be slit.' It's safe with me. I'm no sneak. But you might like to know, Miss M., that my mother thinks the very world of you. And so do I, for that matter; though perhaps for different reasons."

The calm, insolent words infuriated me, and yet her very accents, with a curious sweet rasp in them, like that in a skylark's song when he slides his last twenty feet from the clouds, were an enchantment. Ever and always there seemed to be two Fannies; one visible, her face; the other audible, her voice. But the enchantment was merely fuel for the flames.

"Will you please remember," I broke out peremptorily, "that neither myself nor what I choose to do is any affair of yours. Mrs Bowater is an excellent landlady; you can tell her precisely what you please; and—and" (I seemed to be choking) "I am accustomed to take my meals alone."

The sidelong face grew hard and solemn in the firelight, then slowly turned, and once more the eyes surveyed me under lifted brows—like the eyes of an angel, empty of mockery or astonishment or of any meaning but that of their beauty. "There you are," she said. "One talks like one human being to another, and I should have thought you'd be grateful for that; and this is the result. Facts are facts; and I'm not sorry for them, good or bad. If you wish to see the last of me, here it is. I don't thrust myself on people—there's no need. But still; I'm not telling."

She rose, and with one light foot on my fender, surveyed herself for a moment with infinite composure in the large looking-glass that spanned the chimney-piece.

And I?—I was exceedingly tired. My head was burning like a coal; my thoughts in confusion. Suddenly I lost control of myself and broke into an angry, ridiculous sobbing. I simply sat there, my face hidden in my dry, hot hands, miserable and defeated. And strange Fanny Bowater, what did she do?

"Heavens!" she muttered scornfully, "I gave up snivelling when I was a baby." Then voice, manner, even attitude suddenly changed—"And there's mother!"

When Mrs Bowater knocked at my door, though still in my day-clothes, I was in bed again, and my tea lay untasted on a chair beside it.

"Dear, dear," she said, leaning anxiously over me, "your poor cheeks are red as a firebrand, miss. Those chemists daren't put a nose outside their soaps and tooth powders. It must be Dr Phelps to-morrow if you are no better. And as plump a little Christmas pudding boiling for you in the pot as ever you could see! Tell me, now; there's no pain anywhere—throat, limbs, or elsewhere?"

I shook my head. She sprinkled a drop or two of eau de Cologne on my sheet and pillow, gently bathed my temples and hands, kindled a night-light, and left me once more to my own reflections.

They were none too comfortable. One thing only was in my mind—Fanny Bowater, her face, her voice, every glance and intonation, smile, and gesture. That few minutes' talk seemed now as remote and incredible as a nightmare. The stars, the woods, my solitary delights in learning and thinking were all suddenly become empty and meaningless. She despised me: and I hated her with a passion I cannot describe.

Yet in the midst of my hatred I longed for her company again, distracting myself with the sharp and clever speeches I might have made to her, and picturing her confounded by my contempt and indifference. But should I ever see her alone again? At every sound and movement in the house, which before had so little concerned me, I lay listening, with held breath. I might have been a mummy in a Pyramid hearkening after the fluttering pinions of its spirit come back to bring it life. But no tidings came of the stranger.

When my door opened again, it was only to admit Mrs Bowater with my supper—a bowl of infant's gruel, not the customary old lady's rusk and milk. I laughed angrily within to think that her daughter must have witnessed its preparation. Even at twenty, then, I had not grown used to being of so little consequence in other people's eyes. Yet, after all, who ever quite succeeds in being that? My real rage was not that Fanny had taken me as a midget, but as such a midget. Yet can I honestly say that I have ever taken her as mere Fanny, and not as such a Fanny?

The truth is she had wounded my vanity, and vanity may be a more fractious nursling even than a wounded heart. Tired and fretful, I had hardly realized the flattering candour of her advances. Even her promises not to "tell" of my night-wanderings, implied that she trusted in my honour not to tell of her promise. I thought and thought of her. She remained an enigma. Cold and hard—no one had ever spoken to me like that before. Yet her voice—it was as if it had run about in my blood, and made my eyes shine. A mere human sound to set me sobbing! More dangerous yet, I began to think of what Miss Bowater must be thinking of me, until, exhausted, I fell asleep, to dream that I was a child again and shut up in one of Mrs Ballard's glass jars, and that a hairy woman who was a kind of mixture of Mrs Bowater and Miss Fenne, was tapping with a thimbled finger on its side to increase my terror.

Next morning, thank Heaven, admitted me to my right mind again. I got out of bed and peered through the window. It was Christmas Day. A thin scatter of snow was powdering down out of the grey sky. The fields were calm and frozen. I felt, as I might say, the hunger in my face, looking out. There was something astonishingly new in my life. Everything familiar had become a little strange.

Over night, too, some one—and with mingled feelings I guessed who—must have stolen into my room while I lay asleep. Laid out on a bedside chair was a crimson padded dressing-jacket, threaded with gold, a delicate piece of needlework that would have gladdened my grandfather. Rolled up on the floor beside it was a thick woollen mat, lozenged in green and scarlet, and just of a size to spread beside my bed. These gifts multiplied my self-reproaches and made me acutely homesick.

What should I do? Beneath these thoughts was a quiet fizz of expectation and delight, like water under a boat. Pride and common sense fought out their battle in my mind. It was pride that lost the day. When Mrs Bowater brought in my breakfast, she found her invalid sitting up in Fanny's handsome jacket, and the mat laid over the bedrail for my constant contemplation. Nor had I forgotten Mrs Bowater. By a little ruse I had found out the name and address of a chemist in the town, and on the tray beside my breakfast was the fine bottle of lavender water which I had myself ordered him to send by the Christmas Eve post.

"Well there, miss, you did take me in that time," she assured me. "And more like a Valentine than a Christmas present; and its being the only scent so-called that I've any nose for."

Clearly this was no occasion for the confessional, even if I had had a mind to it. But I made at least half a vow never to go star-gazing again without her knowledge. My looks pleased her better, too, though not so much better as to persuade her to countermand Dr Phelps. Her yellowish long hand with its worn wedding-ring was smoothing my counterpane. I clutched at it, and, shame-stricken, smiled up into her face.

"You have made me very happy," I said. At this small remark, the heavy eyelids trembled, but she made no reply.

"Did," I managed to inquire at last, "did she have any breakfast before she went for the doctor?"

"A cup of tea," said Mrs Bowater shortly. A curious happiness took possession of me.

"She is very young to be teaching; not much older than I am."

"The danger was to keep her back," was the obscure reply. "We don't always see eye to eye."

For an instant the dark, cavernous face above me was mated by that other of birdlike lightness and beauty. "Isn't it funny?" I observed, "I had made quite, quite a different picture of her."

"Looks are looks, and brains are brains; and between them you must tread very wary."

About eleven o'clock a solemn-looking young man of about thirty, with a large pair of reddish leather gloves in his hand, entered the room. For a moment he did not see my bed, then, remarking circumspectly in a cheerful, hollow voice, "So this is our patient," he bade me good-morning, and took a seat beside my bed. A deep blush mounted up into the fair, smooth-downed cheeks as he returned my scrutiny and asked me to exhibit my tongue. I put it out, and he blushed even deeper.

"And the pulse, please," he murmured, rising. I drew back the crimson sleeve of Fanny's jacket, and with extreme nicety he placed the tip of a square, icy forefinger on my wrist. Once more his fair-lashed eyelids began to blink. He extracted a fine gold watch from his waistcoat pocket, compared beat with beat, frowned, and turned to Mrs Bowater.

"You are not, I assume, aware of the—the young lady's normal pulse?"

"There being no cause before to consider it, I am not," Mrs Bowater returned.

"Any pain?" said Dr Phelps.

"Headache," replied Mrs Bowater on my behalf, "and shoots in the limbs."

At that Dr Phelps took a metal case out of his waistcoat, glanced at it, glanced at me, and put it back again. He leaned over so close to catch the whisper of my breathing that there seemed a danger of my losing myself in the labyrinth of his downy ear.

"H'm, a little fever," he said musingly. "Have we any reason to suppose that we can have taken a chill?"

The head on the pillow stirred gently to and fro, and I think its cheek was dyed with an even sprightlier red than had coloured his. After one or two further questions, and a low colloquy with Mrs Bowater in the passage, Dr Phelps withdrew, and his carriage rolled away.

"A painstaking young man," Mrs Bowater summed him up in the doorway, "but not the kind I should choose to die under. You are to keep quiet and warm, miss; have plenty of light nourishment; and physic to follow. Which, except for the last-mentioned, and that mainly water, one don't have to ride in a carriage to know for one's self."

But "peace and goodwill": I liked Dr Phelps, and felt so much better for his skill that before his wheels had rolled out of hearing I had leapt out of bed, dragged out the trunk that lay beneath it, and fetched out from it a treasured ivory box. On removal of the lid, this ingenious work disclosed an Oriental Temple, with a spreading tree, a pool, a long-legged bird, and a mountain. And all these exquisitely tinted in their natural colours. It had come from China, and had belonged to my mother's brother, Andrew, who was an officer in the Navy and had died at sea. This I wrapped up in a square of silk and tied with a green thread. During the whole of his visit my head had been so hotly in chase of this one stratagem that it is a marvel Dr Phelps had not deciphered it in my pulse.

When Mrs Bowater brought in my Christmas dinner—little but bread sauce and a sprig of holly!—I dipped in the spoon, and, as innocently as I knew how, inquired if her daughter would like to see some really fine sewing.

The black eyes stood fast, then the ghost of a smile vanished over her features; "I'll be bound she would, miss. I'll give her your message." Alone again, I turned over on my pillow and laughed until tears all but came into my eyes.

All that afternoon I waited on, the coals of fire that I had prepared for my enemy's head the night before now ashes of penitence on my own. A dense smell of cooking pervaded the house; and it was not until the evening that Fanny Bowater appeared.

She was dressed in a white muslin gown with a wreath of pale green leaves in her hair. "I am going to a party," she said, "so I can't waste much time."

"Mrs Bowater thought you would like to see some really beautiful needlework," I replied suavely.

"Well," she said, "where is it?"

"Won't you come a little closer?"

That figure, as nearly like the silver slip of the new moon as ever I have seen, seemed to float in my direction. I held my breath and looked up into the light, dwelling eyes. "It is this," I whispered, drawing my two hands down the bosom of her crimson dressing-jacket. "It is only, Thank you, I wanted to say."

In a flash her lips broke into a low clear laughter. "Why, that's nothing. Really and truly I hate that kind of work; but mother often wrote of you; there was nothing better to do; and the smallness of the thing amused me."

I nodded humbly. "Yes, yes," I muttered, "Midget is as Midget wears. I know that. And—and here, Miss Bowater, is a little Christmas present from me."

Voraciously I watched her smooth face as she untied the thread. "A little ivory box!" she exclaimed, pushing back the lid, "and a Buddhist temple, how very pretty. Thank you."

"Yes, Miss Bowater, and, do you see, in the corner there? a moon. 'She enchants' you."

"So it is," she laughed, closing the box. "I was supposing," she went on solemnly, "that I had been put in the corner in positively everlasting disgrace."

"Please don't say that," I entreated. "We may be friends, mayn't we? I am better now."

Her eyes wandered over my bed, my wardrobe, and all my possessions. "But yes," she said, "of course"; and laughed again.

"And you believe me?"

"Believe you?"

"That it was the stars? I thought Mrs Bowater might be anxious if she knew. It was quite, quite safe, really; and I'm going to tell her."

"Oh, dear," she replied in a cold, small voice, "so you are still worrying about that. I—I envied you." With a glance over her shoulder, she leaned closer. "Next time you go," she breathed out to me, "we'll go together."

My heart gave a furious leap; my lips closed tight. "I could tell you the names of some of the stars now," I said, in a last wrestle with conscience.

"No, no," said Fanny Bowater, "it isn't the stars I'm after. The first fine night we'll go to the woods. You shall wait for me till everything is quiet. It will be good practise in practical astronomy." She watched my face, and began silently laughing as if she were reading my thoughts. "That's a bargain, then. What is life, Miss M., but experience? And what is experience, but knowing thyself? And what's knowing thyself but the very apex of wisdom? Anyhow it's a good deal more interesting than the Prince of Denmark."

"Yes", I agreed. "And there's still all but a full moon."

"Aha!" said she. "But what a world with only one! Jupiter has scores, hasn't he? Just think of his Love Lanes!" She rose to her feet with a sigh of boredom, and smoothed out her skirts with her long, narrow hands. I stared at her beauty in amazement.

"I hate these parties here," she said. "They are not worth while."

"You look lov—you look all right."

"H'm; but what's that when there's no one to see."

"But you see yourself. You live in it."

The reflected face in the glass, which, craning forward, I could just distinguish, knitted its placid brows. "Why, if that were enough, we should all be hermits. I rather think, you know, that God made man almost solely in the hope of his two-legged appreciation. But perhaps you disapprove of incense?"

"Why should I, Miss Bowater? My Aunt Kitilda was a Catholic: and so was my mother's family right back."

"That's right," said Miss Bowater. She kissed her hand to looking-glass and four-poster, flung me a last fervid smile, and was gone. And the little box I had given her lay on the table, beside my bed.

I was aroused much later by the sound of voices drawing nearer. Instinctively I sat up, my senses fastened on the sound like a vampire. The voices seemed to be in argument, then the footsteps ceased and clear on the night air came the words:—

"But you made me promise not to write. Oh, Fanny, and you have broken your own!"

"Then you must confess," was the cautious reply, "that I am consistent. As for the promises, you are quite, quite welcome to the pieces."

"You mean that?" was the muffled retort.

"That," cried the other softly, "depends entirely on what you mean by 'mean.' Please look happy! You'd soon grow old and uglier if there was only that scrap of moon to light your face."

"Oh, Fanny. Will you never be serious?"—the misery in the words seemed to creep about in my own mind for shelter. They were answered by a sparkling gush of laughter, followed by a crisp, emphatic knock at the door. Fanny had returned from her party, and the eavesdropper buried her face in her pillow. So she enjoyed hurting people. And yet....

Chapter Twelve

The next afternoon Mrs Bowater was out when Dr Phelps made his call. It was Fanny who ushered him into the room. He felt my pulse again, held up the phial of medicine to the light, left unconsulted my tongue, and pronounced that "we are doing very nicely." As indeed I was. While this professional inquiry was in progress Fanny stood silently watching us, then exclaimed that it was half-past four, and that I must have my tea. She was standing behind Dr Phelps, and for a few seconds I watched with extreme interest but slow understanding a series of mute little movements of brows and lips which she was directing at me while he was jotting down a note in a leather pocket-book. At length I found myself repeating—as if at her dictation—a polite little invitation to him to take tea with me. The startled blue eyes lifted themselves above the pocket-book, the square, fair head was bowing a polite refusal, when, "But, of course, Dr Phelps," Fanny broke in like one inspired, "how very thoughtless of me!"

"Thank you, thank you, Miss Bowater, but——" cried Dr Phelps, with a smooth uplifted hand, and almost statuesque in his pose. His refusal was too late. Miss Bowater had hastened from the room.

His panic passed. He reseated himself, and remarking that it was a very cold afternoon, predicted that if the frost continued, skating might be expected. Conversation of this kind is apt so soon to faint away like a breeze in hot weather, that I kept wondering what to say next. Besides, whenever Dr Phelps seemed impelled to look at me, he far more quickly looked away, and the sound of his voice suggested that he was uncertain if he was not all but talking to himself. To put him more at his ease I inquired boldly if he had many other midgets among his patients.

The long lashes swept his cheeks; he pondered a while on my landlady's window curtains. "As a matter of fact perhaps not," he replied at last, as if giving me the result of a mathematical calculation.

"I suppose, Dr Phelps," I then inquired, "there might be more, at any time, might there not?" Our glances this time met. He blinked.

"My father and mother, I mean," I explained in some confusion, "were just of the com—of the ordinary size. And what I was wondering is, whether you yourself would be sorry—in quite a general way, of course—if you found your practice going down like that."

"Going down?"

"I mean the patients coming smaller. I never had the opportunity of asking our own doctor, Dr Grose. At Lyndsey, you know. Besides, I was a child then. Now, first of all, it is true, isn't it, that giants are usually rather dull-witted people? So nobody would deliberately choose that kind of change. If, then, quality does vary with quantity, mightn't there be an improvement in the other direction? You will think I am being extremely ego—egotistical. But one must take Jack's side, mustn't one?—even if one's Jill?"

"Jack?"

"The Giant Killer."

He looked at me curiously, and his finger and thumb once more strayed up towards the waistcoat pocket in which he kept his thermometer. But instead of taking it out, he coughed.

"There is a norm——" he began in a voice not quite his own.

"Ah," I cried, interrupting him, and throwing up my hands, "there is indeed. But why, I ask myself, so vast a number of examples of it!"

It was as if a voice within were prompting me. Perhaps the excitement of Fanny's homecoming was partly to blame. "I sit at my window here and watch the passers-by. Norms, in mere size, Dr Phelps, every one of them, if you allow for the few little defects in the—the moulding, you know. And just think what London must be like. Why, nobody can be noticeable, there."

"But surely," Dr Phelps smiled indulgently, though his eyelashes seemed to be in the way, "surely variety is possible, without—er—excess. Indeed there must be variety in order to arrive at our norm, mustn't there?"

"You'd be astonished," I assured him, "how slight the differences really are. A few inches or ounces; red or black or fawn; and age, and sex, of course; that's all. Now, isn't it true, Dr Phelps, that almost any twenty women—unselected, you know—would weigh about a ton? And surely there's no particular reason why just human shells should weigh as much as that. We are not lobsters. And yet, do you know, I have watched, and they really seem to enjoy being the same as one another. One would think they tried to be—manners and habits, knowledge and victuals, hats and boots, everything. And if on the outside, I suppose on the inside, too. What a mysterious thing it seems. All of them thinking pretty much the same: Norm-Thoughts, you know; just five-foot-fivers. After all, one wouldn't so much mind the monotonous packages, if the contents were different. 'Forty feeding like one'—who said that? Now, truly, Dr Phelps, don't you feel?—— It would, of course, be very serious at first for their mothers and fathers if all the little human babies here came midgets, but it would be amusing, too, wouldn't it?... And it isn't quite my own idea, either."

Dr Phelps cleared his throat, and looked at his watch. "But surely," he said, with a peculiar emphasis which I have noticed men are apt to make when my sex asks intelligent or unintelligent questions: "Surely you and I are understanding one another. I try to make myself clear to you. So extremes can meet; at least I hope so." He gave me a charming little awkward bow. "Tell me, then, what is this peculiar difference you are so anxious about? You wouldn't like a pygmy England, a pygmy Universe, now, would you, Miss M.?"

It was a great pity. A pygmy England—the thought dazzled me. In a few minutes Dr Phelps would perhaps have set all my doubts at rest. But at that moment Miss Bowater came in with the tea, and the talk took quite another turn. She just made it Fanny's size. Even Dr Phelps looked a great deal handsomer in her company. More sociable. Nor were we to remain "three's none." She had finished but one slice of toast over my fire, and inflamed but one cheek, when a more protracted but far less vigorous knock than Dr Phelps's on the door summoned her out of the room again. And a minute or two afterwards our tea-party became one of four, and its sexes (in number, at any rate) equally matched.

By a happy coincidence, just as Good King Wenceslas had looked out on the Feast of Stephen, so Mr Crimble, the curate-in-charge at St Peter's, had looked in. By his "Ah, Phelps!" it was evident that our guests were well acquainted with one another; and Fanny and I were soon enjoying a tea enriched by the cream of local society. Mr Crimble had mild dark eyes, gold spectacles, rather full red lips, and a voice that reminded me of raspberries. I think he had heard of me, for he was very attentive, and handled my small cup and saucer with remarkable, if rather conspicuous, ingenuity.

Candles were lit. The talk soon became animated. From the weather of this Christmas we passed to the weather of last, to Dr Phelps's prospects of skating, and thence to the good old times, to Mr Pickwick, to our respective childish beliefs in Santa Claus, stockings, and to credulous parents. Fanny repeated some of the naïve remarks made by her pupils, and Mr Crimble capped them with a collection of biblical bons mots culled in his Sunday School. I couldn't glance fast enough from one to the other. Dr Phelps steadily munched and watched Mr Crimble. He in turn told us of a patient of his, a Mrs Hall, who, poor old creature, was 101, and enjoyed nothing better than playing at "Old Soldier" with a small grandson.

"Literally, second childhood. Senile decay," he said, passing his cup.

From Mrs Hall we naturally turned to parochial affairs; and then Mr Crimble, without more ado, bolted his mouthful of toast, in order to explain the inmost purpose of his visit.

He was anxious to persuade Miss Bowater to sing at the annual Parish Concert, which was to be given on New Year's Eve. Try as he might, he had been unable to persuade his vicar of the efficacy of Watch Night Services. So a concert was to be given instead. Now, would Miss Bowater, as ever, be ever so kind, and would I add my entreaties to his? As he looked at Fanny and I did too—with one of those odd turns of the mind, I was conscious that the peculiar leaning angle of his head was exactly the same as my own. Whereupon I glanced at Dr Phelps, but he sat fair and foursquare, one feeding like forty. Fanny remaining hesitant, appeal was made to him. With almost more cordiality than Mr Crimble appeared to relish, he agreed that the musical talent available was not so abundant as it might be, and he promised to take as many of the expensive tickets as Miss Bowater would sing songs.

"I don't pretend to be musical, not like you, Crimble. But I don't mind a pleasant voice—in moderation; and I assure you, Miss Bowater, I am an excellent listener—given a fair chance, you know."

"But then," said Fanny, "so am I. I believe now really—and one can judge from one's speaking voice, can't one, Mr Crimble?—I believe you sing yourself."

"Sing, Miss Bowater," interjected Mr Crimble, tipping back his chair. "'The wedding guest here beat his chest, for he heard the loud bassoon.' Now, conjuring tricks, eh, Phelps? With a stethoscope and a clinical thermometer; and I'll hold the hat and make the omelette. It would bring down the house."

"It was his breast he beat; not his chest," I broke in.

The six eyes slid round, as if at a voice out of the clouds. There was a pause.

"Why, exactly," cried Mr Crimble, slapping his leg.

"But I wish Dr Phelps would sing," said Fanny in a small voice, passing him the sugar.

"He must, he shall," said Mr Crimble, in extreme jubilation. "So that's settled. Thank you, Miss Bowater," his eyes seemed to melt in his head at his success, "the programme is complete."

He drew a slip of paper from his inside pocket and brandished a silver pencil-case. "Mrs Browning, 'The Better Land'—better and better every year. 'Caller Herrin'' to follow—though what kind of herrings caller herrings are I've never been able to discover." He beamed on me. "Miss Finch—she is sending me the names of her songs this evening. Miss Willett and Mr Bangor—'O that we two,' and a queer pair they'd look; and 'My luv is like.' Hardy annuals. Mrs Bullace—recitations, 'Abt Vogler,' and no doubt a Lord Tennyson. Flute, Mr Piper; 'Cello, Miss Oran, a niece of Lady Pollacke's; and for comic relief, Tom Sturgess, of course; though I hope he will be a little more—er—eclectic this year. And you and I," again he turned his boyish brow on me, "will sit with Mrs Bowater in the front row of the gallery—a claque, Phelps, eh?"

He seemed to be in the topmost height of good spirits. Well, thought I, if social badinage and bonhomie were as pleasant and easy as this, why hadn't my mother——?

"But why in the gallery?" drawled Fanny suddenly from the hearthrug, with the little steel poker ready poised; "Miss M. dances."

The clear voice rasped on the word. A peculiar silence followed the lingering accents. The two gentlemen's faces smoothed themselves out, and both, I knew, though I gave them no heed, sat gazing, not at their hostess. But Fanny herself was looking at me now, her light eyes quite still in the flame of the candles, which, with their reflections in Mrs Bowater's pier glass were not two, but four. It was into those eyes I gazed, yet not into, only at.

All day my thoughts had remained on her, like bubbles in wine. All day hope of the coming night and of our expedition to the woods had been, as it were, a palace in which my girlish fancy had wandered, and now, though only a few minutes ago I had been cheeping my small extemporary philosophy into the ear of Dr Phelps, the fires of self-contempt and hatred burned up in me hotter than ever.

I forgot even the dainty dressing-jacket on my back. "Miss Bowater is pleased to be satirical," I said, my hand clenched in my lap.

"Now was I?" cried Fanny, appealing to Dr Phelps, "be just to me." Dr Phelps opened his mouth, swallowed, and shut it again.

"I really think not, you know," said Mr Crimble persuasively, coming to her rescue. "Indeed it would be extremely kind and—er—entertaining; though dancing—er—and—unless, perhaps, so many strangers.... We can count in any case on your being present, can we not, Miss M.?" He leaned over seductively, finger and thumb twitching at the plain gold cross suspended from his watch-chain on his black waistcoat.

"Oh, yes," I replied, "you can count on me for the claque."

The room had sunk into a stillness. Constraint was in the air. "Then that's settled. On New Year's Eve we—we all meet again. Unless, Miss Bowater, there is any hope of seeing you meanwhile—just to arrange the titles and so on of your songs on the programme."

"No," smiled Fanny, "I see no hope whatever. You forget, Mr Crimble, there are dishes to wash. And hadn't you better see Miss Finch first?"

Mr Crimble cast a strange look at her face. He was close to her, and it was almost as if he had whispered, "Fanny." But there was no time for further discussion. Dr Phelps, gloved and buttoned, was already at the door.

Fanny returned into the room when our guests had taken their departure. I heard their male voices in vivacious talk as they marched off in the cold dark air beneath my window.

"I thought they were never going," said Fanny lightly, twisting up into her hair an escaped ringlet. "I think, do you know, we had better say nothing to mother about the tea—at least not yet a while. They are dull creatures: it's pottering about so dull and sleepy a place, I suppose. What could have inspired you to invite Dr Phelps to tea? Really, really, Miss M., you are rather astonishing. Aren't you, now?"

What right had she to speak to me like this, as if we had met again after another life? She paused in her swift collection of the remnants of our feast. "Sulking?" she inquired sweetly.

With an effort I kept my self-possession. "You meant what you said, then? You really think I would sink to that?"

"'Sink!' To what? Oh, the dancing, you mean. How funny you should still be fretting about that. Still, you look quite entertaining when you are cross: 'Diaphenia like the daffadowndilly,' you know. Good Heavens! Surely we shouldn't hide any kind of lights under bushels, should we? I'm sure the Reverend Harold would agree to that. Isn't it being the least bit pedantic?"

"I should think," I retorted, "Mr Crimble would say anything pleasant to any young woman."

"I have no doubt he would," she agreed. "The other cheek also, you know. But the real question is what the young woman would say in reply. You are too sensitive, Miss M."

"Perhaps I am." Oh that I could escape from this horrible net between us. "I know this, anyhow—that I lay awake till midnight because you had made a kind of promise to come in. Then I—I 'counted the pieces.'"

Her face whitened beneath the clear skin. "Oh, so we list——" she began, turning on me, then checked herself. "I tell you this," she said, her hand trembling, "I'm sick of it all. Those—those fools! Ph! I thought that you, being as you are—snippeting along out of the night—might understand. There's such a thing as friendship on false pretences, Miss M."

Was she, too, addressing, as she supposed, a confidant hardly more external to herself than that inward being whom we engage in such endless talk and argument? Her violence shocked me; still more her "fools." For the word was still next-door neighbour in my mind to the dreadful "Raca."

"'Understand,'" I said, "I do, if you would only let me. You just hide in your—in your own outside. You think because I am as I am that I'm only of that much account. It's you are the—foolish. Oh, don't let us quarrel. You just came. I never knew. Every hour, every minute...." Inarticulate my tongue might be, but my face told its tale. She must have heard many similar confessions, yet an almost childish incredulity lightened in hers.

"Keep there," she said; "keep there! I won't be a moment."

She hastened out of the room with the tea things, poising an instant like a bird on a branch as she pushed open the door with her foot. The slave left behind her listened to her footsteps dying away in a mingling of shame, sorrow, and of a happiness beyond words. I know now that it is not when we are near people that we reach themselves, not, I mean, in their looks and words, but only by following their thoughts to where the spirit within plays and has its being. Perhaps if I had realized this earlier, I shouldn't have fallen so easy a prey to Fanny Bowater. I waited—but that particular exchange of confidences was never to be completed. A key sounded in the latch. Fanny had but time to show herself with stooping, almost serpent-like head, in the doorway. "To-night!" she whispered. "And not a word, not a word!"

Chapter Thirteen

Was there suspicion in the face of Mrs Bowater that evening? Our usual familiar talk dwindled to a few words this supper-time. The old conflict was raging in my mind—hatred of my deceit, horror at betraying an accomplice, and longing for the solemn quiet and solitude of the dark. I crushed my doubtings down and cast a dismal, hostile look at the long face, so yellow of skin and sombre in expression. When would she be gone and leave me in peace? The packed little parlour hung stagnant in the candlelight. It seemed impossible that Mrs Bowater could not hear the thoughts in my mind. Apparently not. She tidied up my few belongings, which, contrary to my usual neat habits, I had left scattered over the table. She bade me good-night; but paused in the doorway to look back at me. But what intimacy she had meant to share with me was put aside. "Good-night, miss," she repeated; "and I'm sure, God bless you." It was the dark, quiet look that whelmed over me. I gazed mutely, without response, and the silence was broken by a clear voice like that of a cautious mocking-bird out of a wood.

It called softly on two honeyed notes, "Mo—ther!"

The house draped itself in quiet. Until ten had struck, and footsteps had ascended to the rooms overhead, I kept close in my bedchamber. Then I hastily put on my outdoor clothes, shivering not with cold, but with expectation, and sat down by the fire, prepared for the least sound that would prove that Fanny had not forgotten our assignation. But I waited in vain. The cold gathered. The vaporous light of the waning moon brightened in the room. The cinders fainted to a darker glow. I heard the kitchen clock with its cracked, cantankerous stroke beat out eleven. Its solemn mate outside, who had seemingly lost his voice, ticked on.

Hope died out in me, leaving an almost physical nausea, a profound hatred of myself and even of being alive. "Well," a cold voice said in my ear, "that's how we are treated; that comes of those eyes we cannot forget. Cheated, cheated again, my friend."

In those young days disappointment set my heart aching with a bitterness less easy to bear than it is now. No doubt I was steeped in sentimentality and folly. It was the vehemence of this new feeling that almost terrified me. But my mind was my world; it is my only excuse. I could not get out of that by merely turning a tiny key in a Brahma lock. Nor could I betake myself to bed. How sleep in such an inward storm of reproaches, humiliation, and despised love?

I drew down my veil, wrapped my shawl closer round my shoulders, descended my staircase, and presently stood in the porch in confrontation of the night. Low on the horizon, at evens with me across space, and burning with a limpid fire, hung my chosen—Sirius. The sudden sight of him pouring his brilliance into my eyes brought a revulsion of feeling. He was "cutting me dead." I brazened him down. I trod with exquisite caution down the steps, daring but one fleeting glance, as I turned, at Fanny's window. It was blinded, empty. Toiling on heavily up the hill, I sourly comforted myself with the vow that she should realize how little I cared, that her room had been sweeter than her company. Never more would I put trust in "any child of man."

Gradually, however, the quiet night received me into its peace (just as, poor soul, did the Moor Desdemona), and its influence stole into my darkened mind. The smooth, columnar boughs of the beeches lifted themselves archingly into the sky. Soon I was climbing over the moss-bound roots of my customary observatory. But this night the stars were left for a while unsignalled and unadmired. The crisped, frost-lined leaves scattered between the snake-like roots sparkled faintly. Years seemed to have passed away, dwindled in Time's hour-glass, since my previous visit. That Miss M. had ghosted herself away for ever. In my reverie the vision of Fanny re-arose into my imagination—that secret still fountain—of herself. Asleep now.... I could no more free myself from her sorcery than I could disclaim the two hands that lay in my lap. She was indeed more closely mine than they—and nearer in actuality than I had imagined.

A faint stir in the woods suddenly caught my attention. The sound neared. I pressed my hand to my breast, torn now between two incentives, two desires—to fly, to stay. And on the path by which I had come, appeared, some yards distant, in the faint trickling light, the dark figure of my dreams.

She was dressed in a black cloak, its peaked old-fashioned hood drawn over her head. The moonbeams struck its folds as she moved. Her face was bowed down a little, her hand from within clutching her cloak together. And I realized instinctively and with joy that the silence and solitude of the woods alarmed her. It was I who was calm and self-contained. She paused and looked around her—stood listening with lips divided that yet could not persuade themselves to call me by name. For my part, I softly gathered myself closer together and continued to gloat. And suddenly out of the far-away of the woods a nightbird loosed its cry: "A-hoo.... Ahoo-oo-oo-hooh!"

There is a hunter in us all. I laughed inwardly as I watched. A few months more and I was to watch a lion-tamer ... but let me keep to one thing at a time. I needled myself in, and, almost hooting the sound through my mouth, as if in echo of the bird, I heard myself call stealthily across the air, "Fanny!—Fanny Bowater!"

The cloaked figure recoiled, with lifted head, like the picture of a fawn I have seen, and gazed in my direction. Seeing nothing of me amidst the leaves and shadows, she was about to flee, when I called again:—

"It is I, Fanny. Here: here!"

Instantly she woke to herself, came near, and looked down on me. No movement welcomed her. "I was tired of waiting," I yawned. "There is nothing to be frightened about."

Many of her fellow creatures, I fancy, have in their day wearied of waiting for Fanny Bowater, but few have had the courage or sagacity to tell her so. She had not recovered her equanimity fully enough to refrain from excuses.

"Surely you did not expect me while mother was moving? I am not accustomed, Miss M., to midnight wanderings."

"I gave up expecting you, and was glad to be alone."

The barb fell short. She looked stilly around her. The solemn beeches were like mute giants overarching with their starry, sky-hung boughs the dark, slim figure. What consciousness had they, I wonder, of those odd humans at their roots?

"Alone! Here!" she returned. "But no wonder. It's what you are all about."

A peculiar elation sprang up in me at this none too intelligible remark.

"I wonder, though," she added, "you are not frozen like—like a pebble, sitting there."

"But I am," I said, laughing softly. "It doesn't matter in me, because I'm so easy to thaw. You ought to know that. Oh, Miss Bowater, think if this were summer time and the dew and the first burning heat! Are you wrapped up? And shall we sit here, just—just for one dance of the Sisters: thou lost dove, Merope?"

For there on high—and I had murmured the last words all but inaudibly to myself—there played the spangling Pleiads, clear above her head in the twig-swept sky.

"What sisters?" she inquired, merely humouring me, perhaps.

"The Six, Fanny, look! You cannot see their Seventh—yet she is all that that is about." South to north I swept my hand across the powdery firmament. "And I myself trudge along down Watling Street; that's the Milky Way. I don't think, Fanny, I shall ever, ever be weaned. Please, may I call you that?"

She frowned up a moment into the emptiness, hesitated, then—just like a white peacock I had once seen when a child from my godmother's ancient carriage as we rolled by an old low house with terraces smooth as velvet beneath its cedars—she disposed her black draperies upon the ground at a little distance, disclosing, in so doing, beneath their folds the moon-blanched flounces of her party gown. I gazed spellbound. I looked at the white and black, and thought of what there was within their folds, and of the heart within that, and of the spirit of man. Such was my foolish fashion, following idly like a butterfly the scents of the air, flitting on from thought to thought, and so missing the full richness of the one blossom on which I might have hovered.

"Tell me some more," broke suddenly the curious voice into the midst of this reverie.

"Well, there," I cried, "is fickle Algol; the Demon. And over there where the Crab crawls, is the little Beehive between the Roses."

"Præsepe," drawled Fanny.

"Yes," said I, unabashed, "the Beehive. And crane back your neck, Fanny—there's little Jack-by-the-Middle-Horse; and far down, oh, far down, Berenice's Hair, which would have been Fanny Bowater's Hair, if you had been she."

Even as I looked, a remote film of mist blotted out the infinitesimal cluster. "And see, beyond the Chair," I went on, laughing, and yet exalted with my theme, "that dim in the Girdle is the Great Nebula—s-sh! And on, on, that chirruping Invisible, that, Fanny, is the Midget. Perhaps you cannot even dream of her: but she watches."

"Never even heard of her," said Fanny good-humouredly, withdrawing the angle of her chin from the Ecliptic.

"Say not so, Horatia," I mocked, "there are more things...."

"Oh, yes, I know all about that. And these cold, monotonous old things really please you? Personally, I'd give the whole meaningless scramble of them for another moon."

"But your old glutton has gobbled up half of them already."

"Then my old glutton can gobble up what's left. Who taught you about them? And why," she scanned me closely, "why did you pick out the faintest; do you see them the best?"

"I picked out the faintest because they were meant especially for me so that I could give them to you. My father taught me a little about them; and your father the rest."

"My father," echoed Fanny, her face suddenly intent.

"His book. Do you miss him? Mine is dead."

"Oh, yes, I miss him," was the serene retort, "and so, I fancy, does mother."

"Oh, Fanny, I am sorry. She told me—something like that."

"You need not be. I suppose God chooses one's parents quite deliberately. Praise Him from Whom all blessings flow!" She smoothed out her black cloak over her ankles, raised her face again into the dwindling moonlight, and gently smiled at me. "I am glad I came, Midgetina, though it's suicidally cold. 'Pardi! on sent Dieu bien à son aise ici.' We are going to be great friends, aren't we?" Her eyes swept over me. "Would you like that?"

"Friends," indeed! and as if she had offered me a lump of sugar.

I gravely nodded. "But I must come to you. You can't come to me. No one has; except, perhaps, my mother—a little."

"Oh, yes," she replied cautiously, piercing her eyes at me, "that is a riddle. You must tell me about your childhood. Not that I love children, or my own childhood either. I had enough of that to last me a lifetime. I shan't pass it on; though I promise you, Midgetina, if I ever do have a baby, I will anoint its little backbone with the grease of moles, bats, and dormice, and make it like you. Was your mother——" she began again, after a pause of reflection. "Are you sorry, I mean, you aren't—you aren't——?"

Her look supplied the missing words. "Sorry that I am a midget, Fanny? People think I must be. But why? It is all I am, all I ever was. I am myself, inside; like everybody else; and yet, you know, not quite like everybody else. I sometimes think"—I laughed at the memory—"I was asking Dr Phelps about that. Besides, would you be—alone?"

"Not when I was alone, perhaps. Still, it must be rather odd, Miss Needle-in-a-Haystack. As for being alone"—once again our owl, if owl it was, much nearer now, screeched its screech in the wintry woods—"I hate it!"

"But surely," expostulated the wiseacre in me, "that's what we cannot help being. We even die alone, Fanny."

"Oh, but I'm going to help it. I'm not dead yet. Do you ever think of the future?"

For an instant its great black hole yawned close, but I shook my head.

"Well, that," replied she, "is what Fanny Bowater is doing all the time. There's nothing," she added satirically, "so important, so imperative for teachers as learning. And you must learn your lesson, my dear, before you are heard it—if you want to escape a slapping. Every little donkey knows that."

"I suppose the truth is," said I, as if seized with a bright idea, "there are two kinds of ambitions, of wants, I mean. We are all like those Chinese boxes; and some of us want to live in the biggest, the outsidest we can possibly manage; and some in the inmost one of all. The one," I added a little drearily, "no one can share."

"Quite, quite true," said Fanny, mimicking my sententiousness, "the teeniest, tiniest, ickiest one, which no mortal ingenuity has ever been able to open—and so discover the nothing inside. I know your Chinese Boxes!"

"Poor Fanny," I cried, rising up and kneeling beside the ice-cold hand that lay on the frosty leaves. "All that I have shall help you."

Infatuated thing; I stooped low as I knelt, and stroked softly with my own the outstretched fingers on which she was leaning.

I might have been a pet animal for all the heed she paid to my caress. "Fanny," I whispered tragically, "will you please sing to me—if you are not frozenly cold? You remember—the Moon Song: I have never forgotten it; and only three notes, yet it sometimes wakes me at night. It's queer, isn't it, being you and me?"

She laughed, tilting her chin; and her voice began at once to sing, as if at the scarcely opened door of her throat, and a tune so plain it seemed but the words speaking:—

"Twas a Cuckoo, cried 'cuck-oo'

In the youth of the year;

And the timid things nesting,

Crouched, ruffled in fear;

And the Cuckoo cried, 'cuck-oo,'

For the honest to hear.

One—two notes: a bell sound

In the blue and the green;

'Cuck-oo: cuck-oo: cuck-oo!'

And a silence between.

Ay, mistress, have a care, lest

Harsh love, he hie by,

And for kindness a monster

To nourish you try—

In your bosom to lie:

'Cuck-oo,' and a 'cuck-oo,'

And 'cuck-oo!'"

The sounds fell like beads into the quiet—as if a small child had come up out of her heart and gone down again; and she callous and unmoved. I cannot say why the clear, muted notes saddened and thrilled me so. Was she the monster?

I had drawn back, and stayed eyeing her pale face, the high cheek, the delicate straight nose, the darkened lips, the slim black eyebrows, the light, clear, unfathomable eyes reflecting the solitude and the thin brilliance of the wood. Yet the secret of herself remained her own. She tried in vain not to be disturbed at my scrutiny.

"Well," she inquired at last, with motionless glance fixed on the distance. "Do you think you could honestly give me a testimonial, Miss Midget?"

It is strange. The Sphinx had spoken, yet without much enlightenment. "Now look at me," I commanded. "If I went away, you couldn't follow. When you go away, you cannot escape from me. I can go back and—and be where I was." My own meaning was half-concealed from me; but a startled something that had not been there before peeped out of those eyes so close to mine.

"If," she said, "I could care like that too, yet wanted nothing, then I should be free too."

"What do you mean?" said I, lifting my hand from the unanswering fingers.

"I mean," she exclaimed, leaping to her feet, "that I'm sick to death of the stars and am going home to bed. Hateful, listening old woods!"

I turned sharp round, as if in apprehension that some secret hearer might have caught her remark. But Fanny stretched out her arms, and, laughing a foolish tune, in affected abandonment began softly to dance in the crisp leaves, quite lost to me again. So twirling, she set off down the path by which she had come trespassing. A physical exhaustion came over me. I watched her no more, but stumbled along, with unheeding eyes, in her wake. What had I not given, I thought bitterly, and this my reward. Thus solitary, I had gone only a little distance, and had reached the outskirts of the woods, when a far from indifferent Fanny came hastening back to intercept me.

And no wonder. She had remembered to attire herself becomingly for her moonlight tryst, but had forgotten the door key. We stood looking at one another aghast, as, from eternity, I suppose, have all fellow-conspirators in danger of discovery. It was I who first awoke to action. There was but one thing to be done, and, warning Fanny that I had never before attempted to unlatch the big front door of her mother's house, I set off resolutely down the hill.

"You walk so slowly!" she said suddenly, turning back on me. "I will carry you."

Again we paused. I looked up at her with an inextricable medley of emotions struggling together in my mind, and shook my head.

"But why, why?" she repeated impatiently. "We could get there in half the time."

"If you could fly, Fanny, I'd walk," I replied stubbornly.

"You mean——" and her cold anger distorted her face. "Oh, pride! What childish nonsense! And you said we were to be friends. Do you suppose I care whether...?" But the question remained unfinished.

"I am your friend," said I, "and that is why I will not, I will not give way to you." It was hardly friendship that gleamed out of the wide eyes then. But mine the victory—a victory in which only a tithe of the spoils, unrecognized by the vanquished, had fallen to the victor.

Without another word she turned on her heel, and for the rest of our dejected journey she might have been mistaken for a cross nurse trailing on pace for pace beside a rebellious child. My dignity was less ruffled than hers, however, and for a brief while I had earned my freedom.

Arrived at the house, dumbly hostile in the luminous night, Fanny concealed herself as best she could behind the gate-post and kept watch on the windows. Far away in the stillness we heard a footfall echoing on the hill. "There is some one coming," she whispered, "you must hurry." She might, I think, have serpented her way in by my own little door. Where the head leads, the heart may follow. But she did not suggest it. Nor did I.

I tugged and pushed as best I could, but the umbrella with which from a chair I at last managed to draw the upper bolt of the door was extremely cumbersome. The latch for a while resisted my efforts. And the knowledge that Fanny was fretting and fuming behind the gatepost hardly increased my skill. The house was sunken in quiet; Mrs Bowater apparently was sleeping without her usual accompaniment; only Henry shared my labours, and he sat moodily at the foot of the stairs, refusing to draw near until at the same moment Fanny entered, and he leapt out.

Once safely within, and the door closed and bolted again, Fanny stood for a few moments listening. Then with a sigh and a curious gesture she bent herself and kissed the black veil that concealed my fair hair.

"I am sorry, Midgetina," she whispered into its folds, "I was impatient. Mother wouldn't have liked the astronomy, you know. That was all. And I am truly sorry for—for——"

"My dear," I replied in firm, elderly tones, whose echo is in my ear to this very day; "My dear, it was my mind you hurt, not my feelings." With that piece of sententiousness I scrambled blindly through my Bates's doorway, shut the door behind me, and more disturbed at heart than I can tell, soon sank into the thronging slumber of the guilty and the obsessed.

Chapter Fourteen

When my eyes opened next morning, a strange, still glare lay over the ceiling, and I looked out of my window on a world mantled and cold with snow. For a while I forgot the fever of the last few days in watching the birds hopping and twittering among the crumbs that Mrs Bowater scattered out on the windowsill for my pleasure. And yet—their every virtue, every grace, Fanny Bowater, all were thine! The very snow, in my girlish fantasy, was the fairness beneath which the unknown Self in her must, as I fondly believed, lie slumbering; a beauty that hid also from me for a while the restless, self-centred mind. How believe that such beauty is any the less a gift to its possessor than its bespeckled breast and song to a thrush, its sheen to a starling? It is a riddle that still baffles me. If we are all shut up in our bodies as the poets and the Scriptures say we are, then how is it that many of the loveliest seem to be all but uninhabited, or to harbour such dingy tenants; while quite plain faces may throng with animated ghosts?

Fanny did not come to share my delight in the snow that morning. And as I looked out on it, waiting on in vain, hope flagged, and a sadness stole over its beauty. Probably she had not given the fantastic lodger a thought. She slid through life, it seemed, as easily as a seal through water. But I was not the only friend who survived her caprices. In spite of her warning about the dish-washing, Mr Crimble came to see her that afternoon. She was out. With a little bundle of papers in his hand he paused at the gate-post to push his spectacles more firmly on to his nose and cast a kind of homeless look over the fields before turning his face towards St Peter's. Next day, Holy Innocents', he came again; but this time with more determination, for he asked to see me.

To rid myself, as far as possible, of one piece of duplicity, I at once took the bull by the horns, and in the presence of Mrs Bowater boldly invited him to stay to tea. With a flurried glance of the eye in her direction he accepted my invitation.

"A cold afternoon, Mrs Bowater," he intoned. "The cup that cheers, the cup that cheers."

My landlady left the conventions to take care of themselves; and presently he and I found ourselves positively tête-à-tête over her seed cake and thin bread and butter.

But though we both set to work to make conversation, an absent intentness in his manner, a listening turn of his head, hinted that his thoughts were not wholly with me.

"Are you long with us?" he inquired, stirring his tea.

"I am quite, quite happy here," I replied, with a sigh.

"Ah!" he replied, a little wistfully, taking a sip, "how few of us have the courage to confess that. Perhaps it flatters us to suppose we are miserable. It is this pessimism—of a mechanical, a scientific age—which we have chiefly to contend against. We don't often see you at St Peter's, I think?"

"You wouldn't see very much of me, if I did come," I replied a little tartly. Possibly it was his "we" that had fretted me. It seemed needlessly egotistical. "On the other hand," I added, "wouldn't there be a risk of the congregation seeing nothing else?"

Mr Crimble opened his mouth and laughed. "I wish," he said, with a gallant little bow, "there were more like you."

"More like me, Mr Crimble?"

"I mean," he explained, darting a glance at the furniture of my bedroom, whose curtains, to my annoyance, hung withdrawn, "I mean that—that you—that so many of us refuse to see the facts of life. To look them in the face, Miss M. There is nothing to fear."

We were getting along famously, and I begged him to take some of Mrs Bowater's black currant jam.

"But then, I have plenty of time," I said agreeably. "And the real difficulty is to get the facts to face me. Dear me, if only, now, I had some of Miss Bowater's brains."

A veil seemed suddenly to lift from his face and as suddenly to descend again. So, too, he had for a moment stopped eating, then as suddenly begun eating again.

"Ah, Miss Bowater! She is indeed clever; a—a brilliant young lady. The very life of a party, I assure you. And, yet, do you know, in parochial gatherings, try as I may, I occasionally find it very difficult to get people to mix. The little social formulas, the prejudices. Yet, surely, Miss M., religion should be the great solvent. At least, that is my view."

He munched away more vigorously, and gazed through his spectacles out through my window-blinds.

"Mixing people must be very wearisome," I suggested, examining his face.

"'Wearisome,'" he repeated blandly. "I am sometimes at my wits' end. No. A curate's life is not a happy one." Yet he confessed it almost with joy.

"And the visiting!" I said. And then, alas! my tongue began to run away with me. He was falling back again into what I may call his company voice, and I pined to talk to the real Mr Crimble, little dreaming how soon that want was to be satiated.

"I sometimes wonder, do you know, if religion is made difficult enough."

"But I assure you," he replied, politely but firmly, "a true religion is exceedingly difficult. 'The eye of a needle'—we mustn't forget that."

"Ah, yes," said I warmly; "that 'eye' will be narrow enough even for a person with my little advantages. I remember my mother's cook telling me, when I was a child, that in the old days, really wicked people if they wanted to return to the Church, had to do so in a sheet, with ashes on their heads, you know, and carrying a long lighted candle. She said that if the door was shut against them, they died in torment, and went to Hell. But she was a Roman Catholic, like my grandmother."

Mr Crimble peered at me as if over a wall.

"I remember, too," I went on, "one summer's day as a very little girl I was taken to the evening service. And the singing—bursting out like that, you know, with the panting and the yowling of the organ, made me faint and sick; and I jumped right out of the window."

"Jumped out of the window!" cried my visitor in consternation.

"Yes, we were at the back. Pollie, my nursemaid, had put me up in the niche, you see; and I dragged her hand away. But I didn't hurt myself. The grass was thick in the churchyard; I fell light, and I had plenty of clothes on. I rather enjoyed it—the air and the tombstones. And though I had my gasps, the 'eye' seemed big enough when I was a child. But afterwards—when I was confirmed—I thought of Hell a good deal. I can't see it so plainly now. Wide, low, and black, with a few demons. That can't be right."

"My dear young lady!" cried Mr Crimble, as if shocked, "is it wise to attempt it? It must be admitted, of course, that if we do not take advantage of the benefits bestowed upon us by Providence in a Christian community, we cannot escape His displeasure. The absence from His Love."

"Yes," I said, looking at him in sudden intimacy, "I believe that." And I pondered a while, following up my own thoughts. "Have you ever read Mr Clodd's Childhood of the World, Mr Crimble?"

By the momentary confusion of his face I gathered that he had not. "Mr Clodd?... Ah, yes, the writer on Primitive Man."

"This was only a little book, for the young, you know. But in it Mr Clodd says, I remember, that even the most shocking old forms of religion were not invented by devils. They were 'Man's struggles from darkness to twilight.' What he meant was that no man loves darkness. At least," I added, with a sudden gush of remembrances, "not without the stars."

"That is exceedingly true," replied Mr Crimble. "And, talking of stars, what a wonderful sight it was the night before last, the whole heavens one spangle of diamonds! I was returning from visiting a sick parishioner, Mr Hubbins." Then it was his foot that Fanny and I had heard reverberating on the hill! I hastily hid my face in my cup, but he appeared not to have noticed my confusion. He took another slice of bread and butter; folded it carefully in two, then peered up out of the corner of his round eye at me, and added solemnly: "Sick, I regret to say, no longer."

"Dead?" I cried from the bottom of my heart, and again looked at him.

Then my eyes strayed to the silent scene beyond the window, silent, it seemed, with the very presence of poor Mr Hubbins. "I should not like to go to Hell in the snow," I said ruminatingly. Out of the past welled into memory an old ballad my mother had taught me:—

"This ae nighte, this ae nighte

—Every nighte and alle,

Fire and sleet and candle-lighte,

And Christe receive thy saule!"

"Beautiful, beautiful," murmured Mr Crimble, yet not without a trace of alarm in his dark eyes. "But believe me, I am not suggesting that Mr Hubbins—— His was, I am told, a wonderfully peaceful end."

"Peaceful! Oh, but surely not in his mind, Mr Crimble. Surely one must be more alive in that last hour than ever—just when one's going away. At any rate," and I couldn't refrain a sigh, almost of envy, "I hope I shall be. Was Mr Hubbins a good man?"

"He was a most regular church-goer," replied my visitor a little unsteadily; "a family-man, one of our Sidesmen, in fact. He will be greatly missed. You may remember what Mr Ruskin wrote of his father: 'Here lies an entirely honest merchant.' Mr Ruskin, senior, was, as a matter of fact, in the wine trade. Mr Hubbins, I believe, was in linen, though, of course, it amounts to the same thing. But haven't we," and he cleared his throat, "haven't we—er—strayed into a rather lugubrious subject?"

"We have strayed into a rather lugubrious world," said I.

"Of course, of course; but, believe me, we mustn't always think too closely. 'Days and moments quickly flying,' true enough, though hardly appropriate, as a matter of fact, at this particular season in the Christian year. But, on the other hand, 'we may make our lives sublime.' Does not yet another poet tell us that? Although, perhaps, Mr Hub——"

"Yes," I interposed eagerly, the lover of books in me at once rising to the bait, "but what do you think Longfellow absolutely meant by his 'sailor on the main' of life being comforted, you remember, by somebody else having been shipwrecked and just leaving footprints in the sand? I used to wonder and wonder. Does the poem imply, Mr Crimble, that merely to be born is to be shipwrecked? I don't think that can be so, because Longfellow was quite a cheerful man, wasn't he?—at least for a poet. For my part," I ran on, now thoroughly at home with my visitor, and on familiar ground, "I am sure I prefer poor Friday. Do you remember how Robinson Crusoe described him soon after the rescue from the savages as 'without Passions, Sullenness, or Designs,' even though he did, poor thing, 'have a hankering stomach after some of the Flesh'? Not that I mean to suggest," I added hastily, "that Mr Hubbins was in any sense a cannibal."

"By no means," said Mr Crimble helplessly. "But there," and he brushed his knees with his handkerchief, "I fear you are too much of a reader for me, and—and critic. For that very reason I do hope, Miss M., you will sometimes contrive to pay a visit to St Peter's. Mother Church has room for all, you know, in her—about her footstool." He smiled at me very kindly. "And our organist, Mr Temple, has been treating us to some charmingly quaint old carols—at least the words seem a little quaint to a modern ear. But I cannot boast of being a student of poetry. Parochial work leaves little time even for the classics:—

"Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo.

Favete linguis...."

He almost chirped the delightful words in a high, pleasant voice, but except for the first three of them, they were too many for my small Latin, and I afterwards forgot to test the aptness of his quotation. I was just about to ask him (with some little unwillingness) to translate the whole ode for me, when I heard Fanny's step at the door. I desisted.

At her entry the whole of our conversation, as it hung about in Mrs Bowater's firelit little parlour, seemed to have become threadbare and meaningless. My visitor and I turned away from each other almost with relief—like Longfellow's shipwrecked sailors, perhaps, at sight of a ship.

Fanny's pale cheeks beneath her round beaver hat and veil were bright with the cold—for frost had followed the snow. She eyed us slowly, with less even than a smile in her eyes, facing my candles softly, as if she had come out of a dream. Whatever class of the community Mr Crimble may have meant to include in his Odi, the celerity with which he rose to greet her made it perfectly clear that it was not Miss Bowater's. She smiled at the black sleeve, cuff, and signet ring outstretched towards her, but made no further advance. She brought him, too, a sad disappointment, simply that she would be unable to sing at his concert on the last night of the year. At this blow Mr Crimble instinctively folded his hands. He looked helpless and distressed.

"But, Miss Bowater," he pleaded, "the printer has been waiting nearly two days for the names of your songs. The time is very short now."

"Yes," said Fanny, seating herself on a stool by the fire and slowly removing her gloves. "It is annoying. I hadn't a vestige of a cold last night."

"But indeed, indeed," he began, "is it wise in this severe weather——?"

"Oh, it isn't the weather I mind," was the serene retort, "it's the croaking like a frog in public."

"'A frog!'" cried Mr Crimble beguilingly, "oh, no!"

But all his protestations and cajoleries were unavailing. Even to a long, silent glance so private in appearance that it seemed more courteous to turn away from it, Fanny made no discernible response. His shoulders humped. He caught up his soft hat, made his adieu—a little formal, and hasty—and hurried off through the door to the printer.

When his muffled footsteps had passed away, I looked at Fanny.

"Oh, yes," she agreed, shrugging her shoulders, "it was a lie. I said it like a lie, so that it shouldn't deceive him. I detest all that wheedling. To come here two days running, after.... And why, may I ask, if it is beneath your dignity to dance to the parish, is it not beneath mine to sing? Let the silly sheep amuse themselves with their bleating. I have done with it all."

She rose, folded her gloves into a ball and her veil over her hat, and once more faced her reflection in her mother's looking-glass. I had not the courage to tell her that the expression she wore on other occasions suited her best.

"But surely," I argued uneasily, "things are different. If I were to dance, stuck up there on a platform, you know very well it would not be the dancing that would amuse them, but—just me. Would you care for that if you were—well, what I am?"

"Ah, you don't know," a low voice replied bitterly, "you don't know. The snobs they are! I have soaked in it for years, like a pig in brine. Boxed up here in your pretty little doll's house, you suppose that all that matters is what you think of other people. But to be perfectly frank, you are out of the running, my dear. I have to get my own living, and all that matters is not what I think of other people but what other people think of me. Do you suppose I don't know what he, in his heart, thinks of me—and all the rest of them? Well, I say, wait!"

And she left me to my doll's house—a more helpless slave than ever.

Not only one "star" the fewer, then, dazzled St Peter's parish that New Year's Eve, but Fanny and I never again shared an hour's practical astronomy. Still, she would often sit and talk to me, and the chain of my devotion grew heavy. Perhaps she, on her side, merely basked in the flattery of my imagination. It was for her a new variety of a familiar experience. Perhaps a curious and condescending fondness for me for a while sprang up in her—as far as that was possible, for, apart from her instinctive heartlessness, she never really accustomed herself to my physical shortcomings. I believe they attracted yet repelled her. To my lonely spirit she was a dream that remained a dream in spite of its intensifying resemblance to a nightmare.

I realize now that she was desperately capricious, of a cat-like cruelty by nature, and so evasive and elusive that frequently I could not distinguish her soft, furry pads from her claws. But whatever her mood, or her treatment of me, or her lapses into a kind of commonness to which I deliberately shut my eyes, her beauty remained. Whomsoever we love becomes unique in that love, and I suppose we are responsible for what we give as well as for what we accept. The very memory of her beauty, when I was alone, haunted me as intensely as if she were present. Yet in her actual company, it made her in a sense unreal. So, often, it was only the ghost of her with whom I sat and talked. How sharply it would have incensed her to know it. When she came to me in my sleep, she was both paradise and seraph, and never fiddle entranced a Paganini as did her liquid lapsing voice my small fastidious ear. Yet, however much she loved to watch herself in looking-glass or in her mind, and to observe her effects on others, she was not vain.

But the constant, unbanishable thought of anything wearies the mind and weakens the body. In my infatuation, I, too, was scarcely more than a ghost—a very childish ghost perhaps. I think if I could call him for witness, my small pasha in the train from Lyndsey would bear me out in this. As for what is called passion, the only burning of it I ever felt was for an outcast with whom I never shared so much as glance or word. Alas, Fanny, I suppose, was merely a brazen image.

Long before the dark day of her departure—a day which stood in my thoughts like a barrier at the world's end—I had very foolishly poured out most of my memories for her profit and amusement, though so immobile was she when seated in a chair beside my table, or standing foot on fender at the chimney-piece, that it was difficult at times to decide whether she was listening to me or not. What is more important, she told me in return in her curious tortuous and contradictory fashion, a good deal about herself, and of her childhood, which—because of the endless violent roarings of her nautical father, and the taciturn discipline of poor Mrs Bowater—filled me with compassion and heaped fuel on my love. And not least of these bonds was the secret which, in spite of endless temptation, I managed to withhold from her in a last instinctive loyalty to Mrs Bowater—the discovery that her own mother was long since dead and gone.

She possessed more brains than she cared to exhibit to visitors like Dr Phelps and Mr Crimble. Even to this day I cannot believe that Mr Crimble even so much as guessed how clever she was. It was just part of herself, like the bloom on a plum. Hers was not one of those gesticulating minds. Her efforts only intensified her Fannyishness. Oh dear, how simple things are if only you leave them unexplained. Her very knowledge, too (which for the most part she kept to herself) was to me like finding chain armour when one is in search of a beating heart. She could shed it all, and her cleverness too, as easily as a swan water-drops. What could she not shed, and yet remain Fanny? And with all her confidences, she was extremely reticent. A lift of the light shoulders, or of the flat arched eyebrows, a sarcasm, a far-away smile, at the same time illuminated and obscured her talk. These are feminine gifts, and yet past my mastery. Perhaps for this reason I admired them the more in Fanny—just as, in reading my childhood's beloved volume, The Observing Eye, I had admired the crab's cuirass and the scorpion's horny rings—because, being, after all, myself a woman, I faintly understood their purpose.

Thus, when Fanny told me of the school she taught in; and of the smooth-haired drawing-master who attended it with his skill, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and of the vivacious and saturnine "Monsieur Crapaud," who, poked up in a room under the gables, lived in the house; or of that other parish curate who was a nephew of the head-mistress's, the implacable Miss Stebbings, and who, apparently, preached Sunday after Sunday, with peculiar pertinacity, on such texts as "God is love"—when Fanny recounted to me these afflictions, graces, and mockeries of her daily routine as "literature" mistress, I could as easily bestow on her the vivifying particulars she left out, as a painter can send his portraits to be framed.

Once and again—just as I have seen a blackbird drop plumb from the upper boughs of a tree on a worm disporting itself in the dewy mould—once I did ask a question which produced in her one of those curious reactions which made her, rather than immaterial, an exceedingly vigilant image of her very self. "What will you do, Fanny, when you can't mock at him?"

"Him?" she inquired in a breath.

"The him!" I said.

"What him?" she replied.

"Well," I said, stumbling along down what was a rather black and unfamiliar alley to me, "my father was not, I suppose, particularly wise in anything, but my mother loved him very much."

"And my father," she retorted, in words so carefully pronounced that I knew they must be dangerous, "my father was a first mate in the mercantile marine when he married your landlady."

"Well," I repeated, "what would you do, if—if you fell in love?"

Fanny sat quite still, all the light at the window gently beating on her face, with its half-closed eyes. Her foot stirred, and with an almost imperceptible movement of her shoulder, she replied, "I shall go blind."

I looked at her, dumbfounded. All the days of her company were shrivelled up in that small sentence. "Oh, Fanny," I whispered hopelessly, "then you know?"

"'Know'?" echoed the smooth lips.

"Why, I mean," I expostulated, rushing for shelter fully as rapidly as my old friend the lobster must have done when it was time to change his shell, "I mean that's what that absurd little Frenchman is—'Monsieur Crapaud.'"

"Oh, no," said Fanny calmly, "he is not blind, he only has his eyes shut. Mine," she added, as if the whole light of the wintry sky she faced were the mirror of her prediction, "mine will be wide open."

How did I know that for once the serene, theatrical creature was being mortally serious?

Chapter Fifteen

I grew a little weary of the beautiful snow in the days that followed my first talk with Mr Crimble, and fretted at the close air of the house. The last day of the year the wind was still in the north. It perplexed me that the pride which from my seed had sprung up in Fanny, and had prevented her from taking part in the parish concert, yet allowed her to attend it. She set off thickly veiled. Not even Mr Crimble's spectacles were likely to pierce her disguise. I had written a little letter the afternoon before and had myself handed it to Mrs Bowater with a large fork of mistletoe from my Christmas bunch. It was an invitation to herself and Fanny to sit with me and "see in" the New Year. She smiled at me over it—still her tranquil, though neglected self—and I was half-satisfied.

Her best black dress was donned for the occasion. She had purchased a bottle of ginger wine, which she brought in with some glasses and placed in the middle of the red and black tablecloth. Its white-lettered, dark-green label "haunts me still." The hours drew on. Fanny returned from the concert—entering the room like a cloud of beauty. She beguiled the dwindling minutes of the year with mocking echoes of it.

In a rich falsetto she repeated Mr Crimble's "few words" of sympathetic apology for her absence: "'I must ask your indulgence, ladies and gentlemen, for a lamentable hiatus in our programme.'" She gave us Miss Willett's and Mr Bangor's spirited rendering of "Oh, that we two"; and of the recitation which rather easily, it appeared, Mrs Bullace had been prevailed upon to give as an encore after her "Abt Vogler": "The Lady's 'Yes,'" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And what a glance of light and fire she cast me when she came to stanza six of the poem:—

"Lead her from the festive boards,

Point her to the starry skies!..."

And she imitated Lady Pollacke's niece's—Miss Oran's—'cello obligato to "The Lost Chord," with a plangency that stirred even the soul of Henry as he lay curled up in my landlady's lap. The black head split like a pomegranate as he yawned his disgust.

At this Mrs Bowater turned her bony face on me, her hands on her knees, and with a lift of her eyes disclosed the fact that she was amused, and that she hoped her amusement would remain a confidence between us. She got up and put the cat out: and on her return had regained her solemnity.

"I suppose," she said stiffly, staring into the sparkling fire that was our only illumination, "I suppose, poor creatures, they did their best: and it isn't so many years ago, Fanny, since you were as put-about to be allowed to sing at one of the church concerts as a bird is to hop out of its cage."

"Yes," said Fanny, "but in this world birds merely hop out of one cage into another; though I suppose the larger are the more comfortable." This retort set Mrs Bowater's countenance in an impassive mask—so impassive that every fitfully-lit photograph in the room seemed to have imitated her stare. "And, mother," added Fanny seductively, "who taught me to sing?"

"The Lord knows," cried Mrs Bowater, with conviction, "I never did."

"Yes," muttered Fanny in a low voice, for my information, "but does He care?" I hastily asked Mrs Bowater if she was glad of to-morrow's New Year. As if in reply the kitchen clock, always ten minutes fast, began to chime twelve, half-choking at every stroke. And once more the soul of poor Mr Hubbins sorrowfully took shape in a gaze at me out of vacancy.

"To them going downhill, miss," my landlady was replying to my question, "it is not the milestones are the pleasantest company—nor that the journey's then of much account until it is over. By which I don't mean to suggest there need be gloom. But to you and Fanny here—well, I expect the little that's the present for you is mostly wasted on the future." With that, she rose, and poured out the syrupy brown wine from the green bottle, reserving a remarkably little glass which she had rummaged out of her years' hoardings for me.

Fanny herself, with musing head—her mockings over—was sitting drawn-up on a stool by the fire. I doubt if she was thinking. Whether or not, to my enchanted eyes some phantom within her seemed content merely to be her beauty. And in rest, there was a grace in her body—the smooth shoulder, the poised head that, because, perhaps, it was so transitory, seemed to resemble the never-changing—that mimicry of the unknown which may be seen in a flower, in a green hill, even in an animal. It is as though, I do think, what we love most in this life must of necessity share two worlds.

Faintly out of the frosty air was wafted the knelling of midnight. I rose, stepped back from the firelight, drew the curtain, and stole a look into space. Away on the right flashed Sirius, and to east of him came gliding flat-headed Hydra with Alphard, the Red Bird, in his coil. So, for a moment in our history, I and the terrestrial globe were alone together. It seemed indeed that an intenser silence drew over reality as the earth faced yet one more fleeting revolution round her invisible lord and master. But no moon was risen yet.

I turned towards the shape by the fire, and without her perceiving it, wafted kiss and prayer in her direction. Cold, careless Fanny—further than Uranus. We were alone, for at first stroke of St Peter's Mrs Bowater had left the room and had opened the front door. She was smiling; but was she smiling, or was that vague bewitchingness in her face merely an unmeaning guile of which she was unaware? It might have been a mermaid sitting there in the firelight.

The bells broke in on our stillness; and fortunately, since there was no dark man in the house to bring us luck, Henry, already disgusted with the snow and blacker in hue than any whiskered human I have ever seen, seized his opportunity, and was the first living creature to cross our threshold from one year into another.

This auspicious event renewed our spirits which, in waiting, had begun to flag. From far away came a jangling murmur of shouting and instruments and bells, which showed that the rest of the parish was sharing our solemn vigil; and then, with me on my table between them, a hand of each clasping mine, Mrs Bowater, Fanny, and I, after sipping each other's health, raised the strains of "Auld Lang Syne." There must have been Scottish blood in Mrs Bowater; she certainly made up for some little variation from the tune by a heartfelt pronunciation of the words. Hardly had we completed this rite than the grandfather's clock in the narrow passage staidly protested its own rendering of eternity; and we all—even Mrs Bowater—burst out laughing.

"Good-night, Midgetina; an immense happy New Year to you," whispered a voice to me about half an hour afterwards. I jumped out of bed, and peeped through my curtains. On some little errand Fanny had come down from her bedroom, and with a Paisley shawl over her shoulders stood with head and candle thrust in at the door. I gazed at her fairness. "Oh, Fanny!" I cried. "Oh, Fanny!"

New Year's Day brought a change of weather. A slight mist rose over the fields, it began to thaw. A kind of listlessness now came over Fanny, which I tried in vain to dispel. Yet she seemed to seek my company; often to remain silent, and occasionally to ask me curious questions as if testing one answer against another. And one discovery I made in my efforts to keep her near me: that she liked being read to. Most of the volumes in Mrs Bowater's small library were of a nautical character, and though one of them, on the winds and tides and seas and coasts of the world, was to console me later in Fanny's absence, the majority defied even my obstinacy. Fanny hated stories of the sea, seemed to detest Crusoe; and smiled her slow, mysterious smile while she examined my own small literary treasures. By a flighty stroke of fortune, tacked up by an unskilled hand in the stained brown binding of a volume on Disorders of the Nerves, we discovered among her father's books a copy of Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë.

The very first sentence of this strange, dwelling book, was a spell: "1801.—I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with."... And when, a few lines farther on, I read: "He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows"—the apparition of who but Mr Crumble blinked at me out of the print, and the enchantment was complete. It was not only gaunt enormous Yorkshire with its fells and wastes of snow that seized on my imagination, not only that vast kitchen with its flagstones, green chairs, and firearms, but the mere music and aroma of the words, "I beheld his black eyes"; "a range of gaunt thorns"; "a wilderness of crumbling griffins"; "a huge, liver-coloured bitch pointer"—they rang in my mind, echoed on in my dreams.

And though in the wet and windy afternoons and evenings which Fanny and I thus shared, she, much more than poor Mr Crimble, resembled Heathcliff in being "rather morose," and in frequently expressing "an aversion to showing displays of feeling," she was more attracted by my discovery than she condescended to confess. Jane Eyre, she said, was a better story, "though Jane herself was a fool." What cared I? To me this book was like the kindling of a light in a strange house; and that house my mind. I gazed, watched, marvelled, and recognized, as I kneeled before its pages. But though my heart was torn, and my feelings were a little deranged by the scenes of violence, and my fancy was haunted by that stalking wolfish spectre, I took no part. I surveyed all with just that sense of aloofness and absorption with which as children Cathy and Heathcliff, barefoot in the darkness of the garden, had looked in that Sunday evening on the Lintons' crimson taper-lit drawing-room.

If, in February, you put a newly gathered sprig of budding thorn into the fire; instantaneously, in the influence of the heat, it will break into bright-green tiny leaf. That is what Emily Brontë did for me. Not so for Fanny. In her "vapid listlessness" she often pretended to yawn over Wuthering Heights, and would shock me with mocking criticism, or cry "Ah!" at the poignant passages. But I believe it was pure concealment. She was really playing a part in the story. I have, at any rate, never seen her face so transfigured as when once she suddenly looked up in the firelight and caught my eye fixed on her over the book.

It was at the passage where Cathy—in her grand plaid silk frock, white trousers, and burnished shoes—returns to the dreadful Grange; and, "dismally beclouded," Heathcliff stares out at her from his hiding-place. "'He might,'" I read on, "'well skulk behind the settle, at beholding such a bright, graceful damsel enter the house. "Is Heathcliff not here?" she demanded, pulling off her gloves, and displaying fingers wonderfully whitened with doing nothing and staying indoors.'"

It was at this point that our eyes, as I say, Fanny's and mine, met. But she, bright, graceful damsel, was not thinking of me.

"Do you like that kind of character, Fanny?" I inquired.

My candle's flames gleamed lean and tiny in her eyes. "Whose?" she asked.

"Why, Heathcliff's."

She turned slowly away. "You take things so seriously, Midgetina. It's merely a story. He only wanted taming. You'll see by-and-by." But at that moment my ear caught the sound of footsteps, and when Mrs Bowater opened the door to contemplate idle Fanny, the book was under my bed.

As the day drew near for Fanny's return to her "duties," her mood brightened. She displayed before me in all their stages, the new clothes which Mrs Bowater lavished on her—to a degree that, amateur though I was in domestic economy, filled me with astonishment. I had to feign delight in these fineries—"Ah!" whispered I to each, "when she wears you she will be far, far away." I envied the very buttons, and indeed pestered her with entreaties. I implored her to think of me at certain hours; to say good-night to herself for me; to write day by day in the first of the evening; to share the moon: "If we both look at her at the same moment," I argued, "it will be next to looking at one another. You cannot be utterly gone: and if you see even a flower, or hear the wind.... Oh, I hope and hope you will be happy."

She promised everything with smiling ease, and would have sealed the compact in blood if I had thought to cut my thumb for it. Thursday in Holy Week—then she would be home again. I stared at the blessed day across the centuries as a condemned man stares in fancy at the scaffold awaiting him; but on mine hung all my hopes. Long evenings I never saw her at all; and voices in the kitchen, when she came in late, suggested that my landlady had also missed her. But Fanny never lost her self-control even when she lost her temper; and I dared not tax her with neglecting me. Her cold looks almost suffocated me. I besought her to spend one last hour of the eve of her departure alone with me and with the stars in the woods. She promised. At eleven she came home, and went straight up into her bedroom. I heard her footsteps. She was packing. Then silence.

I waited on until sick at heart I flung myself on my knees beside my bed and prayed that God would comfort her. Heathcliff had acquired a feeble pupil. The next afternoon she was gone.

Chapter Sixteen

For many days my mind was an empty husk, yet in a constant torment of longing, daydream, despair, and self-reproaches. Everything I looked at had but one meaning—that she was not there. I did not dare to admit into my heart a hope of the future, since it would be treason to the absent. There was an ecstatic mournfulness even in the sight of the January sun, the greening fields, the first scarcely perceptible signals of a new year. And when one morning I awoke early and heard, still half in dream, a thrush in all but darkness singing of spring, it seemed it was a voice pealing in the empty courts of paradise. What ridiculous care I took to conceal my misery from Mrs Bowater. Hardly a morning passed but that I carried out in a bag the food I couldn't eat the day before, to hide it away or bury it. But such journeys were brief.

I have read somewhere that love is a disease. Or is it that Life piles up the fuel, a chance stranger darts a spark, and the whole world goes up in smoke? Was I happier in that fever than I am in this literary calm? Why did love for things without jealousy or envy fill me with delight, pour happiness into me, and love for Fanny parch me up, suck every other interest from my mind, and all but blind my eyes? Is that true? I cannot be sure: for to remember her ravages is as difficult as to re-assemble the dismal phantoms that flock into a delirious brain. And still to be honest—there's another chance: Was she to blame? Would my mind have been at peace even in its solitary woe if she had dealt truly with me? Would any one believe it?—it never occurred to me to remind myself that it might be a question merely of size. Simply because I loved, I deemed myself lovable. Yet in my heart of hearts that afternoon I had been twitting Mr Crimble for saying his prayers!

But even the heart is Phœnix-like. The outer world began to break into my desolation, not least successfully when after a week or two of absence there came a post card from Fanny to her mother with a mere "love to M." scrawled in its top right-hand corner. It was as if a wine-glass of cold water had been poured down my back. It was followed by yet another little "shock." One evening, when she had carefully set down my bowl of rusk and milk, Mrs Bowater took up her stand opposite to me, black as an image in wood. "You haven't been after your stars, miss, of late. It's moping you are. I suffered myself from the same greensick fantasticalities, when I was a girl. Not that a good result's any the better for a poor cause; but it was courting danger with your frail frame; it was indeed."

I smile in remembrance of the picture presented by that conscience-stricken face of mine upturned to that stark monitor—a monitor no less stark at this very moment though we are both many years older.

"Yes, yes," she continued, and even the dun, fading photograph over her head might have paled at her accents. "I'm soliciting no divulgements; she wouldn't have gone alone, and if she did, would have heard of it from me. But you must please remember, miss, I am her mother. And you will remember, miss, also," she added, with upper lip drawn even tighter, "that your care is my care, and always will be while you are under my roof—and after, please God."

She soundlessly closed the door behind her, as if in so doing she were shutting up the whole matter in her mind for ever, as indeed she was, for she never referred to it again. Thunderbolts fall quietly at times. I sat stupefied. But as I examine that distant conscience, I am aware, first, of a faint flitting of the problem through my mind as to why a freedom which Mrs Bowater would have denied to Fanny should have held no dangers for me, and next, I realize that of all the emotions in conflict within me, humiliation stood head and shoulders above the rest. Indeed I flushed all over, at the thought that never for one moment—then or since—had I paused to consider how, on that fateful midnight, Fanny could have left the house-door bolted behind her. My utter stupidity: and Fanny's! All these weeks my landlady had known, and said nothing. The green gooseberries of my childhood were a far less effective tonic. But I lost no love for Mrs Bowater in this prodigious increase of respect.

A far pleasanter interruption of my sick longings for the absent one occurred the next morning. At a loss what to be reading (for Fanny had abstracted my Wuthering Heights and taken it away with her), once more shudderingly pushing aside my breakfast, I turned over the dusty, faded pile of Bowater books. And in one of them I discovered a chapter on knots. Our minds are cleverer than we think them, and not only cats have an instinct for physicking themselves. I took out a piece of silk twine from my drawer and—with Fanny's phantom sulking a while in neglect—set myself to the mastery of "the ship boy's" science. I had learned for ever to distinguish between the granny and the reef (such is fate, this knot was also called the true lover's!), and was setting about the fisherman's bend, when there came a knock on the door—and then a head.

It was Pollie. Until I saw her round, red, country cheek, and stiff Sunday hat, thus unexpectedly appear, I had almost forgotten how much I loved and had missed her. No doubt my landlady had been the dea ex machinâ that had produced her on this fine sunshine morning. Anyhow she was from heaven. Besides butter, a posy of winter jasmine, a crochet bedspread, and a varnished arbour chair made especially for me during the winter evenings by her father, Mr Muggeridge, she brought startling news. There suddenly fell a pause in our excited talk. She drew out her handkerchief and a slow crimson mounted up over neck, cheek, ears, and brow. I couldn't look quite away from this delicious sight, so my eyes wandered up in admiration of the artificial cornflowers and daisies in her hat.

Whereupon she softly blew her nose and, with a gliding glance at the shut door, she breathed out her secret. She was engaged to be married. A trying, romantic vapour seemed instantly to gather about us, in whose hush I was curiously aware not only of Pollie thus suffused, sitting with her hands loosely folded in her lap, but of myself also, perched opposite to her with eyes in which curiosity, incredulity, and even a remote consternation played upon her homely features. Time melted away, and there once more sat the old Pollie—a gawk of a girl in a pinafore, munching up green apples and re-plaiting her dull brown hair.

Then, of course, I was bashfully challenged to name the happy man. I guessed and guessed to Pollie's ever-increasing gusto, and at last I dared my first unuttered choice: "Well, then, it must be Adam Waggett!"

"Adam Waggett! Oh, miss, him! a nose like a winebottle."

It was undeniable. I apologized, and Pollie surrendered her future into my hands. "It's Bob Halibut, miss," she whispered hoarsely.

And instantaneously Bob Halibut's red head loomed louringly out at me. But I know little about husbands; and premonitions only impress us when they come true. Time was to prove that Pollie and her mother had made a prudent choice. Am I not now Mr Halibut's god-sister, so to speak?

The wedding, said Pollie, was to be in the summer. "And oh, miss"—would I come?

The scheming that followed! The sensitive draping of difficulties on either side, the old homesick longing on mine—to flee away now, at once, from this scene of my afflicted adoration. I almost hated Fanny for giving me so much pain. Mrs Bowater was summoned to our council; my promise was given; and it was she who suggested that its being "a nice bright afternoon," Pollie should take me for a walk.

But whither? It seemed a sheer waste of Pollie to take her to the woods. Thoughts of St Peter's, the nocturnal splendour in the cab, a hunger for novelty, the itch to spend money, and maybe a tinge of dare-devilry—without a moment's hesitation I chose the shops and the "town." Once more in my black, with two thicknesses of veil canopying my head, as if I were a joint of meat in the Dog Days, I settled myself on Pollie's arm, and—in the full publicity of three o'clock in the afternoon—off we went.

We chattered; we laughed; we sniggled together like schoolgirls in amusement at the passers-by, in the strange, busy High Street. I devoured the entrancing wares in the shop windows—milliner, hairdresser and perfumer, confectioner; even the pyramids of jam jars and sugar-cones in the grocer's, and the soaps, syrups, and sponges of Mr Simpkins—Beechwood's pharmaceutical chemist. Out of the sovereign which I had brought with me from my treasure-chest Pollie made purchases on my behalf. For Mrs Bowater, a muslin tie for the neck; for herself—after heated controversy—a pair of kid gloves and a bottle of frangipani; and for me a novel.

This last necessitated a visit to Mrs Stocks's Circulating Library. My hopes had been set on Jane Eyre. Mrs Stocks regretted that the demand for this novel had always exceeded her supply: "What may be called the sensational style of fiction" (or was it friction?) "never lays much on our hands." She produced, instead, and very tactfully, a comparatively diminutive copy of Miss Austen's Sense and Sensibility. It was a little shop-soiled; "But books keep, miss"; and she let me have it at a reduced price. Her great shears severed the string. Pollie and I once more set clanging the sonorous bell at the door, and emerged into the sunlight. "Oh, Pollie," I whispered, "if only you could stay with me for ever!"

This taste of "life" had so elated me that after fevered and silent debate I at last laughed out, and explained to Pollie that I wished to be "put down." Her breathless arguments against this foolhardy experiment only increased my obstinacy. She was compelled to obey. Bidding her keep some little distance behind me, I settled my veil, clasped tight my Miss Austen in my arms and set my face in the direction from which we had come. One after another the wide paving-stones stretched out in front of me. It was an extraordinary experience. I was openly alone now, not with the skulking, deceitful shades and appearances of night, or the quiet flowers and trees in the enormous vacancy of nature; but in the midst of a town of men in their height—and walking along there: by myself. It was as if I had suddenly realized what astonishingly active and domineering and multitudinous creatures we humans are. I can't explain. The High Street, to use a good old phrase, "got up into my head." My mind was in such a whirl of excitement that full consciousness of what followed eludes me.

The sun poured wintry bright into the house-walled gulf of a street that in my isolation seemed immeasurably vast and empty. I think my senses distorted the scene. There was the terrific glitter of glass, the clatter of traffic. A puff of wind whirled dust and grit and particles of straw into the air. The shapes of advancing pedestrians towered close above me, then, stiff with sudden attention, passed me by. My legs grew a little numb and my brain confused. The strident whistling of a butcher's boy, with an empty, blood-stained tray over his shoulder, suddenly ceased. Saucer-eyed, he stood stock still, gulped and gaped. I kept on my course. A yelp of astonishment rent the air. Whereupon, as it seemed, from divers angles, similar boys seemed to leap out of the ground and came whooping and revolving across the street in my direction. And now the blood so hummed in my head that it was rather my nerves than my ears which informed me of a steadily increasing murmur and trampling behind me.

With extraordinary vividness I recall the vision of a gigantic barouche gliding along towards me in the shine and the dust; and seated up in it a high, pompous lady who at one moment with rigid urbanity inclined her head apparently in my direction, and at the next, her face displeased as if at an offensive odour, had sunk back into her cushions, oblivious not only of Beechwood but of the whole habitable globe. Simultaneously, I was aware, even as I hastened on, first that the acquaintance whose salute she had acknowledged was Mr Crimble, and next, that with incredible rapidity he had wheeled himself about and had instantaneously transfixed his entire attention on some object in the window of a hatter's.

Until this moment, as I say, a confused but blackening elation had filled my mind. But at sight of Mr Crimble's rook-like stooping shoulders I began to be afraid. My shoe stumbled against a jutting paving-stone. I almost fell. Whereupon the mute concourse at my heels—spreading tail of me, the Comet—burst into a prolonged squealing roar of delight. The next moment Pollie was at my side, stooping to my rescue. It was too late. One glance over my shoulder—and terror and hatred of the whole human race engulfed me like a sea. I struck savagely at Pollie's cotton-gloved hand. Shivering, with clenched, sticky teeth, I began to run.

Why this panic? Who would have harmed me? And yet on the thronging faces which I had flyingly caught sight of through my veil there lay an expression that was not solely curiosity—a kind of hunger, a dog-like gleam. I remember one thin-legged, ferrety, red-haired lad in particular. Well, no matter. The comedy was brief, and it was Mrs Stocks who lowered the curtain. Attracted by all this racket and hubbub in the street, she was protruding her round head out of her precincts. Like fox to its hole, I scrambled over her wooden doorstep, whisked round her person, and fled for sanctuary into her shop. She hustled poor Pollie in after me, wheeled round on my pursuers, slammed the door in their faces, slipped its bolt, and drew down its dark blue blind.

In the sudden quiet and torpor of this musty gloom I turned my hunted eyes and stared at the dark strip of holland that hid me from my pursuers. So too did Mrs Stocks. The round creature stood like a stone out of reach of the surf. Then she snorted.

"Them!" said she, with a flick of her duster. "A parcel of idle herrand boys. I know them: and no more decency than if you was Royalty, my dear, or a pickpocket, or a corpse run over in the street. You rest a bit, pore young thing, and compose yourself. They'll soon grow tired of themselves."

She retired into the back part of her shop beyond the muslined door and returned with a tumbler of water. I shook my head. My sight pulsed with my heartbeats. As if congealed into a drop of poison, I stared and stared at the blind.

"Open the door," I said. "I'd like to go out again."

"Oh, miss! oh, miss!" cried Pollie.

But Mrs Stocks was of a more practical turn. After surveying my enemies from an upper window she had sent a neighbour's little girl for a cab. By the time this vehicle arrived, with a half-hearted "Boo!" of disappointment, the concourse in the street had all but melted away, and Mrs Stocks's check duster scattered the rest. The cab-door slammed, the wheels ground on the kerbstone, my début was over. I had been but a nine minutes' wonder.

Chapter Seventeen

We jogged on sluggishly up the hill, and at last, in our velvety quiet, as if at a preconcerted signal, Pollie and I turned and looked at one another, and broke into a long, mirthless peal of laughter—a laughter that on her side presently threatened to end in tears. I left her to recover herself, fixing my festering attention on her engagement ring—two hearts in silver encircled by six sky-blue turquoises. And in the silly, helpless fashion of one against the world, I plotted revenge.

The cab stopped. There stood the little brick house, wholly unaffected by the tragic hours which had passed since we had so gaily set out from it. I eyed it with malice and disgust as I reascended my Bateses and preceded Pollie into the passage. Once safely within, I shrugged my shoulders and explained to Mrs Bowater the phenomenon of the cab with such success that I verily believe she was for the moment convinced that her lodger was one of those persons who prosper in the attentions of the mob—Royalty, that is, rather than pickpockets or corpses run over in the street.

With my new muslin tie adorning her neck, Mrs Bowater took tea with us that afternoon, but even Pollie's imaginative version of our adventures made no reference to the lady in the carriage, nor did she share my intense conjecture on what Mr Crimble can have found of such engrossing interest in the hatter's. Was it that the lady had feigned not to have seen me entirely for my sake; and that Mr Crimble had feigned not to have seen me entirely for his? I was still poring over this problem in bed that night when there came a tap at my door. It was Pollie. She had made her way downstairs to assure herself that I was safe and comfortable. "And oh, miss," she whispered, as she bade me a final good-night, "you never see such a lovely little bedroom as Mrs Bowater have put me into—fit for a princess, and yet just quite plain! Bob's been thinking about furniture too."

So I was left alone again with forgotten Fanny, and that night I dreamed of her. Nothing to be seen but black boiling waves flinging their yeasty, curdling crests into the clouds, and every crest the face of my ferrety "herrand-boy." And afloat in the midst of the welter beneath, a beloved shape whiter than the foam, with shut eyes, under the gigantic stoop of the water. Who hangs these tragic veils in the sleeping mind? Who was this I that looked out on them? I awoke, shuddering, breathed a blessing—disjointed, nameless; turned over, and soon was once more asleep.

My day's experiences in the High Street had added at least twenty-four hours to my life. So much a woman of the world was I becoming that when, after Pollie's departure, a knock announced Mr Crimble, I greeted him with a countenance guileless and self-possessed. With spectacles fixed on me, he stood nervously twitching a small bunch of snowdrops which he assured me were the first of the New Year. I thanked him, remarked that our Lyndsey snowdrops were shorter in the stalk than these, and had he noticed the pale green hieroglyphs on the petals?

"In the white, dead nettle you have to look underneath for them: tiny black oblongs; you can't think how secret it looks!"

But Mr Crimble had not come to botanize. After answering my inquiry after the health of Mrs Hubbins, he suddenly sat down and announced that the object of his visit was to cast himself on my generosity. The proposal made me uncomfortable, but my timid attempt to return to Mrs Hubbins was unavailing.

"I speak," he said, "of yesterday's atrocity. There is no other word for it, and inasmuch as it occurred within two hundred yards of my own church, indeed of my mother's house, I cannot disclaim all responsibility for it."

Nor could I. But I wished very heartily that he had not come to talk about his share. "Oh," said I, as airily as I could, "you mean, Mr Crimble, my little experience in the High Street. That was nothing. My attention was so much taken up with other things that I did not get even so much as a glimpse of St Peter's. So you see——"

"You are kindness itself," he interrupted, with a rapid insertion of his forefinger between his neck and his clerical collar, "but the fact is," and he cast a glance at me as if with the whites of his eyes, "the fact is, I was myself a scandalized witness of the occurrence. Believe me, it cannot have hurt your sensitive feelings more than—than it hurt mine."

"But honestly, Mr Crimble," I replied, glancing rather helplessly round the room, "it didn't hurt my feelings at all. You don't feel much, you know, when you are angry. It was just as I should have foreseen. It is important to know where we are, isn't it; and where other people are? And boys will be boys, as Mrs Bowater says, and particularly, I suppose, errand boys. What else could I expect? It has just taught me a very useful lesson—even though I didn't much enjoy learning it. If I am ever to get used to the world (and that is a kind of duty, Mr Crimble, isn't it?), the world must get used to me. Perhaps if we all knew each other's insides—our thoughts and feelings, I mean—everybody would be as peculiar there—inside, you know—as I am, outside. I'm afraid this is not making myself very clear."

And only a few weeks ago I had been bombarding Dr Phelps with precisely the opposite argument. That, I suppose, is what is meant by being "deceitful on the weights."

Mr Crimble opened his mouth, but I continued rapidly, "You see, I must be candid about such things to myself and try not to—to be silly. And you were merely going to be very kind, weren't you? I am a midget, and it's no good denying it. The people that hooted me were not. That's all; and if there hadn't been so many of them, perhaps I might have been just as much amused, if not even shocked at them, as they at me. We think our own size, that's all, and I'm perfectly certain," I nodded at him emphatically, "I'm perfectly certain if poor Mr Hubbins were here now, he'd—he'd bear me out."

Bear me out—the words lingered on in my mind so distinctly, and conveyed so peculiar a picture of Mr Hubbins's spirit and myself, that I missed the beginning of my visitor's reply.

"But I assure you," he was saying, "it is not merely that." The glint of perspiration was on his forehead. "In the Almighty's sight all men are equal. Appearances are nothing. And some of us perhaps are far more precious by very reason of—of passing afflictions, and——"

"My godmother," I interposed, "said exactly that in a letter to me a few months ago. Not that I accept the word, Mr Crimble, the 'afflictions,' I mean. And as for appearances, why they are everything, aren't they?" I gave him as cordial an imitation of a smile as I could.

"No, no, no; yes, yes, yes," said Mr Crimble rapidly. "But it was not of that, not of that in a sense that I was speaking. What I came to say this afternoon is this. I grant it; I freely confess it; I played the coward; morally rather than physically, perhaps, but still the coward. The—the hideous barbarity of the proceeding." He had forgotten me. His eyes were fixed on the scene in his memory. He was once more at the hatter's window. There fell a painful pause.

I rose and sat down again. "But quite, quite honestly," I interposed faintly, "they did me no harm. They were only inquisitive. What could you have done? Why, really and truly," I laughed feebly, "they might have had to pay, you know. It was getting—getting me cheap!"

His head was thrown back, so that he looked under his spectacles at me, as he cried hollowly: "They might have stoned you."

"Not with those pavements."

"But I was there. I turned aside. You saw me?"

What persuaded me to be guilty of such a ridiculous quibble, I cannot think. Anything, perhaps, to ease his agitation: "But honestly, honestly, Mr Crimble," I murmured out at him, "I didn't see you see me."

"Oh, ah! a woman's way!" he adjured me desperately, turning his head from one side to the other. "But you must have known that I knew you knew I had seen you, you must confess that. And, well ... as I say, I can only appeal to your generosity."

"But what can I do? I'm not hurt. If it had been the other way round—you scuttling along, I mean; I really do believe I might have looked into the hatter's. Besides, when we were safe in the cab.... I mean, I'm glad! It was experience: oh, and past. I loved it and the streets, and the shops, and all those grinning, gnashing faces, and even you.... It was wildly exciting, Mr Crimble, can't you see? And now"—I ended triumphantly—"and now I have another novel!"

At this, suddenly overcome, I jumped up from my chair and ran off into my bedroom as if in search of the book. The curtains composed themselves behind me. In this inner quietness, this momentary release, I stood there, erect beside the bed—without a thought in my head. And I began slowly, silently—to laugh. Handkerchief to my lips, I laughed and laughed—not exactly like Pollie in the cab, but because apparently some infinitely minute being within me had risen up at remembrance of the strange human creature beyond the curtains who had suddenly before my very eyes seemed to have expanded and swollen out to double his size. Oh, what extraordinary things life was doing to me. How can I express myself? For that pip of a moment I was just an exquisite icicle of solitude—as if I had never been born. Yet there, under my very nose, was my bed, my glass, my hair-brushes and bottles—"Here we all are, Miss M."—and on the other side of the curtains.... And how contemptuous I had been of Pollie's little lapse into the hysterical! I brushed my handkerchief over my eyes, tranquillized my features, and sallied out once more into the world.

"Ah, here it is," I exclaimed ingenuously, and lifting my Sense and Sensibility from where it lay on the floor beside my table, I placed it almost ceremoniously in Mr Crimble's hands. A visible mist of disconcertion gathered over his face. He looked at the book, he opened it, his eye strayed down the title-page.

"Yes, yes," he murmured, "Jane Austen—a pocket edition. Macaulay, I remember...." He closed-to the covers again, drew finger and thumb slowly down the margin, and then leaned forward. "But you were asking me a question. What could I have done? Frankly I don't quite know. But I might have protected you, driven the rabble off, taken you—— The Good Shepherd. But there, in short," and the sun of relief peered through the glooms of conscience, "I did nothing. That was my failure. And absurd though it may seem, I could not rest until, as a matter of fact, I had unbosomed myself, confessed, knowing you would understand." His tongue came to a standstill. "And when," he continued in a small, constrained voice, and with a searching, almost appealing glance, "when Miss Bowater returns, you will, I hope, allow me to make amends, to prove—— She would never—for—forgive...."

The fog that had been his became mine. In an extravagance of attention to every syllable of his speech as it died away uncompleted in the little listening room I mutely surveyed him. Then I began to understand, to realize where my poor little "generosity" was to come in.

"Ah," I replied at last, forlornly, our eyes in close communion, "she won't be back for months and months. And anyhow, she wouldn't, I am sure, much mind, Mr Crimble."

"Easter," he whispered. "Well, you will write, I suppose," and his eye wandered off as if in search of the inkpot, "and no doubt you will share our—your secret." There was no vestige of interrogation in his voice, and yet it was clear that what he was suggesting I should do was only and exactly what he had come that afternoon to ask me not to do. Why, surely, I thought, examining him none too complimentarily, I am afraid, he was merely playing for a kind of stalemate. What funny, blind alleys love leads us into.

"No," I said solemnly. "I shall say nothing. But that, I suppose, is because I am not so brave as you are. Really and truly, I think she would only be amused. Everything amuses her."

It seemed that we had suddenly reassumed our natural dimensions, for at that he looked at me tinily again, and with the suggestion, to which I was long accustomed, that he would rather not be observed while so looking.

On the whole, ours had been a gloomy talk. Nevertheless, there, not on my generosity, but I hope on my understanding, he reposed himself, and so reposes to this day. When the door had closed behind him, I felt far more friendly towards Mr Crimble than I had felt before. Even apart from the Almighty, he had made us as nearly as he could—equals. I tossed a pleasant little bow to his snowdrops, and, catching sight of Mr Bowater's fixed stare on me, hastily included him within its range.

Mr Crimble, Mrs Bowater informed me the following Sunday evening, lived with an aged mother, and in spite of his sociability and his "fun," was a lonely young man. He hadn't, my landlady thought, yet seen enough of the world to be of much service to those who had. "They," and I think she meant clergymen in general, as well as Mr Crimble in particular, "live a shut-in, complimentary life, and people treat them according. Though, of course, there's those who have seen a bit of trouble and cheeseparing themselves, and the Church is the Church when all's said and done."

And all in a moment I caught my first real glimpse of the Church—no more just a number of St Peterses than I was so many "organs," or Beechwood was so many errand boys, or, for that matter, England so many counties. It was an idea; my attention wandered.

"But he was very anxious about the concert," I ventured to protest.

"I've no doubt," said Mrs Bowater shortly.

"But then," I remarked with a sigh, "Fanny seems to make friends wherever she goes."

"It isn't the making," replied her mother, "but the keeping."

The heavy weeks dragged slowly by, and a one-sided correspondence is like posting letters into a dream. My progress with Miss Austen was slow, because she made me think and argue with her. Apart from her, I devoured every fragment of print I could lay hands on. For when fiction palled I turned to facts, mastered the sheepshank, the running bowline, and the figure-of-eight; and wrestled on with my sea-craft. It was a hard task, and I thought it fair progress if in that I covered half a knot a day.

Besides which, Mrs Bowater sometimes played with me at solitaire, draughts, or cards. In these she was a martinet, and would appropriate a fat pack at Beggar-my-neighbour with infinite gusto. How silent stood the little room, with just the click of the cards, the simmering of the kettle on the hob, and Mrs Bowater's occasional gruff "Four to pay." We might have been on a desert island. I must confess this particular game soon grew a little wearisome; but I played on, thinking to please my partner, and that she had chosen it for her own sake. Until one evening, with a stifled sigh, she murmured the word, Cribbage! I was shuffling my own small pack at the moment, and paused, my eyes on their backs, in a rather wry amusement. But Fate has pretty frequently so turned the tables on me; and after that, "One for his nob," sepulchrally broke the night-silence of Beechwood far more often than "Four to pay."

Not all my letters to Fanny went into the post. My landlady looked a little askance at them, and many of the unposted ones were scrawled, if possible in moonlight, after she had gone to bed. To judge from my recollection of other letters written in my young days, I may be thankful that Fanny was one of those practical people who do not hoard the valueless. I can still recall the poignancy of my postscripts. On the one hand: "I beseech you to write to me, Fanny, I live to hear. Last night was full moon again. I saw you—you only in her glass." On the other: "Henry has been fighting. There is a chip out of his ear. Nine centuries nearer now! And how is 'Monsieur Crapaud'?"

Wanderslore

Chapter Eighteen

At last there came a post which brought me, not a sermon from Miss Fenne, nor gossip from Pollie, but a message from the Islands of the Blest. All that evening and night it lay unopened under my pillow. I was saving it up. And never have I passed hours so studious yet so barren of result. It was the end of February. A sudden burst of light and sunshine had fallen on the world. There were green shining grass and new-fallen lambs in the meadows, and the almond tree beyond my window was in full, leafless bloom. As for the larks, they were singing of Fanny. The next morning early, about seven o'clock, her letter folded up in its small envelope in the bosom of my cloak, I was out of the house and making my way to the woods. It was the clear air of daybreak and only the large stars shook faint and silvery in the brightening sky.

Frost powdered the ground and edged the grasses. But now tufts of primroses were in blow among the withered mist of leaves. I came to my "observatory" just as the first beams of sunrise smote on its upper boughs. Yet even now I deferred the longed-for moment and hastened on between the trees, beech and brooding yew, by what seemed a faint foot-track, and at last came out on a kind of rising on the edge of the woods. From this green eminence for the first time I looked straight across its desolate garden to Wanderslore.

It was a long, dark, many-windowed house. It gloomed sullenly back at me beneath the last of night. From the alarm calls of the blackbirds it seemed that even so harmless a trespasser as I was a rare spectacle. A tangle of brier and bramble bushed frostily over its grey stone terraces. Nearer at hand in the hollow stood an angled house, also of stone—and as small compared with Wanderslore as a little child compared with its mother. It had been shattered at one corner by a falling tree, whose bole still lay among the undergrowth. The faint track I was following led on, and apparently past it. Breathless and triumphant, I presently found myself seated on a low mossy stone beside it, monarch of all I surveyed. With a profound sigh I opened my letter:—

"BURN THIS LETTER, AND SHOW THE OTHER TO M.

"Dear Midgetina,—Don't suppose, because I have not written, that Fanny is a monster, though, in fact, she is. I have often thought of you—with your stars and knick-knacks. And of course your letters have come. My thanks. I can't really answer them now because I am trying at the same time to scribble this note and to correct 'composition' papers under the very eyes of Miss Stebbings—the abhorred daughter of Argus and the eldest Gorgon. Dear me, I almost envy you, Midgetina. It must be fun to be like a tiny, round-headed pin in a pin-cushion and just mock at the Workbox. But all things in moderation.

"When the full moon came last I remembered our vow. She was so dazzling, poor old wreck. And I wondered, as I blinked up at her, if you would not some day vanish away altogether—unless you make a fortune by being looked at. I wish I could. Only would they pay enough? That is the question.

"What I am writing about now is not the moon, but—don't be amused!—a Man. Not Monsieur Crapaud, who is more absurd than ever; but some one you know, Mr Crimble. He has sent me the most alarming letter and wants me to marry him. It is not for the first time of asking, but still a solemn occasion. Mother once said that he was like a coquette—all attention and no intention. Sad to say, it is the other way round. M., you see, always judges by what she fears. I by what this Heart tells me.

"Now I daren't write back to him direct (a) because I wish just now to say neither Yes nor No; (b) because a little delay will benefit his family pride; (c) because it is safer not to—he's very careless and I might soon want to change my mind; (d) because that's how my fancy takes me; and (e) because I love you exceedingly and know you will help me.

"When no answer comes to his letter, he will probably dare another pilgrimage to Beechwood Hill, if only to make sure that I am not in my grave. So I want you to tell him secretly that I have received his letter and that I am giving it my earnest attention—let alone my prayers. Tell me exactly how he takes this answer; then I will write to you again. I am sure, Midgetina, in some previous life you must have lived in the tiny rooms in the Palace at Mantua—you are a born intrigante.

"In my bedroom, 11 p.m.—A scheme is in my mind, but it is not yet in bloom, and you may infer from all this that I don't care. Often I wish this were so. I sat in front of my eight inches of grained looking-glass last night till it seemed some god(dess) must intervene. But no. My head was dark and empty. I could hear Mr Oliphant cajoling with his violin in the distance—as if music had charms. Oh, dear, they give you life, and leave you to ask, Why. You seem to be perfectly contented in your queer little prim way with merely asking. But Fanny Bowater wants an answer, or she will make one up. Meanwhile, search for a scrap of magic mushroom, little sister, and come nearer! Some day I will tell you even more about myself! Meanwhile, believe me, petitissimost M., your affec.—F.

"PS.—Burn this.

"PPS.—What I mean is, that he must be made to realize that I will not and cannot give him an answer before I come home—unless he hears meanwhile.

"Burn this: the other letter is for show purposes."

Fanny's "other" was more brief:—

"Dear Midgetina,—It is delightful to have your letters, and I am ashamed of myself for not answering them before. But I will do so the very moment there is a free hour. Would you please ask mother with my love to send me some handkerchiefs, some stockings, and some soap? My first are worn with weeping, my second with sitting still, and my third is mottled—and similarly affects the complexion. But Easter draws near, and I am sure I must long to be home. Did you tell mother by any chance of your midnight astronomy lesson? It has been most useful when all other baits and threats have failed to teach the young idea how to shoot. Truly a poet's way of putting it. Is Mr Crimble still visiting his charming parishioner?

"I remain,
"Yours affec'ly,
"Fanny Bowater."

Slowly, self-conscious word by word, lingering here and there, I read these letters through—then through again. Then I lifted my eyes and stared for a while over my left shoulder at empty Wanderslore. A medley of emotions strove for mastery, and as if to reassure herself the "tiny, round-headed pin" kissed the signature, whispering languishingly to herself in the great garden: "I love you exceedingly. Oh, Fanny, I love you exceedingly," and hid her eyes in her hands. The note-paper was very faintly scented. My imagination wandered off I know not where; and returned, elated and dejected. Which the more I know not. Then I folded up the secret letter into as small a compass as I could, dragged back a loose, flat stone, hid it away in the dry crevice beneath, and replaced the stone. The other I put into my silk bag.

I emerged from these labours to see in my mind Mrs Bowater steadfastly regarding me, and behind her the shadowy shape of Mr Crimble, with I know not what of entreaty in his magnified dark eyes. I smiled a little ruefully to myself to think that my life was become like a pool of deep water in which I was slowly sinking down and down. As if, in sober fact, there were stones in my pocket, or leaden soles to my shoes. It was more like reading a story about myself, than being myself, and what was to be the end of it all? I thought of Fanny married to Mr Crimble, as my mother was married to my father. How dark and uncomfortable a creature he looked beside Fanny's grace and fairness. And would Mrs Crimble sit in an arm-chair and watch Fanny as Fanny had watched me? And should I be asked to tea? I was surprised into a shudder. Yet I don't think there would have been any wild jealousy in my heart—even if Fanny should say, Yes. I could love her better, perhaps, if she would give me a little time. And what was really keeping her back? Why did every word she said or wrote only hide what she truly meant?

So, far from mocking at the Workbox, I was only helplessly examining its tangled skeins. Nor was I criticizing Fanny. To help her—that was my one burning desire, to give all I had, take nothing. In a vague, and possibly priggish, fashion, I knew, too, that I wanted to help her against herself. Her letter (and perhaps the long waiting for it) had smoothed out my old excitements. In the midst of these musings memory suddenly alighted on the question in the letter which was to be shown to Mrs Bowater: about the star-gazing. There was no need for that now. But the point was, had not Fanny extorted a promise from me not to tell her mother of our midnight adventure? It seemed as though without a shred of warning the fair face had drawn close in my consciousness and was looking at me low and fixedly, like a snake in a picture. Why, it was like cheating at cards! Fascinated and repelled, I sank again into reverie.

"No, no, it's cowardly, Fanny," cried aloud a voice in the midst of this inward argument, as startling as if a stranger had addressed me. The morning was intensely still. Sunbeams out of the sky now silvered the clustered chimney shafts of Wanderslore. Where shadow lay, the frost gloomed wondrously blue on the dishevelled terraces; where sun, a thin smoke of vapour was ascending into the air. The plants and bushes around me were knobbed all over with wax-green buds. The enormous trees were faintly coloured in their twigs. A sun-beetle staggered, out among the pebbles at my feet. I glanced at my hands; they were coral pink with the cold. "I love you exceedingly—exceedingly," I repeated, though this time I knew not to whom.

So saying, and, even as I said it, realizing that the exceedingly was not my own, and that I must be intelligent even if I was sentimental, I rose from my stone, and turned to go back. I thus faced the worn, small, stone house again. Instantly I was all attention. A curious feeling came over me, familiar, yet eluding remembrance. It meant that I must be vigilant. Cautiously I edged round to the other side of the angled wall, where lay the fallen tree. Hard, dark buds showed on its yet living fringes. Rather than clamber over its sodden bole, I skirted it until I could walk beneath a lank, upthrust bough. At every few steps I shrank in and glanced around me, then fixed my eyes—as I had learned to do by my stream-side or when star-gazing—on a single object, in order to mark what was passing on the outskirts of my field of vision. Nothing. I was alone in the garden. A robin, with a light flutter of wing, perched to eye me. A string of rooks cawed across the sky. Wanderslore emptily stared. If, indeed, I was being watched, then my watcher was no less circumspect than I. Soon I was skirting the woods again, and had climbed the green knoll by which I had descended into the garden. I wheeled sharply, searching the whole course of my retreat. Nothing.

When I opened my door, Mrs Bowater and Henry seemed to be awaiting me. Was it my fancy that both of them looked censorious? Absently she stood aside to let me pass to my room, then followed me in.

"Such a lovely morning, Mrs Bowater," I called pleasantly down from my bedroom, as I stood taking off my cloak in front of the glass, "and not a soul to be seen—though" (and my voice was better under command with a hairpin between my teeth); "I wouldn't have minded if there had been. Not now."

"Ah," came the reply, "but you must be cautious, miss. Boys will be boys; and," the sound tailed away, "men, men." I heard the door open and close, and paused, with hands still lifted to my hair, prickling cold all over at this strange behaviour. What could I have been found out in now?

Then a voice sounded seemingly out of nowhere. "What I was going to say, miss, is—A letter's come."

With that I drew aside the curtain. The explanation was simple. Having let Henry out of my room, in which he was never at ease, Mrs Bowater was still standing, like a figure in waxwork, in front of her chiffonier, her eyes fixed on the window. They then wheeled on me. "Mr Bowater," she said.

I was conscious of an inexpressible relief and of the profoundest interest. I glanced at the great portrait. "Mr Bowater?" I repeated.

"Yes," she replied. "Buenos Ayres. He's broken a leg; and so's fixed there for the time being."

"Oh, Mrs Bowater," I said, "I am sorry. And how terribly sudden."

"Believe me, my young friend," she replied musingly, "it's never in my experience what's unprepared for that finds us least expecting it. Not that it was actually his leg was in my mind."

What was chiefly in my selfish mind was the happy conviction that I had better not give her Fanny's letter just then.

"I do hope he's not in great pain," was all I found to say.

She continued to muse at me in her queer, sightless fashion, almost as if she were looking for help.

"Oh, dear me, miss," the poor thing cried brokenly, "how should your young mind feel what an old woman feels: just grovelling in the past?"

She was gone; and, feeling very uncomfortable in my humiliation, I sat down and stared—at "the workbox." Why, why indeed, I thought angrily, why should I be responsible? Well, I suppose it's only when the poor fish—sturgeon or stickleback—struggles, that he really knows he's in the net.

Chapter Nineteen

One of the many perplexing problems that now hemmed me in was brushed away by Fortune that afternoon. Between gloomy bursts of reflection on Fanny's, Mr Crimble's, Mrs Bowater's, and my own account, I had been reading Miss Austen; and at about four o'clock was sharing Chapter XXIII. with poor Elinor:—

"The youthful infatuation of nineteen would naturally blind her to everything but her beauty and good nature, but the four succeeding years—years which, if rationally spent, give such improvements to the understanding—must have opened her eyes to her defects of Education, which the same period of time, spent on her side in inferior society and more frivolous pursuits...."

I say I was reading this passage, and had come to the words—"and more frivolous pursuits," when an unusually imperative rat-tat-tat fell upon the outer door, and I emerged from my book to discover that an impressive white-horsed barouche was drawn up in the street beyond my window. The horse tossed its head and chawed its frothy bit; and the coachman sat up beside his whip in the sparkling frosty afternoon air. My heart gave a thump, and I was still seeking vaguely to connect this event with myself or with Mr Bowater in Buenos Ayres, when the door opened and a lady entered whose plumed and purple bonnet was as much too small for her head as she herself was too large for the room. Yet in sheer dimensions this was not a very large lady. It was her "presence" that augmented her.

She seemed, too, to be perfectly accustomed to these special proportions, and with a rather haughty, "Thank you," to Mrs Bowater, winningly announced that she was Lady Pollacke, "a friend, a mutual friend, as I understand, of dear Mr Crimble's."

Though a mauvish pink in complexion, Lady Pollacke was so like her own white horse that whinnyingly rather than winningly would perhaps have been the apter word. I have read somewhere that this human resemblance to horses sometimes accompanies unusual intelligence. The poet, William Wordsworth, was like a horse; I have seen his portrait. And I should like to see Dean Swift's. Whether or not, the unexpected arrival of this visitor betrayed me into some little gaucherie, and for a moment I still sat on, as she had discovered me, literally "floored" by my novel. Then I scrambled with what dignity I could to my feet, and chased after my manners.

"And not merely that," continued my visitor, seating herself on a horsehair easy-chair, "but among my still older friends is Mr Pellew. So you see—you see," she repeated, apparently a little dazzled by the light of my window, "that we need no introduction, and that I know all—all the circumstances." She lowered a plump, white-kidded hand to her lap, as if, providentially, there all the circumstances lay.

Unlike Mr Crimble, Lady Pollacke had not come to make excuses, but to bring me an invitation—nothing less than to take tea with her on the following Thursday afternoon. But first she hoped—she was sure, in fact, and she satisfied herself with a candid gaze round my apartment—that I was comfortable with Mrs Bowater; "a thoroughly trustworthy and sagacious woman, though, perhaps, a little eccentric in address."

I assured her that I was so comfortable that some of my happiest hours were spent gossiping with my landlady over my supper.

"Ah, yes," she said, "that class of person tells us such very interesting things occasionally, do they not? Yet I am convinced that the crying need in these days is for discrimination. Uplift, by all means, but we mustn't confuse. What does the old proverb say: Festina lente: there's still truth in that. Now, had I known your father—but there; we must not rake in old ashes. We are clean, I see; and quiet and secluded."

Her equine glance made a rapid circuit of the photographs and ornaments that diversified the walls, and I simply couldn't help thinking what a queer little cage they adorned for so large and handsome a bird, the kind of bird, as one might say, that is less weight than magnitude.

I was still casting my eye up and down her silk and laces when she abruptly turned upon me with a direct question: "You seldom, I suppose, go out?"

Possibly if Lady Pollacke had not at this so composedly turned her full face on me—with its exceedingly handsome nose—her bonnet might have remained only vaguely familiar. Now as I looked at her, it was as if the full moon had risen. She was, without the least doubt in the world, the lady who had bowed to Mr Crimble from her carriage that fateful afternoon. A little countenance is not, perhaps, so tell-tale as a large one. (I remember, at any rate, the horrid shock I once experienced when my father set me up on his hand one day to show me my own face, many times magnified, in his dressing-room shaving-glass.) But my eyes must have narrowed a little, for Lady Pollacke's at once seemed to set a little harder. And she was still awaiting an answer to her question.

"'Go out'!" I repeated meditatively, "not very much, Lady Pollacke; at least not in crowded places. The boys, you know."

"Ah, yes, the boys." It was Mr Crimble's little dilemma all over again: Lady Pollacke was evidently wondering whether I knew she knew I knew.

"But still," I continued cheerfully, "it is the looker-on that sees most of the game, isn't it?"

Her eyelids descended, though her face was still lifted up. "Well, so the proverb says," she agreed, with the utmost cordiality. It was at this moment—as I have said—that she invited me to tea.

She would come for me herself, she promised. "Now wouldn't that be very nice for us both—quite a little adventure?"

I was not perfectly certain of the niceness, but might not Mr Crimble be a fellow-guest; and hadn't I an urgent and anxious mission with him? I smiled and murmured; and, as if her life had been a series of such little social triumphs, my visitor immediately rose; and, I must confess, in so doing seemed rather a waste of space.

"Then that's settled: Thursday afternoon. We must wrap up," she called gaily through her descending veil. "This treacherous month! It has come in like a lamb, but"—and she tugged at her gloves, still scrutinizing me fixedly beneath her eyelids, "but it will probably go out like a lion." As if to illustrate this prediction, she swept away to the door, leaving Mrs Bowater's little parlour and myself to gather our scattered wits together as best we could, while her carriage rolled away.

Alas, though I love talking and watching and exploring, how could I be, even at that age, a really social creature? Though Lady Pollacke had been politeness itself, the remembrance of her bonnet in less favourable surroundings was still in my mind's eye. If anything, then, her invitation slightly depressed me. Besides, Thursday never was a favourite day of mine. It is said to have only one lucky hour—the last before dawn. But this is not tea-time. Worse still, the coming Thursday seemed to have sucked all the virtue out of the Wednesday in between. I prefer to see the future stretching out boundless and empty in front of me—like the savannas of Robinson Crusoe's island. Visitors, and I am quite sure he would have agreed with me, are hardly at times to be distinguished from visitations.

All this merely means that I was a rather green and backward young woman, and, far worse, unashamed of being so. Here was one of the greatest ladies of Beechwood lavishing attentions upon me, and all I was thinking was how splendid an appearance she would have made a few days before if she had borrowed his whip from her coachman and dispersed my little mob with it, as had Mrs Stocks with her duster. But noblesse oblige; Mr Crimble had been compelled to consider my feelings, and no doubt Lady Pollacke had been compelled to consider his.

The next day was fine, but I overslept myself and was robbed of my morning walk. For many hours I was alone. Mrs Bowater had departed on one of her shopping bouts. So, whoever knocked, knocked in vain; and I listened to such efforts in secret and unmannerly amusement. I wonder if ever ghosts come knocking like that on the doors of the mind; and it isn't that one won't hear, but can't. My afternoon was spent in an anxious examination of my wardrobe. Four o'clock punctually arrived, and, almost as punctually, Lady Pollacke. Soon, under Mrs Bowater's contemplative gaze, I was mounted up on a pile of cushions, and we were bowling along in most inspiriting fashion through the fresh March air. Strangely enough, when during our progress, eyes were now bent in my direction, Lady Pollacke seemed copiously to enjoy their interest. This was especially the case when she was acquainted with their owners; and bowed her bow in return.

"Quite a little reception for you," she beamed at me, after a particularly respectable carriage had cast its occupants' scarcely modulated glances in my direction. How strange is human character! To an intelligent onlooker, my other little reception must have been infinitely more inspiring; and yet she had almost wantonly refused to take any part in it. Now, supposing I had been Royalty or a corpse run over in the street.... But we were come to our journey's end.

Brunswick House was a fine, square, stone-edged edifice, dominating its own "grounds." Regiments of crocuses stood with mouths wide open in its rich loam. Its gateposts were surmounted by white balls of stone; and the gravel was of so lively a colour that it must have been new laid. Wherever I looked, my eyes were impressed by the best things in the best order. This was as true of Lady Pollacke's clothes, as of her features, of her gateposts, and her drawing-room. And the next most important thing in the last was its light.

Light simply poured in upon its gilt and brass and pale maroon from two high wide windows staring each other down from between their rich silk damask curtains. It was like entering an enormous bath, and it made me timid. In the midst of a large animal's skin, beneath a fine white marble chimney-piece, and under an ormolu clock, the parlour-maid was directed to place a cherry-coloured stool for me. Here I seated myself. With a fine, encouraging smile my hostess left me for a few minutes to myself. Maybe because an embroidered fire-screen that stood near reminded me of Miss Fenne, I pulled myself together. "Don't be a ninny," I heard myself murmur. My one hope and desire in this luxurious solitude was for the opportunity to deliver my message to Mr Crimble. This was not only a visit, it was an adventure. I looked about the flashing room; and it rather stared back at me.

The first visitor to appear was none but Miss Bullace, whose recitation of "The Lady's 'Yes'" had so peculiarly inspirited Fanny. She sat square and dark with her broad lap in front of her, and scrutinized me as if no emergency ever daunted her. And Lady Pollacke recounted the complexity of ties that had brought us together. Miss Bullace, alas, knew neither Mr Ambrose Pellew, nor my godmother, nor even my godmother's sister, Augusta Fenne. Indeed I seemed to have no claim at all on her recognition until she inquired whether it was not Augusta Fenne's cousin, Dr Julius Fenne, who had died suddenly while on a visit to the Bermudas. Apparently it was. We all at once fell into better spirits, which were still more refreshed when Lady Pollacke remarked that Augusta had also "gone off like that," and that Fennes were a doomed family.

But merely to smile and smile is not to partake; so I ventured to suggest that to judge from my last letter from my godmother she, at any rate, was in her usual health; and I added, rather more cheerfully perhaps than the fact warranted, that my family seemed to be doomed too, since, so far as I was aware, I myself was the last of it left alive.

At this a sudden gush of shame welled up in me at the thought that through all my troubles I had never once remembered the kindnesses of my step-grandfather; that he, too, might be dead. I was so rapt away by the thought that I caught only the last three words of Miss Bullace's murmured aside to Lady Pollacke, viz., "not blush unseen."

Lady Pollacke raised her eyebrows and nodded vigorously; and then to my joy Mr Crimble and a venerable old lady with silver curls clustering out of her bonnet were shown into the room. He looked pale and absent as he bent himself down to take my hand. It was almost as if in secret collusion we had breathed the word Fanny together. Mrs Crimble was supplied with a tea-cup, and her front teeth were soon unusually busy with a slice of thin bread and butter. Eating or drinking, her intense old eyes dwelt distantly but assiduously on my small shape; and she at last entered into a long story of how, as a girl, she had been taken to a circus—a circus: and there had seen.... But what she had seen Mr Crimble refused to let her divulge. He jerked forward so hastily that his fragment of toasted scone rolled off his plate into the wild beast's skin, and while, with some little difficulty, he was retrieving it, he assured us that his mother's memory was little short of miraculous, and particularly in relation to the past.

"I have noticed," he remarked, in what I thought a rather hollow voice, "that the more advanced in years we—er—happily become, the more closely we return to childhood."

"Senile...." I began timidly, remembering Dr Phelps's phrase.

But Mr Crimble hastened on. "Why, mother," he appealed to her, with an indulgent laugh, "I suppose to you I am still nothing but a small boy about that height?" He stretched out a ringless left hand about twenty-four inches above the rose-patterned carpet.

The old lady was not to be so easily smoothed over. "You interrupted me, Harold," she retorted, with some little show of indignation, "in what I was telling Lady Pollacke. Even a child of that size would have been a perfect monstrosity."

A lightning grimace swept over Miss Bullace's square features.

"Ah, ah, ah!" laughed Mr Crimble, "I am rebuked, I am in the corner! Another scone, Lady Pollacke?" Mrs Crimble was a beautiful old lady; but it was with a rather unfriendly and feline eye that she continued to regard me; and I wondered earnestly if Fanny had ever noticed this characteristic.

"The fact of the matter is," said Lady Pollacke, with conviction, "our memories rust for want of exercise. Where, physically speaking, would you be, Mr Crimble, if you hadn't the parish to tramp over? Precisely the same with the mind. Every day I make a personal effort to commit some salient fact to memory—such a fact, for a trivial example, as the date of the Norman Conquest. The consequence is, my husband tells me, I am a veritable encyclopædia. My father took after me. Alexander the Great, I have read somewhere, could address by name—though one may assume not Christian name—every soldier in his army. Thomas Babington Macaulay, a great genius, poor man, knew by heart every book he had ever read. A veritable mine of memory. On the other hand, I once had a parlour-maid, Sarah Jakes, who couldn't remember even the simplest of her duties, and if it hadn't been for my constant supervision would have given us port with the soup."

"Perfectly, perfectly true," assented Miss Bullace. "Now mine is a verbal memory. My mind is a positive magnet for words. Method, of course, is everything. I weld. Let us say that a line of a poem terminates with the word bower, and the next line commences with she, I commit these to memory as one word—Bowershee—and so master the sequence. My old friend, Lady Bovill Porter—we were schoolfellows—recommended this method. It was Edmund Kean's, I fancy, or some other well-known actor's. How else indeed, could a great actor realize what he was doing? Word-perfect, you see, he is free."

"Exactly, exactly," sagely nodded Mr Crimble, but with a countenance so colourless and sad that it called back to my remembrance the picture of a martyr—of St Sebastian, I think—that used to hang up in my mother's room.

"And you?"—I discovered Lady Pollacke was rather shrilly inquiring of me. "Is yours a verbal memory like Miss Bullace's; or are you in my camp?"

"Ah, there," cried Mr Crimble, tilting back his chair in sudden enthusiasm. "Miss M. positively puts me to shame. And poetry, Miss Bullace; even your wonderful repertory!"

"You mean Miss M. recites?" inquired Miss Bullace, leaning forward over her lap. "But how entrancing! It is we, then, who are birds of a feather. And how I should adore to hear a fellow-enthusiast. Now, won't you, Lady Pollacke, join your entreaties to mine? Just a stanza or two!"

A chill crept through my bones. I had accepted Lady Pollacke's invitation, thinking my mere presence would be entertainment enough, and because I knew it was important to see life, and immensely important to see Mr Crimble. In actual fact it seemed I had hopped for a moment not out of my cage, but merely, as Fanny had said, into another compartment of it.

"But Mr Crimble and I were only talking," I managed to utter.

"Oh, now, but do! Delicious!" pleaded a trio of voices.

Their faces had suddenly become a little strained and unnatural. The threat of further persuasion lifted me almost automatically to my feet. With hunted eyes fixed at last on a small marble bust with stooping head and winged brow that stood on a narrow table under the window, I recited the first thing that sprang to remembrance—an old poem my mother had taught me, Tom o' Bedlam.

"The moon's my constant mistress,

And the lovely owl my marrow;

The flaming drake,

And the night-crow, make

Me music to my sorrow.

I know more than Apollo;

For oft when he lies sleeping,

I behold the stars

At mortal wars,

And the rounded welkin weeping.

The moon embraces her shepherd,

And the Queen of Love her warrior;

While the first does horn

The stars of the morn,

And the next the heavenly farrier...."

Throughout these first three stanzas all went well. So rapt was my audience that I seemed to be breaking the silence of the seas beyond their furthest Hebrides. But at the first line of the fourth—at "With a heart"—my glance unfortunately wandered off from the unheeding face of the image and swam through the air, to be caught, as it were, like fly by spider, by Miss Bullace's dark, fixed gaze, that lay on me from under her flat hat.

"'With a heart,'" I began; and failed. Some ghost within had risen in rebellion, sealed my tongue. It seemed to my irrational heart that I had—how shall I say it?—betrayed my "stars," betrayed Fanny, that she and they and I could never be of the same far, quiet company again. So the "furious fancies" were never shared. The blood ran out of my cheek; I stuck fast; and shook my head.

At which quite a little tempest of applause spent itself against the walls of Lady Pollacke's drawing-room, an applause reinforced by that of a little round old gentleman, who, unnoticed, had entered the room by a farther door, and was now advancing to greet his guest. He was promptly presented to me on the beast-skin, and with the gentlest courtesy begged me to continue.

"'With a heart,' now; 'with a heart ...'" he prompted me, "a most important organ, though less in use nowadays than when I was a boy."

But it was in vain. Even if he had asked me only to whisper the rest of the poem into his long, pink ear, for his sake alone, I could not have done so. Moreover, Mr Crimble was still nodding his head at his mother in confirmation of his applause; and Miss Bullace was assuring me that mine was a poem entirely unknown to her, that, "with a few little excisions," it should be instantly enshrined in her repertory—"though perhaps a little bizarre!" and that if I made trial of Lady Bovill Porter's Bowershee method, my memory would never again play me false.

"The enunciation—am I not right, Sir Walter?—as distinct from the elocution—was flawless. And really, quite remarkable vocal power!"

Amidst these smiles and delights, and what with the brassy heat of the fire and the scent of the skin, I thought I should presently faint, and caught, as if at a straw, at the bust in the window.

"How lovely!" I cried, with pointing finger....

At that, silence fell, but only for a moment. Lady Pollacke managed to follow the unexpected allusion, and led me off for a closer inspection. In the hushed course of our progress thither I caught out of the distance two quavering words uttered as if in expostulation, "apparent intelligence." It was Mrs Crimble addressing Sir Walter Pollacke.

"Classical, you know," Lady Pollacke was sonorously informing me, as we stood together before the marble head. "Charming pose, don't you think? Though, as we see, only a fragment—one of Sir Walter's little hobbies."

I looked up at the serene, winged, sightless face, and a whisper sounded on and on in my mind in its mute presence, "I know more than Apollo; I know more than Apollo." How strange that this mere deaf-and-dumbness should seem more real, more human even, than anything or any one else in Lady Pollacke's elegant drawing-room. But self-possession was creeping back. "Who," I asked, "is he? And who sculped him?"

"Scalped him?" cried Lady Pollacke, poring down on me in dismay.

"Cut him out?"

"Ah, my dear young lady," said a quiet voice, "that I cannot tell you. It is the head of Hypnos, Sleep, you know, the son of Night and brother of Death. One wing, as you see, has been broken away in preparation for this more active age, and yet ... only a replica, of course"; the voice trembled into richness, "but an exceedingly pleasant example. It gives me rare pleasure, rare pleasure," he stood softly rocking, hands under coat-tails, eyes drinking me in, "to—to have your companionship."

What pleasure his words gave me, I could not—can never—express. Then and there I was his slave for ever.

"Walter," murmured Lady Pollacke, as if fondly, smiling down on the rotund old gentleman, "you are a positive peacock over your little toys; is he not, Mr Crimble? Did you ever hear of a woman wasting her affections on the inanimate? Even a doll, I am told, is an infant in disguise."

But Mr Crimble had approached us not to discuss infants or woman, but to tell Lady Pollacke that her carriage was awaiting me.

"Then pity 'tis, 'tis true," cried she, as if in Miss Bullace's words. "But please, Miss M., it must be the briefest of adieus. There are so many of my friends who would enjoy your company—and those delightful recitations. Walter, will you see that everything's quite—er—convenient?"

I am sure Lady Pollacke's was a flawless savoir faire, yet, when I held out my hand in farewell, her cheek crimsoned, it seemed, from some other cause than stooping. The crucial moment had arrived. If one private word was to be mine with Mr Crimble, it must be now or never. To my relief both gentlemen accompanied me out of the room, addressing their steps to mine. Urgency gave me initiative. I came to a standstill on the tesselated marble of the hall, and this time proffered my hand to Sir Walter. He stooped himself double over it; and I tried in vain to dismiss from remembrance a favourite reference of Pollie's to the guinea-pig held up by its tail.

I wonder now what Sir W. would have said of me in his autobiography: "And there stood a flaxen spelican in the midst of the hearthrug; blushing, poor tiny thing, over her little piece like some little bread-and-butter miss fresh from school." Something to that effect? I wonder still more who taught him so lovable a skill in handling that spelican?

"There; good-bye," said he, "and the blessing, my dear young lady, of a fellow fanatic."

He turned about and ascended the staircase. Except for the parlour-maid who was awaiting me in the porch, Mr Crimble and I were alone.

Chapter Twenty

"Mr Crimble," I whispered, "I have a message."

A tense excitement seized him. His face turned a dusky yellow. How curious it is to see others as they must sometimes see ourselves. Should I have gasped like that, if Mr Crimble had been Fanny's Mercury?

"A letter from Miss Bowater," I whispered, "and I am to say," the cadaverous face was close above me, its sombre melting eyes almost bulging behind their glasses, "I am to say that she is giving yours 'her earnest attention, let alone her prayers.'"

I remember once, when Adam Waggett as a noisy little boy was playing in the garden at home, the string of his toy bow suddenly snapped: Mr Crimble drew back as straight and as swiftly as that. His eyes rained unanswerable questions. But the parlourmaid had turned to meet me, and the next moment she and I were side by side in Lady Pollacke's springy carriage en route for my lodgings. I had given my message, but never for an instant had I anticipated it would have so overwhelming an effect.

There must have been something inebriating in Lady Pollacke's tea. My mind was still simmering with excitement. And yet, during the whole of that journey, I spent not a moment on Mr Crimble's or Fanny's affairs, or even on Brunswick House, but on the dreadful problem whether or not I ought to "tip" the parlourmaid, and if so, with how much. Where had I picked this enigma up? Possibly from some chance reference of my father's. It made me absent and harassed. I saw not a face or a flower; and even when the parlourmaid was actually waiting at my request in Mrs Bowater's passage, I stood over my money-chest, still incapable of coming to a decision.

Instinct prevailed. Just as I could not bring myself to complete Tom o' Bedlam with Miss Bullace looking out of her eyes at me, so I could not bring myself to offer money to Lady Pollacke's nice prim parlourmaid. Instead I hastily scrabbled up in tissue paper a large flat brooch—a bloodstone set in pinchbeck—a thing of no intrinsic value, alas, but precious to me because it had been the gift of an old servant of my mother's. I hastened out and lifting it over my head, pushed it into her hand.

Dear me, how ashamed of this impulsive action I felt when I had regained my solitude. Should I not now be the jest of the Pollacke kitchen and drawing-room alike?—for even in my anxiety to attain Mr Crimble's private ear, I had half-consciously noticed what a cascade of talk had gushed forth when Mr Crimble had closed the door of the latter behind him.

That evening I shared with Mrs Bowater my experiences at Brunswick House. So absorbed was I in my own affairs that I deliberately evaded any reference to hers. Yet her pallid face, seemingly an inch longer and many shades more austere these last two days, touched my heart.

"You won't think," I pleaded at last, "that I don't infinitely prefer being here, with you? Isn't it, Mrs Bowater, that you and I haven't quite so many things to pretend about? It is easy thinking of others when there are only one or two of them. But whole drawing-roomsful! While here; well, there is only just you and me."

"Why, miss," she replied, "as for pretending, the world's full of shadows, though substantial enough when it comes to close quarters. If we were all to look at things just bare in a manner of speaking, it would have to be the Garden of Eden over again. It can't be done. And it's just that that what's called the gentry know so well. We must make the best use of the mess we can."

I was tired. The thin, sweet air of spring, wafted in at my window after the precocious heat of the day, breathed a faint, reviving fragrance. A curious excitement was in me. Yet her words, or perhaps the tone of her voice, coloured my fancy with vague forebodings. I pushed aside my supper, slipped off my fine visiting clothes, and put on my dressing-gown. With lights extinguished, I drew the blind, and strove for a while to puzzle out life's riddle for myself. Not for the first or the last time did wandering wits cheat me of the goal, for presently in the quiet out of my thoughts, stole into my imagination the vision of that dreaming head my eyes had sheltered on.

"Hypnos," I sighed the word; and—another face, Fanny's, seemed to melt into and mingle with the visionary features. Why, why, was my desperate thought, why needed she allow the world to come to such close quarters? Why, with so many plausible reasons given in her letter for keeping poor Mr Crimble waiting, had she withheld the one that counted for most? And what was it? I knew in my heart that that could not be "making the best use of the mess." Surely, if one just told only the truth, there wasn't anything else to tell. It had taken me some time to learn this lesson.

A low, rumbling voice shook up from the kitchen. Mrs Bowater was talking to herself. Dejection drew over me again at the thought of the deceit I was in, and I looked at my love for Fanny as I suppose Abraham at the altar of stones looked at his son Isaac. Then suddenly a thought far more matter-of-fact chilled through my mind. I saw again Mr Crimble huddling down towards me in that echoing hall, heard my voice delivering Fanny's message, and realized that half of what I had said had been written in mockery. It had been intended for my eye only—"Let alone my prayers." In the solitude of the darkness the words had a sound far more sinister than even Fanny can have intended.

Mr Crimble, however, had accepted them apparently in good faith—to judge at least from the letter which reached me the following morning:—

"Dear Miss M.,—Thank you. I write with a mind so overburdened that words fail me. But I realize that Miss Bowater has no truer friend than yourself, and shall be frank. After that terrible morning you might well have refused to help me. I cannot believe that you will—for her sake. This long concealment, believe me, is not of my own seeking. It cannot, it must not, continue, a moment beyond the necessity. For weeks, nay, months, I have been tortured with doubts and misgivings. Her pride, her impenetrable heedlessness; oh, indeed, I realize the difficulties of her situation. I dare not speak till she gives consent. Yet silence puts me in a false position, and tongues, as perhaps even you may be aware, begin to wag. Nor is this my first attempt, and—to be more frank than I feel is discreet—there is my mother (quite apart from hers) now, alas, aged and more dependent on my affection and care than ever. To make a change now—the talk, the absence of Christian charity, my own temperament and calling! I pray for counsel to guide my stumbling bark on this sea of darkest tempest.

"Can F. decide that her affections are such as could justify her in committing her future to me? Am I justified in asking her? You, too, must have many anxieties—anxieties perhaps unguessed at by those of coarser fibre. And though I cannot venture to ask your confidences, I do ask for your feminine intuition—even though this may seem an intrusion after my sad discomfiture the other day. And yet, I assure you, it was not corporeal fear—are not we priests the police of the City Beautiful? Might I not have succeeded merely in making us both ridiculous? But that is past, and the dead past must bury its dead: there is no gentler sexton.

"Need I say that this letter is not the fruit of any mere impulse. The thought, the very image of her never leaves my consciousness night or day; and I get no rest. I am almost afraid at the power she has of imprinting herself on the mind. I implore you to be discreet, without needless deception. I will wait patiently. My last desire is to hasten an answer—unless, dear Miss M., one in the affirmative. And would it be possible—indeed the chief purpose of this letter was to make this small request—would it be possible to give me one hour—no tea—this afternoon? There was a phrase in your whispered message—probably because of the peculiar acoustic properties of Brunswick House—that was but half-caught. We must not risk the faintest shadow of misunderstanding.

"Believe me, yours most gratefully, though 'perplexed in the extreme,'

"Harold Crimble.

"PS.—I feel at times that it is incumbent on one to burn one's boats; even though out of sight the further shore.

"And the letter: would it be even possible to share a glance at that?"

My old habit of hunting in the crannies of what I read had ample opportunity here. Two things stood out in my mind: a kind of astonishment at Mr Crimble's "stumbling bark" which he was asking me to help to steer, and inexpressible relief that Fanny's letter was buried beyond hope of recovery before he could call that afternoon. The more I pitied and understood his state of mind, the more helpless and anxious I felt. Then, in my foolish fashion, I began again picturing in fancy the ceremony that would bring Mr Crimble and my landlady into so close a relationship. Why did he fear the wagging of tongues so much? I didn't. Would Miss Bullace be a bridesmaid? Would I? I searched in my drawer and read over the "Form of Solemnization of Matrimony." I came to "the dreadful day of judgment," and to "serve" and "obey," and shivered. I was not sure that I cared for the way human beings had managed these things. But at least, bridesmaids said nothing, and if I——

While I was thus engaged Mrs Bowater entered the room. I smuggled my prayer-book aside and gave her Fanny's letter. She was always a woman of few words. She folded it reflectively; took off her spectacles, replaced them in their leather case, and that in her pocket.

"'Soap, handkerchiefs, stockings,'" she mused, "though why in the world she didn't say 'silk' is merely Fanny's way. And I am sure, miss," she added, "she must have had one peculiar moment when the thought occurred to her of the bolt."

"But, Mrs Bowater," I cried in snake-like accents, "you said you were 'soliciting no divulgements.'"

Mrs Bowater's mouth opened in silent laughter. "Between you——" she began, and broke off. "Gracious goodness, but here's that young man, Mr Crimble, calling again."

Mr Crimble drank tea with me, though he ate nothing. And now, his darkest tempest being long since stilled, I completely absolve myself for amending the message which Lady Pollacke's tesselated hall had mercifully left obscure. He sat there, almost like a goldfish—though black in effect beyond description—gaping for the crumb that never comes. "She bade me," I muttered my falsehood, "she bade me say secretly that she has had your letter, that she is giving it her earnest attention, her earnest attention, alone, and in her prayers."

The dark liquid pupils appeared for one sheer instant to rotate, then he turned away, and, as if quite helplessly, stifled an unsheltered yawn.

"'Alone,'" he cried desperately. "I see myself, I see myself in her young imagination!"

I think he guessed that my words were false, that his ear had not been as treacherous as all that. Whether or not, no human utterance have I ever heard so humble, tragic, final. It knelled in my ear like the surrender of all hope. And yet it brought me, personally, some enlightenment. It was with Mr Crimble's eyes that I now scanned not only his phantom presence in Fanny's imagination, but my own, standing beside him—a "knick-knack" figure of fun, pygmied beneath the flappets of his clerical coat, like a sun-beetle by a rook. The spectacle strengthened me without much affecting Fanny. She was no longer the absolute sultana of my being. I could think now, as well as adore.

How strange it is that when our minds are needled to a sharp focus mere "things" swarm so close. There was not a single ornament or book or fading photograph in Mrs Bowater's parlour that in this queer privacy did not mutely seem to cry, "Yes, here am I. This is how things go."

I leant forward and looked at him. "We mustn't care what she sees, what she thinks, if only we can go on loving her."

"'Can, can'?" echoed Mr Crimble, "I have prayed on my knees not to."

This was a sharp ray on my thoughts of love. "But why?" I said. "Even when I was a child, I knew by my mother's face that I must go on, and should go on, loving her, Mr Crimble, whether she loved me or not. One can't make a bad mistake in giving, can one? And yet—well, you must remember that I cannot but have been a—a disappointment; that as long as I live I can't expect any great affection, any disproportionate one, I mean."

"But, but," he stumbled on, "a daughter's affection—it's different. I mustn't brood on my trouble. It unhinges me. Why, the clock stops. But nevertheless may God bless you for that."

"But surely," I persisted, smiling as cheerfully as I could, "Nil desperandum, Mr Crimble. And you know what they say about fish in the sea."

His eye rolled round on me as if a serpent had spoken. "I am sorry, I am sorry," he repeated rapidly, in the same low, unemphatic undertone as if to himself. "I must just wait. You have never seen a sheep—a bullock, shall we call him?—being driven to the slaughter-house. On, on—from despair to despair. That's my position." His face was emptied of expression, his eyes fixed.

These words, his air, his look, this awful private thing—I can't say—it shocked and frightened me beyond words. But I answered him steadily none the less. "Listen, Mr Crimble," I said, "look at me, here, what I am. I have had my desperate moments too—more alone in the world than you can ever be! And I swear before God that I will never, never be not myself." I wonder what the listener thought of this little challenge, not perhaps what Mr Crimble did.

"Well," he replied, with sudden calm, "that's the courage of the martyrs, and not all of them perhaps have been Christians, if history is to be credited. Yes, and in sober truth, I assure you, you, that I would go to the stake for—for Miss Bowater."

He rose, and in that instant of dignity I foresaw what was never to be—lawn sleeves encasing those loose, black arms. He had somehow wafted me back to my Confirmation.

"And the letter? I have no wish to intrude. But her actual words. I mayn't see that?"

"You will please forgive me," I entreated helplessly, "it is buried; because, you see, Fanny—you see, Mrs Bowater——"

"Ah," he said. "It is this deception which dismays, scandalizes me most. But you will keep me informed?"

He seized his soft round hat, and it was on this cold word we parted. I stood by the window, with hand stretched out to summon him back. But no word of comfort or hope came to my aid, and I watched him out of sight.

Chapter Twenty-One

That night I wrote to Fanny, copying out my letter from the scrawling draft from which I am copying it now:—

"Dear Fanny,—I have given Mr Crimble your message; first, exactly in your own words, though he did not quite hear them, and then, leaving out a little. You may be angry at what I am going to say—but I am quite sure you ought to answer him at once. Fanny, he's dreadfully fond of you. I never even dreamed people were like that—in such torture for what can't be, unless you mean you do care, but are too proud to tell him so. If he knows you have no heart for him, he may soon be better. This sounds hateful. But I am not such a pin in a pincushion as not to know that even the greatest sorrows and disappointments wear out. Why, isn't that beech-tree we sat under a kind of cannibal of its own dead leaves?

"Your private letter is quite safe; though I prefer not to burn it—indeed, cannot burn it. You know how I have longed for it. But please, if possible, don't send me two in future. It doesn't seem fair; and your mother knew already about our star-gazing. You see, how else could the door have been bolted!! But it's best to have been found out—next, I mean, to telling oneself.

"What day are you coming home? I look at it, as if it were a lighthouse—even though it is out of sight. Shall we go on with Wuthering Heights when you do come? I saw the 'dazzling' moon—but there, Fanny, what I want most to beg of you is to write to Mr. Crimble—all that you feel, even if not all that you think. No, perhaps I mean the reverse. He must have been wondering about you long before I began to. And there it was, all sunken in; no one could have guessed his longing by looking at him. I am afraid it must affect his health.

"And now good-bye. I have made a vow to myself not to think into things too much. Your affectionate friend (as much of her as there is)—

"Midgetina.

"PS.—Please tell me the day you are coming; and that shall be my birthday."

Fanny was prompt in reply:—