FAN

The novel Fan was originally published in 1892, under the pseudonym of “Henry Harford.” It now makes its appearance under the name of W.H. Hudson for the first time.

This edition is limited to 498 copies of which 450 copies are for sale.

CHAPTER I

A Misty evening in mid-October; a top room in one of the small dingy houses on the north side of Moon Street, its floor partially covered with pieces of drugget carpet trodden into rags; for furniture, an iron bed placed against the wall, a deal cupboard or wardrobe, a broken iron cot in a corner, a wooden box and three or four chairs, and a small square deal table; on the table one candle in a tin candlestick gave light to the two occupants of the room. One of these a woman sitting in a listless attitude before the grate, fireless now, although the evening was damp and chilly. She appeared strong, but just now was almost repulsive to look at as she sat there in her dirty ill-fitting gown, with her feet thrust out before her, showing her broken muddy boots. Her features were regular, even handsome; that, however, was little in her favour when set against the hard red colour of her skin, which told of habitual intemperance, and the expression, half sullen and half reckless, of her dark eyes, as she sat there staring into the empty grate. There were no white threads yet in her thick long hair that had once been black and glossy, unkempt now, like everything about her, with a dusky dead look in it.

On the cot in the corner rested or crouched a girl not yet fifteen years old, the woman's only child: she was trying to keep herself warm there, sitting close against the wall with her knees drawn up to enable her to cover herself, head included, with a shawl and an old quilt. Both were silent: at intervals the girl would start up out of her wrappings and stare towards the door with a startled look on her face, apparently listening. From the street sounded the shrill animal-like cries of children playing and quarrelling, and, further away, the low, dull, continuous roar of traffic in the Edgware Road. Then she would drop back again, to crouch against the wall, drawing the quilt about her, and remain motionless until a step on the stair or the banging of a door below would startle her once more.

Meanwhile her mother maintained her silence and passive attitude, only stirring when the light grew very dim; then she would turn half round, snuff the wick off with her fingers, and wipe them on her shabby dirty dress.

At length the girl started up, throwing her quilt quite off, and remained seated on the edge of her cot, the look of anxiety increasing every moment on her thin pale face. In the matter of dress she seemed even worse off than her mother, and wore an old tattered earth-coloured gown, which came down to within three or four inches of her ankles, showing under it ragged stockings and shoes trodden down at heel, so much too large for her feet that they had evidently belonged to her mother. She looked tall for her years, but this was owing to her extreme thinness. Her arms were like sticks, and her sunken cheeks showed the bones of her face; but it was a pathetic face, both on account of the want and anxiety so plainly written on it and its promise of beauty. There was not a particle of colour in it, even the thin lips were almost white, but the eyes were of the purest grey, shaded by long dark lashes; while her hair, hanging uneven and disordered to her shoulders, was of a pure golden brown.

“Mother, he's coming!” said the girl.

“Let him come!” returned the other, without looking up or stirring.

Slowly the approaching footsteps came nearer, stumbling up the dark, narrow staircase; then the door was pushed open and a man entered—a broad-chested, broad-faced rough-looking man with stubbly whiskers, wearing the dress and rusty boots of a labourer.

He drew a chair to the table and sat down in silence. Presently he turned to his wife.

“Well, what have you got to say?” he asked, in a somewhat unsteady voice.

“Nothing,” she returned. “What have you got?”

“I've got tired of walking about for a job, and I want something to eat and drink, and that's what I've got.”

“Then you'd better go where you can get it,” said she. “You can't find work, but you can find drink, and you ain't sober now.”

For only answer he began whistling and drumming noisily on the table. Suddenly he paused and looked at her.

“Ain't you done that charing job, then?” he asked with a grin.

“Yes; and what's more, I got a florin and gave it to Mrs. Clark,” she replied.

“You blarsted fool! what did you do that for?”

“Because I'm not going to have my few sticks taken for rent and be turned into the street with my girl. That's what I did it for; and if you won't work you'll starve, so don't you come to me for anything.”

Again he drummed noisily on the table, and hummed or tried to hum a tune. Presently he spoke again:

“What's Fan been a-doing, then?”

“You know fast enough; tramping about the streets to sell a box of matches. A nice thing!”

“How much did she get?”

To this question no answer was returned.

“What did she get, I arsk you?” he repeated, getting up and putting his hand heavily on her shoulder.

“Enough for bread,” she replied, shaking his hand off.

“How much?” But as she refused to answer, he turned to the girl and repeated in a threatening tone, “How much?”

She sat trembling, her eyes cast down, but silent.

“I'll learn you to answer when you're spoken to, you damn barstard!” he said, approaching her with raised hand.

“Don't you hit her, you brute!” exclaimed his wife, springing in sudden anger to her feet.

“Oh, father, don't hit me—oh, please don't—I'll tell—I'll tell! I got eighteenpence,” cried the girl, shrinking back terrified.

He turned and went back to his seat, grinning at his success in getting at the truth. Presently he asked his wife if she had spent eighteenpence in bread.

“No, I didn't. I got a haddock for morning, and two ounces of tea, and a loaf, and a bundle of wood,” she returned sullenly.

After an interval of a couple of minutes he got up, went to the cupboard, and opened it.

“There's the haddy right enough,” he said. “No great things—cost you thrippence, I s'pose. Tea tuppence-ha'penny, and that's fivepence-ha'penny, and a ha'penny for wood, and tuppence-ha'penny for a loaf makes eightpence-ha'penny. There's more'n ninepence over, Margy, and all I want is a pint of beer and a screw. Threepence—come now.”

“I've nothing to give you,” she returned doggedly.

“Then what did you do with it? How much gin did you drink—eh?”

“As much as I could get,” she answered defiantly.

He looked at her, whistled and drummed, then got up and went out.

“Mother, he's gone,” whispered Fan.

“No such luck. He's only going to ask Mrs. Clark if I gave her the florin. He won't be long you'll see.”

Very soon he did return and sat down again. “A pint and a screw, that's all I want,” he said, as if speaking to himself, and there was no answer. Then he got up, put his hand on her shoulder, and almost shook her out of her chair. “Don't you hear?” he shouted.

“Let me alone, you drunken brute; I've got nothing, I tell you,” she returned, and after watching his face a few moments settled down again.

“All right, old woman, I'll leave you,” he said, dropping his hands. But suddenly changing his mind, he swung round and dealt her a heavy blow.

She sprang up with a scream of anger and pain, and taking no notice of Fan's piteous cries and pleadings, rushed at him; they struggled together for some moments, but the man was the strongest; very soon he flung her violently from him, and reeling away to some distance, and unable to recover her balance, she finally fell heavily on to the floor.

“Oh, mother, mother, he has killed you,” sobbed Fan, throwing herself down beside the fallen woman and trying to raise her head.

“That I will, and you too,” remarked the man, going back to his seat.

The woman, recovering from the shock, struggled to her feet and sat down again on her chair. She was silent, looking now neither angry nor frightened, but seemed half-dazed, and bending forward a little she covered her eyes with her hand.

“Oh, mother, poor mother—are you hurt?” whispered Fan, trying to draw the hand away to look into the bowed face.

“You go back to your corner and leave your mother to me,” he said; and Fan, after hesitating a few moments, rose and shrank away.

Presently he got up again, and seizing his wife by the wrist, dragged her hand forcibly from her face.

“Where's the coppers, you blarsted drunkard?” he shouted in her ear. “D'ye think to get off with the little crack on the crown I've giv' you? I'll do for you to-night if you won't hand over.”

“Oh, father, father!” cried the girl, starting up in an agony of terror. “Oh, have mercy and don't hit her, and I'll go out and try to get threepence. Oh, father, there's nothing in the house!”

“Then go, and don't be long about it,” he said, going back to his seat.

The mother roused herself at this.

“You sha'n't stir a step to-night, Fan,” she said, but in a voice not altogether resolute. “What'll come to you, going into the streets at this time of night?”

“Something grand, like what's come to her mother, perhaps,” said he with a laugh.

“Not a step, Fan, if I die for it,” retorted the mother, stung by his words. But the girl quickly and with trembling hands had already thrust on her old shapeless hat, and wrapped her shawl about her; then she took a couple of boxes of safety matches, old and greasy from long use, and moved towards the door as her mother rose to prevent her from going out.

“Oh, mother, let me go,” she pleaded. “It's best for all of us. It'll kill me to stay in. Let me go, mother; I sha'n't be long.”

Her mother still protested; but Fan, seeing her irresolution, slipped past her and was out of the door in a moment.

Once out of the house she ran swiftly along the dark sloppy street until she came to the wide thronged thoroughfare, bright with the flaring gas of the shops; then, after a few moments' hesitation, walked rapidly northwards.

Even in that squalid street where she lived, those who knew Fan from living in the same house, or in one of those immediately adjoining it, considered it a disgraceful thing for her parents to send her out begging; for that was what they called it, although the begging was made lawful by the match-selling pretext. To them it was a very flimsy one, since the cost of a dozen such boxes at any oil-shop in the Edgware Road was twopence-three-farthings—eleven farthings for twelve boxes of safety matches! The London poor know how hard it is to live and pay their weekly rent, and are accustomed to make every allowance for each other; and those who sat in judgment on the Harrods—Fan's parents—were mostly people who were glad to make a shilling by almost any means; glad also, many of them, to get drunk occasionally when the state of the finances allowed it; also they regarded it as the natural and right thing to do to repair regularly every Monday morning to the pawnbroker's shop to pledge the Sunday shoes and children's frocks, with perhaps a tool or two or a pair of sheets and blankets not too dirty and ragged to tempt the cautious gentleman with the big nose.

But they were not disreputable, they knew where to draw the line. Had Fan been a coarse-fibred girl with a ready insolent tongue and fond of horse-play, it would not have seemed so shocking; for such girls, and a large majority of them are like that, seem fitted to fight their way in the rough brutish world of the London streets; and if they fall and become altogether bad, that only strikes one as the almost inevitable result of girlhood passed in such conditions. That Fan was a shy, modest, pretty girl, with a delicate type of face not often seen among those of her class, made the case look all the worse for those who sent her out, exposing her to almost certain ruin.

Poor unhappy Fan knew what they thought, and to avoid exciting remarks she always skulked away, concealing her little stock-in-trade beneath her dilapidated shawl, and only bringing it out when at a safe distance from the outspoken criticisms of Moon Street. Sometimes in fine weather her morning expeditions were as far as Netting Hill, and as she frequently appeared at the same places at certain hours, a few individuals got to know her; in some instances they had began by regarding the poor dilapidated girl with a kind of resentment, a feeling which, after two or three glances at her soft grey timid eyes, turned to pity; and from such as these who were not political economists, when she was so lucky as to meet them, she always got a penny, or a threepenny-bit, sometimes with even a kind word added, which made the gift seem a great deal to her. From others she received many a sharp rebuke for her illicit way of getting a living; and these without a second look would pass on, little knowing how keen a pang had been inflicted to make the poor shamefaced child's lot still harder to bear.

She had never been out so late before, and hurrying along the wet pavement, trembling lest she should run against some Moon Street acquaintance, and stung with the thought of the miserable scene in store for her should she be compelled to return empty-handed, she walked not less than half a mile before pausing. Then she drew forth the concealed matches and began the piteous pleading—“Will you please buy a box of matches?” spoken in a low tremulous voice to each passer-by, unheeded by those who were preoccupied with their own thoughts, by all others looked scornfully at, until at last, tired and dispirited, she turned to retrace the long hopeless road. And now the thoughts of home became at every yard of the way more painful and even terrifying to her. What a misery to have to face it—to have to think of it! But to run away and hide herself from her parents, and escape for ever from her torturing apprehensions, never entered her mind. She loved her poor drink-degraded mother; there was no one else for her to love, and where her mother was there must be her only home. But the thought of her father was like a nightmare to her; even the remembrance of his often brutal treatment and language made her tremble. Father she had always called him, but for some months past, since he had been idle, or out of work as he called it, he had become more and more harsh towards her, not often addressing her without calling her “barstard,” usually with the addition of one of his pet expletives, profane or sanguineous. She had always feared and shrunk from him, regarding him as her enemy and the chief troubler of her peace; and his evident dislike of her had greatly increased during her last year at the Board School, when he had more than once been brought before a magistrate and fined for her non-attendance. When that time was over, and he was no longer compelled by law to keep her at school, he had begun driving her out to beg in the streets, to make good what her “book-larning,” as he contemptuously expressed it, had cost him. And the miserable wife had allowed it, after some violent scenes and occasional protests, until the illegal pence brought in each day grew to be an expected thing, and formed now a constant cause of wrangling between husband and wife, each trying to secure the lion's share, only to spend it at the public-house.

At last, without one penny of that small sum of threepence, which she had mentally fixed on as the price of a domestic truce, she had got back to within fifteen minutes' walk of Moon Street. Her anxiety had made her more eager perhaps, and had given a strange tremor to her voice and made her eyes more eloquent in their silent pathos, when two young men pushed by her, walking fast and conversing, but she did not let them pass without repeating the oft-repeated words.

“No, indeed, you little fraud!” exclaimed one of the young men; while his companion, glancing back, looked curiously into her face.

“Stop a moment,” he said to his friend. “Don't be afraid, I'm not going to pay. But, I say, just look at her eyes—good eyes, aren't they?”

The other turned round laughing, and stared hard at her face. Fan reddened and dropped her eyes. Finally he took a penny from his pocket and held it up before her. “Take,” he said. She took the penny, thanking him with a grateful glance, whereupon he laughed and turned away, remarking that he had got his money's worth.

She was nearly back to her own street again before anyone else noticed her; then she met a very large important-looking gentleman, with a lady at his side—a small, thin, meagre woman, with a dried yellow face, wearing spectacles. The lady stopped very deliberately before Fan, and scrutinised her face.

“Come along,” said her husband or companion. “You are not going to stop to talk to that wretched little beggar, I hope.”

“Yes, I am, so please be quiet.—Now, my girl, are you not ashamed to come out begging in the streets—do you not know that it is very wrong of you?”

“I'm not begging—I'm selling matches,” answered Fan sullenly, and looking down.

“You might have known that she'd say that, so come on, and don't waste more time,” said the impatient gentleman.

“Don't hurry me, Charles,” returned the lady. “You know perfectly well that I never bestow alms indiscriminately, so that you have nothing to fear.—Now, my girl, why do you come out selling matches, as you call it? It is only a pretext, because you really do not sell them, you know. Do your parents send you out—are they so poor?”

Then Fan repeated the words she had been instructed to use on occasions like the present, which she had repeated so often that they had lost all meaning to her. “Father's out of work and mother's ill, and I came out because we're starving.”

“Just so, of course, what did you think she would say!” exclaimed the big gentleman. “Now I hope you are satisfied that I was right.”

“That's just where you are mistaken, Charles. You know that I never give without a thorough investigation beforehand, and I am now determined to look narrowly into this case, if you will only let me go quietly on in my own way.—And now, my girl,” she continued, turning to Fan, “just tell me where you live, so that I can call on your mother when I have time, and perhaps assist her if it is as you say, and if I find that her case is a deserving one.”

Fan at once gave the address and her mother's name.

“There now, Charles,” said the lady with a smile. “That is the test; you see there is no deception here, and I think that I am able to distinguish a genuine case of distress when I meet with one.—Here is a penny, my girl”—one penny after all this preamble!—“and I trust your poor mother will find it a help to her.” And then with a smile and a nod she walked off, satisfied that she had observed all due precautions in investing her penny, and that it would not be lost: for he who “giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord,” but certainly not to all the London poor. Her husband, with a less high opinion of her perspicacity, for he had muttered “Stuff and nonsense” in reply to her last remark, followed, pleased to have the business over.

Fan remained standing still, undecided whether to go home or not, when to her surprise a big rough-looking workman, without stopping in his walk or speaking to her, thrust a penny into her hand. That made up the required sum of threepence, and turning into Moon Street, she ran home as fast as those ragged and loose old shoes would let her.

The candle was still burning on the table, throwing its flickering yellow light on her mother's form, still sitting in the same listless attitude, staring into the empty grate. The man was now lying on the bed, apparently asleep.

On her entrance the mother started up, enjoining silence, and held out her hand for the money; but before she could take it her husband awoke with a snort.

“Drop that!” he growled, tumbling himself hastily off the bed, and Fan, starting back in fear, stood still. He took the coppers roughly from her, cursing her for being so long away, then taking his clay-pipe from the mantelpiece and putting on his old hat, swung out of the room; but after going a few steps he groped his way back and looked in again. “Go to bed, Margy,” he said. “Sorry I hit you, but 'tain't much, and we must give and take, you know.” And then with a nod and grin he shut the door and took himself off.

Meanwhile Fan had gone to her corner and removed her old hat and kicked off her muddy shoes, and now sat there watching her mother, who had despondently settled in her chair again.

“Go to bed, Fan—it's late enough,” she said.

Instead of obeying her the girl came and knelt down by her side, taking one of her mother's listless hands in hers.

“Mother”—she spoke in a low tone, but with a strange eagerness in her voice—“let's run away together and leave him.”

“Don't talk nonsense, child! Where'd we go?”

“Oh, mother, let's go right away from London—right out into the country, far as we can, where he'll never find us, where we can sit on the grass under the trees and rest.”

“And leave my sticks for him to drink up? Don't you think I'm such a silly.”

“Do—do let's go, mother! It's worse and worse every day, and he'll kill us if we don't.”

“No fear. He'll knock us about a bit, but he don't want a rope round his neck, you be sure. And he ain't so bad neither, when he's not in the drink. He's sorry he hit me now.”

“Oh, mother, I can't bear it! I hate him—I hate him; and he isn't my father, and he hates me, and he'll kill me some day when I come home with nothing.”

“Who says he isn't your father—where did you hear that, Fan?”

“He calls me bastard every day, and I know what that means. Mother, is he my father?”

“The brute—no!”

“Then why did you marry him, mother? Oh, we could have been so happy together!”

“Yes, Fan, I know that now, but I didn't know it then. I married him three months before you was born, so that you'd be the child of honest parents. He had a hundred pounds with me, but it all went in a year; and it's always been up and down, up and down with us ever since, but now it's nothing but down.”

“A hundred pounds!” exclaimed Fan in amazement “And who was my father?”

“Go to bed, Fan, and don't ask questions. I've been very foolish to say so much. You are too young to understand such things.”

“But, mother, I do understand, and I want to know who my father is. Oh, do—do tell me!”

“What for?”

“Because when I know I'll go to him and tell him how—how he treats us, and ask him to help us to go away into the country where he'll never find us any more.” Her mother laughed. “You're a brave girl if you'd do that,” she said, her face softening. “No, Fan, it can't be done.”

“Oh, please tell me, and I'll do it. Why can't it be done, mother?”

“I can't tell you any more, child. Go to bed, and forget all about it. You hear bad things enough in the street, and it 'ud only put badness into your head to hear talk of such things.”

Fan's pleading eyes were fixed on her mother's face with a strange meaning and earnestness in them; then she said:

“Mother, I hear bad things in the street every day, but they don't make me bad. Oh, do tell me about my father, and why can't I go to him?”

The unhappy woman looked down, and yet could hardly meet those grey beautiful eyes fixed so earnestly on her face. She hesitated, and passed her trembling fingers over Fan's disordered hair, and finally burst into tears.

“Oh, Fan, I can't help it,” she said, half sobbing. “You have just his eyes, and it brings it all back when I look into them. It was wicked of me to go wrong, for I was brought up good and honest in the country; but he was a gentleman, and kind and good to me, and not a working-man and a drunken brute like poor Joe. But I sha'n't ever see him again. I don't know where he is, and he wouldn't know me if he saw me; and perhaps he's dead now. I loved him and he loved me, but we couldn't marry because he was a gentleman and me only a servant-girl, and I think he had a wife. But I didn't care, because he was good to me and loved me, and he gave me a hundred pounds to get married, and I can't ever tell you his name, Fan, because I promised never to name him to anyone, and kissed the Book on it when he gave me the hundred pounds, and it would be wicked to tell now. And Joe, he wanted to marry me; he knew it all, and took the hundred pounds and said it would make no difference. He'd love you just the same, he said, and never throw it up to me; and that's why I married Joe. Oh, what a fool I was, to be sure! But it can't be helped now, and it's no use saying more about it. Now go to bed, Fan, and forget all I've said to you.”

Fan rose and went sorrowfully to her bed; but she did not forget, or try to forget, what she had heard. It was sad to lose that hope of ever seeing her father, but it was a secret joy to know that he had been kind and loving to her poor mother, and that he was a gentleman, and not one like Joe Harrod; that thought kept her awake in her cold bed for a long time—long after Joe and his wife were peacefully sleeping side by side.

CHAPTER II

That troubled evening was followed by a quiet period, lasting from Wednesday to Saturday, during which there were no brawls indoors, and Fan was free of the hateful task of going out to collect pence in the streets. Joe had been offered a three or four days' job; he had accepted it gratefully because it was only for three or four days, and for that period he would be the sober, stolid, British workman. The pleasures of the pot-house would claim him on Saturday, when he would have money in his pockets and the appetite that comes from abstention.

On Saturday morning after he had left the house at six o'clock, Fan started up from her cot and came to her mother's side at the table.

“Mother, may I go out to the fields to-day?” she asked. “I know if I go straight along the Edgware Road I'll come to them soon. And I'll be home early.”

“No, Fan, don't you try it. It's too far and'll tire you, and you'd be hungry and maybe get lost.”

“Can't I take some bread, mother? Do let me go! It will be so nice to see the fields and trees, and they say it isn't far to walk.”

“You're not fit to be seen walking, Fan. Wait till you've got proper shoes to your feet, and a dress to wear. Perhaps I'll git you one next week.”

“But if I wait I'll never go! He'll finish his work to-day and spend the money, and on Monday he'll send me out just the same as before.”

And as she continued to plead, almost with tears, so intent was she on this little outing, her mother at length gave her consent. She even got her scissors to cut off the ragged fringing from the girl's dress to make her look more trim, and mended her torn shoes with needle and thread; then cut her a hunk of bread for her dinner.

“I never see a girl so set on the country,” she said, when Fan was about to start, her thin pale face brightening with anticipation. “It's a long tramp up the Edgware Road, and not much to see when you git to the fields.”

There would be much to see, Fan thought, as she set out on her expedition. She had secretly planned it in her mind, and had thought about it by day and dreamed about it by night—how much there would be to see!

But the way was long; so long that before she got out of London—out of that seemingly endless road with shops on either hand—she began to be very tired. Then came that wide zone surrounding London, of uncompleted streets and rows of houses partly occupied, separated by wide spaces with brick-fields, market-gardens, and waste grounds. Here she might have turned aside to rest in one of the numerous huge excavations, their bottoms weedy and grass-grown, showing that they had been long abandoned; but this was not the country, the silent green woods and fields she had come so far to seek, and in spite of weariness she trudged determinedly on.

At first the day had promised to be fine; now a change came over it, the sky was overcast with grey clouds, and a keen wind from the north-west blew in her face and made her shiver with cold. Many times during that long walk she drew up beside some gate or wooden fence, and leaned against it, feeling almost too tired and dispirited to proceed further; but she could not sit down there to rest, for people were constantly passing in traps, carts and carriages, and on foot, and not one passed without looking hard at her; and by-and-by, overcoming her weakness, she would trudge on again, all the time wishing herself back in the miserable room in Moon Street once more.

At last she got beyond the builders' zone, into the country; from an elevated piece of ground over which the road passed she was able to see the prospect for miles ahead, and the sight made her heart sink within her. The few trees visible were bare of foliage, and the fields, shut within their brown ragged hedges, were mostly ploughed and black, and the green fields were as level as the ploughed, and there was no shelter from the cold wind, no sunshine on the pale damp sward. It was in the middle of October; the foliage and beauty of summer had long vanished; she had seen the shed autumn leaves in Hyde Park many days ago, yet she had walked all the weary distance from Moon Street, cheered with the thought that in the country it would be different, that there would still be sunshine and shadow there, and green trees and flowers. It was useless to go on, and impossible in her weak exhausted condition to attempt to return at once. The only thing left for her to do was to creep aside and lie down under the shelter of some hedge, and get through the time in the best way she could. Near the road, some distance ahead, there was a narrow lane with a rough thorny hedge on either side, and thither she now went in quest of a shelter of some kind from the rain which was beginning to fall. The lane was on the east side of the road, and under the hedge on one hand there was an old ditch overgrown with grass and weeds; here Fan crouched down under a bush until the shower was over, then got out and walked on again. Presently she discovered a gap in the hedge large enough to admit her body, and after peering cautiously through and seeing no person about, she got into the field. It was small, and the hedge all round shut out the view on every side; nevertheless it was a relief to be there, safe out of sight of all men for a little while. She walked on, still keeping close to the hedge, until she came to a dwarf oak tree, with a deep hollow in the ground between its trunk and the hedge; the hollow was half filled with fallen dead leaves, and Fan, turning them with her foot, found that under the surface they were dry, and this spot being the most tempting one she had yet seen, she coiled herself up in the leafy bed to rest. And lying there in the shelter, after eating her bread, she very soon fell asleep, in spite of the cold.

From her sleep, which lasted for some hours, she woke stiff and chilled to the marrow. It was late in the day, and the occasional watery gleams the sun shot through the grey clouds came from low down in the western sky. She started up, and scarcely able at first to use her sore, cramped limbs, set out on her return. She was hungry and thirsty and sore—sore also in mind at her disappointment—and the gusty evening wind blew chill, and more than one shower of rain fell to wet her; but she reached Paddington at last. In the Edgware Road the Saturday evening market was in full progress when she passed, too tired and miserable to take any interest in the busy bustling scene. And by-and-by the dense moving crowds, noise of bawling costermongers, and glare of gas and naphtha torches were left behind, when she reached the welcome gloom and comparative quiet of her own squalid street. There was also welcome quiet in the top room when she entered, for her parents were out. A remnant of fire was in the grate, and the teapot had been left on the fender to keep warm. Fan poured herself out some tea and drank it thirstily; then hanging her dress over a chair to dry by the heat of the embers, and nestling into her rickety bed in the corner, she very quickly fell asleep. From her sleep she was at length roused by Mrs. Clark, the landlady, who with her husband and children inhabited the ground-floor.

“When did you come in, Fan?” she asked.

“I think it was half-past seven,” said the girl.

“Well, your mother went out earlier than that, and now it's half-past ten, and she not in yet. It's a shame for them always to stay out like that when they've got a bit of money. I think you'd better go and see if you can find her, and make her come in. She went to buy the dinner, and look for Joe in Crawford Street. That's where you'll find her, I'm thinking.”

Fan rose obediently, shivering with cold, her eyes still heavy with sleep, and putting on her damp things went out into the streets again. In a few minutes she was in Crawford Street. It is long, narrow, crooked, and ill-paved; full of shops, but of a meaner description than those in the adjacent thoroughfare, with a larger proportion of fishmongers, greengrocers, secondhand furniture and old clothes sellers. Here also was a Saturday evening market, an overflow from the Edgware Road, composed chiefly of the poorer class of costermongers—the vendors of cheap damaged fruits and vegetables, of haddock and herring, shell-fish, and rabbits, the skins dangling in clusters at each end of the barrow. Public-houses were numerous here; on the pavement before them groups of men were standing, pipe in mouth, idly talking; these were men who had already got rid of their week's earnings, or of that portion they had reserved for their own pleasures, but were not yet prepared to go home, and so miss the chance of a last half-pint of beer from some passing still solvent acquaintance. There were other larger groups and little crowds gathered round the street auctioneers, minstrels, quacks, and jugglers, whose presence in the busier thoroughfare was not tolerated by the police.

It was late now, and the money spending and getting nearly over; costermongers, some with half their goods still unsold, were leaving; the groups were visibly thinning, the doors of the public-houses swinging to and fro less frequently. As Fan hurried anxiously along, she peeped carefully through the clouded window-panes into the “public bar” department of each drinking place in search of her mother, and paused for a few moments whenever she came to a group of spectators gathered round some object of curiosity at a street corner. After satisfying herself that her mother was not in the crowd, she would remain for a few moments looking on with the others.

At one spot her attention was painfully held by a short, dark, misshapen man with no hands nor arms, but only the stump of an arm, with a stick tied to it. Before him on a rough stand was a board, with half a dozen thick metal wires stretched across it. Rapidly moving his one poor stump, he struck on the wires with his stick and so produced a succession of sounds that roughly resembled a tune. Poor man, how she pitied him; how much more miserable seemed his life than hers! It was cold and damp, yet the perspiration stood in great drops on his sallow, wasted face as he violently wriggled his deformed body about, playing without hands on his rude instrument—all to make a few pence to save himself from starvation, or from that living tomb into which, with a humanity more cruel than Nature's cruelty, we thrust the unfit ones away out of our sight! No one gave him anything for his music, and with a pang in her heart she hurried away on her quest.

Not all the street scenes were ghastly or painful. She came to one crowd, ranged motionless and silent before a large, fat, dignified-looking man, in good broad-cloth garments, white tie, and wearing a fez; he was calmly sitting on a camp-stool, and held a small phial in one hand. Not a word did he speak for a long time. At length one of the onlookers, a tipsy working-man, becoming impatient, addressed him:

“Ain't you going to do nothing, mister? Here I've been a-waiting with these other ladies and gentl'men more'n ten minutes, and you ain't done nothing yet, nor yet said nothing.”

The fat man placed a hand on his broad shirt-front, rolled up his eyes, and solemnly shook his head.

“Fools, fools!” he said, as if speaking to himself. “But what does it matter to me if they won't be saved—if they'd rather die of their complaints? In the East it's different, because I'm known there. I've been to Constantinople, and Morocco, and everywhere. Let them ask the heathen what I have done for them. Do they think I cure them for the sake of their dirty pence? No, no; those that like gold, and jewels, and elephants to ride on, can have it all in the East, and I came away from there. Because why? I care more for these. I don't ask them what's the matter with them! Is there such a thing as a leper in this crowd? Let them bring me a leper here, and I'll cure him for nothing, just to show them what this medicine is. As for rheumatics, consumption, toothache, palpitations of the 'art—what you like, that's all nothing. One drop and it's gone. Sarsaparilla, and waters this, and pills that, what they give their pence for, and expect it's going to do them good. Rubbish, I call it. They buy it, as much as they can put in their insides, and die just the same. This is different. Twenty years in the East, and this is what I got. Doctors! I laugh at such people.”

Here, with a superior smile, he cast down his eyes again and relapsed into silence.

No one laughed. Then Fan heard someone near her remark: “He has book-learning, that's what he has”; to which another voice replied, “Ah, you may say it, and he has more'n that.”

Next to Fan stood a gaunt, aged woman, miserably dressed, and she, too, listened to these remarks; and presently she pushed her way to the wise man of the East, and began, “Oh, sir, my heart's that bad—”

“Hush, hush! don't say another word,” he interrupted with a majestic wave of his hand. “You needn't tell me what you have. I saw it all before you spoke.”

He uncorked the phial. “One drop on your tongue will make you whole for ever. Poor woman! poor woman! how much you have suffered. I know it all. Sixpence first, if you please. If you were rich I would say a hundred pounds; but you are poor, and your sixpence shall be more to you in the Day of Judgment than the hundred pounds of the rich man.”

With trembling fingers she brought out her money and counted out fivepence-halfpenny.

“It's ahl I have,” she sorrowfully said, offering it to him.

He shook his head, and she was about to retire when someone came forward and placed a halfpenny in her hand. He took his fee, and then all pressed closer round to watch with intense interest while a drop of brown liquid was poured on to the poor woman's tongue, thrust far out so that none of that balsam of life should be lost. After witnessing this scene, Fan hurried on once more.

At length, near Blandford Square, she came against a crowd so large that nothing short of a fight, or the immediate prospect of one, could have caused it to collect at that late hour. A temporary opening of the crowd enabled her to see into the middle of it, and there, in a small space which had been made for them, two women stood defiantly facing each other. The dim light from the windows of the public-house they had been drinking in fell on their heads, and she instantly recognised them both: one was her mother, excited by alcohol and anger; the other a tall, pale-faced, but brawny-looking woman, known in the place as “Long 'Liza,” a noted brawler, once a neighbour of the Harrods in Moon Street, but now just out of prison and burning to pay off old scores. In vain Fan struggled to reach her mother; the ring of people closed up again; she was flung roughly back and no regard paid to her piteous appeals and sobs.

It was anguish to her to have to stand there powerless on the outer edge of the ring of people, to listen to the frantic words of the insult and challenge of the two women and the cries and cheers of the excited crowd. But it was plain that a war of words was not enough to satisfy the onlookers, that they were bent on making the women come to blows. The crowd increased every moment; she was pushed further and further back, and in the hubbub could only catch portions of what the two furious women were saying.

“No, you won't fight, you ——; that's not your way, but wait till one's down, and then.... And if you got six weeks with hard, it's a pity, I say, as it wasn't six months.... But if I was a —— blab like you I could say worse things of you than you and your —— Moon Street crew can say of me any day.... And you'll out with it if you don't want your head knocked on the stones for nothing.... Not by you, you ——; I'm ready, if you want to try your strength with me, then we'll see whose head 'ull be knocked on the stones.... Yes, I'll fight you fast enough, but first.... If you'll have it, where's the girl you send into the streets to beg? You and your man to git drunk on the coppers she gits! More too if you'd like to hear it.... But you can't say more, nor that neither, you ——.... Smash my teeth, then! Who was her father, or did the poor fool marry you off the streets when he was drunk?”

With a scream and a curse her antagonist sprang at her, and in a moment they were striking and tearing at each other like a couple of enraged wild animals. With a burst of cheering the people pressed closer round, but after a few moments they interposed and forcibly pulled the combatants apart. Not that there was any ruth in their hearts, any compassionate desire to shield these two miserable women of their own class from their insane fury; their only fear was that the fighters would exhaust themselves too soon, encumbered as they were with their jackets and shawls. Not one in the throng remembered that he had an old mother, a pale-faced wife and little children at home, and sisters, working-girls perhaps. For the working-man has a sporting instinct as well as his betters; he cannot gratify it by seeing stripped athletic men pounding each other with their fists at Pelican Clubs; he has only the occasional street fight to delight his soul, and the spectacle of two maddened women tearing each other is not one to be ungrateful for.

Having pulled off their hats and stripped them to their corsets, their friends and backers released them with encouraging words and slaps on the back, just as dog-fighters set their dogs on each other. Again there were yells and curses, tearing of hair and garments, and a blind, mad rain of blows; until Long 'Liza, striking her foot on the curb, measured her length on the stones, and instantly her adversary was down on her chest, pounding her face with clenched fists.

Groans and shouts of protest arose from the onlookers, and then several of them rushed in and dragged her off, after which the two women were set on their feet and encouraged to renew the fight. Round after round was fought with unabated fury, invariably ending by one going down, to be stamped on, beaten, and kicked by her opponent until rescued by the spectators, who wished only to prolong the contest. But the last round ended more disastrously; locked in a close tussle, 'Liza exerted her whole strength to lift her antagonist from the ground and hurl her down, and succeeded, falling heavily on her, then quickly disengaging herself she jumped on her as if with the object of trampling her life out, when once more the spectators rushed in and dragged her off, still struggling and yelling with baffled rage. But the fallen woman could not be roused; the back of her head had struck the edge of the kerbstone; she was senseless, and her loosened hair becoming saturated with fast-flowing blood.

Fan, sobbing and pressing her hands together in anguish and terror, was no longer kept back; as if by magic the crowd had dissipated, while half a dozen men and women surrounded 'Liza and hurried her, still struggling and cursing, from the ground. Fan was on her knees beside the fallen woman, trying to raise her; but presently she was pushed roughly aside by two policemen who had just arrived on the scene. Of the crowd, numbering about a hundred and fifty persons, only a dozen or twenty men still lingered on the spot, and some of these assisted the policemen in raising the woman and bathing her head with cold water. Then, finding that she was seriously injured, they put her into a four-wheeler and drove off to St. Mary's Hospital.

Left alone, Fan stood for a few moments not knowing what to do, then she set off running after the cab, crying as she ran; but it went too fast for her, and before she got to the end of Crawford Street it was out of sight. Still she kept on, and at last, crossing Edgware Road, plunged into a wilderness of narrow dark streets, still hoping to reach St. Mary's not long after the cab. But though well acquainted with the hospital, and all the streets leading to it, on this occasion she became bewildered, and after wandering about for some time, and feeling utterly worn-out with her long fatiguing day and the painful emotions she had experienced, she sat down on a doorstep in a lonely dark street, not knowing where she had got to.

Then a poor woman came by and was able to direct her, and she hurried on once more; but when close to the gate she met her father, who asked her in a surly tone what she did there at that late hour. He had witnessed the whole fight to the end, only keeping well in the background to escape observation, and was just returning from the hospital when he met Fan. Hearing that she was going to see her mother, he ordered her home, saying that at the hospital they would admit no one at that hour, and that she must go in the morning to inquire. Sick with grief and misery, she followed him back to Moon Street, which they reached at about half-past twelve.

CHAPTER III

Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday passed sadly and slowly enough, and at five o'clock on the evening of the last day Fan was told at St. Mary's—that Margaret Harrod was dead. During those three miserable days of suspense she had spent most of her time hanging about the doors of the hospital, going timidly at intervals to inquire, and to ask to be allowed to see her mother. But her request was refused. Her mother was suffering from concussion of the brain, besides other serious injuries, and continued unconscious; nothing was to be gained by seeing her.

Without a word, without a tear, she turned away from the dreary gates and walked slowly back to Moon Street; and at intervals on her homeward walk she paused to gaze about her in a dazed way, like a person who had wandered unknowingly into some distant place where everything wore a strange look. The old familiar streets and buildings were there, the big shop-windows full of cheap ticketed goods, the cab-stand and the drinking-fountain, the omnibuses and perpetual streams of' foot-passengers on the broad pavement. She knew it all so well, yet now it looked so unfamiliar. She was a stranger, lost and alone there in that place and everywhere. She was walking there like one in a dream, from which there would be no more waking to the old reality; no more begging pence from careless passers-by in the street; no more shrinking away and hiding herself with an unutterable sense of shame and degradation from the sight of some neighbour or old school acquaintance; no more going about in terror of the persecution and foul language of the gangs of grown-up boys and girls that spent their evenings in horse-play in the streets; no more going home to the one being she loved, and who loved her, whose affection supplied the food for which her heart hungered.

Arrived at her home, she did not go up as was her custom to her dreary room at the top, but remained standing in the passage near the landlady's door; and presently Mrs. Clark, coming out, discovered her there.

“Well, Fan, how's mother now?” she asked in a kind voice.

“She's dead,” returned Fan, hanging her head.

“Dead! I thought it 'ud be that! Dear, dear! poor Margy, so strong as she was only last Saturday, and dead! Poor Margy, poor dear—we was always friendly”—here she wiped away a tear—“as good a soul as ever breathed! That she was, though she did die like that; but she never had a chance, and went to the bad all on account of him. Dead, and he on the drink—Lord only knows where he gits it—and lying there asleep in his room, and his poor wife dead at the hospital, and never thinking how he's going to pay the rent. I've stood it long enough for poor Margy, poor dear, because we was friends like, and she'd her troubles the same as me, but I ain't going to stand it from him. That I'll let him know fast enough; and now she's dead he can take himself off, and good riddance. But how're you going to live—begging about the street? A big girl like you—I'm ashamed of such goings on, and ain't going to have it in my house.”

Fan shook her head: the slow tears were beginning to fall now. “I'd do anything for mother,” she said, with a half sob, “but she's dead, and I'll never beg more.”

“That's a good girl, Fan. But you always was a good girl, I must say, only they didn't do what's right by you. Now don't cry, poor dear, but run up to your room and lie down; you're dead tired.”

“I can't go there any more,” murmured Fan, in a kind of despairing way.

“And what are you going to do? He'll do nothing for you, but 'll only make you beg and abuse you. I know Joe Harrod, and only wish he'd got his head broke instead of poor Margy. Ain't you got no relation you know of to go to? She was country-bred, Margy was; she come from Norfolk, I often heard her say.”

“I've got no one,” murmured Fan.

“Well, don't cry no more. Come in here; you look starved and tired to death. When my man comes in you'll have tea with us, and I'll let you sleep in my room. But, Fan, if Joe won't keep you and goes off and leaves you, you'll have to go into the House, because I couldn't keep you, if I wanted ever so.”

Fan followed her into her room on the ground-floor: there was a fire in the grate, which threw a dim flickering light on the dusty-looking walls and ceiling and the old shabby furniture, but it was very superior to the Harrods' bare apartment, and to the poor girl it seemed a perfect haven of rest. Retreating to a corner she sat down, and began slowly pondering over the words the landlady had spoken. The “House” she had always been taught to look on as a kind of prison where those who were unfit to live, and could not live, and yet would not die, were put away out of sight. For those who went to gaol for doing wrong there was hope; not so for the penniless, friendless incapables who drifted or were dragged into the dreary refuge of the “House.” They might come out again when the weather was warm, and try to renew the struggle in which they had suffered defeat; but their case would be then like that of the fighter who has been felled to the earth, and staggers up, half stunned and blinded with blood, to renew the combat with an uninjured opponent. And yet the words she had heard, while persistently remaining in her mind, did not impress her very much then. She was tired and dazed, and had nothing to live for, and was powerless to think and plan for herself: she was ready to go wherever she was bidden, and ask no questions and make no trouble. So she went and sat down in a dark corner, without making any reply. With eyes closed and her tired head resting against the wall, she remained for half an hour in that impassive state, saying no word in answer to Mrs. Clark's occasional remarks, as she moved about preparing the six o'clock meal.

Then the husband came in, and being a silent man, said nothing when his wife told him that Margaret was dead at the hospital. When she proceeded to add that Joe would sell the sticks and go off, leaving Fan on their hands, and that Fan would have to go to the House, he only nodded his head and went on with his tea.

Fan drank her tea and ate her bread-and-butter, and then once more returned to her seat, and after some time she fell asleep, leaning her head against the wall. She woke with a start two hours later to find herself alone in the room, but there was still some fire in the grate, and a candle burning on the table. The heavy steps of a man on the stairs had woke her, and she knew that Joe Harrod was coming down from his room. He came and knocked at the door.

“Is Fan here?” he called huskily. “Where's the girl got to, I'd like to know?”

She remained silent, shrinking back trembling in her corner; and after waiting a while and getting no answer he went grumbling away, and presently she heard him go out at the street door. Then she sprang to her feet, and stood for a while intently listening, with a terror and hatred of this man stronger than she had ever felt before urging her to fly and place herself for ever beyond his reach. Somewhere in this great city she might find a hiding-place; it was so vast; in all directions the great thoroughfares stretched away into the infinite distance, bright all night with the flaring gas and filled with crowds of people and the noise of traffic; and branching off from the thoroughfares there were streets, hundreds and thousands of streets, leading away into black silent lanes and quiet refuges, in the shadow of vast silent buildings, and arches, and gateways, where she might lie down and rest in safety. So strong on her was this sudden impulse to fly, that she would have acted on it had not Mrs. Clark returned at that moment to the room.

“Come, Fan, I've made you up a bed in my room, and if he comes bothering for you to-night, I'll soon send him about his business. Don't you fear, my girl.”

Fan followed her silently to the adjoining room, where a bed of rugs and blankets had been made for her on four or five chairs. For the present she felt safe; but she could not sleep much, even on a bed made luxurious by warmth, for thinking of the morrow; and finally she resolved to slip away in the morning and make her escape.

At six o'clock next morning the Clarks were up, one to go to his work, the other to make him his breakfast. When they had left the bedroom Fan also got up and dressed herself in all haste, and after waiting till she heard the man leave the house, she went into the next room, and Mrs. Clark gave her some coffee and bread, and expressed surprise at seeing her up so early. Fan answered that she was going out to look for something to do.

“It's not a bit of use,” said the other. “They won't look at you with them things on. Just you stop in quiet, and I'll see he don't worry you; but by-and-by you'll have to go to the House, for Joe Harrod's not the man to take care of you. They'll feed you and give you decent clothes, and that's something; and perhaps they'll send you to some place where they take girls to learn them to be housemaids and kitchen-maids, and things like that. Don't you go running about the streets, because it'll come to no good, and I won't have it.”

Fan had intended to ask her to let her go out and try just once, and when once clear of the neighbourhood, to remain away, but Mrs. Clark had spoken so sharply at the last, that she only hung her head and remained silent.

But presently the opportunity came when the woman went away to look after some domestic matter, and Fan, stealing softly to the door, opened it, and finding no person in sight, made her escape in the direction of Norfolk Crescent. Skirting the neighbourhood of squares and gardens and large houses, she soon reached Praed{035} Street, and then the Harrow Road, along which she hurriedly walked; and when it began to grow light and the shopkeepers were taking down their shutters, she had crossed the Regent's Canal, and found herself in a brick-and-mortar wilderness entirely unknown to her.

Here she felt perfectly safe for the time, for the Clarks, she felt sure, would trouble themselves no further about her, for she was nothing to them; and as for Joe Harrod, she had heard them say that he would be called that day to identify his wife's body at the inquest, and give his evidence about the way in which she had met her death.

About these unknown streets Fan wandered for hours in an aimless kind of way, not seeking work nor speaking to anyone; for the words Mrs. Clark had spoken about the uselessness of seeking employment dressed as she was still weighed on her mind and made her ashamed of addressing any person. Towards noon hunger and fatigue began to make her very faint; and by-and-by the short daylight would fail, and there would be no food and no shelter for the night. This thought spurred her into action. She went into a small side street of poor mean-looking houses and a few shops scattered here and there among the private dwellings. Into one of these—a small oil-shop, where she saw a woman behind the counter—she at last ventured.

“What for you?” said the woman, the moment she put her foot inside the door.

“Please do you want a girl to help with work—”

“No, I don't want a girl, and don't know anyone as does,” said the woman sharply; then turned away, not well pleased that this girl was no buyer of an honest bundle of wood, a ha'porth of treacle, or a half-ounce of one-and-four tea; for out of the profits of such small transactions she had to maintain herself and children.

Fan went out; but by-and-by recovering a little courage, and urged by need, she went into other shops, into all the shops in that mean little street at last, but nobody wanted her, and in one or two instances she was ordered out in sharp tones and followed by sharp eyes lest she should carry off something concealed under her shawl.

Then she wandered on again, and at length finding a quiet spot, she sat down to rest on a doorstep. The pale October sunshine which had been with her up till now deserted her; it was growing cold and grey, and at last, shivering and faint, she got up and walked aimlessly on once more, resolving to go into the next shop she should come to, and to speak to the next woman she should see standing at her door, with the hope of finding someone at last to take her in and give her food and a place to lie down in. But on coming to the shop she would pass on; and when she saw a woman standing outside her door, with keen hard eyes looking her from head to foot, she would drop her own and walk on; and at last, through very weariness, she began to lose that painful apprehension of the cold night spent out of doors; even her hunger seemed to leave her; she wanted only to sit down and fall asleep and remember no more. By-and-by she found herself again in the Harrow Road, but her brain was confused, so that she did not know whether she was going east or west. It was growing colder now and darker, and a grey mist was forming in the air, and she could find no shelter anywhere from the cold and mud and mist, and from the eyes of the passers-by that seemed to look so pitilessly at her. The sole of one of her shoes was worn through, and the cold flag-stones of the footway and the mud of the streets made her foot numb, so that she could scarcely lift it. Near Paddington Green—for she had been for some time walking back towards the Edgware Road—she paused at the entrance of a short narrow street, running up to the canal. It had a very squalid appearance, and a number of ragged children were running about shouting at their play in it, but it was better than the thoroughfare to rest in, and advancing a few yards, she paused on the edge of the pavement and leant against a lamp-post. A few of the dirty children came near and stared at her, then returned to their noisy sports with the others. A little further on women were standing at their doors exchanging remarks. Presently a thin sad-looking woman, in a rusty black gown, carrying something wrapped in a piece of newspaper in her hand, came by from the thoroughfare. She paused near Fan, looked at her once or twice, and said:

“What name be you looking for? The numbers is mostly rubbed off the doors. Maybe they never had none.”

“I wasn't looking for anyone,” said Fan.

“I thought you was, seeing you standing as if you didn't know where to go, like.”

Fan shook her head, feeling too tired to say anything. She had no friend, no one she knew even in these poor tenements, and only wished to rest a little there out of sight of the passing people. The woman was still standing still, but not watching her.

“Maybe you're waiting for someone?” she suggested.

“No.”

“No? you're not.” And after a further interval she began studying the little loosely-wrapped parcel in her hand; and finally, with slow deliberation, she unfolded it. It contained a bloater: she felt it carefully as though to make sure that it had a soft roe, and then smelt it to make sure that it was good, after which she slowly wrapped it up again. “Maybe you've no home to go to,” she remarked tentatively, looking away from Fan as if speaking to some imaginary person.

“No, I haven't,” said Fan.

“You don't look a bad 'un. P'r'aps they treated you badly and you ran away.”

Fan nodded.

“And you've no place to go to, and no money?”

“No.”

Again the woman's eyes wandered absently away; then she began studying the parcel, and appeared about to unfold it once more, then thought better of it, and at last said, still speaking in the same absent mournful tone: “I've got a room to myself up there,” indicating the upper end of the street. “You can come and sleep along with me, if you like. One bloater ain't much for two, but there's tea and bread, and that'll do you good.”

“Thank you, I'll come,” said Fan, and moving along at her side they walked about forty yards further on to an open door, before which stood a dirty-looking woman with bare folded arms. She moved aside to let them pass, and going in they went up to a top room, small and dingy, furnished with a bed, a small deal table, one chair, and a deal box, which served as a washing-stand. But there was a fire burning in the small grate, with a kettle on; and a cottage loaf, an earthenware teapot with half its spout broken off, and one cup and saucer, also a good deal damaged, were on the table, the poor woman having made all preparations for her tea before going out to buy her bloater.

“Take off your hat and sit here,” she said, drawing her one cane-bottomed chair near the fire.

Fan obeyed, putting her hat on the bed, and then sat warming herself, too tired and sad to think of anything.

Meanwhile her hostess took off her boots and began quietly moving about the room, which was uncarpeted, finishing her preparations for tea. The herring was put down to toast before the coals and the tea made; then she went downstairs and returned with a second cup. Finally she drew the little table up to the bed, which would serve as a second seat. It was all so strangely quiet there, with no sound except the kettle singing, and the hissing and sputtering of the toasting herring, that the unaccustomed silence had the effect of rousing the girl, and she glanced at the woman moving so noiselessly about the room. She was not yet past middle age, but had the coarsened look and furrowed skin of one whose lot in life had been hard; her hair was thin and lustreless, sprinkled with grey, and there was a faraway look of weary resignation in her dim blue eyes. Fan pitied her, and remembering that but for this poor woman's sympathy she would have been still out in the cold streets, with no prospect of a shelter for the night, she bent down her face and began to cry quietly.

The woman took no notice, but continued moving about in her subdued way, until all was ready, and then going to the window she stood there gazing out into the mist and darkness. Only when Fan had finished crying she came back to the fireside, and they sat down to their tea. It was a silent meal, but when it was over, and the few things washed and put away, she drew the deal box up to the fire and sat down by Fan. Then they talked a little: Fan told her that her mother was just dead, that she was homeless and trying to find something to do for a living. The woman, on her side, said she worked at a laundry close by. “But they don't want no more hands there,” she added, in a desponding way. “And you ain't fit for such work neither. You must try to find something for yourself to-morrow, and if you can't find nothing, which I don't think you will, come back and sleep with me. It don't cost much to give you tea, and I ain't owing any rent now, and it's company for me, so you needn't mind.”

After this short conversation they went to bed and to sleep, for they were both tired.

CHAPTER IV

The result of Fan's second day's search for employment proved no more promising than the first. She wandered about the Westbourne Park district, going as far west as Ladbroke Grove Road, still avoiding the streets, gardens, and squares of the larger houses. But she was apparently not good enough for even the humbler class of dwellings, for no one would so much as ask her what she could do, or condescend to speak to her, except in one house, to which she had been directed by a woman in a greengrocer's shop; there she was scoffingly asked if she had a “character” and decent clothes to wear.

When the woman who had given her shelter on the previous evening returned at five o'clock from her work, she found Fan in Dudley Grove, for that was the beautiful name of the slum she lived in, standing, as before, beside the lamp-post; and after a few words of greeting took her to her room. While preparing the tea she noticed the girl's weak and starved condition, for Fan had eaten nothing all day, and went out and presently returned with a better supply of food—brawn, and salt butter, and a bundle of water-cress—quite a variety.

As on the evening before, they sat for a while by the small fire after their meal, speaking a few words, and those not very hopeful ones, and then presently they went to bed, and to sleep as soon as their heads touched the pillow. After their modest breakfast next morning the woman said:

“Are you going back to your friends to-day?”

Fan glanced at her in sudden fear and cast down her eyes.

“You was tired and had nothing to eat yesterday, and couldn't git nothing to do. Didn't it make you wish to go back to them again?”

“No, I'll not go back. I've no friends,” said Fan; and then she added timidly, “You don't want me to come back here no more?”

“Yes; you come back if you don't find nothing. The tea and bread ain't much, and I don't mind it, and it's company to me to have you.”

And without more words they went out together, separating in the Harrow Road.

On this morning Fan took a different route, and going south soon found herself in wide, clean streets, among very big stuccoed and painted houses. It was useless to seek for anything there, she thought, and yet presently something happened in this place to put a new hope into her heart. It was very early, and at some of the houses the cooks or kitchen-maids were cleaning the doorsteps, and while passing one of these doors she was accosted by the woman and asked if she would clean the steps. She consented gladly enough, and received a penny in payment. Then she remembered that she had often seen poor girls, ill-dressed as herself, cleaning the steps of large houses, and had heard that the usual payment was one penny for the task. After walking about for some time she began timidly ringing the area bells of houses where the steps had not yet been cleaned, and asking if a girl was wanted to do them. Almost invariably she was sent away with an emphatic “No!” from a servant angry at being disturbed; but twice again during that day she received a penny for step-cleaning, so that she had earned threepence. After midday, finding she could get no more work, and feeling faint with hunger, she bought a penny loaf, and going to a shelter facing the fountains in Kensington Gardens, made her modest dinner, and rested afterwards until it was time to return to Dudley Grove.

In the evening as she sat by the fire after tea she gave an account of her success, and exhibited the two remaining pence, offering them to the poor woman who had sheltered her.

She only shook her head. “You'll maybe want something to eat to-morrow,” she said; and presently continued, “Step-cleaning ain't no good. There's too many at it. And you a growing girl, and always hungry, you'd starve at it. Saturdays is not bad, because there's many houses where they only clean the steps once a week, and they has a girl to do it. You might make sixpence or a shilling on a Saturday. But other days is bad. You can't live at it. There's nothing you can do to live.”

Fan was profoundly discouraged; but thinking over the subject, she remembered that she had seen other girls out on the same quest as herself that day, and though all of them had a dirty draggled look, as was natural considering the nature of the work, some of them, at all events, looked well-fed, healthy, and not unhappy, and this had made her more hopeful. At last she said:

“If other girls get their living at it, why can't I? If I could make sixpence a day, couldn't I live on that?”

“No, nor yet on ninepence, nor yet on a shilling. You're a tall growing girl, and you ain't strong, and you are hungry, and want your dinner in the middle of the day; and if you don't get it, you'll be down ill, and then what'll you do? You can't do it on sixpence, nor yet on a shilling, because you've got no home to go to, and must pay for a room; and no one to find you clothes and shoes, you must buy them. Them girls you see are stronger than you, and have homes to go to, and don't go about like you to find steps to clean, but go to the houses they know, where they always clean the steps. And they don't get only a penny; they get tuppence, and make a shilling a day—some of them as knows many houses; and on Saturdays they make more'n three shillings. But you can't do it, because you don't know nobody, and have no clothes and no home, and there's too many before you.”

It looked as if this poor woman had worked at step-cleaning herself for a living, she was so pessimistic about it, and appeared to be so very familiar with the whole subject. People never believe that a fortune is to be made at any business in which they have been unsuccessful themselves.

Fan was discouraged, but there was nothing else for her to do, and it was hard for her to give up this one chance.

“Won't you let me try just a few days?” she asked at length.

“Yes, you can try; but it ain't no use, there's so many at it. In a few days your clothes'll be dropping off you, and then what'll you do? It's rough work, and not fit for a girl like you. I don't mind, because your tea don't cost much, and it's company to have you here, as it ain't all giving, but it's give-and-take like between us.”

The same dreary words were repeated evening after evening, when Fan returned from her daily peregrinations; but still the poor girl hoped against hope, and clung desperately to the only occupation she had been able to discover. It was a hard miserable life, and each succeeding day only seemed to bring her nearer to the disastrous end prophesied by the mournful laundrywoman of Dudley Grove. How weary she often was with walking hour after hour, sometimes feeling so famished that she could hardly refrain from picking up the orange-peels from the street to appease the cruel pangs of hunger! And when she was more lucky and had steps to clean, then the wet and grime of the hearthstone made her poor gown more worn and soiled and evil-looking than ever, while her shoes were in such a state that it was hard, by much mending every evening, to keep them from falling to pieces. Every day seemed to bring her nearer to the end, when she would be compelled to sit down and say “I can do no more—I must starve”; yet with the little renewal of strength which the evening meal and drearily-expressed sympathy of her friend and the night's rest would bring her, she would go forth each morning to wander about for another day.

Ten or twelve days had gone by in this way, and acting on a little practical advice given by the poor laundrywoman, she had forsaken the neighbourhood of squares and big houses close to Hyde Park to go further afield into the district lying west of Westbourne Grove, where the houses were smaller, and fewer servants were kept in them.

About ten o'clock one morning she stopped before a house in Dawson Place, a wide clean street of pretty detached, moderate-sized houses, each with a garden in front and a larger garden and trees behind. The house had a trim well-kept appearance, and five or six broad white steps led up to the front door, which was painted deep blue. Fan, looking critically at the steps, could not make out whether they had been already cleaned or not, so white and clean, yet dry, did they look. And the steps of all the houses in Dawson Place had the same white look, so that there seemed no chance of anything for her to do there; but she felt tired already, and stood resting beside the area gate, not venturing to ring.

By-and-by the front door opened and a lady came out and down the steps, and on reaching the pavement stood still and looked hard at Fan. She was tall, and had a round shapely figure, a well-developed bust, and looked about five-and-twenty years old. Fan thought her marvellously beautiful, but felt a little frightened in her presence, she was so tall and stately, and her face had such a frowning, haughty expression. Beautiful women-faces had always had a kind of fascination for her—the gentle, refined face, on which she would gaze with a secret intense pleasure, and a longing to hear some loving word addressed to herself from a sister with sweet lips, so strong that it was like a sharp pain at her heart. The proud masterful expression of this beautiful face affected her differently—she feared as well as admired.

The lady was fashionably dressed, and wore a long dark blue velvet jacket, deeply trimmed with brown fur, and under the shadow of a rather broad fur hat her hair looked very black and glossy; her straight eyebrows were also black, and her eyes very dark, full and penetrating. Her skin was of that beautiful rich red colour not often seen in London ladies, and more common in Ireland than in England. Her features were fine, the nose slightly aquiline, the red lips less full, and the mouth smaller than is usual in faces of so luxuriant a type; a shapely, beautiful mouth, which would have been very sweet but for its trick of looking scornful.

“What do you want?” she said in a sharp imperative tone—just the tone one would have expected from so imperious-looking a dame.

“Please, do you want the steps cleaned?” Fan asked very timidly.

“No, of course not. What an absurd little goose you must be to ask such a thing! Servants are kept for such a purpose.”

For a few moments Fan still remained standing there, her eyes cast down, then shyly glanced up at that richly-coloured beautiful face, and encountered the dark strong eyes intently watching her.

“Yes, you may clean them,” said the lady. “When you have finished go down to the kitchen, and tell the cook to pay you and give you something to eat.” Then she walked away, but after going about a dozen yards, came back and sharply rang the area-bell to bring out the cook, and repeated the order to her.

“Very well, ma'am,” said the cook, wiping her hands on her apron; but she did not return at once to her kitchen, for her mistress was still standing there watching Fan.

“Never mind, cook, you needn't pay her,” said the lady, speaking again. “Let her wait in the kitchen till I return. I am going to the Grove, and shall be back in half an hour.”

Then she walked away, her head well up, and with that stately bird-like gait seen in some women. When Fan had finished the steps she went into the kitchen, and the cook gave her some bread and cheese and a glass of ale, which revived her and made her more strong and hopeful than she had felt for many a day. Then she began to wonder what the fine lady was going to say to her, and whether she would give her twopence instead of the usual penny. Or perhaps it was intended to present her with an old gown or pair of boots. Such things had happened, she knew, and the thought that such a thing might happen again, and to her, made her heart beat fast; and though it was so pleasant resting there in that bright warm kitchen, she began to wish for the lady's return, so that her suspense might end. And while she sat there occupied with her thoughts, the cook, a staid-looking woman of about forty—the usual age of the London cook—made up her fire and went about doing a variety of things, taking no notice of her guest.

Then the housemaid came running down the stairs singing into the kitchen, dusting-brush and dust-pan in her hands—a pretty girl with dark merry bright eyes, and her brown hair worn frizzled on her forehead.

“My!” she exclaimed, starting back at seeing Fan. And after surveying her for some time with a mocking smile playing about the corners of her pretty ripe mouth, she said, “Is this one of your poor relations, Mrs. Topping?”

“No, Rosie; that she ain't. The missus gave her the steps to clean, and told her to wait here till she got back.”

The maid burst into a ringing peal of laughter. “Fancy, Miss Starbrow!” she exclaimed. “Where do you come from?” she continued, addressing Fan. “Whitechapel? Seven Dials?”

Fan reddened with shame and anger, and refused to reply: stubborn silence was her only shield against those who scoffed at her extreme poverty; and that this pretty girl was mocking her she knew very well. Then the maid sat down and stared at her, and amused herself and fellow-servant with malicious comments on Fan's dress.

“May I ask you, miss, where you got that lovely hat?” she said. “From Madame Elise? Why, of course, how could I ask! I assure you it is most charmingly becoming. I shall try to get one like it, but I'm afraid I can't go beyond six guineas. And your shawl—a Cashmere, I see. A present from her Majesty, no doubt.”

“Oh, do be quiet, Rosie; you'll kill me!” cried the cook, overcome with laughter at such exquisite wit. But Rosie, seeing the effects of it, only became more lively and satirical, until Fan, goaded beyond endurance, started up from her seat, determined to make her escape. Fortunately at that moment the lady of the house returned, and the maid scampered off to open the door to her. Soon she returned and dropped Fan a mocking curtsey. “Please follow me this way,” she said. “Miss Starbrow regrets that she has been detained so long, and is now quite ready to receive you.”

Fan followed her up the kitchen stairs to the hall, where Miss Starbrow, with her hat on as she had come in, stood waiting to see her. She looked keenly at the girl's flushed and tearful face, and turned to Rosie for an explanation; but that lively damsel, foreseeing storms, had already vanished up the stairs.

“Has she been teasing you?” said the lady. “Well, never mind, don't think any more about it. She's an impudent hussy, I know—they all are, and one has to put up with them. Now sit down here and tell me your name, and where you live, and all about yourself, and why you go out cleaning steps for a living.”

Then she also sat down and listened patiently, aiding with an occasional question, while the girl in a timid, hesitating way related the principal events in her unhappy life.

“Poor girl!” was Miss Starbrow's comment when the narrative was finished. She had drawn off her glove and now took Fan's hand in hers. “How can you do that hard rough work with such poor thin little hands?” she said. “Let me look at your eyes again—it is so strange that you should have such eyes! You don't seem like a child of such people as your parents were.”

Fan glanced timidly at her again, her eyes brightening, a red colour flushing her pale cheeks, and her lips quivering.

“You have an eloquent face—what do you wish to say?” asked the lady.

Fan still hesitated.

“Trust me, my poor girl, and I shall help you. Then is something in your mind you would like to say.”

Then Fan, losing all fear, said:

“He was not my father—the man that married mother. My father was a gentleman, but I don't know his name.”

“I can very well believe it. Especially when I look at your eyes.”

“Mother said my eyes were just like my father's,” said Fan, with growing confidence and a touch of pride.

“Perhaps they are like his in one way, my poor girl,” said the other, a little frown clouding her forehead. “In another way they are very different, I should think. No one who ever did a cruel thing could have had that expression in his eyes.”

After sitting in silence for some time, still with that frown on her beautiful face, her eyes resting thoughtfully on the tessellated floor, she roused herself, and taking out her purse, gave Fan half-a-crown.

“Go home now,” she said, “and come again to-morrow at the same hour.”

Fan went from the door with a novel sense of happiness filling her heart. At intervals she took out the half-crown from her pocket to look at it. What a great broad noble coin it looked to her eyes! It was old—nearly seventy years old—and the lines on it were blurred, and yet it seemed wonderfully bright and beautiful to Fan; even the face of George the Third on it, which had never been called beautiful, now really seemed so to her. But very soon she ceased thinking about the half-crown and all that it represented; it was not that which caused the strange happiness in her heart, but the gentle compassionate words that the proud-looking lady had spoken to her. Never before had so sweet an experience come to her; how long it would live in her memory—the strange tender words, the kindly expression of the eyes, the touch of the soft white hand—to refresh her like wine in days of hunger and weariness!

It was early still in the day, and many hours before she could return to Dudley Grove; and so she continued roaming about, and found another doorstep to clean, and received threepence for cleaning it, to her surprise. With the threepence she bought all the food she required. The half-crown she would not break into; that must be shown to the poor washer-woman just as she had received it. When the woman saw it in the evening she was very much astonished, and expressed the feeling, if it be not a contradiction to say so, by observing a long profound silence. But like the famous parrot she “thought the more,” and at length she gave it as her opinion that the lady intended taking Fan as a servant in her house.

“Oh, do you really think so?” exclaimed Fan, becoming excited at the prospect of such happiness. And after a while she added, “Then I'll leave you the half-crown for all you've done for me.”

The poor woman would not listen to such a proposal; but next morning she consented to take charge of it, promising, if Fan should not return, to use it.

CHAPTER V

Fan did not fail to be at Dawson Place at the time, or a little before the time, appointed. “Oh, I hope that girl won't open the door when I ring,” she said to herself, giving the door-bell a little hesitating pull. But the summons was promptly answered by the undesirable person in question, and she greeted the visitor with a mocking curtsey. She had little time, however, in which to make Fan miserable, for Miss Starbrow was quickly on the scene, looking very gracious and very beautiful in a dark red morning gown.

“Come here and sit down,” she said, placing herself in one hall chair and making Fan take the other. “Now listen. Would you like to come and live here as my servant? You are not fit for such a place, I know—at all events, not at present; and I should not put you with the other servants, and upstairs you could do nothing. However that does not signify. The thing is this. If you would like to come and live with me you must stay here now, and never go back to those places where you have lived, and try if possible to forget all about them.”

“Oh yes, ma'am, I promise!” she replied, trembling with joy at the very thought of escaping from that life of bitter want and anxiety.

“Very well, that's settled then. Come this way with me.”

She then led the way to a large bath-room, a few steps above the first-floor landing.

“Now,” she said, “undress yourself, and put all your clothes and hat and shoes in a bundle in the corner—they are shocking to look at, and must be taken away—and give yourself a hot bath. See, I am turning on the water for you. That will be enough. And stay in as long as you like, or can, and try not only to wash off all the dirt on your skin, but all thought and recollection of Moon Street and Harrow Road and doorsteps, and all the foul evil things you have seen and heard in your life; and when you have washed all that off, Fan, and dried yourself, wrap this shawl around you, and run into that open room you see facing the bath.”

Left to herself, Fan proceeded to obey the instructions she had received. It was a great luxury to be in that smooth enamelled basin, where she could lie at full length and move her limbs freely about, experiencing the delicious sensation of the hot water over her whole body at the same time.

In the dressing-room she found her mistress waiting for her. There were clothes there ready for her, and now, for the first time in her life, she dressed herself in new, clean, sweet garments, over all a gown of a soft grey material, loose at the waist, and reaching nearly to the ankles—a kind of “Maid Marian” costume. There were also black stockings and new shoes. Everything fitted well, although they had all been made the day before by guess in Westbourne Grove.

Miss Starbrow made her stand in the middle of the room, and turned her round, while Fan glanced shyly at her own reflection in the tall cheval-glass, almost wondering “if this be I.”

“Yes, that will do well enough for the present,” said her mistress. “But your hair is all uneven, Fan, and such lovely hair to be spoilt by barbarous neglect. Let me cut it even for you, and by-and-by we'll find out how to arrange it. Well, no; just now it looks best hanging loose on your back. When it grows long again, we'll put it up. Now come here to the light, and let me, see what you're like. Nearly fifteen years old, and pale and very thin, poor girl, which makes you look tall. Golden hair, good features, and a very pure skin for a girl who has lived a grimy life. And your eyes—don't be afraid to show them, Fan. If you had not looked at me yesterday with those eyes, I should have thought no more about you. Long lashes. Eyes grey—yes, grey decidedly, though at times they look almost sapphire blue; but the pupils are so large—that is perhaps the secret of their pathetic expression. That will do. You think it strange, do you not, Fan? that I should take you into my house and clothe you—a poor homeless girl; for I don't suppose that you can do anything for me, and you will therefore only be an extra expense. A great piece of folly, my friends would probably say. But don't be afraid, I care nothing for what others say. What I do, I do only to please myself, and not others. If I am disappointed in you, and find you different from what I imagine, I shall not keep you, and there will be an end of it all. Now don't look so cast-down; I believe that you are at heart a good, pure, truthful girl. I think I can see that much in your eyes, Fan. And there is, after all, something you can do for me—something which few can do, or do so well, which will be sufficient payment for all I am doing for you.”

“Oh, ma'am, will you please tell me what it is?” exclaimed Fan, her voice trembling with eagerness.

“Perhaps you will do it without my telling you, Fan. I shall leave you to think about it and find out what it is for yourself. I must only tell you this; I have not taken you into my house because I am charitable and like doing good to the poor. I am not charitable, and care nothing about the poor. I have taken you in for my own pleasure; and as I think well of you, I am going to trust you implicitly. You may stay in this room when I am out, or go into the back room on this floor, where you can look out on the garden, and amuse yourself with the books and pictures till I come back. I am going out now, and at one o'clock Rosie will give you some dinner. Take no notice of her if she teases you. Mind me, and not the servants—they are nothing.”

Miss Starbrow then changed her dress and went out, leaving Fan to her own devices, wondering what it was that she could do for her mistress, and feeling a little trouble about the maid who would give her her dinner at one o'clock; and after a while she went to explore that apartment at the back Miss Starbrow had spoken of. It was a large room, nearly square, with cream-coloured walls and dark red dado, and a polished floor, partly covered with a Turkish carpet; but there was very little furniture in it, and the atmosphere seemed chill and heavy, for it was the old unrenewed air of a room that was never used. On a large centre table a number of artistic objects were lying together in a promiscuous jumble: Japanese knick-knacks; an ivory card-case that had lost its cover, and a broken-bladed paper-knife; glove and collar and work-boxes of sandal-wood, mother-of-pearl, and papier-mâché, with broken hinges; faded fans and chipped paper-weights; gorgeous picture-books with loosened covers, and a magnificent portrait-album which had been deflowered and had nothing left in it but the old and ugly, the commonplace middle-aged, and the vapid young; with many other things besides, all more or less defective.

This round table seemed like an asylum and last resting-place of things which had never been useful, and had ceased to be ornamental, which were yet not quite bad enough to be thrown into the dust-bin. To Fan it was a sort of South Kensington Museum, where she was permitted to handle things freely, and for some time she continued inspecting these rich treasures, after which she once more began to glance round the room. Such a stately room, large enough to shelter two or three families, so richly decorated with its red and cream colours, yet silent and cold and dusty and untenanted! On the mantelpiece of grey marble stood a large ornamental clock, which ticked not and the hands of which were stationary, supported on each side by bronzes—a stalwart warrior in a coat of mail in the act of drawing his sword, and a long-haired melancholy minstrel playing on a guitar. A few landscapes in oil were also hanging on the walls—representations of that ideal world of green shade and peace which was so often in Fan's mind. Facing the fireplace stood a tall bookcase, and opening it she selected a book full of poetry and pictures, and took it to an old sofa, or couch, to read. The sofa was under the large window, which had panes of coloured glass, and remembering that Miss Starbrow had told her that it looked on to the garden, she got on to the sofa and pushed the heavy sash up.

There was a good-sized garden without, and trees in it—poplar, lime, and thorn, now nearly leafless; but it was very pleasant to see them and to feel the mild autumn air on her face, so pleasant that Fan thought no more about her book. Ivy grew in abundance against the walls of the garden, and there were laurel and other evergreen shrubs in it, and a few China asters—white, red, and purple—still blooming. No sound came to her at that quiet back window, except the loud glad chirruping of the sparrows that had their home there. How still and peaceful it seemed! The pale October sunshine—pale, but never had sunshine seemed so divine, so like a glory shining on earth from the far heavenly throne—fell lighting up the dark leaves of ivy and laurel, stiff and green and motionless as if cut out of malachite, and the splendid red and purple shields of the asters; and filling the little dun-coloured birds with such joy that their loud chirping grew to a kind of ringing melody.

Oh, that dark forsaken room in Moon Street, full of bitter memories of miserable years! Oh, poor dead mother lying for ever silent and cold in the dark earth! Oh, poor world-weary woman in Dudley Grove, and all the countless thousands that lived toiling, hungry, hopeless lives in squalid London tenements—why had she, Fan, been so favoured as to be carried away from it all into this sweet restful place? Why—why? Then, even while she asked, wondering, thinking that it was all like a strange beautiful dream, unable yet to realise it, suddenly as by inspiration the meaning of the words Miss Starbrow had spoken to her flashed into her mind; and the thought made her tremble, the blood rushed to her face, and she felt her eyes growing dim with tears of joy. Was it true, could it be true, that this proud, beautiful lady—how much more beautiful now to Fan's mind than all other women!—really loved her, and that to be loved was all she desired in return? She was on her knees on the sofa, her arms resting on the window-sill, and forgetful now of the sunshine and leaves and flowers, and of the birds on the brown twigs talking together in their glad ringing language, she closed her eyes and resigned herself wholly to this delicious thought.

“Oh, here you are, sly little cat! Who said you might come into this room?”

Fan, starting up in alarm, found herself confronted with the pretty housemaid. But the pretty eyes were sparkling vindictively, the breath coming short and quick, and the pretty face was white with resentment.

“The lady told me to come here,” returned Fan, still a little frightened.

“Oh, did she! and pray what else did she tell you? And don't lie, because I shall find you out if you do.”

Fan was silent.

“You won't speak, you little sneak! When your mistress is out you must mind me—do you hear? Go instantly and take your filthy rags to the dust-bin, and ask cook for a bottle of carbolic acid to throw over them. We don't want any of your nasty infectious fevers brought here, if you please.”

Fan hesitated a few moments, and then replied, “I'll only do what the lady tells me.”

“You'll only do what the lady tells you!” she repeated, with a mocking whine. Then, in unconscious imitation of the scornful caterpillar in the wonderful story of Alice, she added, “You! And who are you! Shall I tell you what you are? A filthy, ragged little beggar picked out of the gutter, a sneaking area thief, put into the house for a spy! You vile cat, you! A starving mangy cur! Yes, I'll give you your dinner; I'll feed you on swill and dog-biscuits, and that's better than you ever had in your life. You, a diseased, pasty-faced little street-walker, too bad even for the slums, to keep you, to be dressed up and waited on by respectable servants! How dare you come into this house! I'd like to wring your miserable sick-chicken's neck for you!”

She was in a boiling rage, and stamped her foot and poured out her words so rapidly that they almost ran into each other; but Fan's whole previous life had served to make her indifferent to hard words, however unjust, and the housemaid's torrent of abuse had not the least effect.

Rosie, on her side, finding that her rage was wasted, sat down to recover herself, and then began to jeer at her victim, criticising her appearance, and asking her for the cast-off garments—“for which your la'ship will have no further use.” Finding that her ridicule was received in the same silent passive way, she became more demonstrative. “Somebody's been trimming you,” she said. “I s'pose Miss Starbrow was your barber—a nice thing for a lady! Well, I never! But there's one thing she forgot. Here's a pair of scissors. Now, little sick monkey, sit still while I trim your eyelashes. It'll be a great improvement, I'm sure. Oh, you won't! Well, then I'll soon make you.” And putting the pair of small scissors between her lips, she seized Fan by the arms and tried to force her down on the sofa. Fan resisted silently and with all her strength, but her strength was by no means equal to Rosie's, and after a desperate struggle she was overcome and thrown on to the couch.

“Now, will you be quiet and let me trim you!” said the maid.

“No.”

In speaking, Rosie had dropped the scissors from her mouth, and not being able to use her hands occupied in holding her victim down, she could do nothing worse than make faces, thrust out her tongue, and finally spit at Fan. Then she thought of something better. “If you won't be quiet and let me trim you,” she said, “I'll pinch your arms till they're black and blue.”

No reply being given, she proceeded to carry out her threat, and Fan set her teeth together and turned her face away to hide the tears. At length the other, tired of the struggle, released her. Fan bared her arm, displaying a large discoloration, and moistened it with her mouth to soothe the pain. She had a good deal of experience in bruises. “It'll be black by-and-by,” she said, “and I'll show it to the lady when she comes back.”

“Oh, you'll show it to her, you little tell-tale sneak! Then I'll be even with you and put rat's-bane in your dinner.”

“Why don't you leave me alone, then?” said Fan.

Rosie considered for some time, and finally said, “I'll leave you alone if you'll tell me what you are here for—everything about yourself, mind, and no lies; and what Miss Starbrow is going to do with you.”

“I don't know, and I sha'n't say a word more,” returned Fan, whereupon Rosie slapped her face and ran out of the room.

In spite of the rough handling she had been subjected to, and the pain in her arm, Fan very soon recovered her composure. Her happiness was too great to be spoiled by so small a matter, and very soon she returned to her place at the open window and to her pleasant thoughts.

About midday the maid came again bringing a tray. “Here's your food, starved puppy; lap it up, and may it choke you,” she said, and left the room.

After she had been gone a few minutes, Fan, beginning to feel hungry, went to the table, and found a plate of stewed meat and vegetables, with bread and cheese, and a glass of ale. But over it all Rosie had carefully sprinkled ashes, and had also dropped a few pinches into the ale, making it thick and muddy. Now, although on any previous day of her hungry orphaned existence she would have wiped off the ashes and eaten the food, on this occasion she determined not to touch it. Her new surroundings and dress, and the thought that she was no longer without someone to care for her, had served to inspire in her a pride which was stronger than hunger. Presently she noticed that the door had a key to it, and in her indignation at the maid's persecution she ran and locked it, resolved to let the dinner remain there untasted until Miss Starbrow should return.

Presently Rosie came back, and finding the door locked, began knocking and calling. “Open, you cat!” she cried. “I must take the things down, now you've gobbled up your pig's food. Open, you spiteful little devil!”

“I haven't touched the dinner, and I sha'n't open the door till the lady comes,” she answered, and would say no more.

After a good deal more abuse, Rosie in despair went away; but presently the cook came up, and Fan opened to her. She had a second supply of food and beer, without any ashes in it this time, and put it on the table. “Now, have your dinner, miss,” she said, with mock humility. She was taking away the first tray, but at the door she paused and, looking back, said, “You won't say nothing to the missus, will you, miss?”

“If she'll let me be I'll not say anything,” said Fan.

“Very well, miss, she won't trouble you no more. But, lors, she don't mean no harm; it's only her little funny ways.” And having thus explained and smoothed matters over, she went off to the kitchen.

About five o'clock Miss Starbrow came in and found Fan still sitting by the open window in the darkening room.

“Why, my poor girl, you must be half frozen,” she said, coming to the sofa.

But how little Fan felt the chill evening air, when she started up at the kind greeting, her eyes brightening and her face flushing with that strange new happiness now warming her blood and making her heart beat quick!

“Oh no, ma'am, I'm not a bit cold,” she said.

The other pulled off her glove and touched the girl's cheek with her fingers.

“Your skin feels cold enough, anyhow,” she returned. “Come into my room; it is warmer there.”

Fan followed into the adjoining large bedroom, where a bright fire was burning in the grate; and Miss Starbrow, taking off her hat and cloak, sat down. After regarding the girl for some time in silence, she said with a little laugh, “What can I do with you, Fan?”

Fan was troubled at this, and glanced anxiously at the other's face, only to drop her eyes abashed again; but at last, plucking up a little courage, she said:

“Will you please let me do something in the house, ma'am?” And after a few moments she added, “I wish I could do something, and—and be your servant.”

Miss Starbrow laughed again, and then frowned a little and sat silent for some time.

“The fact is,” she said at length, “now that you are here I don't quite know what to do with you. However, that doesn't signify. I took you for my own pleasure, and it doesn't make much difference to have you in the house, and if it did I shouldn't care. But you must look after yourself for the present, as I have just got rid of one servant and there are only two to do everything. They are anxious for me not to engage a third just now, and prefer to do all the work themselves, which means, I suppose, that there will be more plunder to divide between them.”

“And can't I help, ma'am?” said Fan, whose last words had not yet been answered.

“I fancy you would look out of place doing housework,” said Miss Starbrow. “It strikes me that you are not suited for that sort of thing. If it hadn't been so, I shouldn't have noticed you. The only way in which I should care to employ you would be as lady's-maid, and for that you are unfit. Perhaps I shall have you taught needlework and that kind of thing by-and-by, but I am not going to bother about it just now. For the present we must jog along just how we can, and you must try to make yourself as happy as you can by yourself.”

Just then the housemaid came up with tea for her mistress.

“Get me another cup—a large one, and some more bread-and-butter,” said Miss Starbrow.

“The young person's tea is in the back room, ma'am,” returned Rosie, with a tremor in her voice.

Miss Starbrow looked at her, but without speaking; the maid instantly retired to obey the order, and when she set the cup and plate of bread-and-butter on the tray her hand trembled, while her mistress, with a slight smile on her lips, watched her face, white with suppressed rage.

After tea, during which Miss Starbrow had been strangely kind and gentle to the girl, she said:

“Perhaps you can help me take off my dress, Fan, and comb out my hair.”

This was strange work for Fan, but her intense desire to do something for her mistress partly compensated for her ignorance and awkwardness, and after a little while she found that combing those long rich black tresses was an easy and very delightful task. Miss Starbrow sat with eyes half-closed before the glass, only speaking once or twice to tell Fan not to hurry.

“The longer you are with my hair the better I like it,” she said.

Fan was only too glad to prolong the task; it was such a pleasure to feel the hair of this woman who was now so much to her; if the glass had not been before them—the glass in which from time to time she saw the half-closed eyes studying her face—she would more than once have touched the dark tresses she held in her hand to her lips.

Miss Starbrow, however, spoke no more to her, but finishing her dressing went down to her seven o'clock dinner, leaving Fan alone by the fire. After dinner she came up again and sat by the bedroom fire in the dark room. Then Rosie came up to her.

“Captain Horton is in the drawing-room, ma'am,” she said.

Miss Starbrow rose to go to her visitor.

“You can stay where you are, Fan, until bed-time,” she said. “And by-and-by the maid will give you some supper in the back room. Is Rosie impudent to you—how has she been treating you to-day?”

Fan was filled with distress, remembering her promise, and cast down her eyes.

“Very well, say nothing; that's the best way, Fan. Take no notice of what anyone says to you. Servants are always vile, spiteful creatures, and will act after their kind. Good-night, my girl,” and with that she went downstairs.

Fan sat there for half an hour longer in the grateful twilight and warmth of that luxurious room, and then Rosie's voice startled her crying at the door:

“Doggie! doggie! come and have its supper.”

Fan got up and went to the next room, where her supper and a lighted lamp were on the centre table. Rosie followed her.

“Can you tell the truth?” she said.

“Yes,” returned Fan.

“Well, then, have you told Miss Starbrow?”

“No.”

“Did she ask you anything?”

“Yes, and I didn't tell her.”

“Oh, how very kind!” said Rosie; and giving her a box on the ear, ran out of the room.

Not much hurt, and not caring much, Fan sat down to her supper. Returning to the bedroom she heard the sound of the piano, and paused on the landing to listen. Then a fine baritone voice began singing, and was succeeded by a woman's voice, a rich contralto, for they were singing a duet; and voice following voice, and anon mingling in passionate harmony, the song floated out loud from the open door, and rose and seemed to fill the whole house, while Fan stood there listening, trembling with joy at the sound.

The singing and playing continued for upwards of an hour, and Fan still kept her place, until the maid came up with a candle to show her to her bedroom. They went up together to the next floor into a small neatly-furnished room which had been prepared for her.

“Here's your room,” said Rosie, setting down the candle on the table, “and now I'm going to give you a good spanking before you go to bed.”

“If you touch me again I'll scream and tell Miss Starbrow everything,” said Fan, plucking up a spirit.

Rosie shut and locked the door. “Now you can scream your loudest, cat, and she'll not hear a sound.”

For a few moments Fan did not know what to do to save herself; then all at once the memory of some old violent wrangle came to her aid, and springing forward she blew out the candle and softly retreated to a corner of the room, where she remained silent and expectant.

“You little wretch!” exclaimed the other. “Speak, or I'll kill you!” But there was no answer. For some time Rosie stumbled about until she found the door, and after some jeering words retreated downstairs, leaving Fan in the dark.

She had defeated her enemy this time, and quickly locking the door, went to bed without a light.

CHAPTER VI

The next few days, although very sweet and full to Fan, were uneventful; then, early on a Wednesday evening, once more Miss Starbrow made her sit with her at her bedroom fire and talked to her for a long time.

“What did you tell me your name is?” she asked.

“Frances Harrod.”

“I don't like it. I call it horrid. It was only your stepfather's name according to your account, and I must find you a different one. Do you know what your mother's name was—before she married, I mean?”

“Oh yes, ma'am; it was Margaret Affleck.”

“Affleck. It is not common and not ugly. Frances Affleck—that sounds better. Yes, that will do; your name, as long as you live with me, shall be Affleck; you must not forget that.”

“No, ma'am,” Fan replied humbly. But she had some doubts, and after a while said, “But can you change my name, ma'am?”

“Change your name! Why, of course I can. It is just as easy to do that as to give you a new dress; easier in fact. And what do you know, Fan? What did they teach you at the Board School? Reading, I suppose; very well, take this book and read to me.”

She took the book, but felt strangely nervous at this unexpected call to display her accomplishments, and began hurriedly reading in a low voice.

Miss Starbrow laughed.

“I can't stand that, Fan,” she said. “You might be gabbling Dutch or Hindustani. And you are running on without a single pause. Even a bee hovering about the flowers has an occasional comma, or colon, or full stop in its humming. Try once more, but not so fast and a little louder.”

The good-humoured tone in which she spoke served to reassure Fan; and knowing that she could do better, and getting over her nervousness, she began again, and this time Miss Starbrow let her finish the page.

“You can read, I find. Better, I think, than any of the maids I have had. You have a very nice expressive voice, and you will do better when you read a book through from the beginning, and feel interested in it. I shall let you read every day to me. What else did you learn—writing?”

“Yes, ma'am, I always got a high mark for that. And we had Scripture lessons, and grammar, and composition, and arithmetic, and geography; and when I was in the fifth form I had history and drawing.”

“History and drawing—well, what next, I wonder! That's what we are taxed a shilling in the pound for, to give education to a—well, never mind. But can you really draw, Fan? Here's pencil and paper, just draw something for me.”

“What shall I draw, ma'am?” she said, taking the pencil and feeling nervous again.

“Oh, anything you like.”

Now it happened that her drawing lessons had always given her more pleasure than anything else at school, but owing to Joe Harrod's having taken her away as soon as he was allowed to do so, they had not continued long. Still, even in a short time she had made some progress; and even after leaving school she had continued to find a mournful pleasure in depicting leaf and flower forms. Left to choose her own subject, she naturally began sketching a flower—a-rosebud, half-open, with leaves.

“Don't hurry, Fan, as you did with your reading. The slower you are the better it will be,” said Miss Starbrow, taking up a volume and beginning to read, or pretending to read, for her eyes were on the face of the girl most of the time.

Fan, happily unconscious of the other's regard, gave eight or ten minutes to her drawing, and then Miss Starbrow took it in her hands to examine it.

“This is really very well done,” she said, “but what in goodness' name did they teach you drawing for!' What would be the use of it after leaving school? Well, yes, it might be useful in one way. It astonishes me to think how you were trying to live, Fan. You were certainly not fit for that hard rough work, and would have starved at it. You were made, body and mind, in a more delicate mould, and for something better. I think that with all you have learnt at school, and with your appearance, especially with those truthful eyes of yours and that sweet voice, you might have got a place as nursery governess, to teach small children, or something of that sort. Why did you go starving about the streets, Fan?”

“But no one would take me with such clothes, ma'am. They wouldn't look at me or speak to me even in the little shops where I went to ask for work.”

Miss Starbrow uttered a curious little laugh.

“What a strange thing it seems,” she said, “that a few shillings to buy decent clothes may alter a person's destiny. With the shillings—about as many as the man of God pays for his sirloin—shelter from the weather and temptations to evil, three meals a day, a long pleasant life, husband and children, perhaps, and at last—Heaven. And without them, rags and starvation and the streets, and—well, this is a question for the mighty intellect of a man and a theologian, not for mine. I dare say you don't know what I'm talking about, Fan?”

“Not all, ma'am, but I think I understand a little.”

“Very little, I should think. Don't try to understand too much, my poor girl. Perhaps before you are eighty, if you live so long, you will discover that you didn't even understand a little. Ah, Fan, you have been sadly cheated by destiny! Childhood without joy, and girlhood without hope. I wish I could give you happiness to make up for it all, but I can't be Providence to anyone.”

“Oh, ma'am, you have made me so happy!” exclaimed Fan, the tears springing to her eyes.

Miss Starbrow frowned a little and turned her face aside. Then she said:

“Just because I fed and dressed and sheltered you, Fan—does happiness come so easily to you?”

“Oh no, ma'am, not that—it isn't that,” with such keen distress that she could scarcely speak without a sob.

“How then have I made you happy? Will you not answer me? I took you because I believed that you would trust me, and always speak openly from your heart, and hide nothing.”

“Oh, ma'am, I'm afraid to say it. I was so happy because I thought—because—” and here she sunk her voice to a trembling whisper—“I thought that you loved me.”

Miss Starbrow put her arm round the girl's waist and drew her against her knees.

“Your instinct was not at fault, Fan,” she said in a caressing tone. “I do love you, and loved you when I saw you in your rags, and it pained my heart when I told you to clean my doorsteps as if you had been my sister. No, not a sister, but something better and sweeter; my sisters I do not love at all. And do you know now what I meant, Fan, when I said that there was something you could do for me?”

“I think I know,” returned Fan, still troubled in her mind and anxious. “It was that made me feel so happy. I thought—that you wanted me to love you.”

“You are right, my dear girl; I think that I made no mistake when I took you in.”

On that evening Fan had tea with her mistress, and afterwards, earlier than usual, was allowed to comb her hair out—a task which gave her the greatest delight. Miss Starbrow then put on an evening dress, which Fan now saw for the first time, and was filled with wonder at its richness and beauty. It was of saffron-coloured silk, trimmed with black lace; but she wore no ornaments with it, except gold bracelets on her round shapely arms.

“What makes you stare so, Fan?” she said with a laugh, as she stood surveying herself in the tall glass, and fastening the bracelets on.

“Oh, ma'am, you do look so beautiful in that dress! Are you going to the theatre to-night?”

“No, Fan. On Wednesday evenings I always have a number of friends come in to see me—all gentlemen. I have very few lady friends, and care very little for them. And, now I think of it, you can sit up to-night until I tell you to go to bed.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Miss Starbrow was moving towards the door. Then she paused, and finally came back and sat down again, and drew Fan against her knee as before.

“Fan,” she said, “when you speak about me to others, and to me in the presence of others, or of the servants, call me Miss Starbrow. I don't like to hear you call me ma'am, it wounds my ear. Do you understand?”

“Yes—Miss Starbrow.”

“But when we are alone together, as we are now, let me hear you call me Mary. That's my Christian name, and I should like to hear you speak it. Will you remember?”

“Yes”; and then from her lips trembled the name “Mary.”

“It sounds very loving and sweet,” said the other, and, drawing the girl closer, for the first time she kissed her.

With the memory of those tender words and the blissful sensation left by that unexpected kiss, Fan spent the evening alone, hearing, after her supper, the arrival of visitors, and the sound of conversation and laughter from the drawing-room, and then music and singing. Later in the evening the guests went to sup into the dining-room, and there they stayed playing cards until eleven o'clock or later, when she heard them leaving the house.

They were not all gone, however; three of Miss Starbrow's intimate friends still lingered, drinking whisky-and-water and talking. There was Captain Horton—captain by courtesy, since he was no longer in the army—a tall, fine-looking man, slightly horsy in his get-up, with a very large red moustache, reddish-brown hair, and keen blue eyes. He wore a cut-away coat, and was standing on the hearthrug, his hands thrust into his trousers pockets, and smiling as he talked to a young clerical gentleman near him—the Rev. Octavius Brown. The Rev. Octavius was curate of a neighbouring ritualistic church, but in his life he was not ascetic; he loved whisky-and-water not wisely but too well, and he was passionately devoted to the noble game of Napoleon. Mr. Brown had just won seven shillings, and was in very high spirits; for being poor he had a great dread of losing, and played carefully for very small stakes, and seldom won more than half-a-crown or three shillings. At some distance from them a young gentleman reclined in an easy-chair, smoking a cigarette, and apparently not listening to their conversation. This was Mr. Merton Chance, clerk in the Foreign Office, and supposed by his friends to be extremely talented. He was rather slight but well-formed, a little under the medium height, clean shaved, handsome, colourless as marble, with black hair and dark blue eyes that looked black.

Miss Starbrow, who had left the room a few minutes before, came in, and standing by the table listened to the curate.

“Miss Starbrow,” said he, appealing to her, “is it not hard? Captain Horton either doubts my veracity or believes that I am only joking when I assure him that what I have just told him is plain truth.”

“Well, let me hear the whole story,” she replied, “and I'll act as umpire.”

“I couldn't wish for a juster one—nor for a fairer,” he replied with a weak smile. “What I said was that I had once attended a dinner to the clergy in Yorkshire, at which there were sixteen of us present, and the surnames of all were names of things—objects or offices or something—connected with a church.”

“Well, what were the names?”

“You see he remembers only one—a Mr. Church,” said Captain Horton.

“No, pardon me. A Mr. Church, and a Mr. Bishop, and a Mr. Priest, and a Mr. Cross, and—and oh, yes, Mr. Bell.”

“Five of your sixteen,” said Captain Horton, checking them off on his fingers.

“And a Mr. Graves, and a Mr. Sexton, and—and—of course, I can't remember all the names now. Can you expect it, Miss Starbrow?”

“No, of course not; but you have only named seven. If you can remember ten I shall decide in your favour.”

“Thank you. There was a Mr. Church—”

“No, no, old man, we've had that already,” cried the Captain.

“Mr. Tombs,” he continued, and fell again to thinking.

“That makes eight,” said Miss Starbrow. “Cheer up, Mr. Brown, you'll soon remember two others.”

“Your own name makes nine, Mr. Brown,” broke in Mr. Chance, “only I can't make out what connection it has with a church.”

The other two laughed.

“I'm afraid it looks very bad for you,” said Miss Starbrow.

“No, no, Miss Starbrow, please don't think that. Wait a minute and let me see if I can remember how that was,” said the poor curate. “I think I said that all present at the table except myself—”

“No, there was no exception,” interrupted Captain Horton. “Now, if you sixteen fellows had been Catholic priests instead of in the Established Church, and you were Scarlett by name instead of Brown—”

“Don't say any more—please!” cried the curate, lifting his hand. “You are going too far, Captain Horton. I like a little innocent fun well enough, but I draw the line at sacred subjects. Let us drop the subject.”

“Oh, yes, of course, that's a good way of getting out of it. And as for jesting about sacred matters, I always understood that one couldn't prove his zeal for Protestantism better than by having a shot at the Roman business.”

“I am happy to say that I do not class myself with Prots,” said the curate, getting up from his chair very carefully, and then consulting his watch. “I must run away now—”

“You can't do it,” interrupted the Captain.

Miss Starbrow laughed. “Don't go just yet, Mr. Brown,” she said. “I wish you all to help me with your advice, or with an opinion at least. You know that I have taken in a young girl, and I have not yet decided what to do with her. I shall call her down for you to see her, as you are all three my very candid friends, and you shall tell me what you think of her appearance.”

She then opened the door and called Fan down, and the poor girl was brought into the neighbourhood of the three gentlemen, and stood with eyes cast down, her pale face reddening with shame to find herself the centre of so much curiosity.

Miss Starbrow glanced at the Captain, who was keenly studying Fan's face, as he stood before the fire, stroking his red moustache.

“Well, if I'm to give a candid opinion,” he said, “all I can say is that she looks an underfed little monkey.”

“I think you are excessively rude!” returned Miss Starbrow, firing up. “She is too young to feel your words, perhaps, but they are nothing less than insulting to my judgment.”

“Oh, confound it, Pollie, you are always flying out at me! I dare say she's a good girl—she looks it, but if you want me to say that she's good-looking, I can't be such a hypocrite even to please you.”

Miss Starbrow flashed a keen glance at him, and then without replying turned to Mr. Brown.

“Really—honestly, Miss Starbrow,” he said, “you couldn't have selected a more charming-looking girl. But your judgment is always—well, just what it should be; that goes without saying.”

She turned impatiently from him and looked at Mr. Chance, still gracefully reclining in his chair.

“Is my poor opinion really worth anything to you?” he said, and rising he walked over to the girl and touched her hand, which made her start a little. “I wish to see your eyes—won't you look at me?” He spoke very gently.

Fan glanced up into his face for a moment.

“Thank you—just what I thought,” said he, returning to his seat.

“Well?” said Miss Starbrow.

“Must I put it in words—those poor symbols?” he returned. “I know so well that you can understand without them.”

“Perhaps I might if I tried very hard, but I choose not to try,” she replied, with a slight toss of her head.

“It is a pleasure to obey; but the poor girl looks nervous and uncomfortable, and would be so glad not to hear my personal remarks.”

“Oh yes, it was thoughtless of me to keep her here—thanks for reminding me,” said Miss Starbrow, with a strange softening of her voice her friends were not accustomed to hear. “Run up to your room, Fan, and go to bed. I'm sorry I've kept you up so late, poor child.”

And Fan, with a grateful look towards Mr. Chance, left the room gladly enough.

“When she first came into the room I wondered what had attracted you,” said Mr. Chance. “I concluded that it must be something under those long drooping eyelashes, and when I looked there I found out the secret.”

“Intelligent eyes—very intelligent eyes—I noticed that also,” said Mr. Brown.

“Oh no, heaven forbid—I did not mean anything of the kind,” said Mr. Chance. “Intelligence is a masculine quality which I do not love to see in a woman: it is suitable for us, like a rough skin and—moustachios,” with a glance at Captain Horton, and touching his own clean-shaven upper lip. “The more delicate female organism has something finer and higher than intelligence, which however serves the same purpose—and other purposes besides.”

“I don't quite follow you,” said the curate, again preparing to take his leave. “I dare say it's all plain enough to some minds, but—well, Mr. Chance, you'll forgive me for saying that when you talk that way I don't know whether I'm standing on my head or my heels.”

“Naturally, you wouldn't,” said Captain Horton, with a mocking smile. “But don't go yet, Brown; have some more whisky-and-water.”

“No, thanks, no more. I never exceed two or three glasses, you know. Thank you, my dear Miss Starbrow, for a most delightful evening.” And after shaking hands he made his way to the door, bestowing a kindly touch on each chair in passing, and appearing greatly relieved when he reached the hall.

Captain Horton lit a cigarette and threw himself into an easy-chair. Mr. Chance lit another cigarette; if the other was an idle man, he (Chance) was in the Foreign Office, and privileged to sit up as late as he liked.

“On the whole,” he said in a meditative way, “I am inclined to think that Brown is a rather clever fellow.”

Miss Starbrow laughed: she was still standing. “You two appear to be taking it very quietly,” she said. “It is one o'clock—why will you compel me to be rude?”

Then they started up, put on their coats, exchanged a few words at the door with their hostess, and walked down the street together. Presently a hansom came rattling along the quiet street.

“Keb, sir?” came the inevitable question, in a tone sharp as a whip-crack, as the driver pulled up near the kerb.

“Yes, two cabs,” said Captain Horton. “I'll toss you for the first, Chance”; and pulling out a florin he sent it spinning up and deftly caught it as it fell. “Heads or tails?”

“Oh, take it yourself, and I'll find another.”

“No, no, fair play,” insisted the Captain.

“Very well then, heads.”

“Tails!” cried the other, opening his hand. “Goodnight, old man, you're sure to find one in another minute. Oxford Terrace,” he cried to the driver, jumping in. And the cabman, who had watched the proceedings with the deep interest and approval of a true sporting man, shook the reins, flicked the horse's ears with his whip, clicked with his tongue, and drove rapidly away.

Left to himself, Mr. Chance sauntered on in no hurry to get home, and finally stood still at a street corner, evidently pondering some matter of considerable import to him. “By heaven, I'm more than half resolved to try it!” he exclaimed at last. And after a little further reflection, he added, “And I shall—

“He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch
To win or lose it all.”

Then he turned and walked deliberately back to Dawson Place: coming to the house which he had lately quitted, he peered anxiously at windows and doors, and presently caught sight of a faint reflection from burning gas or candle within on the fanlight over the street door, which, he conjectured, came from the open dining-room.

“Fortune favours me,” he said to himself. “'Faint heart never won fair lady.' A happy inspiration, I am beginning to think. Losing that toss will perhaps result in my winning a higher stake. There's a good deal of dash and devilry in that infernal blackguard Horton, and doubtless that is why he has made some progress here. Well then, she ought to appreciate my spirit in coming to her at this time of night, or morning, rather. There's a wild, primitive strain in her; she's not to be wooed and won in the usual silly mawkish way. More like one of the old Sabine women, who liked nothing better than being knocked down and dragged off by their future lords. I suppose that a female of that antique type of mind can be knocked down and taken captive, as it were, with good vigorous words, just as formerly they were knocked down with the fist or the butt end of a spear.”

His action was scarcely in keeping with the daring, resolute spirit of his language: instead of seizing the knocker and demanding admittance with thunderous racket, he went cautiously up the steps, rapped softly on the door with his knuckles, and then anxiously waited the result of his modest summons.

Miss Starbrow was in the dining-room, and heard the tapping. Her servants had been in bed two hours; and after the departure of her late guests she had turned off the gas at the chandelier, and was leaving the room, when seeing a Globe, left by one of her visitors, she took it up to glance at the evening's news. Something she found in the paper interested her, and she continued reading until that subdued knocking attracted her attention. Taking up her candle she went to the door and unfastened it, but without letting down the chain. Her visitor hurriedly whispered his name, and asked to be admitted for a few minutes, as he had something very important to communicate.

She took down the chain and allowed him to come into the hall. “Why have you come back?” she demanded in some alarm. “Where is Captain Horton?—you left together.”

“He went home in the first cab we found. We tossed for it, and he won, for which I thank the gods. Then, acting on the impulse of the moment, I came back to say something to you. A very unusual—very eccentric thing to do, no doubt. But when something involving great issues has to be done or said, I think the best plan is not to wait for a favourable opportunity. Don't you agree with me?”

“I don't understand you, Mr. Chance, and am therefore unable to agree with you. I hope you are not going to keep me standing here much longer.”

“Not for a moment! But will you not let me come inside to say the few words I have to say?”

“Oh yes, you may come in,” she returned not very graciously, and leading the way to the dining-room, where decanters, tumblers, and cards scattered about the table, seen by the dim light of one candle, gave it a somewhat disreputable appearance. “What do you wish to say to me?” she asked a little impatiently, and seating herself.

He took a chair near her. “You are a little unkind to hurry me in this way,” he said, trying to smile, “since you compel me to put my request in very plain blunt language. However, that is perhaps the best plan. Twice I have come to you intending to speak, and have been baffled by fate—”

“Then you might have written, or telegraphed,” she interrupted, “if the matter was so important.”

“Not very well,” he returned, growing very serious. “You know that as well as I do. You must know, dear Miss Starbrow, that I have admired you for a long time. Perhaps you also know that I love you. Miss Starbrow, will you be my wife and make me happy?”

“No, Mr. Chance, I cannot be your wife and make you happy. I must decline your offer.”

Her cold, somewhat ironical tone from the first had prepared him for this result, and he returned almost too quickly, “Oh, I see, you are offended with me for coming to you at this hour. I must suffer the consequences of my mistake, and study to be more cautious and proper in the future. I have always regarded you as an unconventional woman. That, to my mind, is one of your greatest charms; and when I say that I say a good deal. I never imagined that my coming to you like this would have prejudiced you against me.”

She gave a little laugh, but there was an ominous cloud on her face as she answered: “You imagined it was the right thing to do to come at half-past one o'clock in the morning to offer me your hand! Your opinion of my conduct is not a subject I am the least interested in; but whether I am unconventional or not, I assure you, Mr. Chance, that I am not to be pushed or driven one step further than I choose to go.”

“I should never dream of attempting such a thing, Miss Starbrow. But it would be useless to say much more; whatever line I take to-night only makes matters worse for me. But allow me to say one thing before bidding you good-night. The annoyance you feel at the present moment will not last. You have too much generosity, too much intellect, to allow it to rest long in your bosom; and deeply as I feel this rebuff, I am not going to be so weak as to let it darken and spoil my whole life. No, my hope is too strong and too reasonable to be killed so easily. I shall come to you again, and again, and again. For I know that with you for a wife and companion my life would be a happy one; and not happy only, for that is not everything. An ambitious man looks to other greater and perhaps better things.”

The cloud was gone from her brows, and she sat regarding him as he spoke with a slight smile on her lips and a curious critical expression in her eyes. When he finished speaking she laughed and said, “But is my happiness of such little account—do you not propose to make me happy also, Mr. Chance?”

“No,” he returned, his face clouding, and dropping his eyes before her mocking gaze. “You shall not despise me. Single or married, you must make your own happiness or misery. You know that; why do you wish to make me repeat the wretched commonplaces that others use?”

“I'm glad you have so good an opinion of yourself, Mr. Chance,” she replied. “I was vexed with you at first, but am not so now. To watch the changes of your chameleon mind, not always successful in getting the right colour at the right moment, is just as good as a play. If you really mean to come again and again I shall not object—it will amuse me. Only do not come at two o'clock in the morning; it might compromise me, and, unconventional as I am, I should not forgive you a second time. But honestly, Mr. Chance, I don't believe you will come again. You know now that I know you, and you are too wise to waste your energies on me. I hope you will not give up visiting me—in the daytime. We admire each other, and I have always had a friendly feeling for you. That is a real feeling—not an artificial one like the love you spoke of.”

He rose to go. “Time will show whether it is an artificial feeling or not,” he said; and after bidding good-night and hearing the door close after him, he walked away towards Westbourne Grove. He had gone from her presence with a smile on his lips, but in the street it quickly vanished from his face, and breaking into a rapid walk and clenching his fists, he exclaimed, between his set teeth, “Curse the jade!”

It was not a sufficient relief to his feelings, and yet he seemed unable to think of any other expression more suitable to the occasion, for after going a little further, he repeated, “Curse the jade!”

Then he walked on slower and slower, and finally stopped, and turning towards Dawson Place, he repeated for the third time, “Curse the jade!”

CHAPTER VII

Fan saw no more company after that evening, for which she was not sorry; but that had been a red-letter day to her—not soon, perhaps never, to be forgotten.

Great as the human adaptiveness is at the age at which Fan then was, that loving-kindness of her mistress—of one so proud and beautiful above all women, and, to the girl's humble ideas, so rich “beyond the dreams of avarice”—retained its mysterious, almost incredible, character to her mind, and was a continual cause of wonder to her, and at times of ill-defined but anxious thought. For what had she—a poor, simple, ignorant useless girl—to keep the affection of such a one as Miss Starbrow? And as the days and weeks went by, that vague anxiety did not leave her; for the more she saw of her mistress, the less did she seem like one of a steadfast mind, whose feelings would always remain the same. She was touchy, passionate, variable in temper; and if her stormy periods were short-lived, she also had cold and sullen moods, which lasted long, and turned all her sweetness sour; and at such times Fan feared to approach her, but sat apart distressed and sorrowful. And yet, whatever her mood was, she never spoke sharply to Fan, or seemed to grow weary of her. And once, during one of those precious half-hours, when they sat together at the bedroom fire before dinner, when Miss Starbrow in a tender mood again drew the girl to her side and kissed her, Fan, even while her heart was overflowing with happiness, allowed something of the fear that was mixed with it to appear in her words.

“Oh, Mary, if I could do something for you!” she murmured. “But I can do nothing—I can only love you. I wish—I wish you would tell me what to do to—to keep your love!”

Miss Starbrow's face clouded. “Perhaps your heart is a prophetic one, Fan,” she said; “but you must not have those dismal forebodings, or if they will come, then pay as little heed to them as possible. Everything changes about us, and we change too—I suppose we can't help it. Let us try to believe that we will always love each other. Our food is not less grateful to us because it is possible that at some future day we shall have to go hungry. Oh, poor Fan, why should such thoughts trouble your young heart? Take the goods the gods give you, and do not repine because we are not angels in Heaven, with an eternity to enjoy ourselves in. I love you now, and find it sweet to love you, as I have never loved anyone of my own sex before. Women, as a rule, I detest. You can do, and are doing, more than you know for me.”

Fan did not understand it all; but something of it she did understand, and it had a reassuring effect on her mind.

Her life at this period was a solitary one. After breakfast she would go out for a walk, usually to Kensington Gardens, and returning by way of Westbourne Grove, to execute some small commissions for her mistress. Between dinner and tea the time was mostly spent in the back room on the first floor, which nobody else used; and when the weather permitted she sat with the window open, and read aloud to improve herself in the art, and practised writing and drawing, or read in some book Miss Starbrow had recommended to her. With all her time so agreeably filled she did not feel her loneliness, and the life of ease and plenty soon began to tell on her appearance. Her skin became more pure and transparent, although naturally pale; her eyes grew brighter, and could look glad as well as sorrowful; her face lost its painfully bony look, and was rounder and softer, and the straight lines and sharp angles of her girlish form changed to graceful curves from day to day. Miss Starbrow, regarding her with a curious and not untroubled smile, remarked:

“You are improving in your looks every day, Fan; by-and-by you will be a beautiful girl—and then!”

The attitude of the servants had not changed towards her, the cook continuing to observe a kind of neutrality which was scarcely benevolent, while the housemaid's animosity was still active; but it had ceased to trouble her very much. Since the evening on which Fan had baffled her by blowing out the candle, Rosie had not attempted to inflict corporal punishment beyond an occasional pinch or slap, but contented herself by mocking and jeering, and sometimes spitting at her.

Rosie is destined to disappear from the history of Fan's early life in the first third of this volume; but before that time her malice bore very bitter fruit, and for that and other reasons her character is deserving of some description.

She was decidedly pretty, short but well-shaped, with a small English slightly-upturned nose; small mouth with ripe red lips, which were never still except when she held them pressed with her sharp white teeth to make them look redder and riper than ever. Her brown fluffy hair was worn short like a boy's, and she looked not unlike a handsome high-spirited boy, with brown eyes, mirthful and daring. She was extremely vivacious in disposition, and active—too active, in fact, for she got through her housemaid's work so quickly that it left her many hours of each day in which to listen to the promptings of the demon of mischief. It was only because she did her work so rapidly and so well that her mistress kept her on—“put up with her,” as she expressed it—in spite of her faults of temper and tongue. But Rosie's heart was not in her work. She was romantic and ambitious, and her shallow little brain was filled with a thousand dreams of wonderful things to be. She was a constant and ravenous reader of Bow Bells, the London Journal, and one or two penny weeklies besides; and not satisfied with the half-hundred columns of microscopical letterpress they afforded her, she laid her busy hands on all the light literature left about by her mistress, and thought herself hardly treated because Miss Starbrow was a great reader of French novels. It was exceedingly tantalising to know that those yellow-covered books were so well suited to her taste, and not be able to read them. For someone had told her what nice books they were—someone with a big red moustache, who was as fond of pretty red lips as a greedy school-boy is of ripe cherries.

Many were the stolen interviews between the daring little housemaid and her gentleman lover; sometimes in the house itself, in a shaded part of the hall, or in one of the reception-rooms when a happy opportunity offered—and opportunities always come to those who watch for them; sometimes out of doors in the shadow of convenient trees in the neighbouring quiet street and squares after dark. But Rosie was not too reckless. There was a considerable amount of cunning in that small brain of hers, which prevented her from falling over the brink of the precipice on the perilous edge of which she danced like a playful kid so airily. It was very nice and not too naughty to be cuddled and kissed by a handsome gentleman, with a big moustache, fine eyes, and baritone voice! but she was not prepared to go further than that—just yet; only pretending that by-and-by—perhaps; firing his heart with languishing sighs, the soft unspoken “Ask me no more, for at a touch I yield”; and then she would slip from his arms, and run away to put by the little present of sham jewellery, and think it all very fine fun. They were amusing themselves. His serious love-making was for her mistress. She—Rosie—had a future—a great splendid future, to which she must advance by slow degrees, step by step, sometimes even losing ground a little—and much had been lost since that starved white kitten had come into the house.

When Miss Starbrow, in a fit of anger, had dismissed her maid some months before, and then had accepted some little personal assistance in dressing for the play, and at other times, from her housemaid, Rosie at once imagined that she was winning her way to her mistress's heart, and her silly dream was that she would eventually get promoted to the vacant and desirable place of lady's-maid. The cast-off dresses, boots, pieces of finery, and many other things which would be her perquisites would be a little fortune to her, and greatly excited her cupidity. But there were other more important considerations: she would occupy a much higher position in the social scale, and dress well, her hands and skin would grow soft and white, and her appearance and conversation would be that of a lady; for to be a lady's-maid is, of course, the nearest thing to being a lady. And with her native charms, ambitious intriguing brain, what might she not rise to in time? and she had been so careful, and, she imagined, had succeeded so well in ingratiating herself with her mistress; and by means of a few well-constructed lies had so filled Miss Starbrow with disgust at the ordinary lady's-maid taken ready-made out of a registry-office, that she had begun to look on the place almost as her own. She had quite overlooked the small fact that she was not qualified to fill it, and never would be. If she had proposed such an arrangement, Miss Starbrow would have laughed heartily, and sent the impudent minx away with a flea in her ear; but she had not yet ventured to broach the subject.

Fan's coming into the house had not only filled her with the indignation natural to one of her class and in her position at being compelled to wait on a girl picked up half-starved in the streets; but when it appeared that her mistress meant to keep Fan and make much of her, then her jealousy was aroused, and she displayed as much spite and malice as she dared. She had not succeeded in frightening Fan into submission, and she had not dared to invent lies about her; and unable to use her only weapon, she felt herself for the time powerless. On the other hand, it was evident that Fan had made no complaints.

“I'd like to catch the little beggar daring to tell tales of me!” she exclaimed, clenching her vindictive little fists in a fury. But when her mistress gave her any commands about Fan's meals, or other matters, her tone was so sharp and peremptory, and her eyes so penetrating, that Rosie knew that the hatred she cherished in her heart was no secret. The voice, the look seemed to say plainly, as if it had been expressed in words, “One word and you go; and when you send to me for a character, you shall have justice but no mercy.”

This was a terrible state of things for Rosie. There was nothing she could do; and to sit still and wait was torture to one of her restless, energetic mind. When her mistress was out of the house she could give vent to her spite by getting into Fan's room and teasing her in every way that her malice suggested. But Fan usually locked her out, and would not even open the door to take in her dinner when it was brought; then Rosie would wait until it was cold before leaving it on the landing.

When Miss Starbrow was in the house, and had Fan with her to comb her hair or read to her, Rosie would hang about, listening at keyholes, to find out how matters were progressing between “lady and lady's-maid.” But nothing to give her any comfort was discovered. On the contrary, Miss Starbrow showed no signs of becoming disgusted at her own disgraceful infatuation, and seemed more friendly towards the girl than ever. She took her to the dressmaker at the West End, and had a very pretty, dark green walking-dress made for her, in which Fan looked prettier than ever. She also bought her a new stylish hat, a grey fur cape, and long gloves, besides giving her small pieces of jewellery, and so many things besides that poor Rosie was green with envy. Then, as a climax, she ordered in a new pretty iron bed for the girl, and had it put in her own room.

“Fan will be so much warmer and more comfortable here than at the top of the house,” she remarked to Rosie, as if she too had a little malice in her disposition, and was able to take pleasure in sprinkling powder on a raw sore.

CHAPTER VIII

Not until the end of November did anything important occur to make a break in Fan's happy, and on the whole peaceful, life in Dawson Place; then came an eventful day, which rudely reminded her that she was living, if not on, at any rate in the neighbourhood of a volcano. One morning that was not wet nor foggy Miss Starbrow made up her mind to visit the West End to do a little shopping, and, to the maid's unbounded disgust, she took Fan with her. An hour after breakfast they started in a hansom and drove to the Marble Arch, where they dismissed the cab.

“Now,” said Miss Starbrow, who was in high spirits, “we'll walk to Peter Robinson's and afterwards to Piccadilly Circus, looking at all the shops, and then have lunch at the St. James's Restaurant; and walk home along the parks. It is so beautifully dry underfoot to-day.”

Fan was delighted with the prospect, and they proceeded along Oxford Street. The thoroughfares about the Marble Arch had been familiar to her in the old days, and yet they seemed now to have a novel and infinitely more attractive appearance—she did not know why. But the reason was very simple. She was no longer a beggar, hungry, in rags, ashamed, and feeling that she had no right to be there, but was herself a part of that pleasant world of men and women and children. An old Moon Street neighbour, seeing her now in her beautiful dress and with her sweet peaceful face, would not have recognised her.

At Peter Robinson's they spent about half an hour, Miss Starbrow making some purchases for herself, and, being in a generous mood, she also ordered a few things for Fan. As they came out at the door they met a Mr. Mortimer, an old friend of Miss Starbrow's, elderly, but dandified in his dress, and got up to look as youthful as possible. After warmly shaking hands with Miss Starbrow, and bowing to Fan, he accompanied them for some distance up Regent Street. Fan walked a little ahead. Mr. Mortimer seemed very much taken with her, and was most anxious to find out all about her, and to know how she came to be in Miss Starbrow's company. The answers he got were short and not explicit; and whether he resented this, or merely took a malicious pleasure in irritating his companion, whose character he well knew, he continued speaking of Fan, protesting that he had not seen a lovelier girl for a long time, and begging Miss Starbrow to note how everyone—or every man, rather, since man only has eyes to see so exquisite a face—looked keenly at the girl in passing.

“My dear Miss Starbrow,” he said, “I must congratulate you on your—ahem—late repentance. You know you were always a great woman-hater—a kind of she-misogynist, if such a form of expression is allowable. You must have changed indeed before bringing that fresh charming young girl out with you.” He angered her and she did not conceal it, because she could not, though knowing that he was studying to annoy her from motives of revenge. For this man, who was old enough to be her father, and had spent the last decade trying to pick up a woman with money to mend his broken fortunes—this watery-eyed, smirking old beau, who wrote himself down young, going about Regent Street on a cold November day without overcoat or spectacles—this man had had the audacity to propose marriage to her! She had sent him about his business with a burst of scorn, which shook his old, battered moral constitution like a tempest of wind and thunder, and he had not forgotten it. He chuckled at the successful result of his attack, not caring to conceal his glee; but this meeting proved very unfortunate for poor Fan. After dismissing her old lover with scant courtesy, Miss Starbrow caught up with the girl, and they walked on in silence, looking at no shop-windows now. One glance at the dark angry face was enough to spoil Fan's pleasure for the day and to make her shrink within herself, wondering much as to what had caused so great and sudden a change.

Arrived at Piccadilly Circus, Miss Starbrow called a cab.

“Get in, Fan,” she said, speaking rather sharply. “I have a headache and am going home.”

The headache seemed so like a fit of anger that Fan did not venture to speak one word of sympathy.

After reaching home, Miss Starbrow, without saying a word, went to her room. Fan ventured to follow her there.

“I wish to be left alone for the rest of the day,” said her mistress. “Tell Rosie that I don't wish to be disturbed. After you have had your dinner go down to the drawing-room and sit there by the fire with your book. And—stay, if anyone calls to see me, say that I have a headache and do not wish to be disturbed.”

Fan went sorrowfully away and had her dinner, and was mocked by Rosie when she delivered the message, and then taking her book she went to the drawing-room on the ground-floor. After she had been there half an hour she heard a knock, and presently the door was opened and Captain Horton walked in.

“What, alone, Miss Affleck! Tell me about Miss Starbrow,” he said, advancing and taking her hand.

Fan explained that Miss Starbrow was lying down, suffering from a headache, and did not wish to be disturbed.

“I am sorry to hear it,” he said. “But I can sit here and have a little conversation with you, Fan—your name is Fan, is it not?”

He sat down near the fire still keeping her hand in his, and when she tried gently to withdraw it, his grasp became firmer. His hand was very soft, as is usual with men who play cards much—and well; and it held tenaciously—again a characteristic of the card-playing hand.

“Oh, please, sir, let me go!” she said.

“Why, my dear child, don't you know it's the custom for a gentleman to hold a girl's hand in his when he talks to her? But you have always lived among the very poor—have you not?—where they have different customs. Never mind, Fan, you will soon learn. Now look up, Fan, and let me see those wonderful eyes of yours; yes, they are very pretty. You don't mind my teaching you a little, do you, Fan, so that you will know how to behave when you are with well-bred people?”

“No, sir; but please, sir, will you let me go?”

“Why, you foolish child, I am not going to hurt you. You don't take me for a dentist, do you?” he continued, trying to make her laugh. But his smile and the look in his eyes only frightened her. “Look here, Fan, I will teach you something else. Don't you know that it is the custom among ladies and gentlemen for a young girl to kiss a gentleman when he speaks kindly to her?”

“No,” said Fan, reddening and trying again to free herself.

“Don't be so foolish, child, or you will never learn how to behave. Do you know that if you make a noise or fuss you'll disturb your mistress and she will be very angry with you. Come now, be a good dear little girl.”

And with gentle force he drew her between his knees and put his arm round her. Fan, afraid to cry out, struggled vainly to get free; he held her firmly and closely, and had just put his lips to her face when the door swung open, and Miss Starbrow sailed like a tragedy-queen into the room, her head thrown back, her face white as marble and her eyes gleaming.

The visitor instantly rose, while Fan, released from his grip, her face crimson with shame, slunk away, trembling with apprehension.

“Captain Horton, what is the meaning of this?” demanded the lady.

“Why nothing—a mere trifle—a joke, Pollie. Your little girl doesn't mind being kissed by a friend of the family—that's all.”

“Come here, Fan,” she said, in a tone of concentrated rage; and the girl, frightened and hesitating, approached her. “This is the way you behave the moment my back is turned. You corrupt-minded little wretch! Take that!” and with her open hand she struck the girl's face a cruel blow, with force enough to leave the red print of her fingers on the pale cheek.

Fan, covering her face with her hands, shrunk back against the wall, sobbing convulsively.

“Oh, come, Pollie!” exclaimed Horton, “don't be so hard on the poor monkey—she's a mere child, you know, and didn't think any harm.”

Miss Starbrow made no reply, but standing motionless looked at him—watched his face with a fierce, dangerous gleam in her half-closed eyes.

“Don't stand snivelling here,” she spoke, turning to Fan. “Go up instantly to the back room, and stay there. I shall know how to trust a girl out of the slums another time.”

Crying bitterly she left the room, and her mistress shut the door after her, remaining there with her lover.

Fan found the window of the back room open, but she did not feel cold; and kneeling on the sofa, with her face resting on her hands, and still crying, she remained there for a long time. A little wintry sunshine rested on the garden, brightening the brown naked branches of the trees and the dark green leaves of ivy and shrub, and gladdening the sparrows. By-and-by the shortlived sunshine died away, and the sparrows left. It was strangely quiet in the house; distinctly she heard Miss Starbrow come out of the drawing-room and up the stairs; she trembled a little then and felt a little rebellious stirring in her heart, thinking that her mistress was coming up to her. But no, she went to her own room, and closed the door. Then Rosie came in, stealing up to her on tiptoe, and curiously peering into her face.

“Oh I say—something's happened!” she exclaimed, and tripped joyfully away. Half an hour later she came up with some tea.

“I've brought your la'ship a cup of tea. I'm sure it will do your head good,” she said, advancing with mincing steps and affecting profound sympathy in her tone.

“Take it away—I shan't touch it!” returned Fan, becoming angry in her misery.

“Oh, but your la'ship's health is so important! Society will be so distressed when it hears that your la'ship is unwell! I'll leave the cup in the window in case your la'ship—”

Fan pushed cup and saucer angrily away, and over they went, falling outside down to the area, where they struck with a loud crash and were shivered to pieces.

Rosie laughed and clapped her hands in glee. “Oh, I'm so glad you've smashed it!” she exclaimed. “I'll tell Miss Starbrow, and then you'll see! That cup was the thing she valued most in the house. She bought it at a sale at Christie and Manson's and gave twenty-five guineas for it. Oh, how mad she'll be!”

Fan paid no heed to her words, knowing that there was no truth in them. While pushing it away she had noticed that it was an old kitchen cup, chipped and cracked and without a handle; the valuable curio had as a fact been fished out of a heap of rubbish that morning by the maid, who thought that it would serve very well for “her la'ship's tea.”

Rosie got tired of tormenting her, and took herself off at last; then another hour went slowly by while it gradually grew dark; and as the lights faded her rebellious feelings left her, and she began to hope that Miss Starbrow would soon call her or come to her. And at length, unable to bear the loneliness and suspense, she went to the bedroom door and softly knocked. There was no answer, and trying the door she found that it was locked. She waited outside the door for about half an hour, and then hearing her mistress moving in the room she tapped again, with the same result as before. Then she went back despairingly to the back room and her place beside the window. The night was starry and not very cold, and to protect herself from the night air she put on her fur cape. Hour after hour she listened to the bells of St. Matthew's chiming the quarters, feeling a strange loneliness each time the chimes ceased; and then, after a few minutes' time, beginning again to listen for the next quarter. It was getting very late, and still no one came to her, not even Rosie with her supper, which she had made up her mind not to touch. Then she dropped her head on her hands, and cried quietly to herself. She had so many thoughts, and each one seemed sadder than the last. For the great tumult in her soul was over now, and she could think about it all, and of all the individuals who had treated her cruelly. She felt very differently towards them. Captain Horton she feared and hated, and wished him dead with all her heart; and Rosie she also hated, but not so intensely, for the maid's enmity had not injured her. Against Mary she only felt a great anger, but no hatred; for Mary had been so kind, so loving, and she could not forget that, and all the sweetness it had given her life. Then she began to compare this new luxurious life in Dawson Place to the old wretched life in Moon Street, which now seemed so far back in time; and it seemed strange to her that, in spite of the great difference, yet to-night she felt more unhappy than she had ever felt in the old days. She remembered her poor degraded mother, who had never turned against her, and cried quietly again, leaning her face on the window-sill. Then she had a thought which greatly perplexed her, and she asked herself why it was in those old days, when hard words and unjust blows came to her, she only felt a fearful shrinking of the flesh, and wished like some poor hunted animal to fly away and hide herself from her tormentors, while now a spirit of resentment and rebellion was kindled in her and burnt in her heart with a strange fire. Was it wrong to feel like that, to wish that those who made her suffer were dead? That was a hard question which Fan put to herself, and she could not answer it.

Her long fast and the excitement she had experienced, with so many lonely hours of suspense after it, began to tell on her and make her sleepy. It was eleven o'clock; she heard the servants going round to fasten doors and turn off the gas, and finally they passed her landing on their way to bed. It was getting very cold, and giving up all hope of being called by her mistress, she closed the window and, with an old table-cover for covering, coiled herself up on the sofa and went to sleep.

When she woke it was with a start; her face had grown very cold, and she felt a warm hand touching her cheek. The hand was quickly withdrawn when she woke, and looking round Fan saw someone seated by her, and although there was only the starlight from the window in the dim room, she knew that it was her mistress. She raised herself to a sitting position on the sofa, but without speaking. All her bitter, resentful feelings had suddenly rushed back to her heart.

“Well, you have condescended to wake at last,” said Miss Starbrow. “Do you know that it is nearly one o'clock in the morning?”

“No,” returned Fan.

“No! well then, I say yes. It is nearly one o'clock. Do you intend to keep me here waiting your pleasure all night, I wonder!”

“I don't want you to come here. I had no place to sleep because you locked me out of your room.”

“And for an excellent reason,” said the other sharply. “How could I admit you into my room after the outrageous scene I witnessed downstairs! You seem to think that you can behave just how you like in my house, and that it will make no difference.”

Fan was silent.

“Oh, very well, Miss Fan, if you have nothing to say for yourself!”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Say! I wonder at the question. I want you to tell me the truth, of course. That is, if you can. How did it all happen—you must tell me everything just as it occurred, without concealment or prevarication.”

Fan related the facts simply and clearly; she remembered every word the Captain had spoken only too well.

“I wish I knew whether you have told me the simple truth or not,” said Miss Starbrow.

“May God strike me dead if I'm not telling the truth!” said Fan.

“There, that will do. A young lady is supposed to be able to answer a question with a simple yes or no, without swearing about it like a bargee on the Regent's Canal.”

“Then why don't you believe me when I say yes and no, and—and why didn't you ask me before you struck me?”

“I shouldn't have struck you if I had not thought you were a little to blame. It is not likely. You ought to know that after all my kindness to you—but I dare say that is all forgotten. I declare I have been treated most shamefully!” And here she dropped her face into her hands and began crying.

But the girl felt no softening of the heart; that strange fire was still burning in her, and she could only think of the cruel words, the unjust blow.

Miss Starbrow suddenly ceased her crying. “I thought that you, at any rate, had a little gratitude and affection for me,” she said. “But of course I was mistaken about that as I have been about everything else. If you had the faintest spark of sympathy in you, you would show a little feeling, and—and ask me why I cry, or say something.”

For some moments Fan continued silent, then she moved and touched the other's hand, and said very softly, for now all her anger was melting away, “Why do you cry, Mary?”

“You know, Fan, because I love you, and am so sorry I struck you. What a brute I was to hurt you—a poor outcast and orphan, with no friend but me in the world. Forgive me, dear Fan, for treating you so cruelly!” Then she put her arms about the girl and kissed her, holding her close to her breast.

“Oh, Mary, dear,” said Fan, now also crying; “you didn't hurt me very much. I only felt it because—because it was you.”

“I know, Fan, and that's why I can't forgive myself. But I shall never, never hurt you again, for I know that you are truth itself, and that I can trust you. And now let us go down and have some supper together before going to bed. I know you've had nothing since lunch, and I couldn't touch a morsel, I was so troubled about that wretch of a man. I think I have been sitting here quite two hours waiting for you to wake.”

Together they went down to the dining-room, where a delicate little supper, such as Miss Starbrow loved to find on coming home from the play, was laid out for them. For the first time Fan sat at table with her mistress; another new experience was the taste of wine. She had a glass of Sauterne, and thought it very nice.

CHAPTER IX

On the next morning, after a sharp frost, the sun shone brightly as in spring. Fan was up early and enjoyed her breakfast, notwithstanding the late supper, and not in the least disturbed by the scornful words flung at her by the housemaid when she brought up the tray. After breakfasting she went to Miss Starbrow's room, to find her still in bed and not inclined to get up.

“Put on your dress and go for a walk in Kensington Gardens,” she said. “I think it is a fine day, for a wonder. You may stop out until one o'clock, if you like, and take my watch, so as to know the time. And if you wish to rest while out don't sit down on a bench, or you will be sure to have someone speak to you. According to the last census, or Registrar-General's report, or whatever it is, there are twenty thousand young gentlemen loafers in London, who spend their whole time hanging about the parks and public places trying to make the acquaintance of young girls. Sit on a chair by yourself when you are tired—you can always find a chair even in winter—and give the chairman a penny when he comes to you.”

“I haven't got a penny, Mary. But it doesn't matter; I'll not get tired.”

“Then I must give you a purse and some money, and you must never go out without it, and don't mind spending a little money now and then, and giving away a penny when you feel inclined. Give me my writing desk and the keys.”

She opened the desk and took out a small plush purse, then some silver and coppers to put in it, and finally a sovereign.

“The silver you can use, the sovereign you must not change, but keep it in case you should require money when I am not with you.”

With all these fresh proofs of Mary's affection to make her happy, in her lovely new dress and hat, and the beautiful gold chain on her bosom, Fan went out for her walk feeling as light-hearted as a linnet. It was the last day of November, usually a dreary time in London, but never had the world looked so bright and beautiful to Fan as on that morning; and as she walked along with swift elastic tread she could hardly refrain from bursting bird-like into some natural joyous melody. Passing into the Gardens at the Queen's Road entrance, she went along the Broad Walk to the Round Pond, and then on to the Albert Memorial, shining with gold and brilliant colours in the sun like some fairy edifice. Running up the steps she walked round and round the sculptured base of the monument, studying the marble faces and reading the names, and above all admiring the figures there—blind old Homer playing on his harp, with Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and all the immortal sons of song, grouped about him listening. But nothing to her mind equalled the great group of statuary representing Asia at one of the four corners, with that colossal calm-faced woman seated on an elephant in the centre. What a great majestic face, and yet how placid and sweet it looked, reminding her a little of Mary in her kindly moods. But this noble face was of marble, and never changed; Mary's changed every hour, so that the soft expression when it came seemed doubly sweet. By-and-by she walked away towards the bridge over the Serpentine, and in the narrow path, thickly bordered with trees and shrubs and late flowers, she stepped aside to make room for a lady to pass, who held by the hand a little angel-faced, golden-haired child, dressed in a quaint pretty costume. The child stood still and looked up into Fan's face, and then she also involuntarily stopped, so taken was she with the little thing's beauty.

“Mammy,” said the child, pointing to Fan, “I'se like to tiss the pretty laly.”

“Well, my darling, perhaps the young lady will kiss you if you ask very nicely,” said the mother.

“Oh, may I kiss her?” said Fan, reddening with pleasure, and quickly stooping she pressed her lips to the little cherub face.

“I loves you—what's your name?” said the child.

“No, darling, you must not ask questions. You've got your kiss and that ought to satisfy you”; and with a smile and nod to Fan she walked on.

Fan pursued her walk to the Serpentine, with a new delicious sensation in her heart. It was so strange and sweet to be spoken to by a lady, a stranger, and treated like an equal! And in the days that were not so long ago with what sad desire in her eyes had she looked at smiling beautiful faces, like this lady's face, and no smile and no gentle word had been bestowed on her, and no glance that did not express pity or contempt!

At the head of the Serpentine she stood for ten or fifteen minutes to watch the children and nursemaids feeding the swans and ducks. The swans were very stately and graceful, the ducks very noisy and contentious, and it was great fun to see them squabbling over the crumbs of bread. But after leaving the waterside she came upon a scene among the great elms and chestnuts close by which amused her still more. Some poor ragged children—three boys and a girl—were engaged in making a great heap of the old dead fallen leaves, gathering them in armfuls and bringing them to one spot. By-and-by the little girl came up with a fresh load, and as she stooped to put it on the pile, the boys, who had all gathered round, pushed her over and covered her with a mass of old leaves; then, with a shout of laughter at their rough joke, they ran away. She struggled out and stood up half-choked with dust, her face covered with dirt, and dress and hair with the black half-rotten leaves. As soon as she got her breath she burst out in a prolonged howl, while the big tears rushed out, making channels on her grimy cheeks.

“Oh, poor little girl, don't cry,” said Fan, going up to her, but the child only howled the louder. Then Fan remembered her money and Mary's words, and taking out a penny she offered it to the little girl. Instantly the crying ceased, the child clutched the penny in her dirty little fist, then stared at Fan, then at the penny, and finally turned and ran away as fast as she could run, past the fountains, out at the gate, and into the Bayswater Road.

When she was quite out of sight Fan resumed her walk, laughing a little, but with misty eyes, for it was the first time in her life that she had given a penny away, and it made her strangely happy. Before quitting the Gardens, however, one little incident occurred to interfere with her pleasure. Close to the Broad Walk she suddenly encountered Captain Horton walking with a companion in the opposite direction. There was no time to turn aside in order to avoid him; when she recognised him he was watching her face with a curious smile under his moustache which made her feel a little uncomfortable; then, raising his hat, he passed her without speaking.

“You know that pretty girl?” she heard his friend ask, as she hurried away a little frightened towards the Queen's Road gate.

Miss Starbrow appeared very much put out about this casual encounter in the Gardens when Fan related the incidents of her walk.

“I'll not walk there again, Mary, so as not to meet him,” said Fan timidly.

“On the contrary, you shall walk there as often as you like—I had almost said whether you like it or not; and in the Grove, where you are still more likely to meet him.” She spoke angrily; but after a while added, “He couldn't well have done less than notice you when he met you, and I do not think you need be afraid of anything. It is not likely that he would address you. He put an altogether false complexion on that affair yesterday—a cowardly thing to do, and caused us both a great deal of pain, and for that I shall never forgive him. Think no more about it, Fan.”

It was pretty plain, however, that she permitted herself to think more about it; for during the next few days she was by no means cheerful, while her moody fits and bursts of temper were more frequent than usual. Then, one Wednesday evening, when Fan assisted her in dressing to receive her visitors, she seemed all at once to have recovered her spirits, and talked to the girl and laughed in a merry light-hearted way.

“Poor Fan, how dull it must always be for you on a Wednesday evening, sitting here so long by yourself,” she said.

“Oh no, Mary, I always open the door and listen to the music; I like the singing so much.”

“That reminds me,” said Miss Starbrow. “Who do you think is coming this evening?”

“Captain Horton,” she answered promptly.

Miss Starbrow laughed. “Yes; how quick you are at guessing. I must tell you all about it; and do you know, Fan, I find it very delightful to have a dear trusty girl to talk to. I suppose you have noticed how cross I have been all these days. It was all on account of that man. He offended me so much that day that I made up my mind never to speak to him again. But he is very sorry; besides, he looked on you as little more than a child, and really meant it only for a joke. And so I have half forgiven him, and shall let him visit me again, but only on Wednesday evenings when there will be others. I shall not allow him to come whenever he likes, as he used to do. Fan was silent. Miss Starbrow, sitting before the glass, read the ill-concealed trouble in the girl's face reflected there.

“Now don't be foolish, Fan, and think no more about it,” she said. “You are very young—not nearly sixteen yet, and gentlemen look on girls of that age as scarcely more than children, and think it no harm to kiss them. He's a thoughtless fellow, and doesn't always do what is right, but he certainly did not think any harm or he would not have acted that way in my house. That's what he says, and I know very well when I hear the truth.”

After finishing her hair, Miss Starbrow, not yet satisfied that she had removed all disagreeable impression, turned round and said, “Now, my solemn-faced girl, why are you so silent? Are you going to be cross with me? Don't you think I know best what is right and believe what I tell you?”

The tears came to the girl's eyes. “I do believe you know best, Mary,” she said, in a distressed voice. “Oh, please don't think that I am cross. I am so glad you like to talk to me.”

Miss Starbrow smiled and touched her cheek, and at length stooped and kissed her; and this little display of confidence and affection chased away the last remaining cloud, and made Fan perfectly happy.

The partial forgiveness extended to Captain Horton did not have exactly the results foretold. Miss Starbrow was fond of affirming that when her mind was once made up about anything it was not to be moved; but in this affair she had already yielded to persuasion, and had permitted the Captain to visit her again; and by-and-by the second resolution also proved weak, and his visits were not confined to Wednesday evenings. She had struggled against her unworthy feeling for him, and knowing that it was unworthy, that the strength she prided herself so much on was weakness where he was concerned, she was dissatisfied in mind and angry with herself for making these concessions. She really believed in the love he professed for her, and did not think much the worse of him for being a man without income or occupation, and a gambler to boot; but she feared that a marriage with him would only make her miserable, and between her love for him, which could not be concealed, and the fear that he would eventually win her consent to be his wife, her mind was in a constant state of anxiety and restlessness. The little indiscretion he had been guilty of with Fan she had forgiven in her heart: that he had actually conceived a fondness for this poor young girl she could not believe, for in that case he would have been very careful not to do anything to betray it to the woman he wished to marry; but though she had forgiven him, she was resolved not to let him know it just yet, and so continued to be a little distant and formal in her manner, never calling him by his christian name, “Jack,” as formerly, and not allowing him to call her “Pollie.”

All this was nothing to Fan, as she very rarely saw him, but on the few occasions when she accidentally met him, in the house or when out walking, he always had that curious smile on his lips, and studied her face with a bold searching look in his eyes, which made her uncomfortable and even a little afraid.

One day, about the middle of December, Miss Starbrow began to speak to her about her future.

“You have improved wonderfully, Fan, since you first came,” she said, “but I fear that this kind of improvement will not be of much practical use, and my conscience is not quite satisfied about you. I have taken this responsibility on myself, and must not go on shutting my eyes to it. Some day it will be necessary for you to go out into the world to earn your own living; that is what we have got to think about. Remember that you can't have me always to take care of you; I might go abroad, or die, or get married, and then you would be left to your own resources. You couldn't make your living by simply looking pretty; you must be useful as well as ornamental; and I have taught you nothing—teaching is not in my line. It would be a thousand pities if you were ever to sink down to the servant-girl level: we must think of something better than that. A young lady generally aspires to be a governess. But then she must know everything—music, drawing, French, German, Latin, mathematics, algebra; all that she must have at her finger-ends, and be able to gabble political economy, science, and metaphysics to boot. All that is beyond you—unattainable as the stars. But you needn't break your heart about it. She doesn't get much. Her wages are about equal to those of a kitchen-maid, who can't spell, but only peel potatoes. And the more learned she is, the more she is disliked and snubbed by her betters; and she never marries, in spite of what the Family Herald says, but goes on toiling until she is fifty, and then retires to live alone on fifteen shillings a week in some cheap lodging for the remnant of her dreary life. No, poor Fan, you can't hope to be anything as grand as a governess.”

Fan laughed a little: she had grown accustomed to and understood this half-serious mocking style of speech in which her mistress often indulged.

“But,” she continued, “you might qualify yourself for some other kind of employment less magnificent, but still respectable, and even genteel enough. That of a nursery-governess, for instance; you are fond of children, and could teach them their letters. Or you could be companion to a lady; some simple-minded, old-fashioned dame who stays at home, and would not require you to know languages. Or, better still perhaps, you might go into one of the large West End shops. I do not think it would be very difficult for you to get a place of that kind, as your appearance is so much in your favour. I know that your ambition is not a very soaring one, and a few months ago you would not have ventured to dream of ever being a young lady in a shop like Jay's or Peter Robinson's. Yet for such a place you would not have to study for years and pass a stiff examination, as a poor girl is obliged to do before she can make her living by sitting behind a counter selling penny postage-stamps. Homely girls can succeed there: for the fine shop a pretty face, an elegant figure, and a pleasing lady-like manner are greatly prized—more than a knowledge of archaeology and the higher mathematics; and you possess all these essentials to start with. But whether you are destined to go into a shop or private house, it is important that you should make a better use of your time just now, while you are with me, and learn something—dressmaking, let us say, and all kinds of needlework; then you will at least be able to make your own clothes.”

“I should like to learn that very much,” said Fan eagerly.

“Very well, you shall learn then. I have been making inquiries, and find that there is a place in Regent Street, where for a moderate premium they do really succeed in teaching girls such things in a short time. I shall take you there to-morrow, and make all arrangements.”

Very soon after this conversation Fan commenced her new work of learning dressmaking, going every morning by omnibus to Regent Street, lunching where she worked, and returning to Dawson Place at four o'clock. After the preliminary difficulties, or rather strangeness inseparable from a new occupation, had been got over, she began to find her work very agreeable. It was maintained by the teachers in the establishment she was in that by means of their system even a stupid girl could be taught the mystery of dressmaking in a little while. And Fan was not stupid, although she had an extremely modest opinion of her own abilities, and was not regarded by others as remarkably intelligent; but she was diligent and painstaking, and above everything anxious to please her mistress, who had paid extra money to ensure pains being taken with her. So rapid was her progress, that before the end of January Miss Starbrow bought some inexpensive material, and allowed her to make herself a couple of dresses to wear in the house; and these first efforts resulted so well that a better stuff was got for a walking-dress.

The winter had thus far proved a full and happy one to Fan; in February she was even more fully occupied, and, if possible, happier; for after leaving the establishment in Regent Street, Miss Starbrow sent her to the school of embroidery in South Kensington to take lessons in a new and still more delightful art. But at the end of that month Fan unhappily, and from no fault of her own, fell into serious disgrace. She had gone to the Exhibition Road with a sample of her work on the morning of a bright windy day which promised to be dry; a little later Miss Starbrow also went out. Before noon the weather changed, and a heavy continuous rain began to fall. At one o'clock Miss Starbrow came home in a cab, and as she went into the house it occurred to her to ask the maid if Fan had got very wet or had come in a cab. She knew that Fan had not taken an umbrella.

“No, ma'am; she walked home, but didn't get wet. A young gentleman came with her, and I s'pose he kept her dry with his umbrella.”

“A young gentleman—are you quite sure?”

“Yes, ma'am, quite sure,” she returned, indignant at having her sacred word doubted. “He was with her on the steps when I opened the door, and shook hands with her just like an old friend when he went away; and she was quite dry.”

Miss Starbrow said no more. She knew that the servant, though no friend to Fan, would not have dared to invent a story of this kind, and resolved to say nothing, but to wait for the girl to give her own account of the matter.

Fan said nothing about it. On leaving the school of embroidery, seeing how threatening the sky was, she was hurrying towards the park, when the rain came down, and in a few moments she would have been wet through if help had not come in the shape of an umbrella held over her head by an attentive young stranger. He kept at her side all the way across the Gardens to Dawson Place, and Fan felt grateful for his kindness; she conversed with him during the walk, and at the door she had not refused to shake hands when he offered his. In ordinary circumstances, she would have made haste to tell her mistress all about it, thinking no harm; unfortunately it happened that for some days Miss Starbrow had been in one of her worst moods, and during these sullen irritable periods Fan seldom spoke unless spoken to.

When Miss Starbrow found the girl in her room on going there, she looked keenly and not too kindly at her, and imagined that poor Fan wore a look of guilt on her face, whereas it was nothing but distress at her own continued ill-temper which she saw.

“I shall give her till to-morrow to tell me,” thought the lady, “and if she says nothing, I shall conclude that she has made friends out of doors and wishes to keep it from me.”

Fan knew nothing of what was passing in the other's mind; she only saw that her mistress was even less gracious to her than she had been, and thought it best to keep out of her sight. For the rest of the day not one word passed between them.

Next morning Fan got ready to go to Kensington, but first came in to her mistress as was her custom. Miss Starbrow was also dressed in readiness to go out; she was sitting apparently waiting to speak to Fan before leaving the house.

“Are you going out, Mary?” said Fan, a little timidly.

“Yes, I am going out,” she returned coldly, and then seemed waiting for something more to be said.

“May I go now?” said Fan.

“No,” the other returned after some moments. “Change your dress again and stay at home to-day.” Presently she added, “You are learning a little too much in Exhibition Road—more, I fancy, than I bargained for.”

Fan was silent, not knowing what was meant.

Then Miss Starbrow went out, but first she called the maid and told her to remove Fan's bed and toilet requisites out of her room into the back room.

Greatly distressed and perplexed at the unkind way she had been spoken to, Fan changed her dress and sat down in the cold back room to do some work. After a while she heard a great noise as of furniture being dragged about, and presently Rosie came in with the separate pieces of her dismantled bed.

“What are you doing with my things?” exclaimed Fan in surprise.

“Your things!” retorted Rosie, with scorn. “What your mistress told me to do, you cheeky little beggar! Your things indeed! 'Put a beggar on horseback and he'll ride to the devil,' and that's what Miss Starbrow's beginning to find out at last. And quite time, too! Embroidery! That's what you're going to wear perhaps when you're back in the slums you came from! I thought it wouldn't last!” And Rosie, banging the things about, pounding the mattress with clenched fist, and shaking the pillows like a terrier with a rat, kept up this strain of invective until she had finished her task, and then went off, well pleased to think that the day of her triumph was not perhaps very far distant.

On that day, however, Rosie herself was destined to experience great trouble of mind, and an anxiety about her future even exceeding that of Fan, who was spending the long hours alone in that big, cold, fireless room, grieving in her heart at the great change in her beloved mistress, and dropping many a tear on the embroidery in her hands.

It was about three o'clock, and feeling her fingers quite stiff with cold, she determined to go quietly down to the drawing-room in the hope of finding a fire lighted there so as to warm her hands. Miss Starbrow had not returned, and the house was very still, and after standing a few moments on the landing, anxious not to rouse the maid and draw a fresh volley of abuse on herself, she went softly down the stairs, and opened the drawing-room door. For a moment or two she stood motionless, and then muttering some incoherent apology turned and fled back to her room. For there, very much at his ease, sat Captain Horton, with Rosie on his knees, her arms about his neck, and her lips either touching his or in very close proximity to them.

Rosie slipped from her seat, and the Captain stood up, but the intruder had seen and gone, and their movements were too late.

“The spy! the cat!” snapped Rosie, grown suddenly pale with anger and apprehension.

“It's very fine to abuse the girl,” said the Captain; “but it was all through your infernal carelessness. Why didn't you lock the door?”

“Oh, you're going to blame me! That's like a man. Perhaps you're in love with the cat. I s'pose you think she's pretty.”

“I'd like to twist her neck, and yours too, for a fool. If any trouble comes you will be to blame.”

“Say what you like, I don't care. There'll be trouble enough, you may be sure.”

“Do you mean to say that she will dare to tell?”

“Tell! She'll only be too glad of the chance. She'll tell everything to Miss Starbrow, and she hates me and hates you like poison. It would be very funny if she didn't tell.”

He walked about the room fuming.

“It will be as bad for you as for me,” he said.

“No, it won't. I can get another place, I s'pose.”

“Oh, yes; very fine, and be a wretched slavey all your life, if you like that. You know very well that I have promised you two hundred pounds the day I marry your mistress.”

“Yes; because I'm not a fool, and you can't help yourself. Don't think I want to marry you. Not me! Keep your love for Miss Starbrow, and much you'll get out of her!”

“You idiot!” he began; but seeing that she was half sobbing he said no more, and continued walking about the room. Presently he came back to her. “It's no use quarrelling,” he said. “If anything can be done to get out of this infernal scrape it will only be by our acting together. Since this wretched Fan has been in the house, Miss Starbrow is harder than ever to get on with; and even if Fan holds her tongue about this—”

“She won't hold her tongue.”

“But even if she should, we'll never do any good while she has that girl to amuse herself with. You know perfectly well, Rosie, that if there is anyone I really love it is you; but then we've both of us got to do the best we can for ourselves. I shall love you just the same after I am married, and if you still should like me, why then, Rosie, we might be able to enjoy ourselves very well. But if Fan tells at once what she saw just now, then it will be all over with us—with you, at any rate.”

“She won't tell at once—not while her mistress is in her tantrums. The little cat keeps out of her way then. Not to-day, and perhaps not to-morrow; and the day after I think Miss Starbrow's going to visit her friends at Croydon. That's what she said; and if she goes, she'll be out all day.”

“Oh!” ejaculated the Captain; then rising he carefully closed and locked the door before continuing the conversation. They were both very much interested in it; but when it was at last over, and the Captain took his departure, Rosie did not bounce away as usual with tumbled hair and merry flushed face. She left the drawing-room looking pale and a little scared perhaps, and for the rest of the day was unusually silent and subdued.

CHAPTER X

To Fan no comfort came that evening, and an hour after supper she went to bed to get warm, without seeing her mistress, who had returned to dinner. Next day she was no better off; she did not venture to ask whether she might go out or not, or even to go to Miss Starbrow's room, but kept to her own cold apartment, working and grieving, and seeing no one except the maid. Rosie came and went, but she was moody, or else afraid to use her tongue, and silent. On the following morning Miss Starbrow left the house at an early hour, and Fan resigned herself to yet another cold solitary day. About eleven o'clock Rosie came running up in no little excitement with a telegram addressed to “Miss Affleck.” She took it, wondering a little at the change in the maid's manner, but not thinking much about it, for she had never received a telegram before, and it startled and troubled her to have one thrust into her hand. Rosie stood by, anxiously waiting to hear its contents.

“How long are you going to be about it?” she exclaimed. “Let me read it for you.”

Fan held it back, and went on perusing it slowly. It was from Miss Starbrow at Twickenham, and said: “Come to me here by train from Westbourne Park Station. Bring two or three dresses and all you will require in my bag. Shall remain here several days. The housekeeper will meet you at Twickenham Station.”

She allowed Rosie to read the message, and was told that Twickenham was very near London; that she must take a cab to get quickly to Westbourne Park Station, so as not to keep Miss Starbrow waiting. Then, while Fan changed her dress and got herself ready, the maid selected one of Miss Starbrow's best bags and busied herself in folding up and packing as many of Fan's things as she could cram into it. Then she ran out to call a cab, leaving Fan again studying the telegram and feeling strangely perplexed at being thus suddenly sent for by her mistress, who had gone out of the house without speaking one word to her.

In a few minutes the cab was at the door, and Rosie officiously helped the girl in, handed her the bag, and told her to pay the cabman one shilling. After it started she rushed excitedly into the road and stopped it.

“Oh, I forgot, Miss Fan, leave the telegram, you don't want it any more,” she said, coming to the side of the cab.

Fan mechanically pulled the yellow envelope from her pocket and gave it to her without question, and was then driven off. But in her agitation at the sudden summons she had thrust the missive and the cover separately into her pocket, so that Rosie had after all only got the envelope. It was a little matter—a small oversight caused by hurry—but the result was important; in all probability Fan's whole after life would have been different if she had not made that trivial mistake.

She was quickly at the station, and after taking her ticket had only a few minutes to wait for a train; half an hour later she was at Twickenham Station. As soon as the platform was clear of the other passengers who had alighted, a respectably-dressed woman got up from one of the seats and came up to Fan. “You are Miss Affleck,” she said, with a furtive glance at the girl's face. “Miss Starbrow sent me to meet you. She is going to stay a few days with friends just outside of Twickenham. Will you please come this way?”

She took the bag from Fan, then led the way not to, but round the village, and at some distance beyond it into a road with trees planted in it and occasional garden-seats. They followed this road for about a quarter of a mile, then left it, and the villas and houses near it, and struck across a wide field. Beyond it, in an open space, they came to an isolated terrace of small red-brick cottages. The cottages seemed newly built and empty, and no person was moving about; nor had any road been made, but the houses stood on the wet clay, full of deep cart-wheel ruts, and strewn with broken bricks and builders' rubbish. In the middle of the row Fan noticed that one of the cottages was inhabited, apparently by very poor people, for as she passed by with her guide, three or four children and a woman, all wretchedly dressed, came out and stared curiously at her. Then, to her surprise, her guide stopped at the last house of the row, and opened the door with a latchkey. The windows were all closed, and from the outside it looked uninhabited, and as they went into the narrow uncarpeted hall Fan began to experience some nervous fears. Why had her mistress, a rich woman, with a luxurious home of her own, come into this miserable suburban cottage? The door of a small square room on the ground-floor was standing open, and looking into it she saw that it contained a couple of chairs and a table, but no other furniture and no carpet.

“Where's Miss Starbrow?” she asked, becoming alarmed.

“Upstairs, waiting for you. This way, please”; and taking Fan by the hand, she attempted to lead her up the narrow uncarpeted stairs. But suddenly, with a cry of terror, the girl snatched herself free and rushed down into the open room, and stood there panting, white and trembling with terror, her eyes dilated, like some wild animal that finds itself caught in a trap.

“What ails you?” said the woman, quickly following her down.

“Captain Horton is there—I saw him looking down!” said Fan, in a terrified whisper. “Oh, please let me out—let me out!”

“Why, what nonsense you are talking, to be sure! There's no Captain Horton here, and what's more, I don't know who Captain Horton is. It was Miss Starbrow you saw waiting for you on the landing.”

“No, no, no—let me out! let me out!” was Fan's only reply.

The woman then made a dash at her, but the girl, now wild with fear, sprang quickly from her, and running round the room came to the window at the front, and began madly pulling at the fastenings to open it. There she was seized, but not to be conquered yet, for the sense of the terrible peril she was in gave her an unnatural strength, and struggling still to return to the window, her only way of escape, they presently came violently against it and shattered a pane of glass. At this moment the woman, exerting her whole strength, succeeded in dragging her back to the middle of the room; and Fan, finding that she was being overcome, burst forth in a succession of piercing screams, which had the effect of quickly bringing Captain Horton on to the scene.

“Oh, you've come at last! There—manage her yourself—the wild beast!” cried the woman, flinging the girl from her towards him.

He caught her in his arms. “Will you stop screaming?” he shouted; but Fan only screamed the louder.

“Stop her—stop her quick, or we'll have those people and the police here,” cried the woman, running to the window and peering out at the broken pane to see if the noise had attracted their neighbours.

He succeeded in getting one of his hands over her mouth, and still keeping her clasped firmly with the other arm, began drawing her towards the door. But not even yet was she wholly overcome; all the power which had been in her imprisoned arms and hands appeared suddenly to have gone into the muscles of her jaws, and in a moment her sharp teeth had cut his hand to the bone.

“Oh, curse the hell-cat!” he cried; and maddened with rage at the pain, he struck her from him, and her head coming violently in contact with the sharp edge of the table, she was thrown down senseless on the floor. Her forehead was deeply cut, and presently the blood began flowing over her still, white face.

The woman now became terrified in her turn.

“You have killed her!” she cried. “Oh, Captain, you have killed her, and you'll hang for it and make me hang too. Oh God! what's to be done now?”

“Hold your noise, you cursed fool!” exclaimed the other, in a rage. “Get some cold water and dash it over her face.”

She obeyed quickly enough, and kneeling down washed the blood from the girl's face and hair, and loosened her dress. But the fear that they would be discovered unnerved her, her hands shook, and she kept on moaning that the girl was dead, that they would be found out and tried for murder.

“She's not dead, I tell you—damn you for a fool!” exclaimed Captain Horton, dashing the blood from his wounded hand and stamping on the floor in a rage.

“She is! she is! There's not a spark of life in her that I can feel! Oh, what shall I do?”

He pushed her roughly aside and felt for the girl's pulse, and placed his hand over her heart, but was perhaps too much agitated himself to feel its feeble pulsations.

“Good God, it can't be!” he said. “A girl can't be killed with a light knock in falling like that. No, no, she'll come to presently and be all right. And we're safe enough—not a soul knows where she is.”

“Oh, don't you think that!” returned the woman, again kneeling down and chafing and slapping Fan's palms, and moistening her face. “The people at the other house were all there watching us when I brought the girl in. They're curious about it, and maybe suspect something; and when the policeman comes round you may be sure they'll tell him, and they'll have heard the screams too, and they'll be watching about now. Oh, what a blessed fool I was to have anything to do with it!”

Captain Horton began cursing her again; but just then Fan's bosom moved, she drew a long breath, and presently her eyes opened.

They were watching her with a feeling of intense relief, thinking that they had now escaped from a great and terrible danger. Fan looked up into the face of the woman bent over her, and gazed at her in a dazed kind of way, not yet remembering where she was or what had befallen her. Then she glanced at the man's face, a little distance off, shivered and closed her eyes, and in her stillness and extreme pallor seemed to have become insensible again, although her white lips twitched at intervals.

“Go away, for God's sake! Go to the other room—it kills her to see you!” said the woman, in an excited whisper.

He moved away and slipped out at the door very quietly, but presently called softly to the woman.

“Here, make her swallow a little brandy,” he said, giving her a pocket flask.

In about half an hour Fan had recovered so far that she could sit up in a chair; but with her strength her distress and terror came back, and feeling herself powerless she began to cry and beg to be let out.

The woman went to the door and spoke softly to her companion.

“It's all right now; she's getting over it.”

“It's all wrong, I tell you,” said the other with an oath, and in a tone of concentrated rage. “There are two of your neighbour's boys prying about in front and trying to peer through the window. For heaven's sake get rid of her and let her go as soon as you can.”

She was about to return to Fan when he called her back.

“Take her to the station yourself,” he said; and proceeded to give her some directions which she promised to obey, after which she came back to Fan, to find her at the window feebly struggling to unfasten the stiff catch.

“Don't you be afraid any more, my dear,” she said effusively. “I'll take you back to the station as soon as you're well enough to walk. You've had a fall against the table and hurt yourself a little, but you'll soon be all right.”

Fan looked at her and shrunk away as she approached, and then turned her eyes, dilating again with fear, towards the door.

“He's gone, my dear, and won't come near you again, so don't you fear. Sit down quietly and I'll make you a cup of tea, and then you'll be able to walk to the station.”

But Fan would not be reassured, and continued piteously begging the woman to let her out.

“Very well, you shall go out; only take a little brandy first to give you strength to walk.”

Fan thrust the flask away, and then putting her hand to her forehead, cried out:

“Oh, what's this on my head?”

“Only a bit of sticking-plaster where you hit yourself against the table, my dear.”

Then she smoothed out Fan's broken hat, and with a wet sponge cleaned the bloodstains from her gown, and finally opening the door and with the bag in her hand, she accompanied the girl out.

Once in the cold keen air Fan began to recover strength and confidence, but she was still too weak to walk fast, and when they had got to the long road where the benches were, she was compelled to sit down and rest for some time.

“Where are you going after I leave you at the station?” asked the woman.

“To London—to Westbourne Park.”

“And then?”

“I don't know—I can't think. Oh, please leave me here!”

“No, my dear, I'll see you in your train at the station.”

“Perhaps he'll be there,” said Fan, in sudden fear.

“Oh no, bless you, he won't be there. He didn't mean any harm, don't you believe it. We were only going to shut you up in the house just for a few days because Miss Starbrow wanted us to.”

“Miss Starbrow!”

“Why, yes; didn't you get her telegram telling you to come to Twickenham to her, and that I'd meet you at the station?”

“Yes, I remember. Where is she?”

“The Lord knows, my dear. But it seems she's taken a great hatred to you, and can't abide you, and that's all I know. She came this morning with Captain Horton, and they arranged it all together; and she telegraphed and then went away, and said she hated the very sight of your face; and hoped I'd keep you safe because she never wanted to see you again, and was sorry she ever took you.”

“But why—why—what had I done?” moaned Fan, the tears coming to her eyes.

“There's no knowing why, except that she's a cruel, wicked, bad woman. That's all I know about it. Where is the telegram—have you got it?”

Fan put her hand into her pocket and then drew it out again.

“No, I haven't got it; I gave it to Rosie before I left—I remember now she asked me for it when I was in the cab.”

“That's all right; it doesn't matter a bit. But tell me, where are you going when you get back to London—back to Miss Starbrow?”

Fan looked at her, puzzled and surprised at the question. “But you say she sent for me to shut me up because she hated me, and never wished to see me again.”

“Yes, my dear, that's quite right what I told you. But what are you going to do in London? Where will you go to sleep to-night? Here's your bag you'd forgotten all about; if you go and forget it you'll have no clothes to change; and perhaps you'll lose yourself in London, and when they ask you where you belong, you'll let them take you to Miss Starbrow's house.”

The woman in her anxiety was quite voluble; while Fan slowly turned it all over in her mind before replying. “My head is paining so, I was forgetting. But I shan't lose my bag, and I'll find some place to sleep to-night. No, I'll never, never go back to Mary—to Miss Starbrow.”

“And you'll be able to take care of yourself?”

“Yes; will you let me go now?”

“Come then, I'll put you in your train with your bag; and don't you go and speak to anyone about what happened here, and then you'll be quite safe. Let Miss Starbrow think you are shut up safe out of her sight, and then she won't trouble herself about you.”

“There's no one I can speak to—I have no one,” said Fan, mournfully; after which they went on to the station, and she was put into her train with her bag, and about three o'clock in the afternoon arrived at Westbourne Park Station.

There were clothes enough in her bag to last her for some time with those she was wearing, and money in her purse—two or three shillings in small change and the sovereign which had been in her possession for several months. Food and shelter could therefore be had, and she was not a poor girl in rags now, but well dressed, so that she could go without fear or shame to any registry office to seek an engagement. These thoughts passed vaguely through her brain; her head seemed splitting, and she could scarcely stand on her legs when she got out of the train at Westbourne Park. It would be a dreadful thing if she were to fall down in the streets, overcome with faintness, she thought, for then her bag and purse might be stolen from her, or worse still, she might be taken back to the house of her cruel enemy. Clinging to her bag, she walked on as fast as she could seeking for some humble street with rooms to let—some refuge to lie down in and rest her throbbing head. She passed through Colville Gardens, scarcely knowing where she was; but the tall, gloomy, ugly houses there were all too big for her; and she did not know that in some of them were refuges for poor girls—servants and governesses out of place—where for a few shillings a week she might have had board and lodging. Turning aside, she came into the long, narrow, crooked Portobello Road, full of grimy-looking shops, and after walking a little further turned at last into a short street of small houses tenanted by people of the labourer class.

At one of these houses she was shown a small furnished room by a suspicious-looking woman, who asked four-and-sixpence a week for it, including “hot water.” Fan agreed to take it for a week at that rent. The poor woman wanted the money, but seemed undecided. Presently she said, “You see, miss, it's like this, you haven't got no box, and ain't dressed like one that lodges in these places, and—and I couldn't let you the room without the money down.”

“Oh, I'll pay you now,” said Fan; and taking the sovereign from her purse, asked the woman to get change.

“Very well, miss; if you'll go downstairs, I'll put the room straight for you.”

“Oh, I must lie down now, my head is aching so,” said Fan, feeling that she could no longer stand.

“What ails you—are you going to be ill?”

“No, no; this morning I had a fall and struck my head and hurt it so—look,” and taking off her hat, she showed the plaster on her forehead.

That satisfied the woman, who had only been thinking of fever and her own little ones, who were more to her than any stranger, and her manner became kind at once. She imagined that her lodger was a young lady who for some reason had run away from her friends. Smoothing down the coverlet, she went away to get change, closing the door after her, and then, with a sigh of relief, Fan threw herself on to the poor bed.

The pain she was in, and state of exhaustion after the violent emotions and the rough handling she had experienced, prevented her from thinking much of her miserable forlorn condition. She only wished for rest Yet she could not rest, but turned her hot flushed face and throbbing head from side to side, moaning with pain. By-and-by the woman came back with the change and a very big cup of hot tea.

“This'll do your head good,” she said. “Better drink it hot, miss; I always say there's nothing like a cup of tea for the headache.”

Fan took it gratefully and drank the whole of it, though it was rougher tea than she had been accustomed to of late. And the woman proved a good physician; it had the effect of throwing her into a profuse perspiration, and before she had been alone for many minutes she fell asleep.

She did not wake until past nine o'clock, and found a lighted candle on her table; her poor landlady had been up perhaps more than once to visit her. She felt greatly refreshed; the danger, if there had been any, was over now, but she was still drowsy—so drowsy that she longed to be asleep again; and she only got up to undress and go to bed in a more regular way. The time to think had not come yet; sleep alone seemed sweet to her, and in its loving arms she would lie, for it seemed like one that loved her always, like her poor dead mother who had never turned against her and used her cruelly. Before she closed her heavy eyes the landlady came into her room again to see her, and Fan gave her a shilling to get some tea and bread-and-butter for her breakfast next day.

CHAPTER XI

When Fan awoke, physically well and refreshed by her long slumber, it had been light some time, with such dim light as found entrance through the clouded panes of one small window. The day was gloomy, with a bitterly cold blustering east wind, which made the loose window-sashes rattle in their frames, and blew the pungent smell of city smoke in at every crack. She sat up and looked round at the small cheerless apartment, with no fireplace, and for only furniture the bed she was lying on, one cane-chair over which her clothes were thrown, and a circular iron wash-stand, with yellow stone jug and ewer, and underneath a shelf for the soap dish.

She shivered and dropped her head again on the pillow. Then, for the first time since that terrible experience of the previous day, she began to realise her position, and to wonder greatly why she had been subjected to such cruel treatment. The time had already come of which Mary had once spoken prophetically, when they would be for ever separated, and she would have to go out into the world unaided and fight her own battle. But, oh! why had not Mary spoken to her, and told her that she could no longer keep her, and sent her away? For then there would still have been affection and gratitude in her heart for the woman who had done so much for her, and she would have looked forward with hope to a future meeting. Love and hope would have cheered her in her loneliness, and made her strong in her efforts to live. But now all loving ties had been violently sundered, now the separation was eternal. Even as death had divided her from her poor mother, this cruel deed had now put her for all time apart from the one friend she had possessed in the world. What had she done, what had she done to be treated so hardly? Had she not been faithful, loving her mistress with her whole heart? It was little to give in return for so much, but it was her all, and Mary had required nothing more from her. It was not enough; Mary had grown tired of her at last. And not tired only: her loving-kindness had turned to wormwood and gall; the very sight of the girl she had rescued and cared for had become hateful to her, and her unjust hatred and anger had resulted in that cruel outrage. Now she understood the reason of that change in Mary, when she grew silent and stern and repellent before that fatal morning when she went away to carry out her heartless scheme of revenge. But revenge for what?—and Fan could only moan again and again, “What had I done? what had I done?” What had she ever done that she should not be loved and allowed to live in peace and happiness—what had she done to her brutal stepfather, or to Captain Horton and to Rosie, that they should take pleasure in tormenting her?

When the woman came in with the breakfast she found Fan lying sobbing on her pillow.

“Oh, that's wrong to cry so,” she said, putting the tray on the table and coming to the bedside. “Don't take on so, my poor young lady. Things'll come right by-and-by. You'll write to your mother and father——”

“I've no mother and father,” said Fan, trying to repress her sobs.

“Then you'll have brothers and sisters and friends.”

“No, I've got no one. I only had one friend, and she's turned against me, and I'm alone. I'm not a young lady; my mother was poorer than you, and I must get something to do to make my living.”

This confession was a little shock to the woman, for it spoilt her romance, and the result was that her interest in her young lodger diminished considerably.

“Well, it ain't no use taking on, all the same,” she said, in a tone somewhat less deferential and kind than before. “And it's too bad a day for you to go out and look for anything. It's going to snow, I'm thinking; so you'd better have your breakfast in bed and stay in to-day.”

Fan took her advice and remained all day in her room, thinking only of the strange thing that had happened to her, of the misery of a life with no one to love. Mary's image remained persistently in her mind, while the bitter wind without made strange noises in the creaking zinc chimney-pots, and rattled the window and hurled furious handfuls of mingled dust and sleet against the panes. And yet she felt no anger in her heart; unspeakable grief and despair precluded anger, and again and again she cried, her whole frame convulsed with sobs, and the tears and sobs exhausted her body but brought no relief to her mind.

Next day there was no wind, though it was still intensely cold, with a dull grey cloud threatening snow over the whole sky; but it was time for her to be up and doing, and she went out to seek for employment. She wandered about in a somewhat aimless way, until, in the Ladbroke Grove Road, she found a servants' registry-office, and went in to apply for a place as nursemaid or nursery-governess. Mary had once told her that she was fit for such a place, and there was nothing else she could think of. A woman in the office took down her name and address, and promised to send for her if she had any applications. She did not know of anyone in need of a nursemaid or nursery-governess. “But you can call again to-morrow and inquire,” she added.

On the following day she was advised to wait in the office so as to be on the spot should anyone call to engage a girl. After waiting for some hours the woman began to question her, and finding that she had no knowledge of children, and had never been in service and could give no references, told her brusquely that she was giving a great deal of unnecessary trouble, and that she need not come to the office again, as in the circumstances no lady would think of taking her.

Fan returned to her lodgings very much cast down, and there being no one else to seek counsel from, told her troubles to her landlady. But the poor woman had nothing very hopeful to say, and could only tell Fan of another registry-office in Notting Hill High Street, and advise her to apply there.

This was a larger place, and after her name, address, and other particulars had been taken down in a book, she ventured to ask whether her not having been in a place before, and being without a reference, would make it very difficult for her to get a situation; the woman of the office merely said, “One never knows.”

This was not very encouraging, but she was told that she could come every day and sit as long as she liked in the waiting-room. There were always several girls and women there—a row of them sitting chatting together on chairs ranged against the wall—house, parlour, and kitchen-maids out of places; and a few others of a better description, modest-looking, well-dressed young women, who came and stood about for a few minutes and then went away again. Of the girls of this kind Fan alone remained patiently at her post, taking no interest in the conversation of the others, anxious only to avoid their bold inquisitive looks and to keep herself apart from them. Yet their conversation, to anyone wishing to know something of the lights and shadows of downstair life, was instructive and interesting enough.

“Only seven days in your last place!”

“Oh, I say!”

“But what did you leave for?”

“Because she was a beast—my missus was; and what I told her was that it was seven days too much.”

“You never did!”

“Oh, I say!”

“And what did she say?”

“Well, it was like this. I was a-doing of my hair in the kitchen with the curling-iron, when down comes Miss Julia. 'Oh, you are frizzing your hair!' she says. 'Yes, miss,' I says, 'have you any objection?' I says. 'Ma won't let you have a fringe,' she says. When I loses my temper, and I says, 'Well, Miss Himperence, you can go and tell your ma that she can find a servant as can do without a fringe.'”

“Oh, I say!” etc., etc., etc.

They also made critical remarks on Fan's appearance, wondering what a “young lady” wanted among servants. She felt no pride at being taken for a lady; she had no feeling and no thought that gave her any pleasure, but only a dull aching at the heart, only the wish in her mind to find something to do and save herself from utter destitution.

For three days she continued to attend at the office, and beyond a short “Good morning” from the woman that kept it each day, not a word was spoken to her. The third day was Saturday, when the office would close early; and after twelve o'clock, seeing that the others were all going, she too left, to spend the time as best she could until the following Monday. The day was windless and bright, and full of the promise of spring. Not feeling hungry she did not return to her lodgings, but went for a short walk in Kensington Gardens. Leaving the Broad Walk, she went into that secluded spot near the old farm-like buildings of Kensington Palace and sat down on one of the seats among the yews and fir trees. The new gate facing Bayswater Hill has changed that spot now, making it more public, but it was very quiet on that day as she sat there by herself. On that beautiful spring morning her heart seemed strangely heavy, and her life more lonely and desolate than ever. The memory of her loss came over her like a bitter flood, and covering her face with her hands she gave free vent to her grief. There was no person near, no one to be attracted by her sobs. But one person was passing at some distance, and glancing in her direction through the trees, saw her, and stopped in her walk. It was Miss Starbrow, and in the figure of the weeping girl she had recognised Fan. Her face darkened, and she walked on, but presently she stopped again, and stood irresolute, swinging the end of her sunshade over the young grass. At length she turned and walked slowly towards the girl, but Fan was sobbing with covered face, and did not hear her steps and rustling dress. For some moments Miss Starbrow continued watching her, a scornful smile on her lips and a strange look in her eyes as of a slightly cruel feeling struggling against compassion. At length she spoke, startling Fan with her voice sounding so close to her.

“Crying? Well, I am glad that your sin has found you out! Glad you have met with some thief cleverer than yourself, who has stolen your booty, I suppose, and left you penniless—a beggar as I found you! I admire your courage in coming here, but you needn't be afraid; I'll have mercy on you. You have punished yourself more than I could punish you; and some day I shall perhaps see you again in rags, starving in the streets, and shall fling a penny to you.”

Fan had started at first with an instinctive fear—a vague apprehension that she would be seized and dragged away to be shut up and tortured as Miss Starbrow had desired. But suddenly this feeling gave place to another, to a burning resentment experienced for the first time against this woman who had made her suffer so cruelly, and now came to taunt her and mock at her misery. It suffocated and made her dumb for a time. Then she burst out: “You wicked bad woman! You beast—you beast, how I hate you! Oh, I wish God would strike you dead!”

“How dare you say such things to me, you ungrateful, shameless little thief!”

“You liar—you beast of a liar!” exclaimed Fan, still torn with the rage that possessed her. “Go away, you liar! Leave me, you wicked devil! I hate you! I hate you!”

Miss Starbrow uttered a little scornful laugh. “You would have some reason to hate me if I were to shut you up for six months with hard labour,” she answered, turning aside as if about to walk away.

To shut her up for six months! Yes, that was what she had tried to do with the assistance of a strong man and woman. And what other tortures and sufferings had she intended to inflict on her victim! It was too much to be reminded of this. It turned her blood into liquid fire, and maddened her brain; and struggling to find words to speak the rage that overmastered her, suddenly, as if by a miracle, every evil term of reproach, every profane and blasphemous expression of drunken brutish anger she had heard and shuddered at in the old days in Moon Street, flashed back into her mind, and she poured them out in a furious torrent, hurled them at her torturer; and then, exhausted, sunk back into her seat, and covering her face again, sobbed convulsively.

Miss Starbrow's face turned crimson with shame, and she moved two or three steps away; then she turned, and said in cold incisive tones:

“I see, Fan, that you have not forgotten all the nice things you learnt before I took you out of the slums to shelter and feed and clothe you. This will be a lesson to me: I had not thought so meanly of the suffering poor as you make me think. They say that even dogs are grateful to those that feed them. And I did more than feed you, Fan. That's the last word you will ever hear from me.”

She was moving away, but Fan, stung by a reproach so cruelly unjust, started to her feet with a cry of passion.

“Yes, I know you gave me these things—oh, I wish I could tear off this dress you gave me! And this is the money you gave me—take it! I hate it!” And drawing her purse from her pocket, she flung it down at Miss Starbrow's feet. Then, searching for something else to fling back to the donor, she drew out that crumpled pink paper which had been all the time in her pocket. “And take this too—the wicked telegram you sent me. It is yours, like the money—take it, you bad, hateful woman!”

Miss Starbrow still remained standing near, watching her, and in spite of her own great anger, she could not help feeling very much astonished at such an outburst of fury from a girl who had always seemed to her so mild-spirited. She touched the crumpled piece of paper with her foot, then glanced back at the girl seated again with bowed head and covered face. What had she meant by a telegram? Curiosity overcame the impulse to walk away, and stooping, she picked up the paper and smoothed it out and read, “From Miss Starbrow, Twickenham. To Miss Affleck, Dawson Place.”

She had not been to Twickenham, and had sent no telegram to Fan. Then she read the message and turned the paper over, and read it again and again, glancing at intervals at the girl. Then she went up to her and put her hand on her shoulder. Fan started and shook the hand off, and raised her eyes wet with tears and red with weeping, but still full of anger.

Miss Starbrow caught her by the arm. “Tell me what this means—this telegram; when did you get it, and who gave it to you?” she said in such a tone that the girl was compelled to obey.

“You know when you sent it,” said Fan.

“I never sent it! Oh, my God, can't you understand what I say? Answer—answer my question!”

“Rosie gave it to me.”

“And you went to Twickenham?”

“Yes.”

“And what happened?”

“And the woman you sent to meet me—”

“Hush! don't say that. Are you daft? Don't I tell you I never sent it. Tell me, tell me, or you'll drive me mad!”

Fan looked at her in astonishment. Could it be that it had never entered into Mary's heart to do this cruel thing? That raging tempest in her heart was fast subsiding. She began to collect her faculties.

“The woman met me,” she continued, “and took me a long way from the station to a little house. She tried to take me upstairs. She said you were waiting for me, but I looked up and saw Captain Horton peeping over the banisters—”

Miss Starbrow clenched her hands and uttered a little cry. Her face had become white, and she turned away from the girl. Presently she sat down, and said in a strangely altered voice, “Tell me, Fan, did you take some jewels from my dressing-table—a brooch and three rings, and some other things?”

“I took nothing except what you—what the telegram said, and Rosie put the things in a bag and got the cab for me.”

For a minute or two Miss Starbrow sat in silence, and then got up and said:

“Come, Fan.”

“Where?”

“Home with me to Dawson Place.” Then she added, “Must I tell you again that I have done nothing to harm you? Do you not understand that it was all a wicked horrible plot to get you away and destroy you, that the telegram was a forgery, that the jewels were taken to make it appear that you had stolen them and run away during my absence from the house?”

Fan rose and followed her, and when they got to the Bayswater Road Miss Starbrow called a cab.

“Where is your bag—where did you sleep last night?” she asked; and when Fan had told her she said, “Tell the man to drive us there,” and got in.

In a few minutes they arrived at her lodging, and Fan got out and went in to get her bag. She did not owe anything for rent, having paid in advance, but she gave the woman a shilling.

“I knew I was right,” said the woman, who was now all smiles. “Bless you, miss, you ain't fit to make your own living like one of us. Well, I'm real pleased your friends has found you.”

Fan got into the cab again, and they proceeded in silence to Dawson Place. A small boy in buttons, who had only been engaged a day or two before, opened the door to them. They went up to the bedroom on the first floor.

“Sit down, Fan, and rest yourself,” said Miss Starbrow, closing and locking the door; then after moving about the room in an aimless way for a little while, she came and sat down near the girl. “Before you tell me this dreadful story, Fan,” she said, “I wish to ask you one thing more. One day last week when it was raining you came home from Kensington with a young man. Who was he—a friend of yours?”

“A friend of mine! oh no. I was hurrying back in the rain when he came up to me and held his umbrella over my head, and walked to the door with me. It was kind of him, I thought, because he was a stranger, and I had never seen him before.”

“It was a small thing, but you usually tell me everything, and you did not tell me this?”

“No, I was waiting to tell you that—and something else, and didn't tell you because you seemed angry with me, and I was afraid to speak to you.”

“What was the something else you were going to tell me?”

Fan related the scene she had witnessed in the drawing-room. It had seemed a great thing then, and had disturbed her very much, but now, after all she had recently gone through, it seemed a very trivial matter.

To the other it did not appear so small a matter, to judge from her black looks. She got up and moved about the room again, and then once more sat down beside the girl.

“Now tell me your own story—everything from the moment you got the telegram up to our meeting in the Gardens.”

With half-averted face she listened, while the girl again began the interrupted narration, and went on telling everything to the finish, wondering at times why Mary sat so silent with face averted, as if afraid to meet her eyes. But when she finished Mary turned and took her hand.

“Poor Fan,” she said, “you have gone through a dreadful experience, and scarcely seem to understand even now what danger you were in. But there will be time enough to talk of all this—to congratulate you on such a fortunate escape; just now I have got to deal with that infamous wretch of a girl who still poisons the house with her presence.”

She rose and rung the bell sharply, and when the boy in buttons answered it, she ordered him to send Rosie to her.

“She's gone,” said he.

“Gone! what do you mean—when did she go?”

“Just now, ma'am. She came up to speak to you when you came in, and then she got her box down and went away in a cab.”

Miss Starbrow then sent for the cook. “What does this mean about Rosie's going?” she demanded of that person. “How came you to let her go without informing me?”

“She came down and said she had had some words with you, and was going to leave because Miss Fan had been took back.”

“And the wretch has then got away with my jewellery! What else did she say?”

“Nothing very good, ma'am. I'd rather not tell you.”

“Tell me at once when I order you.”

“I asked if she was going without her wages and a character, and she said as you had paid her her wages, \and she didn't want a character, because she didn't consider the house was respectable.”

Miss Starbrow sent her away and closed the door; presently she sat down at some distance from Fan, but spoke no word. Fan was in a low easy-chair near the window, through which the sun was shining very brightly. She looked pale and languid, resting her cheek on her palm and never moving; only at intervals, when Miss Starbrow, with an exclamation of rage, would rise and take a few steps about the room and then drop into her seat again, the girl would raise her eyes and glance at her. All the keen suffering, the strife, the bitterness of heart and anger were over, and the reaction had come. It had all been a mistake; Mary had never dreamt of doing her harm: the whole trouble had been brought about by Captain Horton and Rosie; but she remembered them with a strange indifference; the fire of anger had burnt itself out in her heart and could not be rekindled.

With the other it was different. It had been a great shock to her to discover that the girl she had befriended, and loved as she had never loved anyone of her own sex before, was so false, so unutterably base. For some little time she refused to believe it, and a horrible suspicion of foul play had crossed her mind. But the proofs stared her in the face, and she remembered that Fan had kept that acquaintance she had formed with someone out of doors a secret. On returning to the house in the evening, she was told that shortly after she had gone out for the day a letter was brought addressed to Fan, and, when questioned, she had refused to tell Rosie who it was from. At one o'clock Rosie had gone up with her dinner, and, missing her, had searched for her in all the rooms, and was then amazed to find that most of the girl's clothes had also disappeared. But she did not know that anything else had been taken. Miss Starbrow missed some jewels she had put on her dressing-table, and on a further search it was discovered that other valuables, and one of her best travelling bags, were also gone. The astonishment and indignation displayed by the maid, who exclaimed that she had always considered Fan a sly little hypocrite, helped perhaps to convince her mistress that the girl had taken advantage of her absence to make her escape from the house. Miss Starbrow remembered how confused and guilty she had looked for two or three days before her flight, and came to the conclusion that the young friend out of doors, not being able to see Fan, had kept a watch on the house, and had cunningly arranged it all, and finally sent or left the letter instructing her where to meet him, also probably advising her what to take.

But Miss Starbrow had not been entirely bound up in the girl: she had other affections and interests in life, and great as the shock had been and the succeeding anger, she had recovered her self-possession, and had set herself to banish Fan from her remembrance. She was ashamed to let her servants and friends see how deeply she had been wounded by the little starving wretch she had compassionately rescued from the streets. Outwardly she did not appear much affected; and when Rosie, with well-feigned surprise, asked if the police were not to be employed to trace the stolen articles and arrest the thief, she only laughed carelessly and replied: “No; she has punished herself enough already, and the trinkets have no doubt been sold before now, and could not be traced.”

Rosie hurried away to hide the relief she felt, for she had been trembling to think what might happen if some cunning detective were to be employed to make investigations in the house.

Now, however, when Mary began to recover from the amazement caused by Fan's narrative, a dull rage took such complete possession of her that it left no room for any other feeling. The girl sitting there with bent head seemed no more to her than some stranger who had just come in, and about whom she knew and cared nothing. All that Fan had suffered was forgotten: she only thought of herself, of the outrage on her feelings, of the vile treachery of the man who had pretended to love her, whom she had loved and had treated so kindly, helping him with money and in other ways, and forgiving him again and again when he had offended her. She could not rest or sit still when she thought of it, and she thought of it continually and of nothing else. She rose and paced the room, pausing at every step, and turning herself from side to side, like some savage animal, strong and lithe and full of deadly rage, but unable to spring, trapped and shut within iron bars. Her face had changed to a livid white, and looked hard and pitiless, and her eyes had a fixed stony stare like those of a serpent. And at intervals, as she moved about the room, she clenched her hands with such energy that the nails wounded her palms. And from time to time her rage would rise to a kind of frenzy, and find expression in a voice strangely harsh and unnatural, deeper than a man's, and then suddenly rising to a shrill piercing key that startled Fan and made her tremble. Poor Fan! that little burst of transitory anger she had experienced in the Gardens seemed now only a pitifully weak exhibition compared with the black tempest raging in this strong, undisciplined woman's soul.

“And I have loved him—loved that hell-hound! God! shall I ever cease to despise and loathe myself for sinking into such a depth of infamy! Never—never—until his viper head has been crushed under my heel! To strike! to crush! to torture! How?—have I no mind to think? Nothing can I do—nothing—nothing! Are there no means? Ah, how sweet to scorch the skin and make the handsome face loathsome to look at! To burn the eyes up in their sockets—to shut up the soul for ever in thick blackness!... Oh, is there no wise theologian who can prove to me that there is a hell, that he will be chained there and tortured everlastingly! That would satisfy me—to remember it would be sweeter than Heaven.”

Suddenly she turned in a kind of fury on Fan, who had risen trembling from her seat. “Sit down!” she said. “Hide your miserable white face from my sight! You could have warned me in time, you could have saved me from this, and you failed to do it! Oh, I could strike you dead with my hand for your imbecile cowardice!... And he will escape me! To blast his name, to hold him up to public scorn and hatred, years of imprisonment in a felon's cell—all, all the suffering we can inflict on such a fiendish wretch seems weak and childish, and could give no comfort to my soul. Oh, it drives me mad to think of it—I shall go mad—I shall go mad!” And shrieking, and with eyes that seemed starting from their sockets, she began madly tearing her hair and clothes.

Fan had risen again, white and trembling at that awful sight; and unable to endure it longer, she sprang to the door, and crying out with terror, flew down to the kitchen. The cook returned with her, and on entering the room they discovered their mistress in a mad fit of hysterics, shrieking with laughter, and tearing her clothes off. The woman was strong, and seeing that prompt action was needed, seized her mistress in her arms and threw her on to the couch, and held her there in spite of her frantic struggles. Assisted by Fan, she then emptied the contents of the toilet jug over her face and naked bosom, half drowning her; and after a while Miss Starbrow ceased her struggles, and sank back gasping and half fainting on the cushion, her eyes closed and her face ghostly white.

“You see,” said the cook to Fan, “she never had one before, and she's a strong one, and it's always worse for that sort when it do come. Lor', what a temper she must have been in to take on so!”

Between them they succeeded in undressing and placing her on her bed, where she lay for an hour in a half-conscious state; but later in the day she began to recover, and moved to the couch near the fire, while Fan sat beside her on the carpet, watching the face that looked so strange in its whiteness and languor, and keeping the firelight from the half-closed eyes.

“Oh, Fan, how weak I feel now—so weak!” she murmured. “And a little while ago I felt so strong! If he had been present I could have torn the flesh from his bones. No tiger in the jungle maddened by the hunters has such strength as I felt in me then. And now it has all gone, and he has escaped from me. Let him go. All the kindly feeling I had for him—all the hopes for his future welfare, all my secret plans to aid him—they are dead. But it was all so sudden. Was it to-day, Fan, that I saw you sitting in Kensington Gardens, crying by yourself, or a whole year ago? Poor Fan! poor Fan!”

The girl had hid her face against Mary's knee.

“But why do you cry, my poor girl?”

“Oh, dear Mary, will you ever forgive me?” said Fan, half raising her tearful face.

“Forgive you, Fan! For what?”

“For what I said to-day in the Gardens. Oh, why, why did I say such dreadful things! Oh, I am so—so sorry—I am so sorry!”

“I remember now, but I had forgotten all about it. That was nothing, Fan—less than nothing. It was not you that spoke, but the demon of anger that had possession of you. I forgive you freely for that, poor child, and shall never think of it again. But I shall never be able to feel towards you as I did before. Never, Fan.”

“Mary, Mary, what have I done!”

“Nothing, child. It is not anything you have done, or that you have left undone. But I took you into my house and into my heart, and only asked you to love and trust me, and you forgot it all in a moment, and were ready to believe the worst of me. A stranger told you that I had secretly planned your destruction, and you at once believed it. How could you find it in your heart to believe such a thing of me—a thing so horrible, so impossible?”

Fan, with her face hidden, continued crying.

“But don't cry, Fan. You shall not suffer. If you could lose all faith in me, and think me such a demon of wickedness, you are not to blame. You are not what I imagined, but only what nature made you. Where I thought you strong you are weak, and it was my mistake.”

Suddenly Fan raised her eyes, wet with tears, and looked fixedly at the other's face; nor did she drop them when Mary's eyes, opening wide and expressing a little surprise at the girl's courage, and a little resentment, returned the look.

“Mary,” she said, speaking in a voice which had recovered its firmness, “I loved you so much, and I had never done anything wrong, and—and you said you would always love and trust me because you knew that I was good.”

“Well, Fan?”

“And you believed what Rosie said about me, and that I was a thief, and had taken your jewels and ran away.”

Mary cast down her eyes, and the corners of her mouth twitched as if with a slight smile.

“That is true,” she said slowly. “You are right, Fan; you are not so poor as I thought, but can defend yourself with your tongue or your teeth, as occasion requires. Perhaps my sin balances yours after all, and leaves us quits. Perhaps when I get over this trouble I shall love you as much as ever—perhaps more.”

“And you are not angry with me now, Mary?”

“No, Fan, I was not angry with you: kiss me if you like. Only I feel very, very tired—tired and sick of my life, and wish I could lie down and sleep and forget everything.”

CHAPTER XII

On the very next day Miss Starbrow was herself again apparently, and the old life was resumed just where it had been broken off. But although outwardly things went on in the old way, and her mistress was not unkind, and she had her daily walk, her reading, sewing, and embroidery to fill her time, the girl soon perceived that something very precious to her had been lost in the storm, and she looked and waited in vain for its recovery. In spite of those reassuring well-remembered words Mary had spoken to her, the old tender affection and confidence, which had made their former relations seem so sweet, now seemed lost. Mary was not unkind, but that was all. She did not wish Fan to read to her, or give her any assistance in dressing, or to remain long in her room, but preferred to be left alone. When she spoke, her words and tone were not ungentle, but she no longer wished to talk, and after a few minutes she would send her away; and then Fan, sad at heart, would go to her own room—that large back room where her bed had been allowed to remain, and where she worked silent and solitary, sitting before her own fire.

One day, just as she came in from her morning walk, a letter was left by the postman, and Fan took it up to her mistress, glad always of an excuse to go to her—for now some excuse seemed necessary.

Miss Starbrow, sitting moodily before her fire in her bedroom, took it; but the moment she looked at the writing she started as if a snake had bitten her, and flung the letter into the fire. Then, while watching it blaze up, she suddenly exclaimed:

“I was a fool to burn it before first seeing what was in it!”

Before she finished speaking Fan darted her hand into the flame, and tossing the burning letter on the rug, stamped out the fire with her foot. The envelope and the outer leaf of the letter were black and charred, but the inner leaf, which was the part written on, had not suffered.

“Thanks, Fan; that was clever,” said Miss Starbrow, taking it; and then proceeded to read it, holding it far from her face as if her eyesight had suddenly fallen into decay.

Dear Pollie [ran the letter], When I saw that girl back in your
house I knew that it would be all over between us. It is a terrible
thing for me to lose you in that way, but there is no help for it now;
I know that you will not forgive me. But I don't wish you to think of
me worse than I deserve. You know as well as I do that since you took
Fan into the house you have changed towards me, and that without
quite throwing me over you made it as uncomfortable for me as you
could. As things did not improve, I became convinced that as long as
you had her by you it would continue the same, so I resolved to get
her out of the way. I partially succeeded, and she would have been
kept safely shut up for a few days, and then sent to a distant part
of the country, to be properly taken care of. That is the whole of my
offence, and I am very sorry that my plan failed. Nothing more than
that was intended; and if you have imagined anything more you have
done me an injustice. I am bad enough, I suppose, but not so bad as
that; and I hate and always have hated that girl, who has been my
greatest enemy, though perhaps unintentionally. That is all I have to
say, except that I shall never forget how different it once was—how
kind you could be, and how happy you often made me before that
miserable creature came between us.
Good-bye for ever,
JACK.

Miss Starbrow laughed bitterly. “There, Fan, read it,” she said. “It is all about you, and you deserve a reward for burning your fingers. Coward and villain! why has he added this infamous lie to his other crimes? It has only made me hate and despise him more than ever. If he had had the courage to confess everything, and even to boast of it, I should not have thought so meanly of him.”

The wound was bleeding afresh. Her face had grown pale, and under her black scowling brows her eyes shone as if with the reflected firelight. But it was only the old implacable anger flashing out again.

Fan, after reading the letter for herself, and dropping it with trembling fingers on to the fire, turned to her mistress. Her face had also grown very pale, and her eyes expressed a new and great trouble.

“Why do you look at me like that?” exclaimed Miss Starbrow, seizing her by the arm. “Speak!”

Fan sank down on to her knees, and began stammeringly, “Oh, I can't bear to think—to think—”

“To think what?—Speak, I tell you!”

“Did I come between you?—oh, Mary, are you sorry—”

“Hush!” and Miss Starbrow pushed her angrily from her. “Sorry! Never dare to say such a thing again! Oh, I don't know which is most hateful to me, his villainy or your whining imbecility. Leave me—go to your room, and never come to me unless I call you.”

Fan went away, sad at heart, and cried by herself, fearing now that the sweet lost love would never again return to brighten her life. But after this passionate outburst Miss Starbrow was not less kind and gentle than before. Once at least every day she would call Fan to her room and speak a few words to her, and then send her away. The few words would even be cheerfully spoken, but with a fictitious kind of cheerfulness; under it all there was ever a troubled melancholy look; the clouds which had returned after the rain had not yet passed away. To Fan they were very much, those few daily words which served to keep her hope alive, while her heart hungered for the love that was more than food to her.

Even in her sleep this unsatisfied instinct of her nature and perpetual craving made her dreams sad. But not always, for on more than one occasion she had a very strange sweet dream of Mary pressing her lips and whispering some tender assurance to her; and this dream was so vivid, so like reality, that when she woke she seemed to feel still on face and hands the sensation of loving lips and other clasping hands, so that she put out her hands to return the embrace. And one night from that dream she woke very suddenly, and saw a light in the room—the light of a small shaded lamp moving away towards the door, and Mary, in a white wrapper, with her dark hair hanging unbound on her back, was carrying it.

“Mary, Mary!” cried the girl, starting up in bed, and holding out her arms.

The other turned, and for a little while stood looking at her; no ghost nor somnambulist was she in appearance, with those bright wakeful eyes, the curious smile that played about her lips, and the rich colour, perhaps from confusion or shame at being detected, surging back into her lately pale face. She did not refuse the girl's appeal, or try any longer to conceal her feelings. Setting the lamp down she came to the bedside, and taking Fan in her arms, held her in a long close embrace. When she had finished caressing the girl she remained standing for some time silent beside the bed, her eyes cast down as if in thought, and an expression half melancholy but strangely tender and beautiful on her face.

Presently she bent down over the girl again and spoke.

“Don't fret, dearest, if I seem bad-tempered and strange. I love you just the same; I have come here more than once to kiss you when you were asleep. Do you remember how angry you made me when you asked if you had come between that man and me, and if I were sorry? You did come between us, Fan, in a way that his wholly corrupt soul would never understand. But you could not have done me a greater service than that—no, not if you had spilt your heart's blood for me. You have repaid me for all that I have done, or ever can do for you, and have made me your debtor besides for the rest of my life.”

That midnight interview with her mistress had thereafter a very bright and beautiful place in Fan's memory, and still thinking of it she would sometimes lie awake for hours, wishing and hoping that Mary would come to her again in one of her tender moods. But it did not happen again; for Mary was not one to recover quickly from such a wound as she had suffered, and she still brooded, wrapped up in her own thoughts, dreaming perhaps of revenge. And in the meantime bitter blustering March wore on to its end, the sun daily gaining power; and then, all at once, it was April, with sunshine and showers; and some heavenly angel passed by and touched the brown old desolate elms in Kensington Gardens with tenderest green; and as by a miracle the baskets of the flower-girls in Westbourne Grove were filled to overflowing with spring flowers—pale primroses that die unmarried; and daffodils that come before the swallow dares, shining like gold; and violets dim, but sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes, or Cytherea's breath.

CHAPTER XIII

One afternoon, returning from Westbourne Grove, where she had been out to buy flowers for the table, on coming into the hall, Fan was surprised to hear Miss Starbrow in the dining-room talking to a stranger, with a cheerful ring in her voice, which had not been heard for many weeks. She was about to run upstairs to her room, when her mistress called out, “Is that you, Fan? Come in here; I want you.”

Miss Starbrow and her visitor were sitting near the window. How changed she looked, with her cheeks so full of rich red colour, and her dark eyes sparkling with happy, almost joyous excitement! But she did not speak when Fan, blushing a little with shyness, advanced into the room and stood before them, her eyes cast down in a pretty confusion. Smiling, she watched the girl's face, then the face of her guest, her eyes bright and mirthful glancing from one to the other. Fan, looking up, saw before her a tall broad-shouldered young man with good features, hair almost black; no beard, but whiskers and moustache, very dark brown; and, in strange contrast, grey-blue eyes. Over these eyes, too light in colour to match the hair, the eyelids drooped a little, giving to them that partially-closed sleepy appearance which is often deceptive. Just now they were studying the girl standing before him with very keen interest. A slender girl, not quite sixteen years old, in a loose and broad-sleeved olive-green dress, and yellow scarf at the neck; brown straw hat trimmed with spring flowers; flowers also in her hand, yellow and white, and ferns, in a great loose bunch; and her golden hair hanging in a braid on her back. But the face must be imagined, white and delicate and indescribably lovely in its tender natural pallor.

“Fan,” said Miss Starbrow at last, and speaking with a merry smile, “this is my brother Tom, from Manchester, you have so often heard me speak of. Tom, this is Fan.”

“Well,” exclaimed Miss Starbrow, after he had shaken hands with Fan and sat down again, “what do you think of my little girl? You have heard all about her, and now you have seen her, and I am waiting to hear your opinion.”

“Do you remember the old days at home, Mary, when we were all together? How you do remind me of them now!”

“Oh, bother the old days! You know how I hated them, and I—why don't you answer my question, Tom?”

“That's just it,” he returned. “It was always the same: you always wanted an answer before the question was out of your mouth. Now, it was quite different with the rest of us.”

“Yes, you were a slow lot. Do you remember Jacob?—it always took him fifteen minutes to say yes or no. There's an animal—I forget what it's called—rhinoceros or something—at the Zoo that always reminds me of him; he was so fearfully ponderous.”

“Yes, that's all very well, Mary, but I fancy he's more than doubled the fortune the gov'nor left him; so he has been ponderous to some purpose.”

“Has he? how? But what do I care! Tom, you'll drive me crazy—why can't you answer a simple question instead of going off into fifty other things?”

“Well, Mary, if you'll kindly explain which of all the questions you have asked me during the last minute or two, I'll try my best.”

She frowned, made an impatient gesture, then laughed.

“Go upstairs and take off your things, Fan,” she said. “Well?” she continued, turning to her brother again, and finding his eyes fixed on her face. “Do you tell me, Mary, that this white girl was born and bred in a London slum, that her drunken mother was killed in a street fight, and that she had no other life but that until you picked her up?”

“Yes.”

“Good God!”

“Can't you say Mon Dieu, Tom? Your north-country expressions sound rather shocking to London ears.”

He rose, and coming to her side put his arm about her and kissed her cheek very heartily.

“You were always a good old girl, Mary,” he said, “and you are one still, in spite of your vagaries.”

“Thank you for your very equivocal compliments,” she returned, administering a slight box on his ear. “And now tell me what you think of Fan?”

“I'll tell you presently, if you have not guessed already; but I'd like to know first what you are going to do with her.”

“I don't know; I can't bother about it just now. There's plenty of time to think of that. Perhaps I'll make a lady's-maid of her, though it doesn't seem quite the right thing to do.”

“No, it doesn't. Don't go and spoil what you have done by any such folly as that.”

“Do you want me to make a lady of her—or what?”

“A lady? Well that is a difficult question to answer; but I have heard that sometimes ladies, like poets, are born, not made. At all events, it would not be right, I fancy, to keep the girl here. It might give rise to disagreeable complications, as you always have a parcel of fellows hanging about you.”

Her face darkened with a frown.

“Now, Mary, don't get into a tantrum; it is best for us to be frank. And I say frankly that you never did a better thing in your life than when you took this girl into your house, if my judgment is worth anything. My advice is, send her away for a time—for a year or two, say. She is young, and would be better for a little more teaching. There are poor gentlefolks all over the country who are only too glad to take a girl when they can get one, and give her a pleasant home and instruction for a moderate sum. Find out some such place, and give her a year of it at least; and then if you should have her back she would be more of a companion for you, and, if not, she would be better able to earn her own living. Take my advice, Mary, and finish a good work properly.”

“A good work! You have nearly spoilt the effect of everything you said by that word. I never have done and never will do good works. It is not my nature, Tom. What I have done for Fan is purely from selfish motives. The fact is I fell in love with the girl, and my reward is in being loved by her and seeing her happy. It would be ridiculous to call that benevolence.”

He smiled and shook his head. “You can abuse yourself if you like, Mary; we came from Dissenters, and that's a fashion of theirs—”

“Cant and hypocrisy is a fashion of theirs, if you like,” she interrupted. “You are not going the right way about it if you wish me to pay any attention to your advice.”

“Come, Mary, don't let us quarrel. I'll agree with you that we are all a lot of selfish beggars; and I'll even confess that I have a selfish motive in advising you to send the girl away to the country for a time.”

“What is your motive?” she asked.

“Well, I hate going slap-dash into the middle of a thing without any preface; I like to approach it in my own way.”

“Yes, I know; your way of approaching a subject is to walk in a circle round it. But please dash into the middle of it for once.”

“Well, then, to tell you the plain truth, I am beginning to think that money-getting is not the only thing in life—”

“What a discovery for a Manchester man to make! The millennium must have dawned at last on your smoky old town!”

He laughed at her words, but refused to go on with the subject.

“I was only teasing you a little,” he said. “It gladdens me even to see you put yourself in a temper, Mary—it brings back old times when we were always such good friends, and sometimes had such grand quarrels.”

Mary also laughed, and rang the bell for afternoon tea. She was curious to hear about the “selfish motive,” but remembered the family failing, and forbore to press him.

According to his own accounts, Mr. Tom Starbrow was up in town on business; apparently the business was not of a very pressing nature, as most of his time during the next few days was spent at Dawson Place, where he and his sister had endless conversations about old times. Then he would go with Fan to explore Whiteley's, which seemed to require a great deal of exploring; and from these delightful rambles they would return laden with treasures—choice bon-bons, exotic flowers and hot-house grapes at five or six shillings a pound; quaint Japanese knick-knacks; books and pictures, and photographs of celebrated men—great beetle-browed philosophers, and men of blood and thunder; also of women still more celebrated, on and off the stage. Mr. Starbrow would have nothing sent; the whole fun of the thing, he assured Fan, was in carrying all their purchases home themselves; and so, laden with innumerable small parcels, they would return chatting and laughing like the oldest and best of friends, happy and light-hearted as children.

At last one day Mr. Starbrow went back to the old subject. “Mary, my girl,” he said, “have you thought over the advice I gave you about this white child of yours?”

“No, certainly not; we were speaking of it when you broke off in the middle of a sentence, if you remember. You can finish the sentence now if you like, but don't be in a hurry.”

“Well then, to come at once to the very pith of the whole matter, I think I've been sticking to the mill long enough—for the present. And it may come to pass that some day I shall be married, and then——”

“Your second state will be worse than your first.”

“That will be according to how it turns out. I was only going to say that a married man finds it more difficult to do some things.”

“To flirt with pretty young girls, for instance?”

“No, no. But I haven't finished yet. I haven't even come to the matter at all.”

“Oh, you haven't! How strange!”

He smiled and was silent.

“I hope, Tom, you'll marry a big strong woman.”

“Why, Mary?”

Fan : The Story of a Young Girl's Life

FAN

THE STORY OF A YOUNG GIRL'S LIFE

By Henry Harford

(W.H. Hudson)

NOTE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII