Sons of fire, Vol. I.
Date: 2025-01-22T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: English fiction -- 19th century

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Title: Sons of fire, Vol. I.

Author: M. E. Braddon

Release date: January 22, 2025 [eBook #75173]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co, 1895

Credits: Peter Becker, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SONS OF FIRE, VOL. I. ***

SONS OF FIRE

A Novel

By Mary Elizabeth Braddon

THE AUTHOR OF

"LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET," "VIXEN,"
"ISHMAEL," ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. I.

LONDON
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO. LIMITED
STATIONERS' HALL COURT

[All rights reserved]

LONDON:
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

I. | A STRIKING LIKENESS
II. | ALLAN CAREW'S PEOPLE
III. | "A HOME OF ANCIENT PEACE"
IV. | "IN THE ALL-GOLDEN AFTERNOON"
V. | MORE NEW-COMERS
VI. | LIKE THE MOTH TO THE FLAME
VII. | "O THE RARE SPRING-TIME!"
VIII. | NOT YET
IX. | "SO GREW MY OWN SMALL LIFE COMPLETE"
X. | "OUR DREAMS PURSUE OUR DEAD, AND DO NOT FIND"
XI. | THE MASTER OF DISCOMBE

SONS OF FIRE.

CHAPTER I.

A STRIKING LIKENESS.

The meet was at the Pig and Whistle, at Melbury, nine miles off. Rather a near meet—compared with the usual appointments of the South Sarum hounds—the ostler remarked, as Allan Carew mounted a hired hunter in the yard of the Duke's Head, chief, and indeed only possible inn for a gentleman to put up at, in the little village of Matcham, a small but prosperous hamlet, lying in a hollow of the hills between Salisbury and Andover. He had only arrived on the previous afternoon, and he was sallying forth in the crisp March morning, on an unknown horse in an unfamiliar country, to hunt with a pack whose master's name he had heard for the first time that day.

"Can he jump?" asked Allan, as he scrutinized the lean, upstanding bay; not a bad kind of horse by any means, but with that shabby, under-groomed and over-worked appearance common to hirelings.

"Can't he, sir? There ain't a better lepper in Wiltshire. And as clever as a cat! We had a lady staying here in the winter, Mrs. Colonel Parkyn, brought two 'acks of her own, besides the colonel's two 'unters, and liked this here horse better than any of 'em. She was right down mashed on him, as the young gents say."

"I wonder she didn't buy him," said Allan.

"She couldn't, sir. Money wouldn't buy such a hunter as this off my master. He's a fortune to us."

"I hope I may be of Mrs. Parkyn's opinion when I come home," said Allan. "Now then, ostler, just tell me which way I am to ride to get to the Pig and Whistle by eleven o'clock."

The ostler gave elaborate instructions. A public-house here, an accommodation lane there—a common to cross—a copse to skirt—three villages—one church—a post-office—and several cross-roads.

"You're safe to fall in with company before you get there," concluded the ostler, whisking a bit of straw out of the bay's off hind hoof, and eyeing him critically, previous to departure.

"If I don't, I doubt if I ever shall get there," said Allan, as he rode out of the yard.

He was a stranger in Matcham, a "foreigner," as the villagers called such alien visitors. He had never been in the village before, knew nothing of its inhabitants or its surroundings, its customs, ways, local prejudices, produce, trade, scandals, hates, loves, subserviencies, gods, or devils. And yet henceforward he was to be closely allied with Matcham, for a certain bachelor uncle had lately died and left him a small estate within a mile of the village—a relative with whom Allan Carew had held slightest commune, lunching or dining with him perhaps once in a summer, at an old family hotel in Albemarle Street, never honoured by so much as a hint at an invitation to his rural retreat, and not cherishing any expectation of a legacy, much less the bequest of all the gentleman's worldly possessions, comprising a snug, well-built house, in pretty and spacious grounds, with good and ample stabling, and with farms and homesteads covering something like fifteen hundred acres, and producing an income of a little over two thousand a year.

It need hardly be stated that Allan Carew was not a poor man when this unexpected property fell into his lap.

The children of this world are rarely false to the gospel precept—to every one which hath shall be given. Allan's father had changed his name, ten years before, from Beresford to Carew, upon his succession to a respectable estate in Suffolk, an inheritance from his maternal grandfather, old Squire Carew, of Fendyke Hall, Millfield.

Allan, an only son, was not by any means ill provided for when his maternal uncle, Admiral the Honourable Allan Darnleigh, took it into his head to leave him his Wiltshire property; but this bequest raised him at once to independence, and altogether dispensed with any further care about that gentleman-like profession, the Bar, which had so far repaid Mr. Carew's collegiate studies, labours, outlays, and solicitude by fees amounting in all to seven pounds seven shillings, which sum represented the gross earnings of three years.

So, riding along the rustic high-road, in the clear morning air, under a sapphire sky, just gently flecked with fleecy cloudlets, Allan Carew told himself that it was a blessed escape to have done with chambers, and reading law, and waiting for briefs; and that it was a good thing to be a country gentleman; to have his own house and his own stable; not to be obliged to ride another man's horses, even though that other man were his very father; not to be told after every stiffish day across country that he had done for the grey, or that the chestnut's legs had filled as never horse's legs filled before, nor to hear any other reproachful utterances of an old and privileged stud-groom, who knew the horses he rode were not his own property. Henceforth his stable would be his own kingdom, and he would reign there absolute and unquestioned. He could choose his own horses, and they should be good ones. He naturally shared the common creed of sons, and looked upon all animals of his father's buying as "screws" and "duffers." His own stables would be something altogether different from the drowsy old stables at home, where horses were kept and cherished because they were familiar friends, rather than with a view to locomotion. His stud and his stable should be as different as if horses and grooms had been bred upon another planet.

He loved field-sports. He felt that it was in him to make a model squire, albeit two thousand a year was not a large revenue in these days of elegant living and Continental holidays, and eclectic tastes. He felt that among his numerous nephews, old Admiral Darnleigh had made a wise selection in choosing his god-son, Allan Carew, to inherit his Wiltshire estate. He meant to be prudent and economical. He had spent the previous afternoon in a leisurely inspection of Beechhurst. He had gone over house and stables, and had found all things so well planned, and in such perfect order, that he was assailed by none of those temptations to pull down and to build, to alter and to improve, which often inaugurate ruin in the very dawn of possession. He thought he might build two or three loose boxes on one side of the spacious stable-yard. There were two packs within easy reach of Matcham, to say nothing of packs accessible by rail, and he would naturally want more hunters than had sufficed for the old sailor, who had jogged out on his clever cob two or three times a week, and had gone home early, after artful riding and waiting about the lanes, or to leeward of the great bare hills, and in snug corners, where a profound knowledge of the country enabled him to make sure of the hounds. Allan's hunting-stable would be on a very different footing; and although Beechhurst provided ample accommodation for a stud of eight, Allan told himself that one of his first duties would be to build loose boxes.

"I shall often have to put up a couple of horses for a friend," he thought.

The morning was lovely, more like April than March. The bay trotted along complacently, neither lazy nor feverishly active, but with an air of knowing what he had to do for his day's wage, and meaning honestly to do it. Allan was glad that his road took him past Beechhurst. Possession had still all the charm of novelty. His heart thrilled with pride as he slackened his pace to gaze fondly at the pretty white house, low and long, with a verandah running all along the southern front, admirably placed upon a gentle elevation, against the swelling shoulder of a broad down, facing south-west, and looking over garden and shrubbery, and across a stretch of common, that lay between Beechhurst and the high-road, and gave a dignified aloofness to the situation; seclusion without dulness, a house and grounds remote, but not buried or hidden.

"Nothing manorial about it," mused Allan; "but it certainly looks a gentleman's place."

He would naturally have preferred something less essentially modern. He would have liked Tudor chimneys, panelled walls, and a family ghost. He would have liked to know that his race had taken deep root in the soil, had been lords of the manor centuries and centuries ago, when Wamba was keeping pigs in the woods, and when the jester's bells mixed with the merry music of hawk and hound. Admiral Darnleigh, so far as Wiltshire was concerned, had been a new man. He had made his money in China, speculating in tea-gardens, and other property, while pursuing his naval career with considerable distinction. He had retired from active service soon after the Chinese war, a C.B. and a rich man, had bought Beechhurst a bargain—during a period of depression—and had settled down in yonder pretty white house, with a small but admirable establishment, each member thereof a pearl of price among servants, and had there spent the tranquil even-tide of an honourable and consistently selfish life. He had never married. As a single man, he had always felt himself rich; as a married man he might often have felt himself poor. He had heard Allan at five and twenty declare that he had done with the romance of life, and that he, too, meant to be a bachelor; and it may be that this boyish assertion, carelessly made over a bottle of Lafitte, did in some measure influence the Admiral's choice of an heir.

Allan's father and mother were of a more liberal mind.

"You are in a better position than your father was at your age," said Lady Emily Carew, on her son's accession to fortune. "I hope you will marry well—and soon."

There was no thought of woman's love, or of married bliss, in Allan Carew's mind, as he rode through the lanes and over a common, and across a broad stretch of open down to the Pig and Whistle. He was full, not of his inner self, but of the outer world around and about him, pleased with the pleasant country in which his lot was cast, wondering what his new neighbours were like, and how they would receive him.

"I wonder whether the South Sarum is a hospitable hunt, or whether the members are a surly lot, and look upon every stranger as a sponge and an interloper," he mused.

He had ridden alone for about half the way, when a man in grey fustian and leather gaiters, who looked like a small tenant farmer, trotted past him, turned and stared at him with obvious astonishment, touched his hat and rode on, after a few words of greeting, which were lost in the clatter of hoofs.

He had ridden right so far by the aid of memory; he now followed the man in grey, and, taking care to keep this pioneer in view, duly arrived at a small rustic inn, standing upon high ground, and overlooking an undulating sweep of woodland and common, marsh and plain, one of those picturesque oases which diversify the breadth of wind-swept downs. The inn was an isolated building, the few labourers' cottages within reach being hidden by a turn of the road.

Hounds and hunt-servants were clustered on a level green on the other side of the road, but there was no one else upon the ground.

Allan looked at his watch, and found that it was ten minutes to eleven.

The man in grey had dismounted from his serviceable cob, and was standing on the greensward, talking to the huntsman. Huntsman and whips had taken off their caps to Allan as he rode up, and it seemed to him that there was at once more respect and more friendliness in the salutation than a stranger usually receives—above all a stranger in heather cloth and butcher boots, and not in the orthodox pink and tops. The man in grey, and the hunt-servants, were evidently talking of him as he sat solitary in front of the inn. Their furtive glances in his direction fully indicated that he was the subject of their discourse.

"They take a curious interest in strangers in these parts," thought Allan.

Two minutes afterwards, a stout man, with a weather-beaten red face showing above a weather-beaten red coat, rode up with two other men. Evidently the master and his satellites.

"Hulloa!" cried the jovial man, "what the deuce brings you back so much sooner than Mrs. Wornock expected you? She told me there was no chance of our seeing you for the next year. When did you arrive? I never heard a word about it."

The master's broad doeskin palm was extended to Allan in the most cordial way, and the master's broad red face irradiated kindliest feelings.

"You are under a misapprehension, sir," said Allan, smiling at the frank, friendly face, amused at the eager rapidity of speech which had made it impossible for him to interrupt the speaker. "I have never yet enjoyed the privilege of a day with the South Sarum, and this is my first appearance in your neighbourhood."

"And you ain't Geoffrey Wornock," exclaimed the master, utterly discomfited.

"My name is Carew."

"Ah, your voice is different. I should have known you were not Geoff if I had heard you speak. And now, of course, when one looks deliberately, there is a difference—a difference which would be more marked, I dare say, if Wornock were here. Are you a relation of Wornock's?"

"I never heard the name of Wornock in my life until I heard it from you."

"Well, I'm—dashed," cried the master, suppressing a stronger word as premature so early in the day. "Did you see the likeness, Champion?" asked the master, appealing to one of his satellites.

"Of course I did," replied Captain Champion. "I was just as much under a delusion as you were—and yet—Mr. Carew's features are not the same as Wornock's—and his eyes are a different colour. It's the outlook, the expression, the character in the face that is so like our friend's—and I think that kind of likeness impresses one more than mere form and outline."

"Hang me if I know anything about it, except that I took one man for the other," said the master, bluntly. "Well, Mr. Carew, I hope you will excuse my blunder, and that we may be able to show you some sport on your first day in our country. We'll draw Wellout's Wood, Hamper, and if we don't find there we'll go on to Holiday Hill."

Hounds and servants went off merrily across the down, and dipped into a winding lane. A good many horsemen had ridden up by this time, with half a dozen ladies among them. Some skirmished across the fields, others crowded the lane, and in this latter contingent rode the master, with his hounds in front of him, and Carew at his side.

"Are you staying in the neighbourhood?" he asked; "or did you come by rail this morning? A long ride from Matcham Road station, if you did."

"I am staying at the Duke's Head, at Matcham; but I only arrived yesterday. I am going to settle in your neighbourhood."

"Indeed! Have you bought a place?"

"No."

"Ah, going to rent one. Wiser, perhaps, till you see how you like this part of the country."

"I have had a place left me by my uncle, Admiral Darnleigh."

"What! are you Darnleigh's heir? Yes, by-the-by, I heard that Beechhurst was left to a Mr. Carew; but I've a bad memory for names. So you have got Beechhurst, have you? I congratulate you. A charming place, compact, snug, warm, and in perfect order. Stables a trifle small, perhaps, for a hunting man."

"I am going to extend them," said Allan, with suppressed pride.

"Then you are going to do the right thing, sir. The only part in which Beechhurst falls short of perfection is in the stables. Capital stables, as far as they go, but it isn't far enough for a man who wants to hunt five days a week, and accommodate his hunting friends. Besides, the owner of Beechhurst ought to be in a position to take the hounds at a push."

"I hope it may be long before that push comes," said Allan.

"Ah, you're very kind; but I'm not so young as I was once, nor so rich as I was once—and—the Preacher says there's a time for all things. My time is very nearly past, and your time is coming, Mr. Carew. When do you establish yourself at Beechhurst?"

"I am going back to London to-morrow to settle a few matters, and perhaps have a look round at Tattersall's, and I hope to be at Beechhurst in less than a fortnight."

"I shall do myself the pleasure of calling upon you. Any wife?"

"I am still in the enviable position my uncle enjoyed till his death."

"A bachelor? Ah! that won't last long. It's all very well for a sun-dried old sailor to keep the fair sex at arm's length; but you won't be able to do it, Mr. Carew. I give you till our next hunt-ball for a free man. You've no notion what complexions our Wiltshire women have—Devon can't beat 'em—or what a lot of pretty girls there are within a fifteen-mile drive of Matcham."

"I look forward with a thrill of mingled rapture and apprehension to your next hunt-ball."

"It'll be here before you know where you are. We have postponed it till the first of May. We shall kill our May fox on the thirtieth of April, and dance on his grave on the first."

"I shall be there, my lord," said Allan, as Lord Hambury galloped off after his huntsman, who had just put the hounds into the covert.

A whimper proclaimed that there was something on foot, five minutes afterwards, and the business of the day began—a goodish day, and a long one—two foxes run to earth, and one killed in the twilight. It was seven o'clock when Allan Carew arrived at the Duke's Head, hungry and thirsty, and not a little bored by having been obliged to explain to various people that he was no relation to Geoffrey Wornock.

He had been too much bored at this enforced reiteration to make any inquiries about this double of his in the course of the day, or during the long homeward ride; but when he had taken the edge off his appetite in his cosy sitting-room at the Duke's Head, he began to question the waiter, as he trifled with the customary hotel tart, a hollow cavern of short crust roofing in half a bottle of overgrown gooseberries.

"Do you know Mr. Wornock?"

"Yes, sir; know him uncommonly well. Wonderful likeness between him and you, sir; thought you was him till I heard you speak."

"Our voices are different, I am told."

"Yes, sir, there's a difference. It ain't much—but it's just enough to make one doubtful like. Your voice, begging your pardon, sir, ain't as musical as his. Mr. Wornock's is a voice that would charm a bird off a tree, as the saying is. And then, after the first glance, one can see it ain't the same face," pursued the waiter, thoughtfully. "You've got such a look of him, you see, sir. That's what it is. One don't stop to think of the shape of a nose or a chin. It's the look that catches the eye. I suppose that's what people means by a speaking countenance, sir," added the waiter, garrulous, but not disrespectful.

"Has Mr. Wornock any land in the county?" asked Allan.

"Land, sir? Yes, sir," replied the waiter, with a touch of wonder at being asked such a question. "Mr. Wornock is Lord of the Manor of Discombe, sir—a very large estate—and a fine old house, added to by Mr. Wornock's grandfather. The old part was built in the time of King Charles, sir, and the new part is very fine and picturesque—and the gardens are celebrated in these parts, sir—quite a show place—but Mrs. Wornock never allows it to be shown. She lives very secluded, don't give no entertainments herself, nor visit scarce anywheres. They do say that she was not right in her mind for some years after Mr. Wornock's birth, but that's six and twenty years ago, and there may not be any truth in the report. Gongozorla, sir, or cheddar?"

"Neither, thanks. Are the Wornocks an old family?"

"Very old family, sir. Old Saxon name. Came over with Edward the Confessor."

"And who was Mrs. Wornock?"

"Ah, there's a little 'itch there, sir. Nobody knows who Mrs. Wornock was, or where she came from—and they do say she wasn't county, which is a pity, seeing that the Wornocks had always married county prior to that marriage," added the waiter, proud of his concluding phrase.

"Mr. Wornock is abroad, I understand. Where?"

"Inja, sir. Cavalry regiment, the Eighteenth South Sarum Lancers."

"Strange for a man owning so fine a property to go into the army."

"Well, sir, don't you see, the life at the Manor must have been a very dull one for a young gentleman. No entertainments. No staying company. Mrs. Wornock, she don't care for nothink but music—and, after all, sir, music ain't everythink to a young man. He 'unted, and he 'unted, and he 'unted, from the time he 'ad legs to cross a pony. Wherever there was 'ounds to be follered, he follered 'em. But hunting ain't everythink in life, and it don't last long," added the waiter, philosophically.

"Mrs. Wornock, as dowager, should have withdrawn to her Dower-house, and left the young man free to be as jovial as he liked at the Manor."

"Ah, that may come to pass when he marries, sir, but not before. Mr. Wornock is a devoted son. He'd be the last to turn his mother out-of-doors. And he's almost as keen on music as his mother, I've heard say; plays the fiddle just like a professional—and the organ."

"Well," sighed Carew, having heard all he wanted to hear, "I bear no grudge against Mr. Geoffrey Wornock because he happens to resemble me; but I wish with all my heart that he could have made it convenient to live in any other neighbourhood than that in which my lot is cast. That will do, waiter; I don't want any more wine. You may clear the table, and bring me some tea at nine o'clock."

The waiter cleared the table, in a leisurely way, made up the fire, also in a leisurely way, and contrived to spend a quarter of an hour upon work that might have been done in five minutes; but Allan questioned him no further. He flung himself back in an easy-chair, rested his slippered feet upon the fender, and meditated with closed eyes.

Yes, it was a bore, a decided bore, to have a double in the neighbourhood. A double richer, more important, and altogether better placed than himself; a double in a Lancer regiment—there is at once chic and attractiveness in a cavalry soldier—a double who owned just the fine old manorial estate, and fine old manorial mansion which he, Allan, would have liked to possess.

Beechhurst might be a snug little property; the house might be perfection, as Lord Hambury had averred; but when a house of that calibre is said to be perfect, the adjective rarely means anything more than a good kitchen, and a convenient butler's pantry, roomy cellars, and a well-planned staircase; whereas, to praise a fine old manor house implies that it contains a panelled hall, and a spacious ballroom, a library with a groined roof, and a music gallery in the dining-room. After hearing of Wornock's old house, Allan felt that Beechhurst was distinctly middle-class, and that his sailor uncle must have been a poor creature to have found pride and pleasure in such a cockney paradise.

He jumped up out of his easy-chair, shook himself, and laughed aloud at his own pettiness.

"What an envious brute I am!" he said to himself. "I dare say, when Wornock comes home, I shall find him a decent fellow, and we shall get to be good friends. If we do, I'll tell him how I was gnawed with envy of his better fortune before ever I saw his face."

CHAPTER II.

ALLAN CAREW'S PEOPLE.

Allan Carew spent the best part of the following day at Beechhurst, better pleased with his inheritance than he would confess even to himself. The Admiral's Chinese experiences had not been without tangible result. The hall was decorated with curios whose value their present possessor could only guess, and if the greater part of the house was prim and commonplace, there was one room which was both handsome and original—this was the smoking-room and library, a spacious apartment which the Admiral had added to the original structure, and which was built on the model of a Mandarin's reception-room. Yes, on the whole, Allan was inclined to think his lot had fallen on a pleasant heritage. He went up to town in good spirits; spent ten days in looking at hunting studs at Tattersall's, and made his modest selection with care and prudence, content to start his stable with four good hunters, a dog-cart horse, a pony to fetch and carry, two grooms and a stable-help.

The all-important business of the stable concluded, he went back to Suffolk to spend Easter in the bosom of his family, and to tell his father what he had done. There was perfect harmony of feeling, and frankest confidence between father and son, and the son's regard for the father was all the stronger because, under that quiet and somewhat languid bearing of the Squire of Fendyke, Allan suspected hidden depths. Of the history of his father's youth, or the history of his father's heart, the son knew nothing; yet, fondly as he loved his mother, the excellent and popular Lady Emily, he had a shrewd suspicion that she was not the kind of woman to have won his father's heart in the days when love means romance rather than reason. That she possessed her husband's warm affection now, he, the son, was fully assured; but he was equally assured that the alliance had been passionless, a union of two honourable minds, rather than of two loving hearts.

There was that in his father's manner of life which to Allan's mind told of a youth overshadowed by some unhappy experience; and a word dropped now and then, in the father's talk of his son's prospects and hopes, a hint, a sigh, had suggested an unfortunate love-affair.

His mother was more communicative, and had told her son frankly that she was not his father's first love.

"You remember your grandmother, Allan?" she said.

Yes, Allan remembered her distinctly—an elderly woman dressed in some rich silken fabric, always black, with a silver chatelaine at her side, on which there hung a curious old enamelled watch that he loved to look at. A tall slender figure, a thin aquiline countenance, with silvery hair arrayed in feathery curls under a honiton cap. She had been always kind to him; but no kindness could dispel the awe which she inspired.

"I used to dream of her," he said. "Had she a frightening voice, do you think? She was mixed up in most of my childish nightmares."

"Poor Allan!" laughed his mother. "She was an excellent woman, but she loved to command; and one can't command affection, not even the affection of a child. It was she who made your father marry me. He liked me, and I liked him, and we had been playfellows; but we should never have thought of marrying if your grandmother had not, in a manner, insisted upon it. She told George that I was deeply in love with him; and she told me that George was devoted to me; and so we could not help ourselves. And, after all," she went on, with a comfortable sigh, "it has answered very well. I don't think we could possibly be fonder of our home, or of each other, than we are. And your father has his books, and his shooting and fishing, and I have my farm and my schools—and," with a sudden gush of tenderness, "we both have you. You ought to be fond of us, Allan. You are the link that makes us one in heart and mind."

Allan was fond of them. Both parents had been undeviating in their indulgence, and he had given them love without stint. But it may be that he loved the somewhat silent and reserved father with a profounder affection than he gave to the open-hearted and loquacious mother. That vague consciousness of a secret in his father's life, of sorrows unforgotten, but never told, had evoked the son's warmest sympathy. All that Allan had ever felt of sentiment or romantic feeling hitherto, he had felt for his father. It is not to be supposed that he had reached five and twenty without some commerce with Cupid, but his loves had been only passing fancies, sunbeams glancing on the surface of life's current, not those deep forces which change the course of the river.

The characters of father and mother were distinctly marked in their acceptance of Allan's good fortune. Lady Emily saw only the sunny side of the inheritance. She was delighted that her son should have ample means and perfect independence in the morning of life. She was full of matrimonial schemes on his behalf. Decidedly he ought to marry, well and quickly. An only son, with an estate in possession, and another—his patrimonial estate—in prospective. It was his duty to found a family. She marshalled all the young women she knew in a mental review. There must be good family—a pure race, untarnished by the taint of commerce, unshadowed by hushed-up disgrace—divorces, bankruptcies, turf scandals. There should be money, because even the two estates would not make Allan a rich man, as the world reckons wealth nowadays; but they would give him a respectable platform from which to demand the hand of an heiress. He could woo the wealthiest without fear of being considered a fortune-hunter.

"It is sad to think you will like your own place better than this," said Lady Emily in her cheerfullest voice, "and that we shall hardly see you except at Christmas and Easter; but it is so nice to know that you are in a position to marry as early as you like without being under any obligation to your father; for, indeed, dear, what with his library and my farm, there would have been very little margin for a proper establishment for you."

"My dearest mother, why harp upon matrimony? I have made up my mind to follow my uncle's excellent example."

"My poor brother!" sighed Lady Emily. "He was in love with the belle of the season—a foolish pink and white thing, with one long curl streaming over her left shoulder, and a frock that you would laugh at, if you could see her to-day. Of course Allan's chances were hopeless—a younger son, with a commander's pay, eked out by a pittance from his father. She used to ride in the Row with a plume in her hat—half a Spanish fowl—quite the right thing, I assure you, at that time. Your uncle was twelve years older than I, you know, Allan; and I was still in short petticoats when he went off to China broken-hearted. Of course she wouldn't have him, though she said he was the best waltzer in London. Her people wouldn't let her look at him even, from a matrimonial point of view."

Allan went to church with his mother on Easter morning—attended two services in the fine old church, which seemed much too grand and too big for the tiny town—her loving heart swelling with pride at having such an admirable son. Her friends had always been fond of him; but now it seemed to her there was a touch of deference in their kindness. They had liked him as her son, and the inheritor of Fendyke Hall; but perhaps they liked him even a little better now that he was his own master, a man of independent means.

He accompanied Lady Emily in her weekly visit to the schools; he assisted in dealing out Easter gifts to the school-children, and distributed half a dozen pounds of the very strongest obtainable tobacco among his male acquaintance in the village of Fendyke—a village consisting of a rectory, three picturesque farmhouses, a still more picturesque water-mill and miller's house, a roomy old barn-like inn, said to have once given shelter to good Queen Bess, and a good many decent cottages grouped in threes and fours along the broad, level road, or scattered in side lanes.

The morning of Easter Monday was given to an inspection of Lady Emily's white farm—that farm which, next to her son, was the greatest pride and delight of her innocent and strictly rural life. Here, all buildings and all creatures were of an almost dazzling purity. White horses at the plough, a white fox-terrier running beside it, white birds in the poultry-yard, white cows in the meadow—cows from Lord Cawdor's old white Pembroke breed, cows from Blickling Park and Woodbastwick—white cottages for bailiff and farm-labourers, white palings, white pigs, and white donkeys, a white peacock sunning himself on the top of the clipped yew-hedge in the bailiff's garden, white tulips, white hyacinths in the flower-beds. To procure all this whiteness had cost trouble and money; but there are few home-farms which give as much delight to their possessors as this white farm gave to Lady Emily Carew. She had as much pride in its perfection as the connoisseur who collects only Wedgwood, or only Florentine Majolica, has in his collection. It is not so much the actual value of the thing as the fact that the thing is unique, and has cost the possessor years of patience and labour. Lady Emily would take a long journey to look at a white cow, or to secure the whitest thing in Brahmas or Cochin Chinas.

It was a harmless, simple, womanly hobby, and although Lady Emily's farm was a somewhat costly toy, it served to give her status in the neighbourhood, and it provided labour for a good many people, who were well housed and well looked after, and whose children astonished the school-inspectors by the thoroughness of their education. No incompetent master or mistress could have held on in the schools where Lady Emily was a power. She cultivated a friendly familiarity with the man and woman who taught her cottage children; she asked them to quiet, confidential luncheons three or four times in a quarter; she sounded their opinions, plucked out the heart of their mystery, lent them books, stuffed them with her own ideas, and, in a manner, made them her mouthpiece. Intensely conservative as to her opinions and prejudices, and with an absolute loathing for all radical and revolutionary principles; she was yet, by the beneficence of her nature, more liberal than many a professing demagogue, and would fain have admitted all her fellow-creatures to an equal share in the good things of this life. Her warm heart was full of compassion for the hard lives she saw around her—hard even where the condition of the agricultural labourer was at its best—and it was her delight to introduce into these hard lives occasional glimpses of a happier world—a world of pleasure and gaiety, laughter and frolic. Lady Emily's Christmas and Whitsun balls for the villagers and servants; Lady Emily's May-day feast for the children; Lady Emily's midsummer picnic and harvest-home; and Lady Emily's fairy fir-tree, which reached to the ceiling of the boy's schoolroom, every branch laden with benefits—these were events which broke the slow monotony of each laborious year, joys to dream of and to remember in many a dull week of toil. Second only to these festive gatherings in helpfulness were Lady Emily's coal and blanket society, savings bank, and mothers' meeting—the last a friendly, familiar gathering held in a spacious old building which had been a brewery in the days when every country gentleman's household brewed its own beer. Once a week, through the winter season, Lady Emily sat in the old brewery, with a circle of cottagers' wives sewing industriously, while she talked and read to them. Tea and bread-and-butter, a roaring wood fire, and a bright lamp, were the only material comforts provided; but these and Lady Emily's friendly welcome and pleasant talk, with the short story chosen out of a magazine, and the familiar chapter of the New Testament, read far better than vicar or curate read it in church, sufficed to make the mothers' meeting a cheerful break in the cottage matron's busy week. She went back to her homely hearth cheered and encouraged. Lady Emily had told her the latest news of the great busy world outside Fendyke, had given her a recipe for a new savoury pie of ox-cheek and twopenny rice, or a new way of making barley broth; or had given her a "cutting" for her tiny flower-garden, or had cut out her new Garibawldi. Lady Emily had been to her as a friend and counsellor.

The village remembered with a shudder that long dreary winter when the great house was empty, while Mr. Carew and his wife were in Egypt—ordered there by the doctors, after a serious illness of the squire's.

Much had been done for the sick and the poor even in that desolate winter, for the housekeeper had been given a free hand; but no one could replace Lady Emily, and the gaiety of Fendyke had been extinguished.

CHAPTER III.

"A HOME OF ANCIENT PEACE."

The hunting was nearly over by the time Allan Carew had established himself at Beechhurst and completed his stud. The selection of half a dozen hunters had given him an excuse for running up to London once or twice a week; and he had revelled in the convenience of express trains between Salisbury and Waterloo as compared with the slow and scanty train service between Fendyke and Cambridge, which made a journey from his native village a trial of youthful patience.

London was full of pleasant people at this after-Easter season, so Allan took his time at Tattersall's, saw his friends, dined them, or dined with them, at those clubs which young men most affect, went to his favourite theatres, rode in the Park, and saw a race or two at Sandown, all in the process of buying his horses; but at last the stud was complete, and his stud-groom, a man he had brought from Suffolk, the man who taught him to ride, had shaken a wise head, and told his young master to stop buying.

"You've got just as many as you can use, Mr. Allan," he said, "and if you buy another one, it 'ud mean another b'y, and we shall have b'ys enough for me to keep in order as it is."

So Allan held his hand. "And now I am a country gentleman," he said, "and I must go and live on my acres."

Everybody in the neighbourhood wanted to know him. He was under none of the disadvantages of the new man about whom people have to ask each other, "Who is he?" He came to Matcham with the best possible credentials. His father was a man of old family, against whose name no evil thing had ever been written. His mother was an earl's daughter; and the estate which was his had been left him by a man whose memory was respected in the neighbourhood—a man of easy temper and open hand, a kind master, and a staunch friend.

Allan found his hall-table covered with cards when he returned from his London holiday, and he was occupied for the next fortnight in returning the calls that had been made for the most part in his absence. To a shy young man this business of returning calls in an unknown land would have been terrible—invading unfamiliar drawing-rooms, and seeing strange faces, wondering which of two matrons was his hostess and which the friend or sister-in-law—an ordeal as awful as any mediæval torture; but Allan was not shy, and he accepted the situation with a winning ease which pleased everybody. When he blundered—and his blunders were rare—he laughed at his mistake, and turned it into a jest that served to help him through the first five minutes of small-talk. He had a quick eye, and in a room full of people saw at a glance the welcoming smile and extended hand which marked his hostess. "Quite an acquisition to the neighbourhood," said everybody; and the mothers of marriageable daughters were as eager to improve the acquaintance as Jane Austen's inimitable Mrs. Bennett was to cultivate the irreproachable Bingley.

In the course of that round of visits Allan contrived to find out a good deal about the neighbourhood which was henceforward to be his home.

He discovered that it was, above all, a hunting neighbourhood; but that it was also a shooting neighbourhood; and that there was bad blood between the men who wanted to preserve pheasants and the men who wanted to hunt foxes. From the point of view of the rights of property, the shooters would appear to be in their right, since they only wanted to feed and foster birds on their own land; while the hunting-man—were he but the season-ticket-holding solicitor from Bloomsbury—wanted to hunt his fox over land which belonged to another man, and to spoil that other man's costly sport in the pursuit of a pleasure which cost him, the season-ticket holder, at most a stingy subscription to the hunt he affected. But, on the other hand, hunting is a strictly national sport, and shooting is a selfish, hole-and-corner kind of pleasure; so the hunting men claimed immemorial rights and privileges as against the owners of woods and copses, and the hatchers of pheasants.

Allan found another and more universal sport also in the ascendant at Matcham. The neighbourhood had taken lately to golf, and that game had found favour with old and young of both sexes. Everybody could not hunt, but everybody could play golf, or fancy that he or she was playing golf, or, at least, look on from a respectful distance while golf was being played. The golf-links on Matcham Common had therefore become the most popular institution in the neighbourhood, and the scarlet coat of the golfer was oftener seen than the fox-hunter in pink, and people came from afar to see the young ladies of Matcham contest for the bangles and photograph-frames which the golf club offered as the reward of the strong arm and the accurate eye.

Allan, who could turn his hand to most things in the way of physical exercise, was able to hold his own with the members of the golf club, and speedily became a familiar figure on the links. Here, as elsewhere, he met people who told him he was like Geoffrey Wornock, and who praised Wornock's skill at golf just as other people had praised his riding or his shooting.

"He seems to be something of a Crichton, this Wornock of yours," Allan said sometimes, with a suspicion of annoyance.

He was sick of being told of his likeness to this man whom he had never seen—weary of hearing the likeness discussed in his presence; weary of being told that the resemblance was in expression rather than in actual feature; that there was an indefinable something in his face which recalled Wornock in an absolutely startling manner; while the details of that face taken separately were in many respects unlike Wornock's face.

"Yet it is more than what is generally called a family likeness," said Mrs. Mornington of the Grove, a personage in the neighbourhood, and the cleverest woman among Allan's new acquaintances. "It is the individuality, the life and movement of the face, that are the same. The likeness is a likeness of light and shade rather than of line and colour."

There was a curious feeling in Allan's mind by the time this kind of thing had been said to him in different forms of speech by nearly everybody he knew in Matcham—a feeling which was partly irritation, partly interest in the man whose outward likeness to himself might be allied with some identity of mind and inclinations.

"I wonder whether I shall like him very much, or hate him very much," he said to Mrs. Mornington. "I feel sure I must do one or the other."

"You are sure to like him. He is not the kind of man for anybody to hate," answered the lady quickly; and then, growing suddenly thoughtful, she added, "You may find a something wanting in his character, perhaps; but you cannot dislike him. He is thoroughly likeable."

"What is the something wanting which you have found?"

"I did not say I had found——"

"Oh, but you would not have suggested that I might discover the weak spot if you had not found it yourself!"

"You are as searching as a cross-examining counsel," said Mrs. Mornington, laughing at him. "Well, I will be perfectly frank with you. To my mind, Geoffrey's character suffers from the fault which doctors—speaking of a patient's physical condition—call want of tone. There is a want of mental tone in Geoffrey. I have known him from a boy. I like him; I admire his talents. He and my sons were at Eton together. I have seen more of him perhaps than any one else in this neighbourhood. I like him—I am sorry for him."

"Why sorry? Has he not all the good things of this world?"

"Not all. He lost his father before he was five years old; and his mother is, I fear, a poor creature."

"Eccentric, I understand."

"Lamentably so—a woman who isolates herself from all the people whose society would do her good, and who opens her door to any spirit-rapping charlatan whose tricks become public talk. Poor thing! One ought not to be angry with her, but it is provoking to see such a place as Discombe in the possession of a woman who is utterly unable to fill the position to which she has been elevated."

"Who was Mrs. Wornock before she became Mrs. Wornock? I have heard hints——"

"Yes, and you are never likely to hear more than hints," retorted Mrs. Mornington, impatiently. "Nobody in this neighbourhood knows who Mrs. Wornock was. No creature of her kith or kin has ever been seen at Discombe. I don't suppose her son knows anything more of her antecedents than you or I. Old Squire Wornock left Discombe about seven and twenty years ago to drink the waters of some obscure spring in Bohemia—a place nobody hereabouts had ever heard of. He was past sixty when he set out on that journey, a confirmed bachelor. One would as soon have expected him to bring back the moon as to bring a wife, but to the utter stupefaction of all his friends and acquaintance, he returned with a pretty-looking delicate young creature he had married in Germany—at Dresden, I believe—and who looked much more like dying within the next five years than he did."

"Did he introduce her to his neighbours? Was she well received?"

"Oh, she was received well enough. Mr. Wornock was not the kind of man to marry a disreputable person. People took her on trust. She seemed painfully shy, and her only merit in society was that she sang very prettily. Everybody called upon her, but she did not respond warmly to our advances; and about six months after her marriage there were rumours of an alarming kind about her health—her mental health. Our own good little doctor, dear old Mr. Podmore, who had attended three generations of Wornocks, shook his head when he was questioned about her. 'Was it serious?' people asked—for I suppose you know that in a neighbourhood as rustic as ours, if the doctor's carriage is seen at a particular house very often, people will ask questions of that doctor. Yes, it was very serious. We never got beyond that. Mr. Podmore was loyal to his patient, fondly as he loves a gossip. By-and-by we heard that Mr. Wornock had taken his young wife off to Switzerland. He who in his earlier life had seemed rooted to the soil was off again to the Continent, and Discombe was shut up once more. I'm afraid we all hated Mrs. Wornock. In a neighbourhood like ours, one detests anybody who disturbs the pleasant order of daily life. Dinners and hunting-breakfasts at Discombe were an element in our daily lives, and we resented their cessation. When I say we, I mean, of course, our men-folk."

"Were your men-folk long deprived of Mr. Wornock's hospitalities?"

"For ever," answered Mrs. Mornington, solemnly. "The Wornocks had only been gone half a year or so when we read the announcement of a son and heir, born at Grindelwald in the depth of winter. A nice place for the future owner of Discombe to be born in—Grindelwald—at the sign of the Bear! We were all indignant at the absurdity of the thing. This comes of an old man marrying a nobody, we said. Well, Mr. Carew, it was ages before we saw anything more of the Wornocks. Geoffrey must have been three or four years old when his father and mother brought him to the house in which he ought to have been born—a poor little fragile Frenchified object, hanging on to a French bonne, and speaking nothing but French. Not one sentence of his native tongue did the little wretch utter for a year or two after he appeared among us!"

Allan laughed heartily at Mrs. Mornington's indignant recital of this ancient history. Her disgust was as fresh and as vigorous as if she were describing the events of yesterday.

"Was he a nice child?" he asked, when they had both had their laugh.

"Nice? Well, yes, he was nice, just as a French poodle is nice. He was very active and intelligent—hyper-active, hyper-intelligent. He frightened me. But the Wornocks and the Morningtons had been close friends from generation to generation, so I could not help taking an interest in the brat, and I would have been a cordial friend of the brat's mother, for poor old Wornock's sake, if she would have let me. But she wouldn't, or she couldn't, respond to a sensible, matter-of-fact woman's friendly advances. The poor thing was in the clouds then, and she is in the clouds now. She has never come down to earth. Music, spirit-rapping, thought-reading, slate-writing—what can one expect of a woman who gives all her mind to such things as those?—a woman who lets her housekeeper manage everything from cellar to garret, and who has no will of her own in her garden and hot-houses? I have known Mrs. Wornock seven and twenty years, and I know no more of her now than I knew when she came a stranger to Discombe. I call upon her three or four times a year, and she returns my calls, and sits in my drawing-room for twenty minutes or so looking miserable and longing to go. What can one do with such a woman?"

"Is it sheer stupidity, do you think?"

"Stupidity! No, I think not. She has anything but a stupid expression of countenance. She has an air of spirituality, as of a nature above the common world, which cannot come down to common things. I am told that in music she is really a genius; that her powers of criticism and appreciation are of the highest order. She plays exquisitely, both organ and piano. She has, or had, a heavenly soprano voice; but I have not heard her sing since Geoffrey's birth."

"She must be interesting," said Allan, with conviction.

"She is interesting—only she won't let one be interested in her."

"Can one get a look at her? Does she go to Matcham Church?"

"Never. That is another of her eccentricities. She either goes to that funny little old church you may have noticed right among the fields—Filbury parish church—nearly six miles from Discombe, or she drives thirteen miles to Salisbury Cathedral. I believe she sometimes plays the organ at Filbury. That organ was her gift, by the way. They had only a wretched harmonium when she came to Discombe."

"I shall go to Filbury Church next Sunday," said Allan.

"Shall you? I hope you are not forgetting the lapse of time. This interesting widow is only interesting from a psychological standpoint, remember. She must be five and forty years of age. Not even Cleopatra would have been interesting at forty-five."

"I am under no hallucination as to the lady's age. I want to see the mother of Geoffrey Wornock. It is Geoffrey Wornock in whom I am interested."

"Egotistical person! Only because Geoffrey is like you."

"Is there any man living who would not be interested in his double?"

"Ah, but he is not your double! The village mind is given to exaggeration. He has not your firm chin, nor your thoughtful brow. His face is a reminiscence of yours. It is weaker in every characteristic, in every line. You are the substance, he the reflection."

"Now, you are laughing at my egotism, and developing my vanity."

"No, believe me, no!" protested Mrs. Mornington, gaily. "I see you both with all your defects and qualities. You have the stronger character, but you have not Geoffrey's fascinating personality. His very faults are attractive. He is by no means effeminate; yet there is a something womanish in his nature which makes women fond of him. He has inherited his mother's sensitive, dreamy temperament. I feel sure he would see a ghost if there were one in his neighbourhood. The ghost would go to him instinctively, as dogs go unbidden to certain people—sometimes to people who don't care about them; while the genuine dog-lover may be doing his best to attract bow-wow's attention, and failing ignominiously."

"Every word you say increases my interest in Mr. Wornock. In a neighbourhood like this, where everybody is sensible and commonplace and conventional, excepting always your brilliant self"—Mrs. Mornington nodded, and put her feet on the fender—"it is so delightful to meet some one who does not move just on the common lines, and is not worked by the common machinery."

"You will find nothing common about Geoffrey," said the lady. "I have known him since he was a little white boy in a black velvet suit, and he was just as enigmatical to me the day he left for Bombay as he was on his seventh birthday. I know that he has winning manners, and that I am very fond of him; and that is all I know about him."

Allan drove to Filbury on the following Sunday, and was in his place in the little old parish church ten minutes before the service began. The high oak pews were not favourable to his getting a good view of the congregation, since, when seated, the top of his head was only on a level with the top of his pew; but by leaving the door of the pew ajar he contrived to see Mrs. Wornock as she went up the narrow aisle—nave there was none, the pews forming a solid square in the centre of the church. Yes, he was assured that slim, graceful figure in a plain grey cashmere gown and grey straw bonnet must be Mrs. Wornock and no other. Indeed, the inference was easily arrived at, for the rest of the congregation belonged obviously to the small tenant-farmer and agricultural-labourer class—the women-folk homely and ruddy-cheeked, the men ponderous, and ill at ease in their Sunday clothes.

The lady in the grey gown made her way quietly to a pew that occupied the angle of the church nearest the pulpit and reading-desk—the old three-decker arrangement, for clerk, parson, and preacher. Mr. Wornock was patron of the living of Filbury and Discombe, and this large, square pew had belonged to the Wornocks ever since the rebuilding of the church in Charles the Second's reign, a year or two after the manor-house was built, when the estate, which had hitherto been an outlying possession of the Wornocks, became their place of residence, and most important property.

Allan could see only the lady's profile from his place in the body of the church—a delicate profile, worn as if with long years of thoughtfulness; a sweet, sad face that had lost all freshness of colouring, but had gained the spiritual beauty which grows in thought and solitude, where there are no vulgar cares to harass and vex the mind. A pensive peacefulness was the chief characteristic of the face, Allan thought, when the lady turned towards the organ during the Te Deum, listening to the village voices, which sang truer than village voices generally do.

Allan submitted to the slow torture of a very long sermon about nothing particular, on a text in Nehemiah, which suggested not the faintest bearing on the Christian life—a sermon preached by an elderly gentleman in a black silk gown, whose eloquence would have been more impressive had his false teeth been a better fit. After the sermon there was a hymn, and the old-fashioned plate was carried round by a blacksmith, whom Allan recognized as a man who had fastened his hunter's shoe one day at a forge on the outskirts of Filbury, in the midst of a run; and then the little congregation quietly dispersed, after an exchange of friendly greetings between the church door and the lych-gate.

Allan's gig was waiting for him near the gate, and a victoria, on which he recognized the Wornock crest—a dolphin crowned—stood in the shade of a row of limes, which marked the boundary of the Vicarage garden. Allan waited a little, expecting to see Mrs. Wornock come out; and then, as she did not appear, he re-entered the churchyard, and strayed among moss-mantled tomb-stones, reading the village names, the village histories of birth and death, musing, as he read, upon the long eventless years which make the sum of rustic lives.

The blue pure sky, the perfume of a bean-field in flower, the hawthorns in undulating masses of snowy blossom, and here and there, in the angles of the meadows, the heaped-up gold of furze-bushes that were more bloom than bush—all these made life to-day a sensuous delight which exacted no questionings of the intellect, suggested no doubt as to the bliss of living. If it were always thus—a crust of bread and cheese under such a sky, a bed in the hollow of yonder bank between bean-field and clover, would suffice for a man's content, Allan thought, as he stood on a knoll in God's acre, and looked down upon the meadows that rose and fell over ridge and hollow with gentle undulations between Filbury and Discombe.

What had become of Mrs. Wornock? He had made the circuit of the burial-ground, pausing often to read an epitaph, but never relaxing his watchfulness of the carriage yonder, waiting under the limes. The carriage was there still, and there was no sign of Mrs. Wornock. Was there a celebration? No; he had seen all the congregation leave the church, except the mistress of that curtained pew in the corner near the pulpit.

Presently the broad strong chords of a prelude were poured out upon the still air—a prelude by Sebastian Bach, masterful, imposing, followed by a fugue, whose delicate intricacies were exquisitely rendered by the player. Standing in the sunshine listening to that music, Allan remembered what Mrs. Mornington had told him. The player was Mrs. Wornock. He had seen the professional organist and schoolmaster leave the church with his flock of village boys. Mrs. Wornock had lingered after the service to gratify herself with the music she loved. He sauntered and loitered near the open window, listening to the music for nearly an hour. Then the organ sounds melted away in one last long rallentando, and presently he heard the heavy old key turn in the heavy old lock, and the lady in grey came slowly along the path to the lych-gate, followed by a clumsy boy, who looked like a smaller edition of the blacksmith. Allan stood within a few yards of the pathway to see her go by, hoping to be himself unobserved, screened by the angle of an old monument, where rust had eaten away the railing, and moss and lichen had encrusted the pompous Latin epitaph, while the dense growth of ivy had muffled the funeral urn. Here, in the shadow of ostentation's unenduring monument, he waited for that slender and still youthful form to pass.

In figure the widow of twenty years looked a girl, and the face which turned quickly towards Allan, her keen ear having caught the rustle of the long grass under his tread, had the delicacy of outline and transparency of youth. The cheek had lost its girlish roundness, and the large grey eye was somewhat sunken beneath the thoughtful brow. Involuntarily Allan recalled a familiar line—

"Thy cheek is pale with thought and not with care."

That expression of tranquil thoughtfulness changed in an instant as she looked at him; changed to astonishment, interrogation, which gradually softened to a grave curiosity, an anxious scrutiny. Then, as if becoming suddenly aware of her breach of good manners, the heavy eyelids sank, a faint blush coloured the thin cheeks, and she hurried onward to the gate where her carriage had drawn up in readiness for her.

Her footman, in a sober brown livery, was holding the gate open for her. Her horses were shaking their bridles. She stepped lightly into the victoria, nodded an adieu to the schoolboy who had blown the organ bellows, and vanished into the leafy distance of the lane.

"So that is my double's mother. An interesting face, a graceful figure, and a lady to the tips of her fingers. Whether she is county, or not county, Geoffrey Wornock has no cause to be ashamed of his mother. Nothing would induce me to think ill of that woman."

He brooded on that startled expression which had flashed across Mrs. Wornock's face as she looked at him. Clearly she, too, had seen the likeness which he bore to her son.

"I wonder whether it pains her to be reminded of him when he is so far away," speculated Allan, "or whether she feels kindly towards me for the sake of that absent son?"

This question of his was answered three days later by the lady's own hand. Among the letters on Allan's breakfast-table on Wednesday morning there was one in a strange penmanship, which took his breath away, for on the envelope, in bold brown letters, appeared the address, Discombe Manor.

He thrust all his other letters aside—those uninteresting letters which besiege the man who is supposed to have money to spend, from tradesmen who want to work for him, charities who want to do good for him, stock-jobbers who want to speculate for him—the whole race of spiders that harassed the well-feathered fly. He tore open the letter from Discombe Manor, and his eye ran eagerly over the following lines:—

"DEAR SIR,

"People tell me that you are kind and amiable, and I am emboldened by this assurance to ask you a favour. Etiquette forbids me to call upon you, and as I rarely visit anybody, it might be long before we should meet casually in the houses of other people; but you can, if you like, gratify a solitary woman by letting her make your acquaintance in her own house; and perhaps when my son comes home on leave, the acquaintance, so begun, may ripen into friendship. I dare say people have told you that you are like him, and you will hardly wonder at my wishing to see more of a face that reminds me of my nearest and dearest.

"I am generally at home in the afternoon.

"Very truly yours,
"E. WORNOCK."

"E. Wornock!" he repeated, studying the signature. "Why no Christian name? And what is the name which that initial represents? Eliza, perhaps—and she sinks it, thinking it common and housemaidish—forgetting how Ben Jonson, by that housemaidish name, does designate the most glorious of queens. Possibly Ellen—a milk-and-waterish name, with less of dignity than Eliza; or Emily, my mother's name—graceful but colourless. I have never thought it good enough for so fine a character as my mother. She should have been Katherine or Margaret, Gertrude or Barbara, names that have a fulness of sound which implies fulness of meaning. I will call at Discombe Manor this afternoon. Delay would be churlish—and I want to see what Geoffrey Wornock's home is like."

The afternoon was warm and sunny, and Allan made a leisurely circuit of the chase and park of Discombe on his way to Mrs. Wornock's house.

The beauty of the Manor consisted as much in the perfection of detail as in the grandeur of the mansion or the extent of gardens and park. The mansion was not strikingly architectural nor even strikingly picturesque. It was a sober red brick house, with a high, tiled roof, and level rows of windows—those of the upper story were the original lattices of 1664, the date of the house; but on the lower floors mullions and lattices had given place to long French windows, of a uniform unpicturesque flatness, opening on a broad gravel walk, beyond which the smooth shaven grass sloped gently to the edge of a moat, for Mrs. Wornock's house was one of those moated manor-houses of which there are so few left in the south of England. The gardens surrounding that grave-looking Carolian house had attained the ideal of horticultural beauty under many generations of garden-lovers, the ideal of old-fashioned beauty, be it understood; the beauty of clipped hedges and sunk lawns, walls of ilex and of yew, solemn avenues of obelisk-shaped conifers, labyrinths, arches, temples and arcades of roses, tennis-lawns and bowling-greens, broad borders of old-fashioned perennials, clumps and masses of vivid colour, placed with art that seemed accidental wherever vivid colour was wanted to relieve the verdant monotony.

If the gardens were perfect, the house, farm, and cottages were even more attractive in their arcadian grace, the grace of a day that is dead. Quaint roofs and massive chimney-stacks, lattices, porches, sun-dials, gardens brimming over with flowers, trim pathways, shining panes, everywhere a spotless cleanliness, a wealth of foliage, an air of prosperous fatness, bee-hives, poultry, cattle, all the signs and tokens of dependents for whom much is done, and whose dwellings flourish at somebody else's expense.

Allan noted the cottages which bore the Wornock "W" above the date of the building—he noted them, but lost count of their number—keepers' lodges in the woodland which skirted the park—gardeners' or dairy-men's cottages at every park gate; farmhouse and bailiff's house; cottages for coachmen and helpers. At every available angle where gable, roof, and quaint old chimney-stack could make a picturesque feature in the landscape, a cottage had been placed, and the number of these ideal dwellings suggested territorial importance in a manner more obvious than any effect made by the mere extent of acreage, a thing that is talked about but not seen. Discombe Chase, the Discombe lodges, and the village and school-houses of Discombe were obvious facts which impressed the stranger.

That sweetly pensive face of Mrs. Wornock's had slain the viper envy in Allan's breast. When first he rode through those woods and over those undulating pastures and by those gables embowered in roses and wisteria, or starred with the pale blue clematis, he had felt a certain sour discontent with his own good fortune, about which people, from his mother down to the acquaintance of yesterday, prattled and prosed so officiously. He was sick of hearing himself called a lucky fellow. Luck, forsooth! what was his luck compared with Geoffrey Wornock's? That a bachelor uncle of his, having scraped together a modest little fortune, and not being able to carry it with him to the nether-world, should have passed it on to him, Allan, was not such a strange event as to warrant the running commentary of congratulation that had assailed his ear ever since he came to Matcham. No one congratulated Geoffrey Wornock. Nobody talked of his good luck. He had been born in the purple, and people spoke of him as of one having a divine right to the best things that this earth can give—to a Carolian mansion, and chase and park, and wide-spreading farms. There seemed to Allan Carew's self-consciousness an implied disparagement of himself in the tone which Matcham people took about Geoffrey Wornock. They in a manner congratulated him on his likeness to the Lord of Discombe Manor, and insinuated that he ought to be proud of himself because of this resemblance to the local magnate.

To-day, however, Allan forgot all those infinitesimal vexations which in the beginning of his residence at Matcham had made the name of Wornock odious to him. His thoughts were full of that pale sad face, the wasted cheeks, the heavy eyelids, the somewhat sickly transparency of complexion, the large violet eyes, which lit up the whole face as with a light that is not of this world. It was the most spiritual countenance he had ever seen—the first face which had ever suggested to him the epithet ethereal.

He remembered what society had told him about Mrs. Wornock; her encouragement of spirit-rapping people and thought-reading people, and every phase of modern super-naturalism; her passion for music—a passion so absorbing as almost to pass the border-line of sanity; at least in the opinion of the commonplace sane. He wondered no longer that such a woman had held herself aloof from the hunting, and shooting, and dinner-giving, and tea-drinking population scattered within a radius of eight or ten miles of Discombe; the people with whom, had she lived the conventional life of the conventional rural lady, she should have been on intimate terms. She was among them, but not of them, Allan told himself.

"Surely I am not in love with a woman old enough to be my mother!" he thought, between jest and earnest, as he drove up to the house. "I have not thought so persistently of any woman since I was sick for love of the dean's pretty daughter, fairest and last of my calf-loves."

He was not wholly in jest, for during the last three days the lady's image had haunted him with an insistency that bordered on "possession." It was as if those dark grey eyes had cast a spell upon him, and as if he must needs wait until the enchantress who held him in her mystic bands should unweave her mystery and set his thoughts at liberty.

The hall door stood open to the summer air and the afternoon sun. A large black poodle, with an air of ineffable wisdom, was stretched near the threshold; a liver-and-white St. Bernard sunned his hairy bulk upon the grass in front of the steps; and on the broad terrace to the right of the house a peacock spread the rainbow splendour of his tail, and strutted in stately slowness towards the sun.

"House and garden belong to fairyland," thought Allan. "The enchantress has but to wave her wand and fix the picture for a century. We may have extended the limit of human life a hundred years hence, and Mrs. Wornock's age may count as girlhood, when some gay young prince of fifty-five shall ride through the tangled woodland to awaken the sleeper. Who can tell? 'We know what we are, but we know not what we may be.'"

CHAPTER IV.

"IN THE ALL-GOLDEN AFTERNOON."

The hall door stood wide open to the sunlight, sufficiently guarded by that splendid brute, the St. Bernard.

A middle-aged footman in the sober Wornock livery came at the sound of the bell, the St. Bernard watching the visitor with grave but friendly eyes, and evidently perfectly aware of his respectability.

Mrs. Wornock was at home. A slow and solemn butler now appeared upon the scene, and led the way to a corridor which opened out of the hall; and at the end of this corridor, like Vandyke's famous portrait of Charles the First at Warwick Castle, the full-length portrait of a young man in a hunting-coat looked Allan Carew in the face.

In spite of all he had been told about his likeness to the owner of Discombe, the sight of that frank young face looking at him under the bright white light fairly startled him. For the moment it seemed to him as if he had seen his own reflection in a cheval-glass; but as he drew nearer the canvas the likeness lessened, the difference in the features came out, and he saw that the resemblance was less a likeness than a reminiscence. Distance was needed to make the illusion, and he could understand now why his new friends of the hunting-field should have taken him for Wornock on that first morning when he rode up to them as a stranger.

The portrait was by Millais, painted with as much brio and vigour as the better-known picture of the young Marchioness of Huntley. Mr. Wornock was standing in an old stone doorway, leaning in an easy attitude against the deep arch of the door, hunting-crop, cigar-case, and hat on a table in the background, standing where he had stood on many a winter morning, waiting for his horse.

There was a skylight over this end of the corridor, and the portrait of the master of the house shone out brilliantly under the clear top-light.

The butler stopped within a few paces of the portrait, opened a low, old-fashioned door, and ushered Mr. Carew into a spacious room, at the further end of which a lady was sitting by an open window, beyond which he saw the long vista of an Italian garden, a cypress avenue, where statues were gleaming here and there in the sunshine. There was a grand piano on one side of the room, an organ on the other; books filled every recess. This spacious apartment was evidently music-room and library rather than drawing-room, and here, amidst books and music, lived the lonely lady of the house.

She came to meet him with a friendly smile as he advanced into the room, holding out her hand.

"It was very good of you to come so soon," she said, in her low, musical voice. "I wanted so much to see you—to know you. Yes, you are very like him. One of those accidental likenesses which are so common, and yet seem so strange. My husband had a friend who was murdered because he was like Sir Robert Peel; but my son is not a public man, and he has no enemies. You will run no risks on account of your likeness to him.

"I am grateful to the likeness which has given me the honour of knowing Mrs. Wornock," said Allan, taking the seat to which she motioned him, as she resumed her low chair by the window.

"Indeed, you have no reason. I am a very stupid person. I go nowhere, I see very few people; and the people I do see are people whom you would think unworthy of your interest."

"Not if you are interested in them. They cannot be unworthy."

"Oh, I am easily interested! I like strange people. I like to believe strange things. Your friend, Mrs. Mornington, will tell you that I am a foolish person."

"You have seen Mrs. Mornington lately?" questioned Allan.

"Yes; she was here yesterday afternoon. She is always bright and amusing, and I always feel particularly stupid in her society. She is always bright and amusing, and I always feel particularly stupid in her society. She talked of you, but I did not tell her I wanted to make your acquaintance. She would have offered to make a luncheon-party for me to meet you—or something dreadful of that kind."

"You have a great dislike to society, Mrs. Wornock?" he asked, keenly interested.

Her manner was so fresh and simple, almost childlike in its confiding candour, and her appearance was no less interesting than her manner. It is the fashion of our day for women of five and forty to look young, even to girlishness; but most women of five and forty are considerably indebted to modern art for that advantage. Here there was no art. The pale, clear fairness of the complexion owed nothing to the perfumer's palette. No poudre des fées blanched the delicate brow; no rose d'amour flushed the cheek; no eau de Medée brightened the large violet eyes. The lines which thought and sorrow had drawn upon the fair brow were undisguised, and in the soft, pale gold of the hair there were threads of silver. The youthfulness of the face was in its colouring and expression—the complexion so delicately fair, the countenance so trustful and pleading. It was the countenance of a woman to whom the conventionalities and jargon of modern life were unknown.

"You saw my son's portrait in the corridor?" said Mrs. Wornock.

"Yes. It struck my untutored eye as a very fine picture—almost as powerful as the Gladstone and the Salisbury, which I remember in the Millais collection at the Grosvenor."

"But as for the likeness to yourself, now—did that strike you as forcibly as it has struck other people?"

"I confess that as I stood in the hall I was inclined to exclaim, 'That is I or my brother!' But as I came nearer the picture I saw there was considerable diversity. To begin with, your son is much handsomer than I."

"The drawing of his features may be more correct, but you are quite handsome enough," she answered, with her pretty friendly air, as if she had been his aunt. "And your face is more strongly marked than his, just as your voice is stronger," she added, with a sigh.

"Your son is not an invalid, I hope?"

"An invalid! No. But he is not very strong. He could not play football. He hated even cricket. He is passionately fond of horses, and an ardent sportsman; but he can be sadly idle. He likes to lie about in the sunshine, reading or dreaming. I fear he is a dreamer, like his mother."

"He is not like you, in person."

"No."

"He is like his father, no doubt."

"You will see his father's picture, and you can judge for yourself. Well, we are to be friends, are we not, Mr. Carew? And you will come to see me sometimes; and if you ever have any little troubles which can be lightened by a woman's sympathy, you will come and confide them to me, I hope."

"It will be very sweet to be allowed to confide in so kind a friend," said Allan.

"My son will be home for his long leave before the end of the year, and I want you to make him your friend. He is very amiable," again with a suppressed sigh. "Come, now it is your turn to tell me something about yourself. This room tells you all there is to be told about me."

"It tells me you are very fond of music."

"I live for it. Music has been my companion and consoler all my life."

"And I hope you will let me hear you play again some day."

"Again? Ah, I forgot! You were in the churchyard last Sunday while I was playing. Did you listen?"

"As long as you played. I was under the open window most of the time."

"You are fond of organ music?"

"As fond as an ignorant man may be. I know nothing of the subtleties of music. I have never been educated up to Wagner or Dvorak. I love the familiar voices—Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, Gounod, Auber even, and I adore our English master of melody, Sullivan. Does that shock you?"

"Not at all. I will play his cantata for you some day. If you have nothing better to do with your time this afternoon, I should like to show you my garden."

"I shall be enchanted. I am enchanted already with that long straight walk, those walls of cypress and yew, that peacock sunning his emerald and sapphire plumage by the dial. In such a garden did Beatrice hide when Hero and her ladies talked of Benedick's passion; in such a garden did Jessica and Lorenzo loiter under the moonlight."

"I see you love your Shakespeare."

"As interpreted by Irving and Ellen Terry. The Lyceum was the school in which I learnt to love the bard. An Eton examination in Richard the Second only prejudiced me against him."

"Mr. Wornock was a great Shakespearian."

They were in the garden by this time—sauntering with slow footsteps along the level stretch of turf on one side of the broad gravel walk. At the end of the cypress avenue there was a semicircular recess, shut in by a raised bank, and a wall of clipped yew, in which, at regular intervals, there were statues in dark green niches.

"Mr. Wornock brought the statues from Rome when he was a young man. The gardens were laid out by his grandfather nearly a century ago," explained Mrs. Wornock.

Allan noticed that she spoke of her husband generally as "Mr. Wornock."

"That amphitheatre reminds me a little of the Boboli gardens," said Allan; "but there is a peacefulness about this solitude which no public garden can have."

Three peacocks were trailing their plumage on the long lawns between the house and the amphitheatre, and one less gorgeous but more ethereal, a bird of dazzling whiteness, was perched, with outspread tail, on an angle of the cypress wall.

The lady and her companion strolled to the end of the lawn, and crossed the amphitheatre to a stone temple, open on the side fronting the south-western sun, and spacious enough to accommodate a dozen people.

"If you had a garden-play, how delightfully this temple would serve for a central point in your stage," said Allan, admiringly.

"People have asked me to lend them the gardens for a play—'Twelfth Night,' or 'Much Ado about Nothing;' but I have always said no. I should hate to see a crowd in this dear old garden."

"Yet there are people who would think such a place as this created on purpose for garden-parties, and who would desire nothing better than a crowd of smart people."

Mrs. Wornock shuddered at the mention of smart people.

"A party of that kind would be misery for me," she said. "And now tell me about yourself, and your relations. Mrs. Mornington told me that your father and mother are both living, and that you inherited Beechhurst from your uncle. I remember seeing Admiral Darnleigh years and years ago, when everything at Discombe and at Matcham was new to me. It must be sad for your mother to lose you from her own home."

"My mother is not given to sadness," Allan answered, smiling. "She is the best and kindest of mothers, and I know she loves me as dearly as any son need desire; but she is quite resigned to my having my own home and my own interests. She would argue, perhaps, that were I to marry I must have a house of my own, and that my establishment at Beechhurst is only a little premature."

"You are very much attached to your mother?"

"Very much—and to my father."

"Your tone as you say those words tell me that your father is the dearer of the two."

"You have a quick ear for shades of meaning, Mrs. Wornock."

"Pray do not think me impertinent. I am not questioning you out of idle curiosity. If we are to be friends in the future, I must know and understand something of your life and your mind. But perhaps I bore you—perhaps you think me both eccentric and impertinent."

"My dear Mrs. Wornock, I am deeply touched that you should offer to be my friend. Be assured I have no reserve, and am willing—possibly too willing—to talk of myself and my own people. I have no dark corners in my life. My history is all open country—an uninteresting landscape enough. But there is no difficult going—there are no bogs or risky bits over which the inquiring spirit need skim lightly. Your ear did not deceive you, just now. Fondly as I love my mother, I will freely confess that the bond that draws me to my father is the stronger bond. In the parrot jargon of the day, his is the more interesting 'personality.' He is a man of powerful intellect, whose mind has done nothing for the good of the world—who will die unhonoured and unremembered except by his familiar friends. There is one question I have asked myself about him ever since I was old enough to think—a question which I first asked myself when I began to read classics with him in my school vacations, and which I had not finished asking myself when his untiring help had enabled me to take a first-class in the Honour School. To me it has always been a mystery that a man of wide attainments and financial independence should have been utterly destitute of ambition. My father was a young man when he married; he is still in the prime of life; and for six and twenty years he has been content to vegetate in Suffolk, and has regarded his annual visit to London as more of an affliction than a relief. It is as if the hands of life's clock had stopped in the golden noon of youth. I have told myself again and again that my father's life must have been shadowed by some great sorrow before his marriage, young as he was when he married."

Mrs. Wornock listened intently, her head slightly bent, her clasped hands resting on her knee, her sensitive lips slightly parted.

"You say that your father married young," she said, after a brief silence, in which she seemed to be thinking over his words. "What do you call young in such a case?"

"My father was not three and twenty when he married—two years younger than I am at this present hour—and yet the idea of matrimony has never shaped itself in my mind. But you must not infer from anything I have said that my father's has been an unhappy marriage. On the contrary, he is devoted to my mother, and she to him. I cannot imagine a better assorted couple. Each supplies the qualities wanting in the other. She is all movement, impulse, and spontaneousness. He is calm and meditative, with depths of thought and feeling which no one has sounded. They are perfectly happy as husband and wife. But there is a shade of melancholy that steals over my father in quiet, unoccupied hours, which indicates a sorrow or a disappointment in the past. I have taken it to mean an unhappy love-affair. I may be utterly wrong, and the shadow may be cast by a disappointed ambition. It is not unlikely that a man of powerful intellect and lymphatic temperament should feel that he had wasted opportunities, and failed in life. It is quite easy to imagine ambition without the energy to achieve."

She made no comment upon this, but Allan could see in her eager countenance that she was intensely interested.

"Is your mother beautiful?" she asked timidly.

It seemed a foolish and futile question; and it jarred upon that serious thought of his parents which had been inspired by her previous questioning. But, after all, it was a natural question for a woman to ask, and he smiled as he answered—

"No, my mother is not beautiful. I am not guilty of treason as a son if I confess that she is plain, since she herself would be the first to take offence at any sophistication of the truth. She has never set up for being other than she is. She has a fine countenance and a fine figure, straight as a dart, with a waist which a girl might acknowledge without a blush. She dresses with admirable taste, and always looks well, after her own fashion, exclusive of beautiful features or brilliant colouring. She is what women call stylish, and men distinguished. I am as proud as I am fond of her."

"Will she come to see you in your new home?"

"Most assuredly my mother will pay me a visit before the summer is over, and I shall be charmed to bring you and her together."

"And your father? Will not he come?"

"I don't know. He is very difficult to move. He is like the lichen on the old stone walls at home. He takes no particular interest in chairs and tables; he would care not a fig for my new surroundings. Besides, he saw Beechhurst years ago, when the Admiral was building and improving. He has no curiosity to bring him here; and as for his son, he knows he has only to want me for me to be at his side."

After this there came a silence. Certainly Mrs. Wornock was not gifted as a conversationalist. She sat looking straight before her at the long perspective of lawn and cypress, broad gravel walk, and narrow grass plots, all verging to a point at which the old house rose square and grey, crowned with cupola and bell. The peacocks strutted slowly along the narrow lawn. The waters of a fountain flashed in the warm sunlight. It was a garden that recalled Tivoli, or that old grave garden of the Vatican, with its long level walks and prim flower-beds, in which the Holy Father takes his restricted airing. In the Vatican pleasure grounds there are peacocks and clipped hedges, and smooth greensward, and formal cypress avenues, and quaint arbours; but the hum of Rome, the echoes of the Papal Barrack, the rush of the Tiber are near; and not even in that antique garden can there be this summer silence, profound as in the enchanted isle where it seemeth always afternoon.

"Tell me more about yourself, your childhood, your youth," Mrs. Wornock asked suddenly, with an air of agitated impatience which took Allan by surprise.

Mrs. Mornington had prepared him for a certain eccentricity in the lonely lady of Discombe; but the strangeness of her manner was even more than he had expected.

"There is very little to tell about my own life," he said. "I have lived at home for the most part, except when I was at Eton and Cambridge. My father helped me in all my studies. I never had any other tutor except at the University. My home life was of the quietest. Fendyke is twenty miles from Cambridge, but it seems at the end of the world. The single line of rail that leads to it comes to a full stop. The terminus stands in the midst of a Dutch landscape—level fields divided by shallow dykes, a river so straight that it might as well be a canal, water-mills, pollarded willows, broad clean roads, and fine old Norman churches large enough for a city, no Sunday trains, and not many on lawful days. A neat little town, with decent shops, and comfortable inns, and a market which only awakens from a Pompeian slumber for an hour or two on Fridays. A land of rest and plenty, picturesque cottages and trim cottage gardens, an air of prosperity which I believe is real. So much for our town and surroundings. For the family mansion picture to yourself a long low house, built partly of brick and partly of wood, with chimney-stacks that contain brick enough for the building of respectable houses, and which have defied the gales sweeping down from the Ural mountains—there is nothing, mark you, between Fendyke and the Urals—ever since Queen Elizabeth was young enough to pace a pavan."

"You must be fond of an old house like that."

"Yes, I am very fond of Fendyke. I even love the surrounding country, though I can but wish Nature had not ironed the landscape with her mammoth iron. She might have left us a few creases, a wrinkled meadow here and there."

"I have heard that people born in Norfolk and Suffolk have an innate antipathy to hills."

"That may be. Indeed, I have noticed in the East Anglians a kind of stubborn pride in the flatness of their soil. But I have not that perverted pride in ugliness, since I was not born in Suffolk."

"Indeed!"

"No. My father lived in Sussex—at Hayward's Heath—at the time of his marriage, and for half a dozen years after my birth. Fendyke came to him from his maternal grandfather, who left the estate to his daughter and heiress, and to her son after her, who was to assume the name and arms of Carew when he succeeded to the property. My father's name was Beresford."

There was no reply—no further questioning on Mrs. Wornock's part—and for some minutes Allan abandoned himself to the dreamy silence of the scene, content to watch the peacocks on the lawn, and to listen to the splash of the fountains.

Then suddenly the silence surprised him, and he turned to look at his companion. Her head had fallen back against the wall of the summer-house, her eyes were closed, and her face was white as death. She was in a dead faint; and they were at least a quarter of a mile from the house.

The situation was awkward for Allan, though there was nothing in so simple a matter as a fainting-fit to surprise him. He knew that there are women who faint at the smallest provocation, in a crowded room, in the sunshine, at church, anywhere. Here the sunshine was perhaps to blame; that delicious pure sunlight in which he had been basking.

He gave a long Australian cooe, long enough and loud enough to have brought help in the wilderness, and assuredly calculated to attract some gardener at work within call. Then he bethought himself of the fountain, and ran to get some water in his hat.

At the first dash of water, Mrs. Wornock opened her eyes, with a little sobbing sigh, and looked at him as if wondering who and what he was.

"I knew he would have answered my prayer," she murmured brokenly, "spirit to spirit, ghost to ghost."

It seemed a worse kind of faint than Allan had supposed, for now her mind was wandering.

"I fear the sun was too warm for you," he said, standing before her in painful embarrassment, half expecting some indication of absolute lunacy.

"Yes, yes, it was the sun," she answered nervously. "The glare is so strong this afternoon; and this summer-house is shadeless. I must go back to the house. It was very foolish of me to faint. I am so sorry. I hope you won't consider me a very silly person."

"My dear Mrs. Wornock, I have never heard that a fainting-fit on a warm summer afternoon is a sign of silliness."

"No, it is a thing one cannot help, can one? But it must have been so unpleasant for you. Ah, here is one of the gardeners," as a man came hurrying towards her, with a scared countenance. "There is nothing the matter, Henry. I am quite well now, Mr. Carew, and I can walk back to the house. And so your father's original name was Beresford. Does he call himself Beresford-Carew?"

"Yes, in all important documents; but he is a man too careless of forms to trouble himself much about the first name; and it has fallen into disuse for the most part, Carew being the name of honour in our county. He is known at Fendyke and in the neighbourhood simply as Squire Carew. I sign myself Beresford-Carew sometimes, when I want to distinguish myself from the numerous clan of Carews in Devonshire and elsewhere. Will you take my arm to go back to the house?"

"Yes"—timidly and faintly—"I shall be very glad of your support."

She put her hand through his arm, and walked slowly and silently by his side. Returning consciousness had brought back very little colour to her face. It had still an almost unearthly pallor. She walked the whole distance without uttering a word. A faint sigh fluttered her lips two or three times during that slow promenade, and on her drooping lashes Allan saw the glitter of a tear. For some reason or other she was deeply moved; or it might be that her fainting-fits always took this emotional form. He saw her safely seated on her own sofa, with footman and maid in attendance upon her, before he took a brief adieu.

"You'll come and see me again, I hope," she said, with a faint smile, as she gave him her hand at parting.

"I shall be most happy," he murmured, doubtful within himself whether he would ever hazard a repetition of this agitating finale to an afternoon call.

To be interrogated about himself and his surroundings, with an eager curiosity which was certainly startling, and then to find himself tête-à-tête with an unconscious fellow-creature was an ordeal that few young men would care to repeat.

When he described his visit next day to Mrs. Mornington, she only shrugged her shoulders and said decisively, "Hysteria! Too much money, too much leisure, and no respectable connections. If there is one woman I pity more than another that woman is Mrs. Wornock."

"If ever I call on her again it must be with you or with my mother," said Allan. "I won't face her alone."

Although he came to this decision about the lady, he found himself not the less disposed to dwell upon her image during the days and weeks that followed his afternoon at Discombe; and more than once he asked himself whether there might not be some more cogent reason for her fainting-fit than the sun's warmth or the sun's glare—whether that deep interest which she had evinced in all he could tell her of home and parents might not be founded on something more serious than an idle woman's idle curiosity.

Could it be that he had lighted upon some trace of that mystery in his father's past life—that mystery which, without tangible evidence, he had always imagined as the key-note to his father's character in later years? She had fainted immediately upon his telling her his father's former name. Was that a mere coincidence of time, or was the name the cause of the fainting-fit?

Lady Emily arrived on a visit to her son while he was pondering this unanswerable question about Mrs. Wornock, and he caught at the opportunity. He hardly allowed his mother time to inspect his house and gardens, and the small farm which supplied his larder, and to give her opinion upon the furnishing of the rooms and the arrangement of the flower-beds and lawns, before he suggested taking her to call upon his neighbour at Discombe.

"But why, Allan? why should I call upon this Mrs. Wornock, when I am a stranger in the land?" argued his mother. "If there is any question of calling, it is Mrs. Wornock who must call upon me."

"Ah, but this lady is an exception to all rules, mother. She calls upon hardly anybody, and she has begged me to go and see her, and I feel a kind of hesitation in going alone—a second time."

He stopped in sudden embarrassment. He did not wish to tell his mother about the fainting-fit, though he had described the thing freely to Mrs. Mornington. He had thought more seriously of the circumstance since that conversation, and he was inclined to attach more importance to it now than at that time.

"I think you would be interested in Mrs. Wornock, mother," he urged, after a pause, during which Lady Emily had been pacing the room from window to wall with the idea of suggesting a bay to be thrown out where there was now only a flat French casement.

"Allan, you alarm me. I think you must be in love with this eccentric widow. You told me she was very rich, didn't you? It might not be a bad match for you."

"Perhaps not, if Mrs. Wornock had any penchant for me; and if I wanted a wife old enough to be my mother. Do you know that the lady has a son as old as I am?"

He reddened at the thought of that son, whose likeness to Beresford Carew was startling enough to surprise Lady Emily, and might possibly occasion unpleasant suspicions. And yet accidental likenesses are so common in this world that it would be weak to be scared by such a resemblance.

Would he be wise in taking his mother to Discombe? Perhaps not. He had made up his mind to take her there, wisely or foolishly. He wanted to bring her plain common sense to bear upon Mrs. Wornock's fantastic temperament.

"My mother is the shrewdest woman I know," he told himself. "She will read Mrs. Wornock's character much better than I can."

Lady Emily was the soul of good nature, and was particularly free from the trammels of conventionality; so, when she found her son had the matter at heart, she waived all question of the caller and the called upon, and allowed Allan to drive her to Discombe on the afternoon after her arrival at Beechhurst; and the drive and the approach to the Manor were very agreeable to her.

"You are really prettier hereabouts than we are in Suffolk," she said condescendingly; "but you have not our wide expanse of field and meadow, our open horizon. Those high downs have a cramping effect on your landscape—they narrow your outlook, and shut you in too much. Your sunsets must be very poor, in a broken-up country like this."

The weather was more sultry than on Allan's previous visit. Summer had ripened, the roses were in bloom, and the last purple petal had fallen in the rhododendron jungle through which they drove to the Manor House.

Mrs. Wornock was at home. Vain for the footman to deny it, even had he been so minded, for the deep-toned music of the organ was pealing along the corridor. The chords which begin Beethoven's Funeral March for the Burial of a Hero crashed out, solemnly and slowly, as Lady Emily and her son approached the music-room; and when, at the opening of the door, the player stopped suddenly, the silence was more startling than the music had been.

Startling, too, to see the fragile form of the player, and the semi-transparent hands which had produced that volume of sound.

"I had no idea you were so fine a musician, Mrs. Wornock," Lady Emily said graciously, after the introduction had been got over, the lady of Discombe standing before her timidly in the broad sunlight from the open window, so fragile, so youthful-looking, so unlike the mistress of a great house, and the chief personage in a rustic parish. "My son was eloquent in your praise, but he forgot to tell me of your musical talent."

"I don't think I have much talent," answered Mrs. Wornock, hesitatingly. "I am very fond of music—that is all."

"There is a great deal in that ALL. I wish my love of music—and Allan knows I prefer a good concert to any other form of entertainment—would enable me to play as you do, for then I could take the place of the stupidest organist in England at our parish church."

Lady Emily was making conversation, seeing that Mrs. Wornock's lips were mute and dry, as if she were absolutely speechless from fright. A most extraordinary woman, thought Lady Emily, shy to a degree that bordered on lunacy.

The talk had all to be done by Allan and his mother, since Mrs. Wornock's share in it was hardly more than monosyllabic. She assented to everything they said—she contradicted herself over and over again about the weather, and about the distinguishing features of the surrounding country. She agreed with Lady Emily that the hills spoiled the landscape; she assented to Allan's protestation that the hills were the chief charm of the neighbourhood. She rang for tea, and when the servants had brought tables and tray and tea-kettle, she sat as in a dream for ever so long before she became conscious that the things were there, and that she had a duty to perform. Then she filled the cups with tremulous hands, and allowed Allan to help her through the simplest details.

Her obvious distress strengthened Allan's suspicions. There must be some mystery behind all this embarrassment. Mrs. Wornock could hardly behave in this way to every stranger who called upon her. Of all women living no one was less calculated to inspire awe than Lady Emily Carew. Good humour was writ large upon her open countenance. The milk of human kindness gave softness to her speech. She was full of consideration for others.

Distracted by the music of the organ, Lady Emily had not even glanced at the Millais portrait which faced her as she walked along the corridor. It was, therefore, with unmixed astonishment that she observed a photograph on an easel conspicuous on a distant table—a photograph which she took to be the likeness of her son.

"I see you have given Mrs. Wornock your photo, Allan," she said. "That is more than you have done for me since you were at the University."

"Go and look at the photo, mother, and you will see I have not been so wanting in filial duty."

Lady Emily rose and went over to the table in the furthermost window.

"No, I see it is another face; but there is a wonderful look of you. Pray who is this nice-looking young man, Mrs. Wornock? I may call him nice-looking with a good grace, since he is not my son. His features are more refined than Allan's. The modelling of the face is more delicate."

"That is my son's portrait," answered Mrs. Wornock, "and it is thought a good likeness. He is like Mr. Carew, is he not? Almost startlingly like; but the resemblance is less striking in the picture than in the living face. It is in expression that the two faces are alike."

"I begin to understand why you are interested in my son," said Lady Emily, smiling down at the face on the easel. "The two young men might be brothers. Pray how old is this young gentleman?"

"He will be six and twenty in August."

"And Allan was twenty-five last March. And is Mr. Wornock an only son, like my Allan?"

"Yes. I have only him. When he is away, I am quite alone—except for my organ and piano. I try sometimes to think they are both alive."

"What a pity you have no daughter! A place like this looks as if it wanted a daughter. But you and I are in the same desolate condition. Allan is all I have—and my white farm."

"Mother, why not my white farm and Allan?" said her son laughingly. "If you knew more of my mother, Mrs. Wornock, if you knew her in Suffolk, you would be very likely to think the farm first and not second in her dear love. Perhaps you, too, are interested in farming."

Mrs. Wornock smiled a gentle negative, and gave a glance at the triple keyboard yonder, which was eloquent of meaning. A glance which seemed to ask, "Who could waste time upon cowhouse and poultry-yard when all the master-spirits of harmony are offering their mysteries to the faithful student?"

"Well, mother, how do you like the mistress of Discombe?" asked Allan, as they drove homeward.

"She is very refined—rather graceful—dreadfully shy," answered his mother, musingly; "and I hope you won't be angry with me, Allan, if I add that she seems to me half an idiot."

"You saw her to-day at a disadvantage," said Allan, and then lapsed into meditative silence.

Had he not also seen this strange woman at a disadvantage when she fainted at the mention of his father's name—the name his father had borne in youth, not the name by which he was known now? Her fainting-fit might have had no significance in his eyes if it had not followed upon her eager questioning about his father. And whatever suspicions had been excited by that first visit were intensified by Mrs. Wornock's manner in the presence of Lady Emily. Such obvious embarrassment—a shyness so much more marked than that with which she had received him on his first visit—could hardly exist without a deeper cause than solitary habits or nervous temperament.

The likeness between Geoffrey Wornock and himself might have meant no more than the likeness between Mr. Drummond and Sir Robert Peel; but that likeness, taken in conjunction with Mrs. Wornock's extraordinary interest in his father, and most noticeable embarrassment in receiving his mother, might mean a great deal—might mean, indeed, that the cloud upon his father's life was the shadow of a lifelong remorse, the dark memory of sin and sorrow. It might be that within the years preceding his marriage George Beresford had been involved in a guilty intrigue with Mr. Wornock's young wife.

To believe this was to think very badly of this gentle creature, who used the advantages of wealth and position with such modest restraint, whose only delight in life was in one of the most exalted of life's pleasures. To believe this was to think Mrs. Wornock a false and ungrateful wife to a generous husband; and it was to believe George Beresford a vulgar seducer.

If there is one fallacy to which the non-legal mind is more prone than another it is its belief in its power to estimate the value of circumstantial evidence. Allan Carew tried his father and Mrs. Wornock by the evidence of circumstances, and he found them guilty.

"My mother shall never cross that woman's threshold again!" he decided, angry with himself for having taken Lady Emily to Discombe.

CHAPTER V.

MORE NEW-COMERS.

Allan recalled the story which Mrs. Mornington had told him of Mr. Wornock's marriage, and the mysterious birth of his son and heir—mysterious in that it was a strange thing for an English gentleman with a fine estate to carry off his wife to a foreign country before the birth of her first child, and to remain an exile from home and property until his son was three years old. Mystery of some kind—a secret sorrow or a secret shame—must have been at the root of conduct so unusual; and might not that secret include the story of the young wife's sin?

Allan Carew had heard of husbands so beneficent as to forgive that sin which to the mind of the average man lies beyond reach of pardon; husbands who have taken back runaway wives, and set the fallen idol once again in the temple of home-life; husbands who, knowing themselves old, ugly, and unlovable, have palliated and pardoned the passionate impulses of undisciplined girlhood, the sin in which there has been more of romantic folly than of profligate inclination; husbands who have asked themselves whether they were not the darker sinners in having possessed themselves of creatures so lovely and so frail, so unadapted for a passionless, workaday union with grey hairs and old age. It might be, Allan thought, that Mr. Wornock was one of these, and that he had conveyed his young wife away from the scene of her sin and the influence of her betrayer, and had hidden her shame and his dishonour in that quiet valley among the snow-peaks and the glaciers. But if Mrs. Wornock had so sinned in the early days of her married life there must be people at Matcham who would remember the lover's presence at Discombe, even although his real character had been undiscovered by the searching eyes of village censors.

Lady Emily went back to her husband and her farm after a week at Beechhurst—a pleasant and busy week, in which the mother's experience and good sense had been brought to bear upon all the details of the son's household and domestic possessions—plate and linen, glass and china, books and ornaments.

"If it were not for your smoking-room, or drawing-room, or whatever you may be pleased to call it, your house would be obviously Philistine," said Lady Emily; "but that is a really fine room, and there are some pretty things in it."

"Some pretty things? Yes, there are a few," answered Allan, laughing at her tone of patronage. "I was offered five hundred pounds for that piece of tapestry which hangs in front of the conservatory doors by a man who thinks himself a judge of such things. The room is full of treasures from the Summer Palace."

"My brother must have looted in a most audacious manner!"

"No, he bought the things afterwards—mostly from the French sailors, who were licensed to steal or destroy. I believe the bronzes, and porcelain, and ivories, and embroideries that the admiral bought for a few hundreds are worth as many thousands. But there they are, and I must be very hard up before I disturb them."

Allan called upon Mrs. Mornington the day after his mother's departure, and was lucky enough to find that lady at home and alone.

She was sitting in her verandah, sewing, with a large basket of plain work on the ground beside her, and her scissors and other implements on a wicker-table in front of her. She had a trellis covered with climbing roses for a background, and a sunny lawn, a sunk fence, and a paddock dotted with Jersey cows for her outlook.

"I'm at work for the Guild," she said, apologetically, after shaking hands with Allan, and she went on herring-boning a flannel waistcoat; a waistcoat of that stout flannel which is supposed to have a kind of affinity with the skin of the agricultural labourer, although it can be worn comfortably by no other class.

Allan knew nothing about the Guild, but was accustomed to see Mrs. Mornington's superfluous energy expending itself in some kind of needlework. He seated himself in the comfortable armchair to which she invited him, and prepared himself for a long talk.

Of course he could not begin at once upon the subject of Mrs. Wornock. That would have to be introduced casually. He talked about his mother, and her regret at not having been able to stay till the following week, when Mrs. Mornington was to give a small dance, to which Lady Emily and her son had been invited.

"She can't be as sorry as I am, or she'd have managed to stay," replied Mrs. Mornington, in her blunt style.

"She has my father to think of. She is never long away from him."

"Why don't he come too?"

"I hope to get him for a week or so before the summer is over. He promises to come and look at my surroundings; but he is very much of a recluse. He lives in his library."

"I dare say he will contrive to come when Philip and I are away on our August holiday. We always take a month on the Continent just to keep us in touch with the outside world, and to remind us that the earth doesn't end on the other side of Salisbury. Do you know why I am giving this dance?"

"I am sure it is from a conscientious motive—to pay your debts. I find that most ladies' hospitalities are founded upon a system of exchange and barter, 'cutlet for cutlet,' as Lady Londonderry called it."

"It is very rude of you to say that—as if women had no real hospitality! No, Mr. Carew, I owe no one anything in the dancing line; and I am not making one evening party pay for a whole year's dinners. I have known that done, I assure you. No, I am turning my house out of windows, and making poor Phil utterly miserable, for the sake of a certain young half-French niece of mine, who is coming to live in this neighbourhood with my brother Bob, her thoroughly English father."

"You mean General Vincent? Some one told me that he was related to you."

"Related? I should think he was related to me! He used to pull my hair—we wore long plaits in those days, don't you know—with a ferocity only possible in an elder brother. Poor dear old Bob! I am monstrously pleased at the idea of having him near me in our old age. He has been tossed and beaten about the world for the last thirty years, at home and abroad, and now he is to enjoy enforced leisure, and the noble income which our country bestows upon a retired lieutenant-general. He has a little money of his own, fortunately, and a little more from his wife; so he will be able to live comfortably at Marsh House—in a very quiet, unpretentious way, bien entendu."

"He is a widower, I conclude?"

"Yes; his pretty French wife died fifteen years ago. He met her in Canada, but she was a Parisian pur sang, and of a very good family. She had gone to Montreal with her mother, to visit some relations—uncle, cousin, or what-not. It was a very happy marriage, and Suzette is a very charming girl. She is a Papist"—with a faint sigh—"which, of course, is a pity. But even in spite of that, she is a very sweet girl."

"Worthy that you should turn your house out of window in order to introduce her to the neighbourhood in the pleasantest possible manner," said Allan. "My greenhouse is only a bachelor's idea of glass, but any flowers there shall be sent to add to your decorations—at least, if you don't despise such poor aid."

"How truly nice of you! Every flower will be useful. I want to make the rooms pretty, since nothing can make them spacious. Ah, if I had only the Manor House now—those noble rooms of which Mrs. Wornock makes so little use!"

Allan seized his opportunity.

"Mrs. Wornock is the most singular woman I ever met!" he exclaimed quickly, lest Mrs. Mornington should diverge to another subject. "I took my mother to call upon her——"

"Had she called upon Lady Emily?" asked Mrs. Mornington, surprised.

"No. It was altogether out of order, my mother told me; but I rather insisted upon her going to Discombe. I wanted her to see Mrs. Wornock; and I must say that lady's manner was calculated to excite wonder rather than admiration. I never saw a woman of mature years receive a visitor so awkwardly. Her shyness would have been remarkable in a bread-and-butter miss just escaped from the schoolroom."

"That is so like Mrs. Wornock. The ways of society are a foreign language to her. Had you taken her a German organist with long hair, or a spiritualist, or an esoteric Buddhist, she would have received him with open arms—she would have been simpatica to the highest degree, and would have impressed him with the idea of a sensitive nature and a temperament akin to genius, while I dare say Lady Emily thought her a fool."

"She certainly did not give the lady credit for superior intelligence."

"Of course not. She has not even average intelligence in the affairs of social life. She has lived all these years at Discombe—she might be in touch with some of the best people in the county—and she has learnt nothing, except to play the organ. I believe she has toiled unremittingly at that," concluded Mrs. Mornington, contemptuously.

"I have half forgotten what you told me about her in the first instance. I think you spoke of a mystery in her early life."

"The only mystery was that old Wornock should have married her, and that he should have told us nothing about her belongings. Had she been a lady, we must have heard something about her people in the last five and twenty years; and yet there is a refinement about her which makes me think she could not have sprung from the gutter."

"The gutter! No, indeed! She has an air of exceptional refinement. I should take her to be the offspring of an effete race—a crystallization. In her early married life, when she and Mr. Wornock were living together at Discombe, she had friends, I presume. They must have had visitors occasionally—a house-party?"

"Not they. You must remember that it was not more than six months after Mr. Wornock brought his young wife home when he took her away again——"

"But in the interim," interrupted Allan, eagerly, "they must have had visitors in the house! He would be proud to exhibit his pretty young wife. There must have been men-friends of his coming and going during that time."

"I think not. He was a dry chip; and I don't think he had made many friends in the forty years he had reigned at Discombe. I never heard of any one staying in the house, either at that time or previously. He was hospitable in a casual way to the neighbourhood while he was a bachelor—gave a hunt breakfast every winter, and a good many dinners—but he was not a man to make friends. He was an ardent politician and an ardent Radical, and would have quarrelled with any one who wasn't of his way of thinking."

A blank here. No hint of a too-frequent visitor, of one figure standing out against the quiet background of home-life, of one person whose coming and going had been marked enough to attract attention.

Allan breathed more freely. It was no prurient curiosity which had led him to pry into the secrets of the past. He wanted to know the truth; yet it would have been agony to him to discover anything that would lessen his reverent admiration for his father, or his belief in his father's honour and high principle. Sitting idle in the sunshine beside Mrs. Mornington, he tried to think that there might be nothing more than eccentricity in Mrs. Wornock's conduct, no indication of a dark secret in her fainting-fit, or in her embarrassed manner during his mother's visit.

Mrs. Mornington went back to the subject of her dance—her niece, her brother, his income, his establishment, and the how much or how little he could afford to spend. She lamented the dearth of dancing men.

"Both my boys are away," she said, "Luke with his regiment in Burmah, Fred in London. He might run down for the evening if he liked; but you know what young men are. Well, perhaps you are more civilized than Frederick. He pretends to hate dancing-parties; yet, when we spent a winter at Cannes, he was at a ball nearly every night. He despises my poor little dance."

"I am sure your little dance will be delightful."

"I hope it will not be dull. I am straining every nerve to make it a success. I shall have the house full of nice young people, and I shall have decent music. Only four men, but they will be very good men, and four will make quite enough noise in my poor little rooms."

Mrs. Mornington's "poor little rooms" included a drawing-room thirty feet long, opening into a spacious conservatory. There was a wide bay at the end of the room which would accommodate the grand piano and the four musicians. Allan had to make a tour of inspection with the mistress of the house before he left, and to express his approval of her arrangements.

"There will be a comfortable old-fashioned sit-down supper," she said finally. "I have asked a good many middle-aged people, and there will be nothing for them to do but eat."

CHAPTER VI.

LIKE THE MOTH TO THE FLAME.

A small dance in a bright airy country house on a balmy summer evening is about as pleasant a form of entertainment as can be offered to the youthful mind not satiated by metropolitan entertainments, by balls in Park Lane, where the flowers alone cost the price of an elderly spinster's annuity, Bachelors' balls, and Guards' balls, American balls in Carlton Gardens, patrician balls in grand old London houses, built in the days when rank was as much apart from the herd and the newly rich as royalty; when rank and royalty moved hand-in-hand on a plateau of privilege and splendour as high above the commonality as Madrid is above the sea.

Matcham, which gave itself the airs common to all village communities, pretended to make very light of Mrs. Mornington's dance; a summer dance, when everybody worth meeting was, or ought to be, in London. Happily for Mrs. Mornington, the inhabitants of Matcham were a stay-at-home race—who had neither money nor enterprise for much gadding. To go to Swanage or Budleigh Salterton for a month or so while the leaves were falling was the boldest flight that Matcham people cared about.

There was always so much to do at home—golf, tennis, shooting, hunting, falconry, fishing for the enthusiasts of rod and line, and one's garden and stable all the year round, needing the eye of master and mistress. Except for the absence of the great shipbuilder's family, at Hillerby Height, three miles on the other side of Salisbury, the circle of Matcham society was complete, and the answers to Mrs. Mornington's cards were all acceptances.

Allan went cheerfully enough to the party, but he did not go very early, and he had something of the feeling which most young men entertain, or affect, about dances, the feeling that he was sacrificing himself at the shrine of friendship. He danced well, and he did not dislike dancing—liked it, indeed, when blest with a good partner; but it is not often that a young man can escape the chances of partners that are not altogether good, and Allan felt very doubtful as to the dancing capacities of Matcham. Those healthy, out-of-door young women, who went to about half a dozen dances in a year, would hardly waltz well enough to make waltzing anything but toil and weariness.

He approached the Grove in that state of placid indifference with which a man generally goes to meet his destiny. He looks back in the after-time, and remembers that equable frame of mind, hoping nothing, expecting nothing, content with his lot in life, and in no wise eager to question or forestall fate—

"Tu ne quæsieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi,

Finem di dederint."

The Grove was a long, low stuccoed house, built at the beginning of the century, a house spread over a considerable extent of ground. To-night—with lights and flowers, and all the doors and windows open to the summer gloom, and lace draperies where doors had been, and white-gowned girls moving to and fro, and the sound of a Strauss waltz mixing with the voices of the idlers sitting in the hall—Mrs. Mornington's house was as pretty as a fairy palace, and as much unlike itself in its workaday guise.

Mrs. Mornington, in black lace and diamonds, with a black ostrich fan, loomed with commanding bulk on the threshold of the dancing-room. She wanted no steward, no master of the ceremonies to help her. Alone she did it! Mr. Mornington walked about and pretended to be useful; but it was Mrs. Mornington who did everything. She received the guests, she introduced the few strange young men to the many local young ladies. As for the local young men, whom she had seen grow up from sailor suits and mud-pies to pink coats which marked them members of the South Sarum Hunt, her dominion over these was absolute. She drove them about with threatening movements of her large black fan. She would not allow them rest or respite, would not let them hang together in corners to discuss the hunters they were summering, or the hunters they were thinking of buying, or the probable changes in the management of the kennels, or any other subject dear to the minds of rustic youth.

"You have come here to dance, Billy Walcott, and not to talk of those wretched old screws of yours," said Mrs. Mornington. "You can have that all out in the saddle-room to-morrow when you are smoking with your grooms. Let me look at your programme, Sidney. Not half full, I declare. Now go over to Miss Rycroft this instant, and engage her for the next waltz."

"Come now, Mrs. Mornington, that's rather too rough on me. A man mayn't marry his grandmother; and surely there's some kind of law to forbid his dancing with a woman who looks like his great-aunt."

"Sidney, love, to oblige me. The dear old thing has gone to the expense of a new frock——"

"She might have bought a little more stuff while she was about it," murmured the youth.

"On purpose for my dance, and somebody must give her a waltz. Come, boys, who shall it be?"

"Let's go into the garden and toss up," said Sidney Heathfield; but the other youths protested that they were engaged for every dance, and Sidney, who had come late, and whose programme was only half full, had to submit.

"I'll do it, Mrs. Mornington," he said, with serio-comic resignation, "on condition you get me a dance with Miss Vincent afterwards."

"If I do, she will have to cheat somebody else. Her programme was full a quarter of an hour after she came into the room. My niece is a success."

Young Heathfield made his way to a distant bench, where an elderly young lady of expansive figure, set off by a pink-gauze frock, had been sitting for an hour and a half, smiling blandly upon her friends and acquaintance, with a growing sense of despair.

What had come over the young men of the present generation, when good dancers were allowed to sit partnerless and forlorn? It all came of the absence of men of standing and mature age at evening parties. Sensible men were so disgusted by the slang and boldness of chits just escaped from the schoolroom that they held themselves aloof, and ball-rooms were given over to boys and girls, and to romping galops and kitchen lancers.

Here was one sensible boy at least, thought poor Miss Rycroft, as Sidney Heathfield, tall, slim, studiously correct, stood looking solemnly down upon her, asking for the next waltz. Little did Miss Rycroft dream of the pressure which had been put upon the youth by yonder matron, whose voice was now heard loud and lively on the other side of the lace curtains.

Mrs. Mornington was talking to Allan.

"How horribly late you are, Mr. Carew. You don't deserve to find one nice girl disengaged."

"Even if I don't, I know one nice woman with whom I would as soon sit and talk common sense as dance with the prettiest girl in Matcham."

"If you mean me," said Mrs. Mornington, "there will be no commonsense talk for you and me to-night. I have all these young men to keep in order. Now, Billy," suddenly attacking Mr. Walcott, who was talking mysteriously to a bosom friend about some one or something that was seven off, with capped hocks, but a splendid lepper, "Billy, haven't I told you that you were here to dance, not to talk stables? There's Miss Forlander, the girl from Torquay, who plays golf so well, sitting like a statue next Mrs. Paddington Brown."

"Oh, Mrs. Mornington," groaned the youth, as he strolled off, "what a life you lead us! I hope you don't call this hospitality."

"Am I not at least to be introduced to Miss Vincent, the heroine of the evening?" asked Allan.

"The heroine of the evening is behaving very badly," said Mrs. Mornington. "I don't think I'll ever give a summer dance again. I wish it had rained cats and dogs. Look at the dancing-room, half empty. Those young people are all meandering about the garden, picking my finest roses, I dare say, just to tear them to pieces in the game of 'he loves me, loves me not.'"

"What better use could be made of a garden and roses? As long as you have only the true lovers, and no Mephistopheles or Martha, your garden is another Eden. But I must insist upon being introduced to Miss Vincent before the evening is over."

"I will do my best," said Mrs. Mornington, and then in a lower voice she told him that she had ordered her niece to keep a late number open for his name. "She is a very nice girl, and I think you are a nice young man, and I should like you to know each other," concluded the lady with her bluff straightforwardness.

Mr. Mornington and an elderly stranger, with iron-grey hair and iron-grey moustache, came across the hall at this moment.

"Ah, here is my brother!" cried Mrs. Mornington. "Robert, I want to introduce Mr. Carew to you. He is a new neighbour, but a great favourite of mine."

Allan stopped in the hall for about a quarter of an hour talking to General Vincent and Mr. Mornington, and then he, too, was called to order by his hostess, and was marched into the dancing-room to be introduced to a Dresden-china young lady, pink and white and blue-eyed, like Saxony porcelain, who had been brought by somebody, and who was a stranger in the land.

He waltzed with this young creature, who was pretty and daintily dressed, and who asked him various questions about Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge, evidently with the idea that she was adapting her conversation to the locality. When the dance was over, she refused his offer of an ice, and suggested a turn in the garden; so Allan found himself among the meanderers under the moonlit sky; but there was no plucking of roses or murmuring of "Loves me not, loves me, loves me not," no thought of Gretchen's impassioned love-dream as the Dresden-china young lady and he promenaded solemnly up and down the broad gravel terrace in front of the open windows, still conversing sagely about Salisbury Cathedral and the decoration of the Chapter House.

While parading slowly up and down, Allan found his attention wandering every now and then from the young lady at his side to another young lady who passed and repassed with an elderly cavalier. A tall, slim young lady, with black hair and eyes, a pale brunette complexion, and an elegant simplicity of dress and chevelure which Allan at once recognized as Parisian. No English girl, he thought, ever had that air of being more plainly dressed than other girls, and yet more distinguished and fashionable. He had seen no frock like this girl's frock, but he felt assured that she was dressed in that Parisian fashion which is said to antedate London fashion by a twelvemonth.

She was in white from head to foot, and her gown was made of some dead-white fabric which combined the solidity of satin with the soft suppleness of gauze. The bodice was rather short-waisted, and the young lady wore a broad satin belt clasped with a diamond buckle, which flashed with many coloured gleams in the moonlight, as she passed to and fro; and whereas most young women at that time displayed a prodigious length of arm broken only by a narrow shoulder-strap, this young lady wore large puffed sleeves which recalled the portraits of Sir Thomas Lawrence. The large puffed sleeves became common enough a year later, but they were unknown in Wiltshire when Mrs. Mornington gave her dance. The damsel's silky black hair was coiled with artistic simplicity at the back of the prettily shaped head, while a cloud of little careless curls clustered above the broad, intelligent forehead.

She was talking gaily with her companion, Colonel Fordingbridge, a retired engineer, settled for some fifteen years in the outskirts of Matcham, and an intimate friend of Mr. Mornington's. He was telling her about the neighbourhood, holding it up to contempt and ridicule in a good-natured way which implied that, after all, it was the best neighbourhood in the world.

"It suits an old fellow like me," Allan heard him say; "plenty of sport of a mildish order. Huntin', fishin', shootin', hawkin', and golf."

"Hawking!" cried the young lady. "Do you really mean that? I thought there were no more hawks left in the world. Why, it sounds like the Middle Ages."

"Yes, and I'm afraid you'll say it looks like the Middle Ages when you see a flight on the hills near Matcham. The members of the Falconry Club in this neighbourhood are not all boys."

"But the hawks!" exclaimed she. "Where—where can one see them?"

"Have you really hawks?" inquired Allan's young lady, who had exhausted the Chapter House, and who caught eagerly at another local subject. "How utterly delightful! Do you go out with them very often?"

"I blush to admit that I have not even seen them, though I know there are such birds kept in the neighbourhood. I have even been invited to become a member of the society, and am seriously thinking about offering myself for election."

Seriously thinking since two minutes ago, be it understood, for until he caught that speech from the unknown young lady he had hardly given falconry a thought.

She and her companion had disappeared when he and his porcelain lady turned at the end of the terrace.

"Do you know that girl who was talking about the hawks?" he asked.

"Yes, I have been introduced to her. She is the girl of the house."

"I am afraid you are missing a dance," said Allan, with grave concern. "We had better go in, had we not?"

"Yes, I fear I am behaving badly to somebody; but it is so much nicer here than in those hot rooms."

"Infinitely preferable; but one has a duty to one's neighbour."

They met a youth in quest of the porcelain girl.

"Oh, Miss Mercer, how could you desert me so long? Our waltz is half over!"

Allan breathed more freely, having handed over Miss Mercer. He made his way quickly to the hall where Mrs. Mornington was still on guard, receiving the latest comers, sending the first batch into the supper-room, and dictating to everybody.

"I shall not leave your elbow till you have introduced me to Miss Vincent," he said, planting himself near his hostess.

"If you don't take care, you will have to give me some supper," replied she, "I am beginning to feel sinking. And I think it would be a good plan for me to sup early in order to see that things are as they should be."

Allan's heart also began to sink. He knew what it meant to take a matron in to supper; the leisurely discussion of salmon and cutlets, the half-bottle of champagne, the gossip, lasting half an hour at the least. And while he was ministering to Mrs. Mornington what chance would he have of becoming acquainted with Mrs. Mornington's niece?

"I should be proud to be so honoured; but think how many persons of greater age and dignity you will offend. Colonel Fordingbridge, for instance, such an old friend."

"Colonel Fordingbridge has just gone in with my niece."

"Oh, in that case, let me have the honour," exclaimed Allan eagerly, almost dragging Mrs. Mornington towards the supper-room. "I should not like to have offended dear old Fordingbridge."

"We may get seats at their table, perhaps. I told Suzette to go to one of the cosy little tables at the end of the room."

Suzette! what a coquettish, enchanting name! He pushed past the long table where two rows of people were talking, laughing, gobbling, as if they never dined and had hardly tasted food for a week. He pushed on to the end of the room where, on each side of the fireplace, now a mass of golden lilies and palms, Mrs. Mornington had found space for a small round table—a table which just held four people snugly, if not commodiously.

One of these tables had been made to accommodate six; the other had just been left by the first batch of supper-eaters. Miss Vincent and Colonel Fordingbridge were standing near while a servant re-arranged the table.

"That's lucky," said Mrs. Mornington. "Suzette, I want to introduce my friend Mr. Carew to you—Mr. Carew—Miss Vincent. And after supper he can take you to your father, whom I haven't seen for the last hour."

"I am afraid he has gone home," replied the young lady, after smilingly accepting the introduction. "I heard him ask Mrs. Fordingbridge to take care of me if he should feel tired and be obliged to go home. He can't bear being up late at night."

"No wonder, when he is out and about at daybreak!"

"The mornings are so nice," said Suzette.

"Yes, for people like you, who can do without sleep; people who have quicksilver in their veins."

"One learns to be fond of the early morning in India," explained Suzette.

"Because every other part of the day is intolerable," said Colonel Fordingbridge.

They were seated by this time, and Mrs. Mornington was sipping her first glass of champagne with an air of supreme content, while Allan helped her to lobster mayonnaise. Suzette was on his other side; and even while ministering to the elder lady his looks and his thoughts were on the younger.

How pretty she was, and how interesting. It seemed to him that he had never cared for English beauty; the commonplace pinkness and whiteness, chubby cheeks, blunt noses, cherry lips. Those delicate features, that pale dark skin, those brilliant dark eyes and small white teeth flashing upon him now and then as she smiled, with the most bewitching mouth—a mouth that could express volumes in a smile, or by a pouting movement of the flexible lips.

Allan and she were good friends in about five minutes. He was questioning and she answering. Surely, surely she did not like India as well as England—a life of exile—a life under torrid skies? Surely, surely, yes. There were a hundred things that she loved in India; those three years of her life in the North-West Provinces had been years in fairyland.

"It must have been because you were worshipped," he said. "You lived upon adulation. I'm afraid when a young lady is happy in India, it means that she is not altogether innocent of vanity."

"It is very unkind of you to say that. How sorry you must feel when I tell you that the happiest half-year I spent in India was when father was road-making, and the only other officer in camp was a fat, married major—an immense major, as big as this table."

"And you were happy! How?"

"In all manner of ways; riding, rambling, botanizing, sketching, and looking after father."

"My niece is a Miss Crichton. She has all the accomplishments," said Mrs. Mornington.

"Oh, aunt! that is a dreadful character to give me. It means that I do nothing well!"

Allan had asked her for a dance, and there had been an examination of her programme, which showed only one blank.

"Auntie told me to keep that waltz," she said. "I don't know why."

"I do. It was kept for me. I am the favoured one."

"But why?" she asked naïvely. "Why you more than any one else?"

"Who can say? Will you call me vain if I tell you that I think I am a favourite with your aunt?"

She looked at him laughingly, with a glance that asked a question.

"You don't see any reason why I should be preferred," said Allan, interpreting her look; "but remember there never is any reason for such preferences. Clever women are full of prejudices."

He could imagine a reason which he would not have had Suzette suspect for worlds. Perhaps among the available young men in Mrs. Mornington's circle he was the best placed, with an ample income in the present, and an estate that must be his in the future, the best placed of all except the young master of Discombe Manor; and the Lord of Discombe was away, while he, Allan, was on the spot.

The thought of Geoffrey Wornock suggested a question. They had left the little table to Mrs. Mornington and Colonel Fordingbridge, who were able to take care of each other. Allan and Miss Vincent were going to the dancing-room, not by the nearest way, but through a French window into the garden.

"Shall we take a little turn before we go back to the house?"

"I should like it of all things."

"And you are not afraid of catching cold?"

"On such a night as this? Why, in the hills I lived out-of-doors!"

"You have been at Matcham before, I suppose!"

"Yes, father and I stayed here with auntie once upon a time."

"Long ago?"

"Ages ago, when I wore short petticoats and wasn't allowed late dinner."

"Heartless tyranny!"

"Wasn't it? I didn't know what to do with myself in the long summer evenings. I used to roam about this garden till I was tired, and then I would go and look in at the dining-room window where they were all sitting at dessert, and auntie would wave me away, 'Go and play, child.' Play, indeed! Even the gardeners had gone home, and the dogs were shut up for the night. I was actually glad when it was nine o'clock and bedtime."

"Poor victim of middle-aged egotism."

"Dear auntie! She is so good! But people don't understand children. They forget what their own feelings were when they were little."

"Alas, yes! A child is as great a mystery to me to-day as if I had been born at one and twenty. I can't even understand or interest myself in a lad of fifteen. He seems such an incongruous, unnecessary creature, stupid, lumbering, in everybody's way. I can't realize the fact that he will ever get any better. He is there, complete in himself, a being of a race apart. I should feel insulted if any one were to tell me I had ever been like him."

"How true that is!" assented Suzette, gaily. "I have felt just the same about girls. I only began to wear my hair in a knot three years ago, and yet there seems hardly one point of union between me and a girl with her hair down her back. I have got beyond her, as somebody says. How sad that one should always be getting beyond things! Father detests India—talks only of the climate—while to me it was all enchantment. Perhaps if I were to go back to the East, a few years hence, I should hate it."

"Very likely. Going back is always a mistake."

There was nothing exalted or out of the common in their talk, but at least there was sympathy in it all, and they were telling each other their thoughts as freely as if they had been friends of long years. It was very different from being obliged to talk of Salisbury Cathedral, and theorize on the history of Stonehenge. And then there was the glamour of the garden and the moonlight; the mysterious light and shade of shrubbery walks; the blackness of the cedars that spread a deeper dark across the lawn. Mrs. Mornington had taken care to choose a night when the midsummer moon should be at the full, and she had abstained from cockneyfying the garden with artificial light, from those fairy lamps or Chinese lanterns which are well enough within the narrow limits of a suburban garden, but which could only vulgarize grounds that had something of forestial beauty.

"I am glad you are almost a stranger to Matcham, Miss Vincent," said Allan, after the first brief pause in their talk.

"Why?"

"Because it is such a pleasure to meet some one who does not know Geoffrey Wornock."

"And pray who is Geoffrey Wornock?"

"Ah, how delightful, how refreshing it is to hear that question! Miss Vincent, I am your devoted friend from this moment. Your friend, did I say? I am your slave—command my allegiance in everything."

"Please be tranquil. What does it all mean?"

"Oh, forgive me! Know then that hitherto everybody I have met in this place has greeted me by an expression of surprise at my resemblance to one Geoffrey Wornock—happily now absent with his regiment in the East. Nobody has taken any interest in me except on the score of this likeness to the absent Wornock. My face has been criticized, my features descanted upon one by one in my hearing. I have been informed that it is in this or that feature, in this or that expression, the likeness consists, while I naturally don't care twopence about the likeness, or about Wornock. And to meet some one who doesn't know my double, who will accept me for what I am individually!—oh, Miss Vincent, we ought to be friends. Say that we may be friends."

"Please don't rush on in such a headlong fashion. You talk like the girls at the convent, who wanted me to swear eternal friendship in the first half-hour; and perhaps turned out to be very disagreeable girls when one came to know them."

"I hope I shall not turn out disagreeable."

"I did not mean to be rude; but friendship is a serious thing. At present I have no friend except father, and two girls with whom I have kept up a correspondence since I left the Sacré Cœur. One lives at Bournemouth and the other in Paris, so our friendship is dependent on the post. I think we ought to go back to the dancing-room now. I have to report myself to Mrs. Fordingbridge, and not to keep her later than she may wish to stay."

Allan felt that he had been talking like a fool; that he had presumed on the young lady's unconventional manner. She had talked to him brightly and unrestrainedly; and he had been pushing and impertinent. The moonlight, the garden, the pleasure of talking to a bright vivacious girl had made him forget the respect due to the acquaintance of an hour.

He was silent on the way back to the ballroom, silent and abashed; but five minutes afterwards he was waltzing with Suzette, who was assuredly the best waltzer of all that evening's partners, and he felt that he was treading on air.

CHAPTER VII.

"O THE RARE SPRING-TIME!"

Allan called at the Grove two days after the dance—called at the friendly hour when there was a certainty of afternoon tea, if Mrs. Mornington were at home; and when he thought it likely that Miss Vincent would be with her aunt.

"She will almost live at the Grove," he thought, as he walked towards that comfortable mansion, which was nearly a mile from Beechhurst. "Marsh House is so near. There is a path across the meadows by which she can walk in dry weather. A girl living alone with her father will naturally turn to her aunt for companionship, will take counsel with her upon all household affairs, and will run in and out every day."

It was a disappointment, after having made up his mind in this way, to see no sign of Suzette's presence in the drawing-room at the Grove. Mrs. Mornington was sitting in the verandah with her inevitable work-basket, just as he had found her a fortnight before, when her brother's advent at Marsh House and the dance at the Grove were still in the future.

She received him with her accustomed cordiality, but she did not ask him what he thought of her niece, though he was dying to be questioned. An unwonted shyness prevented his beginning the subject. He sat meekly sustaining a conversation about the parish, the wrongs and rights of the last clerical squabble, till his patience could hold out no longer.

"I hope General Vincent likes Matcham," he said at last, not daring to touch nearer to the subject which absorbed his thoughts.

"Oh yes, he likes the place well enough. He has lived his life, and can amuse himself with his poultry-yard, and will potter about with the hounds now and then when the cub-hunting begins. But I don't know how it will suit her."

"You think Miss Vincent would prefer a livelier place?"

"Of course she would prefer it. The question is, will she put up with this? She has never lived in an English village, though she has lived in out-of-the-way places in India; but, then, that was camp life, adventure, the sort of thing a girl likes. Her father idolizes her, and has taken her about everywhere with him since she left the Sacré Cœur at fourteen years of age. She has lived at Plymouth, at York, at Lucknow. She has had enough adulation to turn a wiser head than hers."

"And yet—so far as a man may venture to judge within the compass of an hour—I don't think her head has been turned," said Allan, growing bolder.

"That's as may be. She has a clever little way of seeming wiser than she is. The nuns gave her that wise air, I think. They have a wonderfully refining effect upon their pupils. Do you think her good-looking?"

"Good-looking is an odious epithet to apply to such a girl. She is exquisitely pretty."

"I'm glad you admire her. Yes, it is a dainty kind of prettiness, ain't it? Exquisite is far too strong a word; but I think she is a little superior to the common run of English girls."

"I hope she may be able to endure Matcham. After all, the country round is tolerably interesting."

"Oh, I believe she will put up with it for her father's sake, if he is happy here. Only no doubt she will miss the adulation."

"She must not be allowed to miss it. All the young men in the neighbourhood will be her worshippers."

Mrs. Mornington shrugged her shoulders, pursed up her lips, and made a long slashing cut in a breadth of substantial calico.

"The young men of the neighbourhood will hardly fill the gap," she said. "Yourself excepted, there is not an idea among them—that is to say, not an idea unconnected with sport. If a girl doesn't care to talk about hunting, shooting, or golf, there is no such thing as conversation for her in Matcham."

Before Allan could reply, the drawing-room door was thrown open, and Mrs. Mornington rose to receive a visitor. Her seat in the verandah commanded the drawing-room as well as the garden, and she was always on the alert for arrivals. Allan rose as quickly, expecting to see Miss Vincent.

"Mrs. Wornock," announced the butler, with a grand air, perfectly cognizant of the lady's social importance.

To Allan the appearance of the lady of Discombe was as startling as if she had lived at the other end of England. And yet Mrs. Mornington had told him that she and Mrs. Wornock exchanged three or four visits in the course of the year.

Mrs. Mornington greeted her guest with cordiality, and the two women came out to the verandah together. They offered a striking contrast, and, as types of the sex, were at the opposite poles of woman. One was of the world, worldly, large, strongly built, loud-voiced, resolute, commanding, a woman whose surplus power was accentuated by the petty sphere in which she lived; the other was slender and youthful in figure, with a marked fragility of frame, pale, ethereal, and with a girlish shyness of manner, not wanting in mental power, perhaps, but likely to be thought inferior, from the lack of self-possession and self-esteem. All the social advantages which surrounded Mrs. Wornock of Discombe had been insufficient to give her the self-confidence which is commonly superabundant in the humblest matron who has passed her thirtieth birthday.

She gave a little start of surprise at finding Allan in the verandah, but the smile with which she offered him her hand was one of pleasure. She took the seat which Mrs. Mornington offered her—the most comfortable chair in the verandah—and then began to apologize for having taken it.

"I'm afraid this is your chair——"

"No, no, no. Sit where you are, for goodness' sake!" cried Mrs. Mornington. "I never indulge myself with an easy-chair till my day's work is done. We are going to have our tea out here." The servants were bringing table and tray as she talked. "I'm very glad you came to see me this afternoon, for I dare say my niece will be running in presently—my brother Robert's daughter—and I want you to call upon her. I told you all about her the other day when I was at the Manor."

"Would she like me to call, do you think? Of course I will call, if you wish it; but I hardly think she will care."

"I know that she will care," replied Mrs. Mornington, busy at the tea-table. "She is not a great performer, but she is almost as enthusiastic about music as you are. She is a Roman, and those old Masses of which you are so fond mean more to her than they do to most of us."

Allan's spirits had risen with the expectation of Miss Vincent's appearance. He had been right in his conclusions, after all.

He resumed his seat, which was near enough to Mrs. Wornock's chair for confidential talk.

"You have quite deserted me, Mr. Carew," she said, with gentle reproachfulness. "I thought you would have been to see me before now."

"I did not want to seem intrusive."

"You could not seem or be intrusive. You are so much more to me than a common friend. You remind me of the past—of my son. You would be almost as another son to me if you would let me think of you like that. If——"

She spoke quickly, almost passionately, and her low voice had a thrill of feeling in it which touched him deeply. What a strange impulsive creature this woman was, in spite of the timidity and reserve that had kept her aloof from that rural society over which she might have reigned as a queen.

Before Allan could reply to Mrs. Wornock's unfinished speech, there came a welcome diversion in the shape of a large black poodle, which rushed vehemently across the lawn, stood on end beside Mrs. Mornington's gown for a moment or two, sniffed the tea-table, wheeled round, and rushed off again in a diagonal line towards the point whence he had come.

This sudden black appearance was followed by an appearance in lavender cambric, and the tall, slim form of a very elegant young woman, whose simple attire, as at the ball, bore the true Parisian stamp, that indescribable air of unlikeness to British dress, which is rather a negative than a positive quality.

The brilliant dark eyes flashed a smile upon Allan, as the young lady allowed him to take her hand à l'Anglaise, after she had spoken to her aunt and been introduced to Mrs. Wornock.

"Your poodle is a little too bad, Suzie. He nearly knocked me and the tea-table clean over."

"That is one of the aunt's innocent exaggerations," said Suzette, laughing. "If you know her as well as I do, Mrs. Wornock, you must know that she always talks in a large way. Poor Caro. He is only a puppy; and I think, for a puppy, his manners are perfect."

Caro was crouching at her feet, breathing hard, for the space of half a minute as she spoke, and then he rushed off again, circling the lawn three or four times, with spasmodic halts by his mistress, or by the tea-table.

"He is rather a ridiculous dog at present," apologized Suzette, fondly watching these manœuvres; "but he is going to be very clever. He has begun to die for his queen, and he will do wonderful things when he is older. I have been warned not to teach him too much while he is a puppy, for fear of addling his brain."

"I don't believe he has any brain to be addled, or at least he must have addled it for himself with that absurd rushing about," said Mrs. Mornington, dealing out the tea-cups, which Allan meekly handed to the two ladies.

He had been to so many afternoon tea-parties of late that he felt as if handing cups and saucers and cream and sugar were a kind of speciality with him. In Suffolk he had never troubled about these things. His time had been taken up with shooting or fishing. He had allowed all social amenities to be performed by his mother, unaided by him. At Matcham he had become a new being, a person to be called upon and to return calls, with all the punctiliousness of a popular curate. He wondered at himself as he accomplished these novel duties.

Mrs. Wornock began to talk to Suzette, constrainedly at first, but the girl's frank vivacity soon put her at her ease, and then Allan joined in the conversation, and in a few minutes they were all three on the friendliest terms, although the elder lady gradually dropped out of the conversation, save for a word or two now and then when addressed by the other two. She seemed content to sit by and listen while those two talked, as much interested in them as they were interested in each other. She was quick to perceive Allan's subjugation, quick to understand that he was surrendering himself without a struggle to the fascination of a girl who was not quite as other girls, who had nothing hackneyed or conventional in person or manner.

After tea, they all went round the lawn, headed by Mrs. Mornington, to look at her roses and carnations, flowers which were her peculiar pride and care.

"If I had such a garden as yours—a day-dream in gardens—I don't suppose I should take any trouble about a few beds of dwarf-roses and picotees," she said to Mrs. Wornock; "but these flower-beds are all I have to console me for the Philistinism of my surroundings."

"Oh, but you have a really fine shrubbery," urged Allan, remembering that promenade of the other night among the lights and shadows, and the perfume of dewy conifers. "That belt of deodara and arbutus and rhododendrons, and this fine expanse of level lawn ought to satisfy any lady's ambition."

"No doubt. This garden of mine always reminds me of the Church catechism. It suggests that state of life to which it has pleased God to call me—an eminently respectable, upper middle-class garden, fifty years old at most; while the grounds at Discombe carry one back three centuries, and one expects to meet fine gentlemen in ruffs and doublets, with roses on their shoes, and talking like that book whose name I forget, or abusing the new and detestable custom of smoking tobacco. You will be in love with Mrs. Wornock's garden, Suzette, and will give up all idea of improving the Marsh House flower-beds."

"No, I shan't give up, however much I may admire," protested Suzette, sturdily. "If I had only a cottage garden, I would toil early and late to make it beautiful."

"There is plenty of room at Marsh House," said Mrs. Wornock, "and the garden is capable of improvement. When will you bring Miss Vincent to see me and my peacocks, Mrs. Mornington? Pray let it be soon. Your niece and I have at least one taste in common, and I think we ought to be good friends. Will you come to luncheon to-morrow, you and Miss Vincent, and you, Mr. Carew, if you are all disengaged?"

"For my part, I would throw over any engagement that was capable of being evaded," said Mrs. Mornington, cheerily. And then in an undertone to Allan, she added, "It will be a new sensation to eat a meal at the Manor. This burst of hospitality is almost a miracle."

Allan accepted the invitation unhesitatingly, and began to think Mrs. Wornock the most delightful of women, and to be angry with himself for ever having suspected evil in her past history. Whatever was strange in her conduct in relation to himself and to his father must be accounted for in some way that would be consonant with guilelessness and goodness.

That luncheon at Discombe Manor was the beginning of a new phase in Allan Carew's existence. All things must begin some day; and love—serious and earnest love—is one of the things which have their beginning, and whose beginning is sweeter than all the other first-fruits of life. It is not to be supposed that Allan was altogether a stranger to tender emotions, that he had come to five and twenty years of age without ever having fancied himself in love. He had had his boyish loves, and they had ended in disappointment. The blighting wind of satiety had swept across his budding loves before they had time to flower. All those youthful goddesses of his had shown him too soon and too plainly that there was very little of Olympian grandeur about them. As an only son with good prospects, he had been rudely awakened to the cruel truth that the average young lady has a sharp eye to the main chance, and that he, Allan Carew, was measured by his expectations rather than by his merits. Very early in his youth he made up his mind that he would never let his heart go out to any woman who contemplated marriage from a business standpoint; and he had been keenly on the watch for the canker of worldliness among the flowers. Unluckily for his chances of matrimony, the prettiest girls he had met hitherto had been the most worldly; trained perhaps to worldliness on account of their marketable qualities. Much as he admired high-mindedness in woman, he was not high-minded enough to seek out virtue under an unattractive exterior; so he had almost made up his mind to follow his uncle's example, and go through life a bachelor.

As a bachelor he might count himself rich, and for a bachelor Beechhurst was an admirable dwelling-place. The house had been built for a bachelor. The rooms were spacious but few. Twice as many bedrooms, best and secondary, would be required for a family man. Thinking vaguely of the possibility of marriage, Allan had shuddered as he thought of an architect exploring that delightful upper floor, measuring walls, and tapping partitions, and discussing the best point at which to throw out a nursery wing, and where to add three or four servants' bedrooms.

And behold now this prudent, far-seeing young man, whose philosophy hitherto had been the philosophy of pure selfishness, was allowing himself to fall in love with a young lady who, for all he could tell, might be just as mercenary and worldly-minded as the girls he had met in Suffolk shooting-parties or in London ball-rooms. He had no reason to suppose her any better than they. Her father was a man of moderate means, and according to all the rules of modern life, it would be her duty to make a good marriage. He remembered how Mrs. Mornington had ordered her niece to save a dance for him, and he might conclude from that and other small facts that the aunt would favour him as a suitor for the niece. Yet the idea of worldly-mindedness never entered his thoughts in relation to Suzette. He abandoned himself to the charm of her delightful individuality without the faintest apprehension of future disillusion. He thought, indeed, but little of the future. The joys of the present were all-sufficing. To talk with her in unrestrained frivolity, glancing from theme to theme, but always with a grain of sentiment or philosophy in their talk; to walk beside her in those stately alleys at Discombe, or to linger in the marble temple; to follow the peacocks along the grass walks; to look for the nests of the thrushes and blackbirds in the thick walls of laurel; to plan garden-plays—Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night's Dream—in that grassy amphitheatre, which reminded Allan of the Boboli Gardens—these things made a happiness that filled mind and heart to the exclusion of all thought of the future.

"I can understand the lilies better now than when I was first told to consider them," said Allan one day, as he stood with Suzette beside a great bed of lilium auratum.

"How do you mean?"

"Because I am as happy as they are, and take no more heed of the future than they do. I feel as they feel when they sway in the summer wind and bask in the summer sun, fed with the dews of night, having all things that are good for flowers, satisfied and happy."

"You are as foolish as I am. I can't help fancying sometimes that flowers are alive and can feel the sun and the glory of the blue sky. To be always looking up at the sky, dumb, lifeless, not knowing! One would hardly care for flowers if one could realize that they have neither sense nor feeling. Yet I suppose one does realize that cruel fact sometimes. I know when I have been looking at the roses, and delighting in their beauty, Caro meets me as I go back to the house, and as he leaps and frisks about me, the difference between him and the flowers strikes me very keenly. They so beautiful and so far off, he so near and dear—the precious living thing!"

"Ah, that is the crown of things, Miss Vincent—life! Dead loveliness is nothing in comparison!"

"No," said Suzette. "And what a blessing that life is beautiful in itself. One can love ugly people; one may adore an ugly dog; but who ever cared for an ugly chair, or could become attached to an ugly house?"

"Not knowingly; but I have known people fondly attached to the most hideously furnished rooms. And oh, how humiliating it is for middle-aged people like my mother to be obliged to admit that the things we think hideous were accounted beautiful when they were young!"

This easy, trivial talk was the growth of more than one luncheon, and a good many tea-drinkings, in the music-room or in the gardens of Discombe. Mrs. Wornock had opened her heart and her house to Suzette as she had never before done to any young lady in the neighbourhood, and Suzette warmly reciprocated the kindness of the recluse. She ran in at the Manor House almost as unceremoniously as she ran in at the Grove. It was understood by the servants that their mistress was always at home to Miss Vincent. And as Allan had previously been made free of the Manor House, it was only natural that he and Suzette should meet very often under Mrs. Wornock's mild chaperonage.

Mrs. Mornington knew of these meetings, and, indeed, often dropped in while the young people were there, coming to take Suzette home in her pony-carriage, or to walk with her through the lanes. She showed no sign of disapproval; yet, as a woman of the world, it may have occurred to her that, since Mrs. Wornock was so fond of Suzette, it might be wise for Suzette to refrain from attaching herself to Allan Carew, while a superior parti remained in the background in the person of Mrs. Wornock's only son.

Happily for Allan, Mrs. Mornington, although essentially mundane, was not a schemer. She had made up her mind that Allan was a good deal better than the average young man, and that Beechhurst was quite good enough for her niece, whose present means and expectations were of a very modest order. There had been no mock humility in Mrs. Mornington's statement of facts when she told Allan that her brother's income, from all sources, was just big enough to enable him to live respectably at Marsh House.

The foliage was beginning to show gleams of gold and red amidst the sombre green of late summer; the hounds were beginning to meet at seven o'clock in the crisper, clearer mornings of September; and Allan Carew was beginning to feel himself the bond-slave of a young lady about whose sentiments towards himself he was still entirely in the dark.

Did she care for him much, a little, not at all? Allan Carew was continually asking himself those questions, and there was no oracle to answer him; no oracle even in his inner consciousness, which told him nothing of Suzette's feelings. He knew that he loved her; but he could recall no word or look of hers which could assure him that she returned his love. It was certain that she liked him, and that his society was pleasant to her.

They had an infinite series of ideas in common—they thought alike upon most subjects; and she seemed no more to weary of his society than he of hers—yet there were times when he thought he might have been nearer winning her love had she liked him less. Her friendship seemed too frank ever to ripen into love. He would have liked to see her start and blush at his coming. She did neither; but received him with her airiest grace, and had always her laughter ready for his poor jokes, her intellect on the alert for his serious speech about books or men. She was the most delightful companion he had ever known; but a sister could not have been more at her ease with him.

"I sometimes think you take me for one of your old convent friends," he said one day, when she had prattled to him of her housekeeping and her garden as they walked up and down the long grass alley, while the music of the organ came to them, now loud with the lessening distance, now sinking slowly to silence as they walked further from the house.

"Oh no; I should never take you for any one so patrician and distinguished as Laure de Beauvais, or Athenaïs de Laroche," she answered laughingly, "I should never dare to talk to them about eggs and butter, the obstinacy of a cook at twenty-five pounds a year, the ignorance of a gardener who is little better than a day labourer. But perhaps I am wrong to talk to you of these everyday cares. I will try to talk as I would to Athenaïs. I will dispute the merit of Lamartine's Elegy on Byron as compared with Hugo's Ode to the King of Rome. I was for Hugo; Athenaïs for Lamartine. We used to have terrible battles. And now Athenaïs is married to a financier, and has a palace in the Parc Monceau, and gives balls to all Paris; and I am living with father in a shabby old house with three maids and a man-of-all-work."

"Talk to me as you like," he said; "talk to me as your serf, your slave."

And then, without a moment's pause in which to arrange his thoughts, surprised into a revelation which he had intended indefinitely to defer, he told her that he was in very truth her slave, and that he must be the most miserable of men if this avowal of his love touched no answering chord in her heart.

She who was habitually so gay grew suddenly grave almost to sadness, and looked at him with an expression which was half-frightened, half-reproachful.

"Oh, why do you talk like this?" she cried. "We have been such friends—so happy."

"Shall we be less friendly or less happy when we are lovers?"

That word "when" touched her keen sense of the ridiculous.

"When we are lovers!" she echoed, smiling at him. "You take everything for granted."

"I have no alternative between confidence and despair."

"Really, really, now? Am I really necessary to your happiness?"

"You are my happiness. I come here, or I go to the Grove, and find you, and I am happy. When I go away, I leave happiness behind me, except the reflected light of memory; except the dreams in which your image floats about me, in which I hear your voice, the sweet voice that is kinder in my dreams than it ever is in my waking hours."

"Surely I am never unkind."

"No; but in my dreams you are more than kind—you are my own and my love. You are what I hope you will be soon, Suzette—soon! Life's morning is so short. Let us spend it together."

They were in the temple at the end of the cypress walk, and in that semi-sacred solitude his arm had stolen round her waist, his lips were seeking hers, gently, yet with a force which it needed all her strength to oppose.

"No; no; you must not. I can promise nothing yet. I have had no time to think."

"No time! Oh, Suzette, you must have known for the last six weeks that I adore you."

"I am not vain enough to imagine myself adored. I think I knew that you liked me—almost from the first——"

"Liked and admired you from the very first," interrupted Allan.

"My aunt said things—hinted and laughed, and was altogether absurd; but one's kinsfolk are so vain."

"Yes, when they have a goddess born among them."

"Oh, please don't be too ridiculous. You know that I like you; but, as for loving, I must have a long, long time to think about that."

"You shall think as long as you like; so long as you do not withdraw your friendship. I cannot live without you."

"Why should I cease to be your friend? Only promise that you will never again talk, or behave, as foolishly as you have done this afternoon."

"I promise, solemnly promise; until you give me leave to be foolish," he added, with a touch of tenderness.

He felt that he had been precipitate; that he might, by this temerity, have brought upon himself banishment from the Eden in which he was so happy. He had been over bold in thinking that the time which had sufficed for the growth of passionate love on his part was enough to make this charming girl as fond of him as he was of her. He was ashamed of his presumption. The degrees of their merit were so different; she a being whom to know was to love; he a very commonplace young man.

Suzette was quite as easy in her manner with him after that little outbreak as she had been before. He had promised not to renew the attack, and in her simple truthfulness she believed all promises sacred between well-bred people.

Mrs. Mornington dropped in at teatime, ready to drive her niece home. It was a common thing now for Suzette to spend the whole day at Discombe, playing classical duets with Mrs. Wornock, or sitting quietly by her side reading or musing while she played the organ. The girl's religious feeling gave significance to that noble music of the old German and Italian masses which to other hearers were only music. The acquaintance between the elder woman and the younger had ripened by this time into a friendship which was not without affection.

"Mrs. Wornock is my second aunt, and Discombe is my second home," said Suzette, explaining the frequency of her visits.

"And the Grove, does not that count as home?" asked Mrs. Mornington, with an offended air.

"It is so much my home that I don't count it at all. It is more like home than Marsh House, both for father and for me."

Later, when the pony-carriage was taking aunt and niece along the road to Matcham, Suzette said suddenly, after a silence—

"Auntie, would it be a shock to your nerves if I were to tell you something that happened to-day."

"My nerves are very strong, Suzie. What kind of thing was it? and did it concern Mr. Carew par exemple?"

"How clever you are at guessing! Yes, it was Mr. Carew. He proposed to me."

"And of course you accepted him."

"Of course! Oh, auntie! what do you think I am made of? I have only known him about two months."

"What of that? If you had been brought up in the French fashion—and a very sensible fashion it is, to my thinking—you would have only seen him two or three times before you marched up to the altar with him. Surely you did not reject him?"

"I may not have said positively no; but I told him that it was much too soon—that I could not possibly love him after such a short acquaintance, and that, if we were to go on being friends, he must never speak of such a thing again."

"Never!"

"I think the word was never—or, at any rate, for a long, long time. And he promised."

"He will keep his promise, no doubt. Well, Suzette, all I can say is that you must be very difficult to please. I don't believe there is another girl in Matcham who would have refused Allan Carew."

"What, are all the young ladies in Matcham so much alike that the same young man would suit them all? Have they no individuality?"

"They have individuality enough to know a good young man, with an excellent position in life, when they see one. I believe your father will be as disappointed as I am."

"Disappointed? Because I am not in a hurry to leave him. I don't know my father, if he is capable of such unkindness."

"Suzette, that little mind of yours is full to the brim of high-flown notions," retorted her aunt, impatiently.

"Dear auntie, surely you are not angry?"

"Yes, Suzie, I am angry, because I have a very high opinion of Allan Carew. I consider him a pearl among young men."

"Really, aunt! And if he were a poor curate, or a barrister without—what do you call them—briefs? Yes, briefs! Would he be a pearl then?"

"He would be just as good a young man, but not a husband for you. Don't expect romantic ideas from me, Suzette. If I ever was romantic, it was so many years ago that I have quite forgotten the sensation."

"And you cannot conjure back your youth in order to understand me," said her niece, musingly. "You are not like Mrs. Wornock, whose mind seems always dwelling upon the past."

"Has she talked to you of her youth?" Mrs. Mornington asked quickly.

"Not directly; but she has talked vaguely sometimes of feelings long dead and gone—of the dead whom she loved—her father whom she lost when she was seventeen, and whose spirit—as she thinks—holds communion with her in her solitary daydreams at the organ. He was a musician, like herself, passionately fond of music."

"I hope you will not take up any of Mrs. Wornock's fads."

"Not unless you call music a fad."

"No, no, music is well enough, and I like you to practise and improve your playing. But I hope you will never allow yourself to believe in poor Mrs. Wornock's nonsense about spirit-rapping, and communion with the dead. You must see that the poor woman is toquée."

"I see that she is dreamy; and I am not carried away by her dreams. I think her the most interesting woman I ever met. Don't be jealous, auntie darling, I should never be as fond of her as I am of you."

"I hope not!"

"Only I can't help being interested in her. She is simpatica."

"'Simpatica!' I hate the word. I never heard any one talked of as simpatica who hadn't a bee in her bonnet. I really don't know if your father ought to allow you to be so much at the Manor."

"I am going to take him to see Mrs. Wornock to-morrow afternoon. I know he will be in love with her."

"It would be a very good thing if he were to marry her, and make a sensible woman of her."

"Mrs. Wornock with a second husband! The idea is hateful. She would cease to interest me, if she were so commonplace as to marry. I prefer her infinitely with what you call her fads."

"'Crabbed age and youth cannot live together,'" said Mrs. Mornington, quoting one of the few poets with whom she had any acquaintance. "You and I would never think alike, I suppose, young woman. And so you refused Mr. Carew, and told him never to talk to you of love or wedlock, and you refused Beechhurst, yonder," pointing with her whip across the heath to where the white walls of Allan Carew's house smiled in the afternoon sunlight. "I know what your uncle Mornington will say when I tell him what a little fool you have been."

"Auntie, why is it you want me to marry, Mr. Carew?" Suzette asked pleadingly. "Is it because he is rich? Is it for the sake of Beechhurst?"

"No, Miss Minx, it is because I believe him to be a good young man—a gentleman—and as true as steel."

Suzette gave a little sigh, and for a minute or so was dumb.

"Do you know why I have always been glad that my father is an Englishman?" she asked presently.

"Why, because he is an Englishman, I suppose. I should think any girl would be English if she could."

"No, auntie, I am not so proud of my father's country as all that. I have been glad of my English father because I knew that English girls are allowed to make their own choice in marriage."

"And a very pretty use you are going to make of your privileges, refusing the best young man in the neighbourhood. If you were my daughter, I should be half inclined to send for one of those whipping ladies we read about, and have you brought to your senses that way."

"No, you wouldn't, auntie. You wouldn't be unkind to daughter or to niece."

"Well, you have your father to account to. What will he say, I wonder?"

"Only that his Suzie is to do just as she likes. Do you know that I refused a subaltern up at the Hills, a young man with an enormous fortune whom ever so many girls were trying to catch—girls and widows too—he might have had a large choice."

"And what did my brother say to that?"

"He only laughed, and told me that I knew my own value."

Mrs. Mornington was thoughtful for the rest of the way. Perhaps, after all, it was a good thing for a girl to be difficult to please. A girl as bright and as pretty as Suzette could afford to give herself airs. Allan would be sure to propose to her again; and then there was Geoffrey Wornock, who was expected home before Christmas. Who could tell if Geoffrey might not be as deeply smitten with this charming hybrid as Allan? and Discombe was to Beechhurst as sunlight unto moonlight, in extensiveness and value.

"And yet I would rather she should marry Carew," mused Mrs. Mornington. "I should be afraid of young Wornock."

CHAPTER VIII.

NOT YET.

Allan was dashed by Suzette's refusal to accept him on any other footing than that of friendship, and he was angry with himself for having spoken too soon. The only comfort left him was her willingness to consider him still her friend; but this was cold comfort, and in some wise more disheartening than if she had been more angry. Yet in his musings he could but think that she liked him better than a mere average acquaintance; while now and then there stole across his mind the flattering hope that she liked him better than she herself knew. He recalled all those happy hours they had spent together, with only Mrs. Wornock to make a third, Mrs. Wornock who so often crept away to her beloved organ and left them free to loiter in the gardens, or to sit in one of the deeply recessed windows, talking in whispers, while the music filled the room, or to stray far off in the stately pleasaunce, where their light laughter could not disturb the player.

They had talked together often enough and long enough to have explored each other's minds and imaginations, and they had found that about all great things they thought alike; while their differences of opinion about the trifles of life gave them subjects for mirthful argument, occasions for disagreeing only to end in agreement.

Suzette complained that Allan's university training made all argument unfair. How could she—an illogical, prejudiced woman, maintain her ground against a master of dialectics?

In all their companionship he could remember no moments of ennui, no indication upon the young lady's part that she could have been happier elsewhere than in his company. This was at least encouraging. The dual solitude seemed to have been as pleasant to her as it was to him. She had confided in him in the frankest fashion. She had told him story after story of her convent life; of her friends and chosen companions. She had talked to him as a girl might talk to a cousin whom she liked and trusted; and how often does such liking ripen into love; an attachment truer and more lasting than that hot-headed love at first sight, born of the pleasure of the eye, and taking shallowest root in the mind. Allan's musings ended in a determination to cultivate the friendship which had not been withheld from him, and to trust to time for the growth of love.

He was anxious to see Suzette as soon as possible after that premature avowal which had stirred the calm current of their companionship, lest she should have time to ponder upon his conduct, and to feel embarrassed at their next meeting. She had told him that she was going to the golf-links before breakfast on the following morning; so at eight o'clock Allan made his appearance on the long stretch of rather rough common-land which bordered the Salisbury road half a mile from Beechhurst, and which was distinguished from other waste places by the little red flags of the golf club.

She was there, as fresh as the morning, in her blue-serge frock and sailor hat, attended by a small boy, and with the vicar's youngest daughter for her companion.

She blushed as they shook hands—blushed, and then distinctly laughed; and the laugh, frank as it sounded, was the laugh of a triumphant coquette, for she was thinking of her aunt's indignation yesterday afternoon, and thinking how little it mattered her refusing a man who was so absolutely her slave. Propose to her again, forsooth? Why, of course he would propose to her again, and again, and again, as that foolish young subaltern had done at Simla. Were all men as foolish, Suzette wondered; and had all young women as much liberty of choice?

She glanced involuntarily at the Vicar's youngest daughter, regarded by her family as the flower of the flock, but of a very humble degree in the floral world. A fresh-coloured, pudding-faced girl, with small eyes and a pug nose, but with a tall, well-developed figure of the order that is usually described as "fine."

The golf went on in a desultory way, Allan strolling after the players, and venturing a remark now and then, as suggested by a single summer's experience at St. Andrews. When the two girls had been round the course, and it was time to hasten home to their respective breakfast-tables, he accompanied them on their way, and after having left Miss Bessie Edgefield at the Vicarage gate he had Suzette all to himself for something under a quarter of a mile. They met Mrs. Mornington a little way from Marsh House, sallying out for her morning conference with butcher and fishmonger, the business of providing Mr. Mornington's dinner being too important to be left to the hazards of cook and shopkeeper. It was necessary that Mrs. Mornington's own infallible eye should survey saddle or sirloin, and measure the thickness of turbot or sole.

She greeted the two young people with jovial heartiness, and rejoiced beyond measure at seeing them together. After all, perhaps Suzette had done well in refusing the first offer. The poor young man was evidently her slave.

"Or if Geoffrey should fall desperately in love with her," mused Mrs. Mornington, on her way to the village street, not quite heroic enough to put the owner of Discombe Manor altogether out of her calculations; "but, no, I shouldn't care about that. It would be too risky."

That which Mrs. Mornington would not care about was the mental tendency that Geoffrey might inherit from his mother, whom the strong-minded, clear-headed lady regarded as a visionary, if not a harmless lunatic. No! Geoffrey was clever, interesting, fascinating even; but he was not to be compared with Allan, whose calm common sense had won Mrs. Mornington's warmest liking.

After that morning on the links, and the friendly homeward walk, Allan felt more hopeful about Suzette; but he was not the less bent upon bringing to bear every influence which might help him to win her for his own, before any other suitor should come forward to dispute the prize with him. Happily for him, there were few eligible young men in the neighbourhood, and those few thought more of horses and guns than of girlhood and beauty.

Lady Emily had promised her son a visit in the autumn. Allan hoped that his father would accompany her. He wanted to bring Suzette into the narrow circle of his home life, to bring her nearer to himself by her liking for his mother and father. With this intent he urged on the promised visit, delighted at the thought that his mother's presence would enable him to receive Suzette as a guest in the house where he hoped she would some day be mistress.

He wrote to his father, reminding him of his assurance that he would not always remain a stranger to his son's home, and this letter of his, which dwelt earnestly upon certain unexplained reasons why he was especially anxious for his father's early presence at Beechhurst, was not without effect. The recluse consented to leave his library, which perhaps was no greater sacrifice on his part than Lady Emily made in leaving her farm. Indeed, one of the inducements which Allan held out to his mother was the promise of a pair of white peacocks from Mrs. Wornock, finer and whiter than the birds at Fendyke.

Mr. Carew professed himself pleased with his son's surroundings.

"Your house is like the good man who bequeathed it to you," he said, after his tour of inspection; "essentially comfortable, solid, and commonplace. The admiral had a grand solidity of character; but even your mother will not deny that he was commonplace."

Lady Emily nodded a cheery assent. She always agreed with her husband on all points that did not touch the white farm. There her opinions were paramount; and she would not have submitted to dictation in so much as the ears of a rabbit.

"I could hardly forgive my brother for buying such a house if he hadn't——-"

"Left it to your son," interrupted her husband.

"No, George, that is not what I was going to say. I could not forgive his Philistine taste if he had not brought home all those delicious things from China, and built the Mandarin's room. That is the redeeming feature which makes the house worth having."

"Every one admits that it is a fine room," said Allan. "There is no such room in the neighbourhood, except at Discombe."

"Your father must see Discombe, Allan. We must introduce him to Mrs. Wornock."

"I think not, mother. He would be insufferably bored by a woman who believes in spirit-rapping, sees visions, and plays the organ for hours at a stretch."

His father looked at him intently.

"Who is this person?" he asked quickly.

"A rich widow, whose son is lord of the manor of Discombe, one of the most important places between here and Salisbury."

"And she believes in spiritualism. Curious in a lady living in the country. I thought that kind of thing had died out with Home, and the famous article in the Cornhill Magazine."

"We have had later prophets. Eglinton, for instance, with his materializations and his slate-writing. I don't think the spiritualistic idea is dead yet, in spite of the ridicule which the outside herd has cast upon it."

"I hope the widow lady is not beguiling you into sharing her delusions, Allan."

The son had seen a look in the father's face which spoke to him as plainly as any spoken words. That look had told him that his description of Mrs. Wornock conjured up some thrilling image in his father's mind. He saw that startled wondering look come and go, slowly fading out of the pensive face, as the mind dismissed the thought which Allan's words had awakened. Surely it was not a guilty look which had troubled his father's mild countenance—rather a look of awakened interest, of eager questioning.

"I should hate to see Allan taking up any nonsense of that kind," said Lady Emily, with her practical air; "but really, if this Mrs. Wornock were not twenty years older than he, I should suspect him of being in love with her. She is a pretty, delicate-looking woman, with a shy, girlish manner, and looks ridiculously young to be the mother of a grown-up son."

"Oh, she has a grown-up son, has she?" asked Mr. Carew. "She belongs to this part of the country, I suppose, and is a woman of good family?"

He looked at his son; but, for some reason of his own, Allan parried the question.

"I know hardly anything about her, except that she is a very fine musician, and that she has been particularly kind to me," he said.

"There, George," cried Lady Emily. "Didn't I tell you so? The foolish boy is half in love with her!"

"You will not say that after to-morrow, mother."

"Shall I not? But why?"

"You will lose all interest in to-morrow, if I tell you. Go on wondering, mother dear, till to-morrow, and to-morrow I will tell you a secret; but, remember, it is not to be talked about to any one in Matcham."

"Should I talk of a secret, Allan?"

"I don't know. I have an idea that secrets are the staple of tea-table talk in a village."

"Poor village! for how much it has to bear the blame; and yet people are worse gossips in Mayfair and Belgravia."

"Only because they have more to talk about."

Allan had arranged a luncheon-party for the following day. His courage had failed at the idea of a dinner: the lengthy ceremonial, the fear of failure if he demanded too much of his cook, the long blank space after dinner, with its possibility of ennui. Luncheon was a friendlier meal, and would less heavily tax the resources of a bachelor's establishment; and then there was the chance of being able to wander about the garden with Suzette in the afternoon, the hope of keeping her and her father till teatime, when the other people had gone home; though people do not disperse so speedily after a country luncheon as in town, and it might be that everybody would stop to tea. No matter, if he could steal away with Suzette to look at the single dahlias, in the west garden, fenced off from the lawn by a high laurel hedge, leaving Lady Emily and Mrs. Mornington to entertain his guests.

He had asked Mr. and Mrs. Mornington, General Vincent and his daughter, Mr. Edgefield, the Vicar, and his daughter Bessie (Suzette's antagonist at golf), Mr. and Mrs. Roebuck, a youngish couple, who prided themselves on being essentially of the great world, towny, cosmopolitan, anything but rustic, and who insisted on talking exclusively of London and the Riviera to people who rarely left their native gardens and paddocks. Mr. Roebuck had been officiously civil to Allan, and he had felt constrained to invite him. The invitation was on Mrs. Mornington's principle of payment for value received.

Allan had invited Mrs. Wornock; he had even pressed her to be of the party, but she had refused.

"I don't care for society," she said. "I am out of my element among smart people."

"There will be very little smartness—only the Roebucks, and one may say of them as Beatrice said of Benedick, 'It is a wonder they will still be talking, for nobody minds them.' Seriously now, Mrs. Wornock, I should like you to meet my father."

"You are very kind, but you must excuse me. Don't think me rude or ungrateful."

"Ungrateful! Why, it is I who ask a favour."

"But I am grateful for your kindness in wishing to have me at your house. I will go there some day with Suzette, when you are quite alone, and you shall show me the Mandarin-room."

"That is too good of you. Mind, I shall exact the performance of that promise. You are very fond of Suzette, I think, Mrs. Wornock?"

"Yes, I am very fond of her. She is the only girl with whom I have ever felt in sympathy; just as you are the only young man, except my son, for whom I have ever cared."

"You link us together in your thoughts."

"I do, Allan," she answered gravely, "and I hoped to see you linked by-and-by in a lifelong union."

"That is my own fondest hope," he said. "How did you discover my secret?"

"Your secret! My dear Allan, I have known that you were in love with Suzette almost from the first time I saw you together—yes, even that afternoon at the Grove."

"You were very sympathetic, very quick to read my thoughts. I own that I admired her immensely even at that early stage of our acquaintance."

"And admiration soon grew into love. It has been such happiness for me to watch the growth of that love—to see you two young creatures so trustful and so happy together, walking about that old garden yonder, which has seen so little of youth or of happiness. I felt almost as a mother might have felt watching the happiness of her son. Indeed, Allan, you have become to me almost as a second son."

"And you are becoming to me almost as a second mother," he said, bending down to kiss the slim white hand which lay languidly upon her open book.

Never till to-day had she called him Allan, never before had she spoken to him so freely of her regard for him.

"Allan," she repeated softly. "You don't mind my calling you by your Christian name?"

"Mind! I am flattered that you should so honour me."

"Allan," she repeated again, musingly, "why were you not called George, after your father?"

"Because Allan is an old family name on my mother's side of the house. Her father and grandfather and elder brother were Allans."

He left her almost immediately, taking leave of her briefly, with a sudden revulsion of feeling. That question of hers, and the mention of his father's name, chilled and angered him, in the very moment when his heart had been moved by her sympathy and affection.

There was something in the familiar mention of his father's name that re-awakened those suspicions which he had never altogether banished from his mind. It was perhaps on this account that he had spoken slightingly of Mrs. Wornock when Lady Emily suggested that he should make her known to his father. That question about the name had seemed to him a fresh link in the chain of circumstantial evidence.

Suzette and her father were the first arrivals at Allan's luncheon-party. The General was a martinet in the matter of punctuality; and having taken what he called his chota haz'ri at half-past six that morning, was by no means inclined to feel indulgently disposed towards dilatory arrivals, who should keep him waiting for his tiffin; nor could he be made to understand that a quarter to two always meant two o'clock. The Morningtons appeared at five minutes before two, the Vicar and his daughter as the clock struck the hour; and then there followed a quarter of an hour of obvious waiting, during which Allan showed Suzette the Chinese enamels and ivories, and the arsenal of deadly swords and daggers displayed against the wall of the Mandarin-room, while the Morningtons were discussing with Lady Emily and her husband the merits of Wiltshire as compared with Suffolk.

This delay, at which General Vincent was righteously angry, was occasioned by the Roebucks, who sauntered in with a leisurely air at a quarter-past two; the wife on the best possible terms with herself and her new tailor gown; the husband puffed up at having read his Times before any one else, and loquacious upon the merits of the "crushing reply" made last night by Lord Hatfield at Windermere to "the abominable farrago of lies" in Mr. Henry Wilkes' oration the night before last at Kendal.

"I dare say it was a very good speech," said the General, grimly; "but you might have kept it for after luncheon. It would have been less injured by waiting than Mr. Carew's joint; if he's going to give us one."

"Are we late?" exclaimed Mrs. Roebuck, who had endured a quarter of an hour's agony in front of her cheval glass before the new tailor bodice could be made to "come to." "Are we really late? How very naughty of us! Please, please don't be angry, good people. We beg everybody's pardon," clasping two tightly gloved hands with a prettily beseeching gesture.

"Don't mention it," said the General. "We all like waiting; but if Carew has got a mug cook, I wouldn't give much for the state of her temper at this moment."

"We'll send a pretty message to the cook after luncheon, if she has been clever enough not to spoil her dishes."

The ladies—Lady Emily and Mrs. Mornington descanting on gardens and glass all the way—went in a bevy to the dining-room, the men following, Mr. Roebuck still quoting Lord Hatfield, and the way in which he had demolished the Radical orator.

"The worst of it is he don't make 'em laugh," said Mr. Mornington. "Nobody can make 'em laugh as Wilkes does. Town or country, hodge or mechanic, he knows the length of their foot to a fraction, and knows what will hit them and what will tickle them."

The cook was sufficiently "mug" to have been equal to the difficulties of twenty minutes' delay, and the luncheon was admirable—not too many courses, nor too many dishes, but everything perfect after its kind. Nor was the joint—that item dear to elderly gentlemen—forgotten, for after a first course of fish and a second of curry and crême de volaille, there appeared a saddle of Wiltshire mutton, to which the elderly gentlemen did ample justice, while the ladies, who had lunched upon the more sophisticated dishes, supplied the greater part of the conversation.

"My father will quote your cook for the next six months," said Suzette, by whose side Allan had contrived to place himself during the casual dropping into seats at the large round table, "for yours is the only house where he has seen Bombay ducks served with the curry."

"Did you not tell me once that your father has a weakness for those absurd little fish?"

"Did I really? Was I capable of talking such absolute twaddle?"

"It was not twaddle. It was very serious. It was on a day when I found you looking worried and absent, unable to appreciate either Mrs. Wornock's music or my conversation; and, on being closely questioned, you confessed that the canker at your heart was dinner. The General had been dissatisfied; the cook was stupid. You had done your uttermost. You had devoted hours to the reading of cookery-books, which seemed all of them hopelessly alike. You had studied all his fancies. You had given him Bombay ducks with his curry——"

"Did I say all that? How silly of me. And how ridiculous of you to remember."

"Memory is not a paid servant, but a most capricious Ariel. One cannot say to one's self, I will remember this or that. My memory is as fugitive as most people's; but there is one thing for which it can be relied on. I remember everything about you—all you say to me, all you do—even to the gowns you wear."

Suzette laughed a little and blushed a little; but did not look offended.

"You had about five minutes' talk with my mother before I took you to see the enamels. How do you like her?"

"Immensely! Lady Emily is charming. She was telling me about her white farm."

"It would have been odd if you had escaped hearing of that, even in the first five minutes."

"I was deeply interested. Lady Emily has promised me some white bramahs. I am going to start a white poultry-yard. I cannot aspire higher than poultry; but I am determined that every bird shall be white."

"Pretty foolishness! And so you like my mother?"

"Very, very much. She is one of those people with whom one feels at one's ease from the first moment. She looks as if she could not say or even think anything unkind."

"I don't believe she could do either. And yet she is human—feminine-human—and can enjoy an interesting scandal—local, if possible. She enjoys it passively. She does nothing to swell the snowball, and will hardly help to roll it along. She remains perfectly passive, and never goes further than to say that she is shocked and disappointed. And yet I believe she enjoys it."

"It is only the excitement that one enjoys. We had scandals even in the convent—girls who behaved badly, dishonourably, about their studies; cheating in order to get a better chance of a prize. I'm afraid we were all too deeply interested in the crime and the punishment. It was something to think about and talk about when life was particularly monotonous."

Lady Emily was watching them from the other side of the table, and lending rather an indifferent ear to Mr. Roebuck's account of Homburg and the people he and his wife had met there. They had only just returned from that exhilarating scene. He could talk of nothing but H.R.H.'s condescension; the dear duchess; Lady this, Lord the other; and the prodigious demand there had been for himself and his wife in the very smartest society.

"Four picnics a day are hardly conducive to the cure of suppressed gout," said Mr. Roebuck; "and there were ever so many days when we had to cut ourselves up into little bits—lunching with one party, taking coffee with another, driving home with somebody else, going to tea-fights all over the place. Dinner engagements I positively set my face against. Mimosa and I were there for rest and recuperation after the season—positively washed out, both of us. You have no idea what a rag my wife looked when we took our seats in the club train."

Happily for Lady Emily, who had been suffering this kind of thing for half an hour, the coffee had gone round, and at her first imploring glance Mrs. Mornington rose and the ladies left the dining-room. Yet even this relief was but temporary; for Mrs. Roebuck appropriated Lady Emily in the garden, and entertained her with her own view of Homburg, which was smarter, inasmuch as it was more exclusive than Mr. Roebuck's.

"A horrid place," said the lady. "One meets all one's London friends mixed up with a herd of foreign royalties whom one is expected to cultivate. I used to send Richard to all the gaieties, while I stopped at home and let my maid-companion read to me. We shall go to Marienbad next August. If one could be at Homburg without people knowing one was there, the place might be tolerable."

"I have been told the scenery is very fine," hazarded Lady Emily.

"Oh, the scenery is well enough; but one knows it, and one has seen so much finer things in that way. When one has been across the Cordilleras, it is absurd to be asked to worship some poor little hills in Germany."

"I have seldom been out of Suffolk, except to visit some of my people in Scotland. Ben Lomond and Ben Nevis are quite big enough for me."

"Oh, the Scotch hills are dear things, with quite a character of their own; and a Scotch deer forest is the finest thing of its kind all over the world. The duke's is sixty thousand acres—and Dick and I always enjoy ourselves at Ultimathule Castle—but after being lost in a snowstorm in the Cordilleras——"

Lady Emily stifled a despairing yawn. Not a word had she been able to say about her Woodbastwick cows, which she was inwardly comparing with Allan's black muzzled Jerseys, grazing on the other side of the sunk fence. Heartfelt was her gratitude to Mrs. Mornington when that lady suddenly wheeled round from a confidential talk with the Vicar and interrupted Mrs. Roebuck's journey across the Cordilleras by an inquiry about the Suffolk branches of the Guild for supplying warm and comfortable raiment to the deserving poor.

"I hope you have a branch in your neighbourhood," she said.

"Yes, indeed we have. I am a slave to the Guild all the winter. One can't make flannel petticoats and things in summer, you know."

"I can," retorted Mrs. Mornington, decisively.

"What, on a broiling day in August! when the very sight of flannel puts one in a fever?"

"I am not so impressionable. The things are wanted in October, and July and August are quite late enough for getting them ready."

"I subscribe to these institutions," Mrs. Roebuck remarked languidly. "I never work for them. Life isn't long enough."

"Then you never have the right kind of feeling about your poorer fellow-creatures," said Mrs. Mornington. "It is the doing something for them, using one's own hand and eye and thought for the poor toiling creatures, sacrificing some little leisure and some little fad to making them more comfortable—it is that kind of thing which brings the idea of that harder world home to one."

"Ah, how nice it is of you dear ladies to sacrifice yourselves like that; but you couldn't do it after a June and July in London. If you had seen what a poor creature I looked when we took our seats in the club train for Homburg——"

Mrs. Mornington tucked her arm under Lady Emily's and walked her away.

"I want you to tell me all about your farm," she said. And then, in a rather loud aside, "I can't stand that woman, and I wish your son hadn't been so conscientious in asking her."

While emptiness and ennui prevailed on the terrace in front of the Mandarin-room, there were a pair of wanderers in the shrubbery, whose talk was unleavened by worldliness or pretence of any kind. Allan had stolen away from the smokers in the dining-room, and was escorting Suzette and her friend Bessie Edgefield round his modest domain—the shrubberies, the paddocks nearest the house, which had been planted and educated into a kind of park; the greenhouse and hothouse, which were just capacious enough to supply plenty of flowers for drawing-room and dinner-table, but not to grow grapes or peaches. Everything was on a modest, unassuming scale. Allan felt that after the mansion and gardens at Discombe, his house suggested the abode of a retired shopkeeper. A successful hosier or bootmaker might create for himself such a home. Wholesale trade, soap, or lucifer matches, or cocoa would require something far more splendid.

Modest as the place was, the two girls admired, or seemed to admire, all its details—the conifers of thirty years' growth, the smiling meadows, the fawn-coloured cows. A sunny September afternoon showed those fertile pastures and trim gardens at their best. Allan felt exquisitely happy walking about those smooth lawns and gravel paths with the girl he loved. At every word of approval he fancied she was praising the place in which she would be content to live. After that avowal of his the other day, it seemed to him that her kindness meant much more than it had meant before she knew her power. She could not be so cruel as to mock him with the promise of her smiles, her sweet words, her undisguised pleasure in his company. Yes, he was perfectly happy. He thought of her refusal the other day as only the prelude to her acceptance. She had not said "No;" she had only said "Not yet."

Bessie Edgefield was one of those sweetly constituted girls whom Nature has especially created to be a third party in a love affair; never to play the heroine in white satin, but always the confidante in white muslin. She walked beside her friend, placid, silent, save for an occasional monosyllable, and was of no more account than Suzette's shadow.

"The Roebucks are taking leave," exclaimed Suzette, looking across the lawn to the groups on the terrace. "Mr. Carew, I'm afraid you are a sadly inattentive host."

"Have I neglected you, Miss Vincent?"

"You have neglected Mrs. Roebuck, which is much worse. She will be talking of your want of savoir vivre all over Matcham."

"Let her talk. She has been boring my mother with a cruelty worthy of Torquemada. She forgets that torture was illegal in England even in Bacon's time. See, they are all going away; but you and the General and Miss Edgefield must stay to tea, even if the Vicar is too busy to stop."

The Vicar had quietly vanished, to resume the round of parish duties, quite content to leave his Bessie in comfortable quarters. The Roebucks were going, and the Morningtons were following their example; but General Vincent had no objection to stop to tea if his daughter and Miss Edgefield desired him to do so.

He was smoking a cheroot, comfortably seated in a sheltered part of the terrace—a corner facing south, screened from east and north by an angle of the house, where the Mandarin-room projected from the main building—and he was absorbed in a discussion of Indian legendary lore with Mr. Carew, who owned to some knowledge of sanscrit, and had made Eastern fable and legend an especial study.

Suzette and her father stayed till nearly seven o'clock, when Allan insisted on walking home with them, having suddenly discovered that he had had no walking that day. He had been cub-hunting from seven in the morning till nine; but he declared himself in need of walking exercise. Lady Emily went with them to the gate, and parted with Suzette as with a favourite of long standing. Allan was enraptured to see his mother's friendliness with the girl he loved; and it was all he could do to restrain his feelings during the walk to Marsh House.

Perhaps it was only that gay temper of hers, that readiness to laugh at him and at all things in creation, which held him at a distance. He had made up his mind that she was to be his—that if she were to refuse him twenty times in twenty capricious moods of her light and airy temperament, there was somewhere in her nature a vein of serious feeling, and by that he would win her and hold her.

"You like Miss Vincent, mother?" he asked that evening, when he was sitting with his father and mother in the Mandarin-room after dinner.

The evening was warm to sultriness, and there were several casements open in the long window which filled one end of the room; a window with richly carved sashes and panels of cedar and lattice-work alternating with the glass. There was another window in the western wall, less elaborate—a door-window—which formed the usual exit to the garden. This was closed, but not curtained.

The room was lighted only with shaded lamps, which lighted the tables and the spaces round them, but left the corners in shadow.

Lady Emily was sitting at one of the tables, her fingers occupied with a large piece of work, which she carried about with her wherever she went, and which, to the eye of the uninitiated, never appeared to make any progress towards completion. It was destined eventually to cover the grand piano at Fendyke, and it was to be something very rare and precious in the way of embroidery; the basis a collection of Breton shawl-pattern handkerchiefs, overlaid by Lady Emily with embroidery in many-coloured silks and Japanese gold thread. This piece of work was a devouring monster in the matter of silk, and Lady Emily was always telling her friends the number of skeins which were required for its maintenance, and the cost of the gold thread which made so faint an effect in the Oriental labyrinth of palms and sprigs and arabesques and medallions.

"I'm afraid I shall never live to finish it," Lady Emily would conclude with a sigh, throwing herself back in her chair after an hour's steadfast labour, her eyes fixed in a kind of ecstasy upon the little corner of palm which she had encrusted with satin stitch and gold; "but if I do, I really think it will repay me for all my trouble."

To-night her mind was divided between her embroidery and her son, who sat on a three-cornered chair beside her, meekly threading her needles while he tried to get her to talk about Suzette.

His father was seated almost out of earshot, at a table near the open window, reading the Nineteenth Century by the light of a lamp which shone full upon his lowered eyelids, and on the thoughtful brow and sensitive mouth, as he sat in a reposeful attitude in the low, deep chair.

"Do I like Miss Vincent?" repeated Lady Emily, when she had turned a critical corner in the leafy edging of a scroll. "I wonder how often you will make me tell you that I think her a very—no, Allan, the light peacock, please—not that dark shade—very sweet girl—bright, unaffected——"

"And exquisitely lovely," interjected her son, as he handed her the needleful of silk.

"Ah, there you exaggerate awfully. She is certainly a pretty girl; but her nose is—well, I hardly know how to describe it; but there is a fault somewhere in the nose, and her mouth might be smaller; but, on the other hand, she has fine eyes. Her manners are really charming—that pretty little Parisian air which is so fascinating in a high-bred Parisian. But, oh, Allan! can you really mean to marry her?"

"I really mean to try my hardest to achieve that happiness, and I shall think myself the luckiest man in Wiltshire, or in England, or in Europe, if I succeed."

"But, Allan, have you reflected seriously? She tells me that she is a Roman Catholic."

"If she were a Fire-worshipper, I would run the risk of failure in converting her to Christianity. If she were a Buddhist, I should be inclined to embrace the faith of Gautama; but since she is only a conformer to a more ancient form of religion of which you and I are followers, I don't see why her creed should be a stumbling-block to my bliss."

Lady Emily shook her head sagely, and breathed a profound sigh.

"Differences of religion are so apt to make unhappiness in married life."

"I am not religious enough to distress myself because my wife believes in some things that are incredible to me. We shall both follow the same Master, both hope for reunion in the same heaven."

"Allan, she believes in Purgatory. Think how inconsistent your ideas of the future must be."

Allan did not pursue the argument. He was smiling to himself at the easy way in which he had been talking of his wife—their future, their very hopes of heaven—making so sure that she was to be his. He looked at his father, sitting alone with them, but not of them, and thought of his father's married life as he had seen it ever since he was old enough to observe or understand the life around him; so peaceful, so in all things what married life should be; and yet over all there had been that faint shadow of melancholy which the son had felt from his earliest years, that absence of the warmth and the romance of a marriage where love is the bond of union. Here, Allan told himself, the bond had been friendly regard, convenience, the world's approval, family interests, and lastly the child as connecting link and meeting-place of hopes and fears. Love had been missing from the life of yonder pale student, musing over half a dozen pages of modern metaphysics.

Allan rose and moved slowly towards that tranquil figure, and feeling the night air blowing cold as he approached that end of the room, he asked his father if he would like the windows shut?

"No, thank you, Allan, not on my account," Mr. Carew answered, without looking up from his book.

Had he looked up, he would have seen Allan standing between the lamplight and the window like a man transfixed.

A pale wan face had that moment vanished in the outward darkness; a face which a moment before had been looking in at one of the open lattices, a face which Allan had recognized at the first glance.

He went to the glass door, opened it quietly, and went out to the terrace, so quickly and so silently that his disappearance attracted no attention from father or mother, one absorbed in his book, the other bending over her work.

The face was the face of Mrs. Wornock; and Mrs. Wornock must be somewhere between the terrace and the gates. There was no moon, but the night was clear, and the sky was full of stars. Allan went swiftly round the angle of the house to the terrace outside the large window; but the figure that he had seen from within was no longer stationed outside the window. The terrace was empty. He went round to the front of the house, whence the carriage drive wound with a gentle curve to the gates, between shrubberies of laurel and arbutus, cypress and deodara.

Yes, the figure he had expected to see vanished round the curve of the drive as he drew near the porch, a slender figure in dark raiment, with something white about the head and shoulders. He ran along the drive, and reached the gate just in time to see Mrs. Wornock's brougham standing in the road, at a distance of about fifty yards, and to see Mrs. Wornock open the door and step in. Another moment—affording him no time for pursuit, had he even wished to pursue her—and the carriage drove away.

Allan had no doubt as to the motive of this conduct. She had come by stealth to look upon the face of the man whom she had refused to meet in the beaten way of friendship.

CHAPTER IX.

"SO GREW MY OWN SMALL LIFE COMPLETE."

After the incident of that September night, there was no longer the shadow of doubt in Allan's mind as to the relations between his father and the lady at Discombe Manor. That they had known each other and loved each other in their youth he was now fully convinced. This last strange act of Mrs. Wornock's was to his mind the strongest link in the chain of evidence. Whatever the relations between them had been, guilty or innocent—and fondly as he loved his father, he feared there had been guilt in that association—it was his duty to prevent any meeting between them, lest the mere sight of that pale, spiritual face with its singular youthfulness of aspect, should re-awaken in his father's breast some faint ghost of the passion that had lived and died a quarter of a century ago. Nor did his respect for his honest-minded, trustful-hearted mother permit him to tolerate the idea of friendly intercourse between her and this mysterious rival from the shadowland of vanished years. He took care, therefore, to discourage any idea of visiting the Manor; and he carefully avoided any further talk of Mrs. Wornock, lest his father's closer questioning should bring about the disclosure of her identity. His father's manner, when the lady was first discussed, had shown him very clearly that the description of her gifts and fancies coincided with the memory of some one known in the past; but it had been also clear that neither the name of Wornock, nor the lady's position at Discombe, had any association for Mr. Carew. If he had known and loved her in the past, he had known and loved her before she married old Geoffrey Wornock.

His anxiety upon his father's account was speedily set at rest, for Mr. Carew—after exploring his son's small and strictly popular library, where among rows of handsomely bound standard works, there were practically no books which appealed to the scholar's taste—soon wearied of unstudious ease, and announced a stern necessity for going to London, where a certain defunct Hebrew scholar's library, lay and ecclesiastical, was to be sold at Hodgson's. He would put up for a few days at the old-fashioned hotel which he had used since he was an undergraduate, potter about among the book-shops, look up some references he wanted in the Museum Reading-room, and meet his wife at Liverpool Street on her way home.

Lady Emily, absorbed in her son and her son's love affair, agreed most amiably to this arrangement.

"Telegraph your day and hour for returning, when you have bought all the books you want," she said. "I'm afraid you spend more money on those dreadful old books, which nobody in Suffolk cares a straw about, than I do on my farm, which people come to see from far and wide."

"And a great nuisance your admirers are, Emily. I am very glad the Suffolk people are no book-lovers; and I hope you will never hint to anybody that my books are worth seeing."

"I could not say anything so untrue. Your shelves are full of horrors. Now Allan's library here is really delightful—Blackwood's Magazine, from the beginning, Macaulay, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer, Lever, Marryat—and all of them so handsomely bound! I think my brother showed excellent taste in literature, though I doubt if he ever read much. But as you seem happier in your library than anywhere else, I suppose one must forgive you for spending a fortune on books that don't interest anybody else. And one can't help being a little bit proud of your scholarship."

And so they kissed and parted, with the unimpassioned kiss of marriage which has never meant more than affectionate friendship. Lady Emily stood at the hall door while her husband drove off to the station, and then turned gaily to her son, and said—

"Now, Allan, I am yours to command. Let me see as much as possible of that sweet young thing you are in love with. Shall we go and call on her this afternoon? She has a white cat which may some day provide her with kittens to distribute among her friends, and, if so, I am to have one to bring up by hand as I did Snowdrop. You remember Snowdrop?"

Allan kissed his mother before he answered, but not for Snowdrop's sake.

"I have a vague recollection of something white and fluffy hanging to the skirt of your gown, that I used to tread upon."

"Yes, you were horrid. You very nearly killed him. Shall we go?"

"Please, please, please, mother dearest. I am ready this instant. Three o'clock. We shall get there at half-past, and if we loiter looking at white kittens, or the mother of potential kittens, till half-past four, she will give us tea, and we can make an afternoon of it."

"Hadn't I better put on a bonnet, Allan?"

"No, no. You will go in your hat, just as you are. You will treat her without the slightest ceremony—treat her as your daughter. Do you know, mother, I am uncommonly glad you never honoured me with a sister."

"Why, Allan?"

"Because, if I marry Suzette, she will be your only daughter. There will be no one to be jealous of her, in Suffolk or here."

"What a foolish fancy! Well, give me a daughter as soon as you like. I am getting old, Allan, and your father's secluded habits leave me very often alone. His books are more his companions than I am——"

"Ah, but you know how he loves you, mother," interrupted Allan.

They were on their way to the gate by this time, Lady Emily in her travelling-hat and loose tan gloves, just as she had been going about the gardens and meadows in the morning, Allan twirling his stick in very gladness of heart.

They were going to her. If she were out, they would go and find her; at her aunt's, at the Vicarage, on the links yonder; anywhere but at Discombe. He hoped she had not gone to Discombe.

"Yes, he is fond of me, I believe, in his own way. There never was a better husband," Lady Emily answered thoughtfully. "But I know, Allan! I know!"

"What, mother?"

"I know that I was not his first love—that I was only a pis aller—that there is something wanting in his life, and always must be till the end. I should brood over it all, perhaps, Allan, and end by making myself unhappy, if it were not for my farm; but all those living creatures occupy my mind. One living fox-terrier is worth a whole picture-gallery."

Suzette was at home. The after-math had been cut in the meadow in front of Marsh House, a somewhat swampy piece of ground at some seasons, but tolerably dry just now, after a hot summer. Suzette and Bessie Edgefield were tossing the scented grass in the afternoon sunshine, and fancying themselves useful haymakers. They threw down their hay-forks at the approach of visitors, and there was no more work done that day, though Allan offered to take a fork. They all sat in the garden talking, or wandered about among the flowers in a casual way, and while Bessie and Lady Emily were looking at the contents of the only greenhouse, Allan found himself alone with Suzette in a long gravel walk on the other side of the lawn-like meadow, along all the length of which there was a broad border filled with old-fashioned perennials that had been growing and spreading and multiplying themselves for half a century. A row of old medlar and hazel trees sheltered this border from the north wind, and hid the boundary fence.

"Dear old garden!" cried Allan. "How much nicer an old garden is than a new one!"

"I hope you don't mean to disparage your garden at Beechhurst. Our gardener is always complaining of the old age of all things here. Everything is worn out. The trees, the shrubs, the frames, the greenhouse. One ought to begin again from the very beginning, he says. He would be charmed with Beechhurst, where all things are so neat and trim."

"Cockney trimness, I'm afraid; but if you are satisfied with it, if you think it not altogether a bad garden——"

"I think it a delightful garden," said Suzette, blushing at that word "satisfied," which implied so much.

"I am glad of that," said Allan, with a deep sigh of content, as if some solemn question had been settled. "And you like my mother?"

"Very much indeed. But how you skip from the garden to Lady Emily!"

"And you approve of the Mandarin-room?"

"It is one of the handsomest rooms I ever saw, except in an Indian palace."

"Then take them, Suzette," he cried eagerly, with his arm round her waist, drawing the slim figure to his breast, holding and dominating her by force of will and strength of arm, smiling down at her with adoring eyes. "Have them, dearest! Mother, garden, room—they are all your own; for they belong to your very slave. They are at your feet, as I am."

"Do you call this being at my feet?" she asked, setting herself suddenly free, with a joyous laugh. "You have a very impertinent way of offering your gifts."

"Not impertinent—only desperate. I remembered my repulse of the other day, and I swore to myself that I would hold you in my arms—once, at least, if only once, even if you were to banish me into outer darkness the next moment—and I have done it, and I am glad! But you won't banish me, will you, Suzette? You must needs know how I love you—how long and patiently I have loved you——"

"Long! patiently! Why, we only met at Midsummer."

"Ah, consider the age that every day on which I did not see you has seemed to me, and the time would hardly come within your powers of computation. Suzette, be merciful! say you love me, were it ever so little. Were it only a love like a grain of mustard-seed, I know it would grow into a wide and spreading tree by-and-by, and all the days of my life would be happy under its shelter."

"You would think me curiously inconsistent if I owned to loving you after what I said the other day," faltered Suzette, looking down at the flowers.

"I should think you adorable."

She was only serious for a moment, and then her natural gaiety prevailed.

"Do you know that my aunt lectured me severely when I confessed to having refused your flattering offer?"

"Did she really? How sweet of her! After that, you cannot refuse me again. Your aunt would shut you up and feed you upon bread and water, as fathers and mothers used to do with rebellious daughters in the eighteenth century."

"I hardly think she would treat me quite so ferociously for saying 'No;' but I think she would be pleased if I were to say 'Yes.'"

"And that means yes, my love, my own!" he cried, in a rapture so swift and sudden that he had clasped her to his breast and snatched the kiss of betrothal before she could check his impulsiveness. "You are my very own," he said, "and I am the happiest man in England. Yes, the happiest——Did I say in England? What a contemptible notion! I cannot conceive the idea that anywhere upon this earth there beats a human heart so full of gladness as mine. Suzette, Suzette, Suzette!" he repeated tenderly, with a kiss for each comma.

"What a whirlwind you are!" she remonstrated. "And what a rag you are making of my frock! Oh, Allan, how you have hurried me into this! And even now I am not quite sure——"

"You are sure that I adore you! What more need my wife be sure of? Oh, my darling, I have seen wedlock where no love is—only affection and trustfulness and kindly feeling—all the domestic virtues with love left out! Dearest, such a union is like a picture to the colour-blind, like music to the stone-deaf, like a landscape without sunlight. There is nothing in this world like love, and nothing can make up for love when love is wanting."

"And nothing can make up for love when love is wanting," repeated Suzette, suddenly serious. "Oh, Allan! what if I am not sure?—if I doubt my own feelings?"

"But you can't doubt. My dearest, I am reading the signs and tokens of love in those eloquent eyes, in those sensitive lips, while you are talking of doubt. There is no one else, is there, Suzette?" he asked, with quick earnestness. "No one in the past whose image comes between you and me?"

"No one, no one."

"In all your Indian experiences?"

"No one."

"Then I am more than satisfied. And now let us go and tell my mother. She has been waiting for a daughter ever since I was born; and, behold, at last I am giving her one, the sweetest her heart could desire."

Suzette submitted, and walked by his side in silence while he went in search of Lady Emily, whom he finally discovered in the poultry-yard with Bessie Edgefield. Allan's elated air and Suzette's blushes were a sufficient indication of what had happened; and when mother and son had clasped hands and looked at each other there was no need of words. Lady Emily took the girl to her heart and kissed her.

"I hope your father will be pleased, Suzette."

"I don't think he will be sorry."

"And I know Mrs. Mornington will be glad. Allan has her consent in advance."

"Auntie is a very silly woman," said Suzette, laughingly. And then she had to endure Bessie Edgefield's congratulations, which were of the boisterous kind.

"Of course you will let me be bridesmaid," she said, with that vulgar, practical view of things which wounds the sensitiveness of the newly betrothed almost as much as an estimate from a furniture dealer, or a prospectus from an insurance office.

CHAPTER X.

"OUR DREAMS PURSUE OUR DEAD, AND DO NOT FIND."

Miss Vincent's engagement met with everybody's approval, with the one exception of the marriageable young ladies of the neighbourhood, who thought that Allan Carew had made a foolish choice, and might certainly have done better for himself. What good could come of marrying a girl who was neither English nor French; who had been educated in a Parisian convent, and who drove to Salisbury every Sunday morning to hear mass?

"What uncomfortable Sundays they will have!" one of these young ladies remarked to Bessie Edgefield; "and then how horrid for him to have a wife of a different creed! They are sure to quarrel about religion. Isn't the Vicar dreadfully shocked?"

"My father is rather sorry that Mr. Carew should marry a Roman Catholic. There is always the fear that he might go over to Rome——"

"Of course. He is sure to do that. It will be the only way to stop the quarrelling. She will make him a pervert."

Mrs. Mornington, on the other hand, flattered herself that, by her marriage with a member of the English Church, her niece would be brought to see the errors of Rome, and would very soon make her appearance in the family pew beside her husband.

Lady Emily cherished the same hope, since, although a less ardent Churchwoman than Mrs. Mornington, she believed in Anglicanism as the surest road to salvation, and she dwelt also upon the difficulties that might arise by-and-by about the poor dear children, talking of those potential beings as if they were already on the scene.

The Roman Church was severe upon that question, and it would perhaps be impossible for Suzette to be married in her own church unless her husband would promise that their children should be baptized and educated in the true faith.

While other people were thinking about these things for him, Allan had no room for thought of any kind, unless a lover's meditation upon the image of the girl he loved could be dignified by the name of thought. For Allan, life was a perpetual ecstasy. To be with Suzette in her own home, at the Grove, on the links, anywhere—to be with her was all he needed for bliss. For his sake, his mother had prolonged her stay at Beechhurst, in order that the two young people might be together in the house where they were to live as man and wife. It was Allan's delight to make Suzette familiar with her future home. He wanted her to feel that this was the house in which she was to live; that under her father's roof she was no longer at home; that her books, her bric-à-brac, the multifarious accumulations of a happy girlhood, might as well be transferred at once to the sunny, bow-windowed upstair room which was to be her den. It was now a plainly furnished, matter-of-fact morning room, a room in which the Admiral had kept his boots, cigar-boxes, and business documents, and transacted the fussy futilities of his unoccupied life. The mantelpiece, which had been built up with shelves and artful cupboards for the accommodation of the Admiral's cigars, would serve excellently to set off Suzette's zoological china; her Dresden pugs, and rats, and lobsters, and pigs, and rabbits, her morsels of silver, and scraps of wrought copper would adorn the shelves; and all her little odds and ends and never-to-be-finished bits of fancy-work could be neatly stowed away in the cupboards.

"But won't you want those dear little cubby-houses for your own cigars?" asked Suzette. "It seems too cruel to rob you of your uncle's snuggery. I've no doubt you smoke just as much as the Admiral."

"Not cigars. My humble pipe and pouch can stow themselves away anywhere. I only smoke cigars out hunting, and I keep a box or two in the saddle-room for handiness. No, this is to be your room, Suzette. I have imagined you in it until it seems so to belong to you that I feel I am taking a liberty in writing a letter here. When are you going to bring the Dresden bow-wows, and the elephants, and mice, and lobsters, and donkeys?—all about of a size, by the way."

"Oh, I could not possibly spare them," Suzette answered quickly, making for the door.

They had come in to look at the room, and for Suzette to give her opinion as to the colour and style of the new papering. It was to be a Morris paper, although that would entail new carpet and curtains, and a complete revolution as to colouring.

"Spare them!" echoed Allan, detaining her. "Who wants you to spare them? When will you bring them with you? When are you coming to take possession of the house which is no home for me until you are mistress of it?"

This was by no means the first time the question had been asked. Again and again had Allan pleaded that his marriage might be soon. There was no reason why he should wait for his wife. His position was established, his house was ready; a house as well found as that flagship had been on whose quarter-deck the Admiral had moved as a king. Why should he wait? He could never love his future wife more dearly than he loved her now. All the framework of his life would be out of gear till he had brought her home to the house which seemed joyless and empty for want of her.

"When is it to be, Suzette? When am I to be completely happy?"

"What, are you not happy, par exemple? You talked about overwhelming happiness when I said 'Yes.'"

"That was the promise of happiness. It lifted me to the skies; but it was only the promise. I am pining for the realization. I want you all to myself—to have and to hold for ever and ever; beside my hearth; interwoven with my life; mine always and always; no longer a bright, capricious spirit, glancing about me like a gleam of sunshine, and vanishing like the sunbeam; but a woman—my very own—of one mind and of one heart with me. Suzette, if you love me, you will not spin out the time of dreams; you will give yourself to me really and for ever."

There was an earnestness in his tone that scared her. The blushes faded from her cheeks, and she looked at him, pale and startled, and sudden tears rushed to her eyes.

"You said you would give me time," she faltered; "time to know you better—to be certain." And then recovering her gaiety in an instant—"Now, Allan, it is too bad of you. Did I not tell you that I would not be married till my one-and-twentieth birthday? Why do you tease me to alter the date? Surely you don't want to marry an infant."

"And your birthday will be on the twenty-third of June," said Allan, rather sullenly. "Nearly a year from now."

"Nearly a year from October to June! What odd ideas you have about arithmetic! And now I must run and find Lady Emily. We are going to drive to Morton Towers together."

Allan made way for her to pass, and followed her downstairs, vexed and disheartened. His mother was to leave him next day; and then there would be one house the less in which he and Suzette could meet—the house which was to be their home.

He had not visited Mrs. Wornock since her nocturnal perambulation, and he had prevented his mother paying her a second visit, albeit the hope of a white peacock and a certain interest in the widow's personality had made Lady Emily anxious to call at the Manor. Allan had found reasons for putting off any such call, without saying one disparaging word about the lady. He had heard of Mrs. Wornock from Suzette, who reproached him for going no more to Discombe.

"I did not know you were so fickle," she said. "I really think you have behaved abominably to poor Mrs. Wornock. She is always asking me why you don't go to see her; and I am tired of inventing excuses."

Suzette was at the Manor every other day. Mrs. Wornock was teaching her to play the organ.

"Is it not sweet of her?" she asked Allan. "And though I don't suppose she ever gave any one a lesson in her life till she began to teach me, she has the teaching gift in a marked degree. I love to learn of her. I can play some simple things of Haydn's not altogether badly. Perhaps you will do me the honour to come and hear me some day, when I have got a little further."

"I will go to hear you to-morrow, if I may."

"What! Then you have no objection to Discombe in the abstract, though you have cut poor Mrs. Wornock for the last six weeks?"

"I was so much occupied with my mother."

"And your mother wanted badly to call upon Mrs. Wornock, and you always put a stumbling-block in her way. But I am happy to say Lady Emily is to have the white peacock all the same. She is to have a pair of birds. I have taken care of that."

"Like a good and thoughtful daughter."

When Allan came back from the station, after seeing his mother safely seated in the London train, he found a letter from Mrs. Wornock on the hall table—a hand-delivered letter which had just arrived. It was brief and to the point.

"Why have you deserted me, Allan? Have I unconsciously offended you, or is there no room in your heart for friendship as well as love? I hear of your happiness from Suzette; but I want to see you and your sweetheart roaming about the gardens here as in the old days, before you were engaged lovers. Now that Lady Emily is leaving Beechhurst, you will have time to spare for me."

The letter seemed a reproach, and he felt that he deserved to be reproached by her. How kind she had been, how sympathetic, how interested in his love-story; and what an ingrate he must appear in her eyes!

He did not wait for the following morning and the music-lesson, lest Mrs. Wornock should think he went to Discombe only on Suzette's account. He set out immediately after reading that reproachful little letter, and walked through the lanes and copses to the Manor House.

It was four o'clock when he arrived, and Mrs. Wornock was at home and alone. The swelling tones of that wonderful organ answered his question on the threshold. No beginner could play with that broad, strong touch, which gave grandeur to the simple phrases of an "Agnus Dei" by Palestrina.

She started up as Allan was announced, and went quickly to meet him, giving him both her hands.

"This is so good of you," she exclaimed.

"Then you are not offended, and you have forgiven me?"

"My dear Mrs. Wornock, why should I be offended? I have received nothing but kindness from you."

"I thought you might be angry with me for refusing the invitation to your luncheon-party."

"It would have been very impertinent of me to be angry, when I know what a recluse you are."

"It is a month since you were here—a whole calendar month. Why didn't you bring Lady Emily to see me? But perhaps she did not wish to come. Was that so?"

"No, Mrs. Wornock," he answered coldly. "My mother wished to call upon you."

"And you prevented her?"

"Yes."

"Why did you do that?"

"Dare I be frank with you?"

"Yes, yes, yes! You cannot be too frank. I love you, Allan. Always remember that. You are to me as a second son."

Her warmth startled and scared him. His face flushed hotly, and he stood before her in mute embarrassment. If the secret of the past was indeed the guilty secret which he had suspected, there was utter shamelessness in this speech of hers.

"Allan, why are you silent?"

"Because there are some things that can hardly be said; least of all by a man of my age to a woman of yours."

"There is nothing that you can say to me, Allan, about myself or my regard for you, that can bring a blush to my face or to yours. There is nothing in my life of which I need be ashamed in your sight or in the sight of my son."

"Forgive me, forgive me, if my secret thoughts have sometimes wronged you. There has been so much to surprise and mystify me. Your agitation on hearing my father's name; your painful embarrassment when I brought my mother here; and last, and most of all, your secret visit to Beechhurst when my father was there."

"What! you know of that?"

"Yes; I saw your face at the open window, looking in at him."

She clasped her hands, and there were tears in her eyes.

"Yes," she faltered, after a silence of some moments, "I was looking at the face I had not seen for nearly thirty years—the face that looked at me like a ghost from the past, and had no knowledge of me, no care for me. I knew—I have known in all these years that George Beresford was to be looked for among the living. I have sought for him in the spirit-world, again and again and again, in long days and nights of waiting, in my dreams, in long, far-reaching thoughts that have carried my soul away from this dull earth; but there was no answer—not a thought, not a breath out of that unseen world where my spirit would have touched his had he died while he was young, and while he still loved me. But he lived, and grew old like me, and found a new love, and so we are as wide apart as if we had never met. I stood in the darkness outside your window for nearly an hour, looking at him, listening to his voice when he spoke—the dear, kind voice! That was not changed."

"It is true, then? You knew and loved my father years ago?"

"Yes, knew him and loved him, and would have been his wife if it had been for his happiness to marry me. Think of that, Allan! I was to have been his wife, and I gave him up for his own sake."

"Why did you do that? Why should you not have married him?"

"Because I was only a poor girl, and he was a gentleman—the only son of a rich widow, and his mother would never have forgiven him for such a marriage. I knew nothing of that when he asked me to be his wife. I only knew that we loved each other truly and dearly. But just before the day that was to have been our wedding-day his mother came to me, and told me that if I persisted in marrying him I should be the bane of his life. It would be social extinction for him to marry me. Social extinction! I remember those words, though I hardly knew then what they meant. I was not eighteen, Allan, and I knew less of the world than many children of eight. But I did not give up my happiness without a struggle. There was strong persuasion brought to bear upon me; and at last I yielded—for his sake."

"And blighted his life!" exclaimed Allan. "My mother is the best of women, and the best and kindest of wives; but I have always known that my father's marriage was a loveless marriage. Well," he went on, recovering himself quickly, apprehensive lest he should lower his mother's dignity by revealing too much, "you acted generously, and no doubt for the best, in making that sacrifice, and all has worked round well. You married a good man, and secured a position of more importance than my father's smaller means could have given you."

"Position! means!" she repeated, in bitterest scorn. "Oh, Allan, don't think so poorly of me as to suppose that it was Mr. Wornock's wealth which attracted me. I married him because he was kind and sympathetic and good to me in my loneliness—a pupil at a German conservatoire, living with stony-hearted people, who only cared for me to the extent of the money that was paid for my board and lodging, and who were always saying hard things to me because they had agreed to take me so cheaply—too cheaply, they said. I used to feel as if I were cheating them when I sat at their wretched meals, and I was thankful that I had a wretched appetite."

"You were cruelly used, dear Mrs. Wornock. I can just remember my grandmother, and I know she was a hard woman. She had no right to interfere with her son's disposal of his life."

"No, she had no right. If I had known even as much of the world as I know now, when Miss Marjorum—Mrs. Beresford's messenger—came to me, I would have acted differently. I know now that a gentleman need not be ashamed of marrying a penniless girl if there is nothing against her but her poverty; but then I believed what Miss Marjorum told me—believed that I should blight the life of the man who loved me with such generous self-sacrificing love. Why should he alone be generous, and I selfish and indifferent to his welfare?"

"But how did he suffer you to sacrifice yourself at his mother's bidding?"

"He had no power to stop me. It was all settled without his knowledge. I hope he was not very sorry—dear, dear George!—so generous, so true, so noble. Oh, how I loved him—how I have loved him—all my life, all my life! My husband knew that I had no heart to give him—that I could be his obedient wife—but that I could never love him as I had loved——"

Again her sobs choked her speech. She threw herself into a chair and abandoned herself to that passionate grief.

"Dear Mrs. Wornock, forgive me for having revived these sorrowful memories. I was wrong—I ought not to have spoken——"

"No, no, there is nothing to forgive. It does me good to talk of the past—with you, Allan, with you, not with any one else. And now you know why my heart went out to you from the first. Why you are to me almost as a son—almost as dear as my own son—and your future wife as my daughter. It does me good to talk to you of that time—so long and long ago. It does me good to talk of my dead self. I have never forgotten. The past has always been dearer to me than anything in this life that came afterwards."

"I do not think my father has forgotten that past, any more than you have, Mrs. Wornock. I know that there has always been a cloud over his life—the shadow of one sad memory. I have felt and understood this, without knowing whence the shadow came."

"He was too true-hearted to forget easily," Mrs. Wornock said, gently, "and we were both so young. I was his first love, as he was mine. And when a first love is pure and strong as ours was, it must be first and last, must it not, Allan?"

"Yes," he answered, half doubtfully, remembering certain sketchy loves of his own, and hoping that they could hardly be ranked as love, so that he might believe that his passion for Suzette was essentially the first; essentially, if not actually.

"No, I have never forgotten," Mrs. Wornock repeated musingly, seating herself at the piano, and softly touching the notes now and then, playing a few bars of pensive melody sotto voce as she talked—now a phrase from an Adagio of Beethoven's, now a resolution from a prelude by Bach, dropping gravely down into the bass with softly repetitive phrases, from piano to pianissimo, melting into silence like a sigh. "No, I have never forgotten—and I have suffered from the pains as well as the pleasures of memory. Before my son was born, and after, there was a long interval of darkness when I lived only in the past, when the shadows of the past were more real to me than the living things of the present, when my husband's face was dim and distant, and that dear face from the past was always near me, with the kind smile that comforted me in my desolate youth. Yes, I loved him, Allan, loved him, and gave him up for his own sake. And now you tell me my sacrifice was useless; that, even with the wife his mother chose for him, the good amiable wife, he has not been altogether happy."

"His life has been placid, studious, kindly, and useful. It may be that he was best fitted for that calm, secluded life—it may be that if you had taken the more natural and the more selfish course—and in so doing parted him for ever from his mother, who was a proud woman, capable of lifelong resentment—it may be that remorse might have blighted his life, and that even your love would not have consoled him under the conviction that he had broken his mother's heart. I know that, after her strong-minded masterful fashion, she adored him. He was all she had in this world to love or care for; and it is quite possible that a lasting quarrel with him might have killed her. Dear Mrs. Wornock, pray do not think that your sacrifice was altogether in vain. No such self-surrender as that can be without some good fruit. I do not pretend to be a holy person, but I do believe in the power of goodness. And, consider, dear friend, your life has not been all unhappy. You had a kind and good husband."

"Good! He was more than good, and for over a year of our married life I was a burden to him. He was an exile from the home he loved, for my sake—for me, who ought to have brightened his home for him."

"But that was only a dark interval," said Allan, remembering what Mrs. Mornington had told him, of the long residence at Grindelwald, and the birth of the heir in that remote spot. "There were happier days afterwards."

"Yes, we had a few peaceful years here, before death took him from me, and while our boy was growing in strength and beauty."

"And in these long years of widowhood music has been your comforter. In your devotion to art you have lived the higher life."

"Yes," she answered, with an inspired look, striking a triumphant chord, "music has been my comforter—music has conjured back my dead father, my lost lover. Music has been my life and my hope."

CHAPTER XI.

THE MASTER OF DISCOMBE.

Mrs. Wornock's frank revelation of her girlish love and self-sacrifice lifted a burden from Allan's heart and mind. He had been interested in her, and attracted towards her from that first summer noontide when he studied her thoughtful face in the village church, and when he lingered among the villagers' graves to hear her play. His sympathy had grown with every hour he spent in her society, and he had been deeply grateful for the friendship which had so cordially included him and the girl he loved. It had been very painful to him to believe that this sweet-mannered woman belonged to the fallen ones of the earth, that her graces were the graces of a Magdalen, most painful to think that she was no fitting companion for the girl who had so readily responded to her friendly advances.

The cloud was lifted now, and he felt ashamed of all his past doubts and suspicions. He respected Mrs. Wornock for her refusal to meet his father in the beaten way of friendship. He was touched by the devotion which had brought her creeping to his windows under the cover of night to look upon the face of her beloved. He resolved that he would do all that in him lay to atone for the wrong his thoughts had done her, that he would be to her, indeed, as a second son, and that he would cultivate her son's friendship in a brotherly spirit.

He stopped in the corridor on the morning after that interview to study the portrait of the young man whose likeness to himself had now resolved itself into a psychological mystery, and he could but see that it was a likeness of the mind rather than of the flesh, a resemblance in character and expression far more than in actual lineaments.

"He is vastly my superior in looks," thought Allan, as he studied the lines of that boldly painted face. "He has his mother's finely chiselled features, his mother's delicate colouring. There is a shade of effeminacy, otherwise the face would be almost faultless. And to mistake this face for that! Absurd!" muttered Allan, catching the reflection of his sunburnt forehead, and strongly marked nose and chin, in the Venetian glass that hung at right angles with the picture.

He heard the organ while the butler paused with his hand on the door, waiting to announce the visitor. The simpler music, the weaker touch, told him that the pupil was playing.

"Please don't stop," he cried, as he went in; "I want to hear if the pupil is worthy of her mistress."

Mrs. Wornock came to meet him, and Suzette went on playing, with only a smile and a nod to her sweetheart.

"She is getting on capitally. She has a real delight in music," announced Mrs. Wornock.

"How happy you are looking this morning!"

"I have had good news. My son is on his way home."

"I congratulate you."

"He is coming home for his long leave. I shall have him for nearly a year."

"How happy you will be! I have just been studying his portrait."

"You are so like him."

"Oh, only a rough copy—a charcoal sketch on coarse paper,—nothing to boast of," said Allan, with a curious laugh.

He was watching Suzette, to see if she were interested in the expected arrival. She played on, her eyes intent alternately upon the page of music in front of her, and upon the stops which she was learning to use. There was no stumbling in the notes, or halting in the time. She played the simple legato passages smoothly and carefully, and seemed to pay no heed to their talk.

Allan would have been less than human, perhaps, if his first thought on hearing of Geoffrey's return had not been of the influence he might exercise upon Suzette—whether in him she would recognize the superior and more attractive personality.

"No," he thought, ashamed of that jealous fear which was so quick to foresee a rival, "Suzette has given me her heart, and it must be my own fault if I can't keep it. Women are our superiors, at least in this, that they are not so easily caught by the modelling of a face, or the rich tones of a complexion. And shall I think so meanly of my sweet Suzette as to suppose that my happiness is in danger because some one more attractive than myself appears upon the scene? When we spend our first season in London as man and wife, she will have to run the gauntlet of all the agreeable men in town, soldiers and sailors, actors and painters, ingenuous young adorers and hoary-headed flatterers. The whole army of Satan that maketh war upon innocence and beauty. No, I am not afraid. She has a fine brain and a noble heart. She is not the kind of woman to jilt a lover or betray a husband. I am safe in loving her."

He had need to comfort himself, for the hour of trial was nearer than he thought.

He went to Discombe before luncheon on the morning after he had heard of Geoffrey's return. He went expecting to find Suzette at the organ, and to hear the latter part of the lesson. He was not a connoisseur, but he loved music well enough to love to hear his sweetheart play, and to be able to distinguish every stage of progress in her performance. To-day, however, the organ was silent; the youth who blew the bellows was chasing a wasp in the corridor, and the room into which Allan was ushered was empty.

"The ladies are in the garden, sir," said the butler. "Shall I tell my mistress that you are here?"

"No, thanks, I'll go and look for the ladies."

The autumn morning was bright and mild, and one of the French windows was open.

Allan hurried out to the garden, and looked down the cypress avenue. The long perspective of smooth-shaven lawn was empty. There was no one loitering by the fountain. They were in the summer-house—the classic temple where Mrs. Wornock had sunk into unconsciousness at the sound of his father's name, where he had lived through the most embarrassing experience of his life.

He could distinguish Mrs. Wornock's black gown, and Suzette's terra-cotta frock, a cloth frock from a Salisbury tailor, which he had greatly admired. But there was another figure that puzzled him—an unfamiliar figure in grey—a man's figure.

Never had the grass walk seemed so long, or the temple so remote. Yes, that third figure was decidedly masculine. There was no optical delusion as to the sex of the stranger—no petticoat hidden behind the marble table. As he drew nearer he saw that the intruder was a young man, sitting in a lounging attitude with his arms resting on the table, and his shoulders leaning forward to bring him nearer to the two ladies seated opposite.

He felt that it would be undignified to run, but he walked so fast in his eagerness to discover the identity of the interloper that he was in an undignified perspiration when he arrived.

"Allan, poor Allan, how you have been running!" exclaimed Suzette.

"I was vexed with myself for losing the whole of your organ lesson," said Allan, shaking hands with Mrs. Wornock, and gazing at the stranger as at a ghost.

Yes, it was Geoffrey Wornock. Even his hurried reflections during that hurried walk had told Allan that it must be he, and none other. No one else would be admitted to the familiarity of the garden and summer-house. Mrs. Wornock had no casual visitors, no intimate friends, except Suzette and himself.

"There has been no organ lesson this morning, Allan," Mrs. Wornock told him, her face radiant with happiness. "Suzette and I have been surprised out of all sober occupations and ideas. This son of mine took it into his head to come home nearly a fortnight before I expected him. He arrived as suddenly as if he had dropped from the skies. He did not even telegraph to be met at the station."

"A telegram would have taken the bloom off the surprise, mother," said the man in grey, standing up tall and straight, but slenderly built.

Allan felt himself a coarse gladiatorial sort of person beside this elegant and refined-looking young man. Nor was there anything effeminate about that graceful figure to which an envious critic could take exception. Soldiering had given that air of manliness which can co-exist with slenderness and grace.

"Geoffrey, this is Allan, of whom you know so much."

"They tell me that you and I are very much alike, Mr. Carew," said Geoffrey, with a pleasant laugh, "and my mother tells me that you and I are to take kindly to each other, and in fact she expects to see us by way of being adopted brothers. I don't quite know what that means—whether we are to ride each other's horses, and make free with each other's guns, or go halves in a yacht or a racehorse?"

"I want you to like each other—to be real friends," said Mrs. Wornock, earnestly.

"Then don't say another word about it, mother. Friendship under that kind of protecting influence rarely comes to any good; but I am quite prepared to like Mr. Carew on his own account, and I hope he may be able to like me on the same poor grounds."

He had an airy way of dismissing the subject which set them all at their ease, and steered them away from the rocks and shoals of sentiment. Mrs. Wornock, who had been on the verge of weeping, smiled again, and led Geoffrey off to look at the gardens, and all the improvements which had been effected during his three years' absence, leaving the lovers to follow or not as they pleased.

The lovers stayed in the summer-house, feeling that mother and son would like to be alone; and mother and son strolled on side by side, looking like brother and sister.

"My dearest," said Mrs. Wornock, tenderly, slipping her arm through her son's directly they were really alone, and out of sight, in an old flower-garden walled round by dense hedges of clipped ilex, a garden laid out in a geometrical pattern, and with narrow gravel paths intersecting the flower-beds. The glory of all gardens was over. There were only a few lingering dahlias, and prim asters lifting up their gaudy discs to the sun, and beds of marigolds of different shades, from palest yellow to deepest orange.

"My dearest, how glad I am to have you! I begin to live again now you have come home."

"And I am very glad to be at home, mother," answered her son, smiling down upon her, fondly, protectingly, but with that light tone which marked all he said. "But it seems to me you have been very much alive while I have been away, with this young man of yours who is almost an adopted son."

"My heart went out to him, Geoffrey, because of his likeness to you."

"A dangerous precedent. You might meet half a dozen such likenesses in a London season. It would hardly do for your heart to go out to them all. You would be coming home with a large family—by adoption."

"There is no fear of that. I don't go into society, and I don't think, if I did, I should meet any one like Allan Carew."

Geoffrey could but note the tenderness in her tone as she spoke Allan's name.

"And who is this double of mine, mother; and what is he, and how does he come to be engaged to that dainty, dark-eyed girl?"

"You like Suzette?"

"Yes, I like her—she is a nice, winning thing—not startlingly pretty; but altogether nice. I like the way that dark silky hair of hers breaks up into tiny curls about her forehead—and she has fine eyes——"

"India has made you critical, Geoffrey."

"Not India, but a native disposition, mother dearest. In India we have often to put up with second best in the way of beauty, faded carnations, tired eyes, hollow cheeks; but the young women have generally plenty to say for themselves. They can talk, and they can dance. They are educated for the marriage market before they are sent out."

His mother laughed, and hung on to his arm admiringly. In her opinion, whatever he said was either wise or witty. All his impertinences were graceful. His ignorance was better than other people's knowledge.

"You have not neglected your violin, I hope, Geoffrey?"

"No, mother. My good little Strad has been my friend and comrade in many a quiet hour while the other fellows were at cards, or telling stale stories. I shall be very glad to play the old de Beriot duets again. Your fingers have not lost their cunning, I know."

"I have played a great deal while you were away. I have had nothing else to think about."

"Except Allan Carew."

"He has not made much difference. He comes and goes as he likes—especially when Suzette is here. I sit at my organ or piano and let them wander about and amuse themselves."

"What an indulgent chaperon!"

"I knew what the end must be, Geoffrey. I knew from the first that they were in love with each other. At least I knew from the very first that he was in love with her."

"You were not so sure about the lady?"

"A girl is too shy to let her feelings be read easily; but I could see she liked his society. They used to roam about the garden together like children. They were too happy not to be in love."

"Does being in love mean happiness, mother? Don't you think there is a middle state between indifference and passion—a cordial, comfortable, sympathetic friendship which is far happier than love? It has no cold fits of doubt, no hot fits of jealousy. From your account of these young people, I question if they were ever really in love. Your Carew looks essentially commonplace. I don't give him credit for much imagination."

"You will understand him better by-and-by, dearest."

The mother was looking up at the newly regained son, admiring him, and beginning to fancy that she had done him an injustice in thinking that Allan resembled him. He was much handsomer than Allan, and there was something picturesque and romantic in his countenance and bearing which appealed to a woman's fancy; a look as of the Lovelaces and Dorsets of old, the courtiers and soldiers who could write a love-song on the eve of a bloody battle, or dance a minuet at midnight, and fight a duel at dawn. His manner to his mother was playful and protecting. He had not the air of thinking her the wisest of women, but no one could doubt that he loved her.

The summer-house was empty when they went back to it, and there was a pencilled note on the marble table addressed to Mrs. Wornock.

"Allan is going to see me home in time to give father his tiffin, and I think you and Mr. Wornock will like to have the day to yourselves. I shall come for my organ lesson to-morrow at eleven, unless you tell me to stop away—

"Ever, dear Mrs. Wornock, your own
"SUZETTE."

"Pretty tactful soul! Of course we want to be alone," said Geoffrey, reading the note over his mother's shoulder. "First you shall give me the best lunch that Discombe can provide; and then we will drive round and look at everything. And we will devote the evening to de Beriot. I must go up to town by an early train to-morrow."

"Running away from me so soon, Geoffrey?"

"Now, mother, it's base ingratitude to say that. I've hardly given myself breathing time since I landed at Brindisi, because I wanted to push home to you, first of the very first. I shall only be in London a day or two. I want to see what kind of horses are being sold at Tattersall's, and I may run down to look at the Belhus hunters. Remember I haven't a horse to ride."

"There are your old hunters, Geoffrey?"

"Three dear old crocks. Admirable as pensioners, not to carry eleven stone to hounds. No, mother, I'm afraid there's nothing in your stables that will be good for more than a cover-hack."

Mrs. Wornock sighed faintly in the midst of her bliss. She had a womanly horror of hunting and all its perils, and in her heart of hearts was always on the side of the fox; but she knew that without hunting and shooting Discombe Manor would very soon pall upon her son, dilettante and Jack-of-all-trades though he was. Music alone—passionately as he loved it—would not keep him contented.

Allan and Suzette strolled home under the bright blue sky. These late days in October were the Indian summer of the year, a season in which it was a joy to live, especially in a land where the smoke from domestic hearths curling upward here and there in silvery wreaths from wood fires, only suggested homeliness and warmth, not filth and fog. They sauntered slowly homeward through the rustic lanes, and their talk was naturally of the new arrival.

"Is he the kind of young man you expected him to be?" asked Suzette.

There was no occasion to be more specific in one's mention of him. There could but be one young man in their thoughts to-day.

"I don't know that I had formed any expectations about him."

"Oh, Allan, that can't be true! You must have thought about him, after everybody telling you of the likeness. Remember what you told me in our very first dance—how dreadfully bored you had been about him, and how glad you were that I didn't know him."

"My being bored—and I was horribly—was no reason why my imagination should dwell upon him. If I thought of him at all, I thought of him just as he is—the image of his portrait by Millais—and a very good-looking and well set-up young man—so much better looking than my humble self, that I wonder at any one's seeing a likeness between the two faces."

"Is he better looking, Allan? I know I like your face best."

"I'm glad of that, since you will have to put up with my face for a lifelong companion."

"Allan, how grumpily you said that."

"Did I, Suzie? I'm afraid I'm a brute. I am beginning to find out disagreeable depths in my character."

She looked at him with a puzzled air—so sweetly innocent, so free from any backward-reaching thought—that made him happy again. He took up the little hand hanging loose at her side and kissed it.

"Let us drop in upon Aunt Mornington, and ask her for lunch," he said as they came within sight of the Grove. "I don't feel like parting with you just yet, Suzie."

"Quite impossible. I must be at home for father's tiffin."

"I forgot that sacred institution. Well, Suzie, do you think it's possible the General might ask me to share that important meal if he saw me hanging about? We could go to the links afterwards, so that you might have the pleasure of seeing how wildly I can beat the air?"

Suzie laughed her assent to this proposition, and General Vincent, overtaking them five minutes afterwards on his useful hack, sustained an Anglo-Indian's reputation for hospitality by immediately inviting Allan to luncheon.

END OF VOL. I.

LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.

[Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphens left as printed.]

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Table of Contents

- SONS OF FIRE

- CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

- SONS OF FIRE.

- CHAPTER I.

- CHAPTER II.

- CHAPTER III.

- CHAPTER IV.

- CHAPTER V.

- CHAPTER VI.

- CHAPTER VII.

- CHAPTER VIII.

- CHAPTER IX.

- CHAPTER X.

- CHAPTER XI.

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE