The Project Gutenberg eBook of Nancy, by Rhoda Broughton

"As through the land at eve we went,
And plucked the ripened ears,
We fell out, my wife and I,
Oh, we fell out, I know not why,
And kissed again with tears."

NANCY.

CHAPTER I.

"Put into a small preserving pan three ounces of fresh butter, and, as soon as it is just melted, add one pound of brown sugar of moderate quality—"

"Cannot say I agree with you. I hate brown sugar—filthy stuff!" says Bobby, contradictiously.

"Not half so filthy as white, if you come to that," retorts Algy, loftily, looking up from the lemon he is grating to extinguish his brother. "They clear white sugar with but—"

"Keep these stirred gently over a clear fire for about fifteen minutes," interrupt I, beginning to read again very fast, in a loud, dull recitative, to hinder further argument, "or until a little of the mixture dipped into cold water breaks clear between the teeth without sticking to them. When it is boiled to this point, it must be poured out immediately or it will burn."

Having galloped jovially along, scorning stops, I here pause out of breath. We are a large family, we Greys, and we are all making taffy. Yes, every one of us. It would take all the fingers of one hand, and the thumb of the other, to count us, O reader. Six! Yes, six. A Frenchman might well hold up his hands in astonished horror at the insane prolificness—the foolhardy fertility—of British householders. We come very improbably close together, except Tou Tou, who was an after-thought. There are no two of us, I am proud to say, exactly simultaneous, but we have come tumbling on each other's heels into the world in so hot a hurry that we evidently expect to find it a pleasant place when we get there. Perhaps we do—perhaps we do not; friends, you will hear and judge for yourselves.

A few years ago when we were little, people used to say that we were quite a pretty sight, like little steps one above another. We are big steps now, and no one any longer hazards the suggestion of our being pretty. On the other hand, nobody denies that we are each as well furnished with legs, arms, and other etceteras, as our neighbors, nor can affirm that we are notably more deficient in wits than those of our friends who have arrived in twos and threes.

We are in the school-room, the big bare school-room, that has seen us all—that is still seeing some of us—unwillingly dragged, and painfully goaded up the steep slopes of book-learning. Outside, the March wind is roughly hustling the dry, brown trees and pinching the diffident green shoots, while the round and rayless sun of late afternoon is staring, from behind the elm-twigs in at the long maps on the wall, in at the high chairs—tall of back, cruelly tiny of seat, off whose rungs we have kicked all the paint—in at the green baize table, richly freaked with splashes. Hardly less red than the sun's, are our burnt faces gathered about the fire.

This fire has no flame—only a glowing, ruddy heart, on which the bright brass saucepan sits; and kneeling before it, stirring the mess with a long iron spoon, is Barbara. Algy, as I have before remarked, is grating a lemon. Bobby is buttering soup-plates. The Brat—the Brat always takes his ease if he can—is peeling almonds, fishing delicately for them in a cup of hot water with his finger and thumb; and I, Nancy, am reading aloud the receipt at the top of my voice, out of a greasy, dog's-eared cookery-book, which, since it came into our hands, has been the innocent father of many a hideous compound. Tou Tou alone, in consideration of her youth, is allowed to be a spectator. She sits on the edge of the table, swinging her thin legs, and kicking her feet together.

Certainly we deteriorate in looks as we go downward. In Barbara we made an excellent start: few families a better one, though we say it that should not. Although in Algy there was a slight falling off, it was not much to complain of. But I am sensibly uglier than Algy (as indeed he has, on several occasions, dispassionately remarked to me); the Brat than me; Bobby than the Brat; and so steadily on, till we reach our nadir of unhandsomeness in Tou Tou. Tou Tou is our climax, and we certainly defy our neighbors and acquaintances to outdo her.

Hapless young Tou Tou! made up of the thinnest legs, the widest mouth, the invisiblest nose, and over-visiblest ears, that ever went to the composition of a child of twelve years.

"Keep stirring always! You must take care that it does not stick to the bottom!" say I, closing the receipt-book, and speaking on my own account, but still as one having authority.

"All very well to say 'Keep stirring always,'" answers Barbara, turning round a face unavoidably pretty, even though at the present moment deeply flame-colored; eyes still sweetly laughing with gay good-humor, even though half burnt out of her head, to answer me; "but if you had been stirring as long as I have, you would wonder that you had any arm left to stir with, however feebly. Here, one of you boys, take a turn! You Brat, you never do any thing for your living!"

The Brat complies, though not with eagerness. They change occupations: the Brat stirs, and she fishes for almonds. Ten minutes pass: the taffy is done, and what is more it really is taffy. The upshot of our cookery is in general so startlingly indifferent from what we had intended, that the result in the present case takes us by surprise. We all prove practically that, in the words of the receipt-book, it "breaks clear between the teeth without sticking to them." It is poured into Bobby's soup-plate, and we have thrown up the window-sashes, and set it on the ledge to cool. The searching wind blows in dry and biting. Now it is rushing in a violent current through the room, for the door has opened. Mother enters.

"To what may we attribute the honor of this visit?" says Algy, turning away from the window to meet her, and setting her a chair. Bobby gives her a kiss, and the Brat a lump of taffy, concerning which it would be invidious to predicate which were the stickier; so exceedingly adhesive are both.

"Your father says," begins she, sitting down. She is interrupted by a loud and universal groan.

"Says what? Something unpleasant of course, who is it now? Who has done any thing now? I do hope it is the Brat," cries Bobby, viciously; "it is quite his turn; he has been good boy of the family for the last week."

"I dare say it is," replies the Brat, resignedly; "one can't expect such prosperity as mine to last forever."

"Of course it is I," says Algy, rather bitterly, "it is always I. I have never been good boy since I was ploughed; and, please God, I never will be again."

"But what is it? what is it? About how bad is it? Is it to be one of our worst rows?"

We are all speaking together at the top of our voices; indeed, we rarely employ a lower key.

"It is no one; no one has done any thing," replies mother, when, at last, we allow her to make herself heard, "only your father sends you a message that, as Sir Roger Tempest is coming here to-day, he hopes you will make less noise this evening in here than you did last night: he says he could hardly hear the sound of his own voice."

"He begs you to see that the swing-door is shut, as he does not wish his friend to imagine that he keeps a private lunatic asylum."

"If we are bedlamites, we know who made us so. We will tell old Roger if he asks," etc.

"For my part," say I, resolutely pinching my lips together as I kneel on the carpet, and violently hammer the now cold and hard taffy with the handle of the poker, which in its day has been put to many uses vile, "I can tell you that I shall not dine with you to-night: I should infallibly say something to father—something unfortunate—I feel it rising; and it would be unseemly to have one of our émeutes before this old gentleman, would not it?"

"They are nice breezy things when you are used to them," says Barbara, laughing; "but one requires to be brought up to them."

"Do not you dine either, Brat," say I, looking up, and waving the poker with suave command at him, "and we will broil bones for tea, and roast potatoes on the shovel."

"He cannot complain if we send our two specimen ones," say I, again looking up, and indicating Barbara and Algy with my weapon, "our sample figs: if Sir Robert—Sir Robin—Sir Roger—what is he?—does not see the rest of us, he may perhaps imagine that we are all equally presentable, which would be more to your credit, mother, than if Bobby and Tou Tou and I were to be submitted to the poor old thing's notice."

"He will have to see us," says Tou Tou, rather lugubriously, "he cannot help it—at prayers."

Tou Tou has descended from the table, and is standing propped against mother's knee, twisting one leg with ingenious grace round the other.

"Bless your heart," says the Brat, comfortingly, "he will never find out that we are there: do you suppose that his blear old eyes will see all across that big room, economically lit up by one pair of candles?"

"He must be very ancient," says Algy, in all the insolence of twenty, leaning his flat back against the mantel-shelf, "as he was at school with father."

"Father has not blear eyes," remarks Bobby, dryly. "Would God he had! For then perhaps he would not see our little vices quite so clearly with them as he does."

"But then father has not been in India," retorts Algy, stretching. "India plays the deuce with one's organs and appurtenances."

"I wish you joy of him," say I, rising flushed and untidy from my knees, having successfully smashed the taffy into little bits; "from soup to walnuts, you will have to undergo a ceaseless tyranny of tales about hitmaghars and dak bungalows and Choto Lazery: which of us has not suffered in our day from the horrible monotony of ideas of an old Indian?"

"Never you mind, Barbara!" cries the Brat, giving her a sounding brotherly pat on the back. "Pay no attention to her."

"'What great events from trivial causes spring!' as the poet says: you may live to bless the day that old Roger crossed our doors."

"As how?" says Barbara, laughing, and rocking herself backward and forward in a veteran American rocking-chair which, at different periods of our history, has served most of us the dirty turn of tipping us over, and presenting us reversed to the eyes of our family.

"Never you mind," repeats the Brat, oracularly; "truth is stranger than fiction! odd things happen: I read in the paper the other day of a man who pulled up the window for an old woman in the train, and she died at once—I do not mean on the spot, but very soon after, and when she died—listen, please, all of you—" (speaking very slowly and impressively)—"she left him two thousand pounds a year."

"Mind that you set a stool for his gouty foot," says Algy, feeling for his faint mustache, "and run and search for his spectacle-case, when he has mislaid it."

"Seriously," say I, "what a grand thing it would be for the family if he were to adopt you, Barbara!"

"Or me," suggests the Brat, standing before the fire with his coat-tails under his arm. "Why not me? My manners to the aged are always considered particularly happy."

"Here he is!" cries Tou Tou from the window, whither she has retired, and now stands, like a heron, on one leg, leaning her elbow on the sill. "Here is the dog-cart turning the corner!"

"Yes, there he is! sure enough! our future benefactor!" says Algy, looking over the rest of our heads, and making a counterfeit greeting.—"Welcome, welcome, good old man!"

"But who is it he has in the fly?" say I, as the second vehicle follows the first. "His harem, I suppose! half a dozen old Wampoos."

"His valet, to be sure," replies the Brat, chidingly, "with his stays, and his evening wig, and the calves of his legs."

CHAPTER II.

The wind is even colder than it was, stronger and more withering now that the sun's faint warmth is withdrawn, and that the small and chilly stars possess the sky. Nevertheless, both the school-room windows are open. We are all huddled shivering round the hearth, yet no one talks of closing them. The fact is, that amateur cooking, though a graceful accomplishment, has its penalties, and that at the present moment the smell of broiled bones and fried potatoes that fills our place of learning is something appalling. Why may not it penetrate beneath the swing-door, through the passages, and reach the drawing-room? Such a thing has happened once or twice before. At the bare thought we all quake. I am in the pleasant situation, just at present, of owning a chilled body and a blazing face.

Chiefest among the cooks have I been, and now I am sitting trying to fan my red cheeks and redder nose, with the back of an old atlas, gutted in some ancient broil, trying, in deference to Sir Roger, to cool down my appearance a little against prayer-time. Alas! that epoch is nearer than I think. Ting! tang! the loud bell is ringing through the house. My hair is loosened and tumbled with stooping over the fire, and I have burnt a hole right in the fore front of my gown, by letting a hot cinder fall from the grate upon it. There is, however, now no time to repair these dilapidations. We issue from our lair, and en route meet the long string of servants filing from their distant regions. How is it that the cook's face is so much, much less red than mine? Prayers are held in the justicing-room, and thither we are all repairing. The accustomed scene bursts on my eye. At one end the long, straight row of the servants, immovably devout, staring at the wall, with their backs to us. In the middle of the room, facing them, father, kneeling upon a chair with his hands clutched, and his eyes closed, repeating the church prayers, as if he were rather angry with them than otherwise. Mother, kneeling on the carpet beside him, like the faithful, ruffed, and farthingaled wife on a fifteenth-century tomb. Behind them, again, at some little distance, we and our visitor. With the best will in the world to do so, I can get but a meagre view of the latter. The room is altogether rather dark, it being one of our manners and customs not to throw much light on prayers, and he has chosen the darkest corner of it. I only vaguely see the outline of a kneeling figure, evidently neither bulky nor obese, of a flat back and vigorous shoulders. His face is generally hidden in his hands, but once or twice he lifts it to scan the proportions of my late grandfather's preposterously fat cob, whose portrait hangs on the wall above his head.

There is no doubt that on some days the devil reigns with a more potent sway over people than on others. To-night he has certainly entered into the boys. He often does a little, but this evening he is holding a great and mighty carnival among them. While father's strong, hard voice vibrates in a loud, dull monotone through the silent room, they are engaged in a hundred dumb yet ungodly antics behind his back.

Algernon has thrust his head far out between the rungs of his chair-back, and affects to be unable to withdraw it again, making movements of simulated suffocation. The Brat is stealthily walking on his knees across the space that intervenes between them to Barbara, with intent, as I too well know, of unseemly pinchings. If father unbutton his eyes, or move his head one barley-corn, we are all dead men. I hold my breath in a nervous agony. Thank Heaven! the harsh recitation still flows on with equable loud slowness. In happy ignorance of his offspring's antics, father is still asking, or rather ordering, the Almighty (for there is more of command than entreaty in his tone) to prosper the High Court of Parliament. Also the Brat is now returning to his place, travelling with surprising noiseless rapidity over the Turkey carpet, dragging his shins and his feet after him. I draw a long breath of relief, and drop my hot face into my spread hands. My peace, however, is not of long duration. I am aroused again by a sort of choking snort from Tou Tou, who is beside me—a snort that seems compounded of mingled laughter and pain, and, looking up, detect Bobby in the act of deftly puncturing one of her long bare legs with a long brass pin, which he has found straying, after the vagabond manner of pins, over the carpet.

I raise myself, and lean over Tou Tou, to give the offender a silent buffet of admonition, and, lifting my eyes apprehensively to see if I am noticed, I meet the blear eyes of Sir Roger fixed upon mine. He has turned his face quite toward me, and a ray from the candles falls full upon it. Blear! Well, if his eyes are blear, then henceforth blear must bear a different signification from the unhandsome one it has hitherto worn. Henceforth it must mean blue as steel: it must mean clear as a glass of spring water; keen as a well-tempered knife; kindly as the early sunshine.

I am so astonished at my discovery, that I remain for full two minutes staring blankly at the object of it, while he also looks stealthily at me; then, recollecting my manners, I burrow my face into my chair-bottom, and so remain until mother's gentle Amen, and a noise of shuffling and scrambling to their feet on the part of the congregation, tell me that the end has come.

We all go up to father, and coldly and stiffly kiss him. While I am waiting for my turn to receive our parent's chilly salute, I steal a second glance at our guest. Yes, he is old certainly. Despite the youth of his eyes, despite the uprightness, the utter freedom from superfluous flesh—from the ugly shaky bulkiness of age—in his tall and stalwart figure, still he is old—old in the eyes of nineteen—as old as father, perhaps—though in much better preservation—forty-eight or forty-nine; for is not his hair iron-gray, and his heavy mustache, and the thick and silky beard that falls on his broad breast, are they not iron-gray too? I have dropped my small and unwilling kiss on father's forehead—and said "good-night" in a tone as suppressedly hostile as his own. Now I may go. We may all go. I am the last, or I think I am, to pass through the swing-door. I hurry along the passage to join the rest in the school-room. I upbraid the boys for the rash impiety of their demeanor. I feel a foot on my garments behind, and hear a long cracking sound that I too, too well know to mean gathers.

"You beast!" cried I, in good nervous English, turning sharply round with my hand raised in act to strike, "that is the third time this week that you have torn out my—"

I stop dumfounded. If I mean to box the offender's ears, I must raise my hand considerably higher than it is at present. Angels and ministers of grace! what has happened? I have called General Sir Roger Tempest a beast, and offered to cuff him. For a moment, I am dumfounded. Then, for shyness has never been my besetting sin, and something in the genial laughter of his eyes reassures me.

"Look! when you see what you have done, I am sure you will forgive me; but of course I meant it for Bobby. I never dreamt it was you."

"How exceedingly clumsy of me! how could it have happened? I beg your pardon ten thousand times."

In his words there is polite remorse and solicitude; in his face only a friendly mirth. He is old, that is clear. Had he been young, he would have said, with that variety and suitability of epithets so characteristic of this generation:

The gas is shining in its garish yellow brightness full down upon us, as we stand together, illuminating my plain, scorched face, the slatternly looseness of my hair, and the burnt hole in my gown.

"You will have to give me another," I say, looking up at him and smiling. I should not have thought of saying it if he had been a young man, but with a vieux papa one may be at one's ease.

"There is nothing in the world I should like better," he says, with a sort of hurry and eagerness, not very suggestive of a vieux papa; "but really—" (seeing me look rather ashamed of my proposition)—"is it quite hopeless? the damage quite irremediable?"

"On the contrary," reply I, tucking my gathers in, with a graceful movement, at the band of my gown, "five minutes will make it as good as new—at least" (casting a disparaging eye over its frayed and taffy-marked surface), "as good as it ever will be in this world."

"I suppose I have lost my way," he says, thinking, I fancy, that I look rather eager to be gone. "I am never very good at the geography of a strange house."

"Yes," say I, promptly; "you came through our door, instead of your own; shall I show you the way back?"

"Since I have come so far, may not I come a little farther?" he asks, glancing rather longingly at the half-open school-room door, whence sounds of pious mirth are again beginning to reissue.

"Do you mean really?" ask I, with a highly-dissuasive inflection of voice. "Please not to-night; we are all higgledy-piggledy—at sixes and sevens! To tell you the truth, we have been cooking. I wonder you did not smell it in the drawing-room."

"May not I cook too? I can, though you look disbelieving; there are few people that can beat me at an Irish stew when I set my mind to it."

"I say, Nancy, who are you colloquing with out there? I believe you have got hold of our future benefact—"

"I am keeping you," Sir Roger says. "Well, I will say good-night. You will shake hands, won't you, to show that you bear no malice?"

"That I will," reply I, heartily stretching out my right hand, and giving his a cordial shake. For was not he at school with father?

CHAPTER III.

Day has followed night. The broiled smell has at length evacuated the school-room, but a good deal of taffy, spilt in the pouring out, still adheres to the carpet, making it nice and sticky. The wind is still running roughly about over the earth, and the yellow crocuses, in the dark-brown garden-borders, opened to their widest extent, are staring up at the sun. How can they stare so straight up at him without blinking? I have been trying to emulate them—trying to stare, too, up at him, through the pane, as he rides laughing, aloft in the faint far sky; and my presumptuous eyes have rained down tears in consequence. I am trying now to read; but a hundred thousand things distract me: the sun shining warm on my shoulder, as I lean against the window; the divine morning clamor of the birds; their invitations to come out that will take no nay; and last, but oh! not, not least, the importunate voices of Barbara and Tou Tou. Every morning at this hour they have a weary tussle with the verb "aimer," "to love." It is hard that they should have pitched upon so tender-hearted a verb for the battle-field of so grim a struggle:

J'aime, I love.

Tu aimes, Thou lovest.

Il aime, He loves.

Nous aimons, We love.

Vous aimez, You love.

Ils aiment, They love.

This, with endless variations of ingenious and hideous inaccuracies—this, interspersed with foolish laughter and bitter tears, is what I have daily been audience to, for the last two months. The day before yesterday a great stride was taken; the present tense was pronounced vanquished, and Barbara and her pupil passed on in triumph to the imperfect, "j'aimais, I loved, or was loving." To-day, in order to be quite on the safe side, a return has been made to "j'aime," and it has been discovered that it has utterly disappeared from our young sister's memory. "J'aimais, I loved, or was loving," has entirely routed and dispersed his elder brother, "j'aime, I love." The old strain is, therefore, desperately resumed:

It is making me drowsy. Ten minutes more, and I shall be asleep in the sun, with my head down-dropped on the window-sill. I get up, and, putting on my out-door garments, stray out into the sun, leaving Barbara—her pretty forehead puckered with ineffectual wrath, and Tou Tou blurred with grimy tears, to their death-struggle with the restive verb "to love." It is the end of March, and when one can hide round a corner from the wind, one has a foretaste of summer, in the sun's warm strength. I gaze lovingly at the rich brown earth, so lately freed from the frost's grasp, through which the blunt green buds are gently forcing themselves. I look down the flaming crocus throats—the imperial purple goblets with powdery gold stamens—and at the modest little pink faces of the hepaticas. All over our wood there is a faint yet certain purply shade, forerunner of the summer green, and the loud and sweet-voiced birds are abroad. O Spring! Spring! with all your searching east winds, with your late, shriveling frosts, with your occasional untimely sleets and snows, you are yet as much better than summer as hope is better than fruition.

It runs in my head like some silly refrain. I meet Bobby. I also meet Vick, my little shivering, smooth, white terrier. They both join me. The one wriggles herself into the shape of a trembling comma, and, foolishly chasing herself, rolls over on her back, to demonstrate her joy at my advent. The other says:

"Come into the kitchen-garden, and see whether the apricot-flowers are out on the south wall."

We pace along the broad and even gravel walk among the red cabbages and the sea-kale, basking in the sun, whose heat we feel undiminished by the influence of any bitter blast, in the prison of these four high walls, against which the long tree-branches are pinioned. In one place, the pinioning has failed. A long, flower-laden arm has burst from its bonds, and is dangling loosely down. There is a ladder against the wall, set for the gardener to replace it.

"One can see nothing here," I answer. "I should like to climb up and sit on the top of the wall, where one can look about one."

My wish is easy of gratification. Bobby holds the ladder, and I climb cautiously, rung by rung. Having reached the summit, I sit at ease, with my legs loosely dangling. There is no broken glass, there are no painful bottoms of bottles to disturb my ruminant quiet. The air bites a little, but I am warmly clad, and young. Bobby sits beside me, whistling and kicking the bricks with his heels. There is the indistinctness of fine weather over the chain of low round hills that bound our horizon, giving them a dignity that, on clearer days, they lack. As I sit, many small and pleasant noises visit my ears, sometimes distinct, sometimes mixed together; the brook's noise, as it runs, quick and brown, between the flat, dry March fields; the gray geese's noise, as they screech all together from the farm-yard; the church-bells' noise, as they ring out from the distant town, whose roofs and vanes are shining and glinting in the morning sun.

"I should not mind," reply I, picking out a morsel of mortar with my finger and thumb. "It is about time for one of us to move off, is not it? And Barbara has made such a signal failure hitherto, that I think it is but fair that I should try my little possible."

"All I ask of you is," says Bobby, gravely, "not to take a fellow who has not got any shooting."

A louder screech than ever from the geese, accompanied with wing-flappings. How unanimous they are! There is not a voice wanting.

"What connection of ideas made you think of him?" asks Bobby, curiously. "Do you suppose that he has any shooting?"

"I do not know, I am sure. I do not think it matters much whether he has or not."

"I dare say that there are a good many women—old ones, you know—who would take him, old as he is," says Bobby, with liberality.

"I dare say," I answer. "I do not know. I am not old, but I am not sure that I would not rather marry him than be an old maid."

"What a fool you did look last night!" I say with sisterly candor, "when you put your head round the school-room door, and found that you had been witty about him to his face!"

Bobby reddens, and aims a bit of mortar at a round-eyed robin that has perched near us.

"Well, never mind; do not get angry! What did it matter?" say I, comfortingly. "You did not mention his name. How could he tell that he was our benefactor? He did not even know that he was to be; and I begin to have misgivings about it myself."

"I cannot say that I see much sign of his putting his hand into his breeches-pocket," says Bobby, vulgarly.

There is the click of a lifted latch. We both look in the direction whence comes the sound. He of whom we speak is entering the garden by a distant door.

"Get down, Bobby!" cry I, hurriedly, "and help me down. Make haste! quick! I would not have him find me perched up here for worlds."

"Hold it steady!" I cry nervously, and, so saying, begin to turn round and to stretch out one leg, with the intention of making a graceful descent backward.

"Stop!" cries Bobby from the bottom, with a diabolical chuckle. "I think you observed just now that I looked a fool last night! perhaps you will not mind trying how it feels!"

So saying, he seizes the ladder—a light and short one—and makes off with it. I cry, "Bobby! Bobby!" suppressedly, several times, but I need hardly say that my appeal is addressed to deaf ears. I remain sitting on the wall-top, trying to look as if I did not mind, while grave misgivings possess my soul as to the extent of strong boot and ankle that my unusual situation leaves visible. Once the desperate idea of jumping presents itself to my mind, but the ground looks so distant, and the height so great, that my heart fails me.

From my watch-tower I trace the progress of Sir Roger between the fruit-trees. As yet, he has not seen me. Perhaps he will turn into another walk, and leave the garden by an opposite door, I remaining undiscovered. No! he is coming toward me. He is walking slowly along, a cigar in his mouth, and his eyes on the ground, evidently in deep meditation. Perhaps he will pass me without looking up. Nearer and nearer he comes, I hold my breath, and sit as still as stone, when, as ill-luck will have it, just as he is approaching quite close to me, utterly innocent of my proximity, a nasty, teasing tickle visits my nose, and I sneeze loudly and irrepressibly. Atcha! atcha! He starts, and not perceiving at first whence comes the unexpected sound, looks about him in a bewildered way. Then his eyes turn toward the wall. Hope and fear are alike at an end. I am discovered. Like Angelina, I—

"How—on—earth—did you get up there?" he asks, in an accent of slow and marked astonishment, not unmixed with admiration.

"How on earth am I to get down again? is more to the purpose," I answer, bluntly.

"I could not have believed that any thing but a cat could have been so agile," he says, beginning to laugh. "Would you mind telling me how did you get up?"

"By the ladder," reply I, laconically, reddening, and, under the influence of that same insupportable doubt concerning my ankles, trying to tuck away my legs under me, a manœuvre which all but succeeds in toppling me over.

"The ladder!" (looking round). "Are you quite sure? Then where has it disappeared to?"

"I said something that vexed Bobby," reply I, driven to the humiliating explanation, "and he went off with it. Never mind! once I am down, I will be even with him!"

"What will you do? What will you say? Will you make use of the same excellently terse expression that you applied to me last night?"

"I should not wonder," reply I, bursting out into uncomfortable laughter; "but it is no use talking of what I shall do when I am down: I am not down yet; I wish I were."

"It is no great distance from the ground," he says, coming nearer the wall, standing close to where the apricot is showering down her white and pinky petals. "Are you afraid to jump? Surely not! Try! If you will, I will promise that you shall come to no hurt."

"But supposing that I knock you down?" say I, doubtfully. "I really am a good weight—heavier than you would think to look at me—and coming from such a height, I shall come with great force."

I require no warmer invitation. With arms extended, like the sails of a windmill, I hurl myself into the embrace of Sir Roger Tempest. The next moment I am standing beside him on the gravel-walk, red and breathless, but safe.

"I hope I did not hurt you much," I say with concern, turning toward him to make my acknowledgments, "but I really am very much obliged to you; I believe that, if you had not come by, I should have been left there till bedtime."

"It must have been a very unpleasant speech that you made to deserve so severe a punishment," he says, looking back at me, with a kindly and amused curiosity.

We walk on in silence, side by side. My temper is ruffled. I am planning five distinct and lengthy vengeances against Bobby.

"I dare say," says my companion presently, "that you are wondering what brought me in here now—what attraction a kitchen-garden could have for me, at a time of year when not the most sanguine mind could expect to find any thing good to eat in it."

"At least, it is sheltered," I answer, shivering, thrusting my hands a little farther into the warm depths of my muff.

"I was thinking of old days," he says, with a hazy, wistful smile. "Ah! you have not come to the time of life for doing that yet. Do you know, I have not been here since your father and I were lads of eleven and twelve together?"

"You look so much younger than he," I answer, looking frankly and unembarrassedly up into his face.

"Do I?" (with a pleased smile). "It is clear, then, that one cannot judge of one's self; on the rare occasions when I look in the glass it seems to me that, in the course of the last five years, I have grown into a very old fogy."

"He looks as if he had been so much oftener vexed, and so much seldomer pleased than you do," continued I, mentally comparing the smooth though weather-beaten benignity of the straight-cut features beside me, with the austere and frown-puckered gravity of my father's.

"Does he?" he answers, with an air of half-surprised interest, as if the subject had never struck him in that light before. "Poor fellow! I am sorry if it is so. Ah, you see"—with a smile—"he has six more reasons for wrinkles than I have."

"You mean us, I suppose," I answer matter-of-factly. "As to that, I think he draws quite as many wrinkles on our faces as we do on his." Then, rather ashamed of my over-candor, I add, with hurried bluntness, "You have never been married, I suppose?"

I am inwardly amused at the power of his denial. Surely, surely he might say in the words of Lancelot:

"Not yet," I answer, laughing, "and most likely I shall have to answer 'not yet' to that question as often as it is put to me till the end of the chapter."

"In moments of depression it strikes Barbara and me, that me and Tou Tou shall end by being three old cats together."

"Are you so anxious to be married?" he asks with an air of wonder, "in such a hurry to leave so happy a home?"

"Every one knows best where his own shoe pinches," I answer vernacularly. "I am afraid that it does not sound very lady-like, but since you ask me the question, I am rather anxious. Barbara is not: I am."

A shade of I cannot exactly say what emotion—it looks like disappointment, but surely it cannot be that—passes across the sunshine of his face.

"All my plans hinge on my marrying," I continue, feeling drawn, I do not know how or why, into confidential communication to this almost total stranger, "and what is more, on my marrying a rich man."

"And what are your plans?" he asks, with an air of benevolent interest, but that unexplained shade is still there.

"Their name is Legion," I answer; "you will be very tired before I get to the end of them."

"Firstly then," say I, narratively, "my husband must have a great deal of interest in several professions—the army, the navy, the bar—so as to give the boys a helping hand; then he must have some shooting—good shooting for them; for them all, that is, except Bobby! never shall he fire a gun in my preserves!"

"He must also keep two or three horses for them to hunt: Algy loves hunting, but he hardly ever gets a day. He is so big, poor dear old boy, that nobody ever gives him a mount—"

"Well, then, I should like to be able to have some nice parties—dancing and theatricals, and that sort of thing, for Barbara—father will never hardly let us have a soul here—and to buy her some pretty dresses to set off her beauty—"

"And then I should like to have a nice, large, cheerful house, where mother could come and stay with me, for two or three months at a time, and get clear away from the worries of house-keeping and—" the tyranny of father, I am about to add, but pull myself up with a jerk, and substitute lamely and stammeringly "and—and—others."

"I should not at all mind a donkey-carriage for Tou Tou, but I shall not insist upon that."

"For myself!" I echo, in surprise, "I have been telling you—you cannot have been listening—all these things are for myself."

I laugh. "That is so probable, is not it? I am so likely to fall in with a rich young man of weak intellect who is willing to marry all the whole six of us, for that is what he would have to do, and so I should explain to him."

Sir Roger is looking at me again with an odd smile—not disagreeable in any way—not at all hold-cheap, or as if he were sneering at me for a simpleton, but merely odd.

"And you think," he says, "that when he hears what is expected of him he will withdraw?"

Again I laugh heartily and rather loudly, for the idea tickles me, and, in a large family, one gets into the habit of raising one's voice, else one is not heard.

"I am so sadly sure that he will never come forward, that I have never taken the trouble to speculate as to whether, if he did, my greediness would make him retire again."

"Now that I come to think of it, though," continue I, after a pause, "I have no manner of doubt that he would."

Apparently Sir Roger is tired of the subject of my future prospects, for he drops it. We have left the kitchen-garden—have passed through the flower-garden—have reached the hall-door. I am irresolutely walking up the stone steps that mount to it, not being able to make up my mind as to whether or no I should make some sort of farewell observation to my companion, when his voice follows me. It seems to me to have a dissuasive inflection.

"It is quite early yet—not near luncheon-time—would it bore you very much to take a turn in the park? I think" (with a smile) "that you are quite honest enough to say so if it would: or, if you did not, I should read it on your face."

"Would you?" say I, a little piqued. "I do not think you would: I assure you that my face can tell stories, at a pinch, as well as its neighbor."

"Not at all! not at all!" reply I briskly, beginning to descend again; "but one thing is very certain, and that is that it will bore you."

"If I say what I was going to say you will think that it is on purpose to be contradicted," I answer, unlatching the gate in the fence, and entering the park.

"Well, then," say I, candidly, looking down at my feet as they trip quickly along through the limp winter grass, "there is no use blinking the fact that I have no conversation—none of us have. We can gabble away among ourselves like a lot of young rooks, about all sorts of silly home jokes, that nobody but us would see any fun in; but when it comes to real talk—"

"I do not care for real talk," he says, looking amused; "I like gabble far, far better. I wish you would gabble a little now."

"This is the tree that they planted when father was born," I say, presently, in a stiff, cicerone manner, pointing to a straight and strong young oak, which is lifting its branchy head, and the fine net-work of its brown twigs, to the cold, pale sky.

"Ah! eight-and-forty years ago! eight-and-forty years ago!" he repeats to himself with musing slowness. "Hard upon half a century!"

I turn over in my own mind whether I should do well to make some observation of a trite and copy-book nature on the much greater duration of trees than men, but reflecting that the application of the remark may be painful to a person so elderly as the gentleman beside me, I abstain. However, he does something of the kind himself.

"To think that it should be such a stripling," he says, looking with a half-pensive smile at the straight young trunk, "hardly out of the petticoat age, and we—he and I—such a couple of old wrecks!"

It never occurs to me that it would be polite, and even natural, to contradict him. Why should not he call himself an old wreck, if it amuses him? I suppose he only means to express a gentleman decidedly in the decline of life, which, in my eyes, he is; so I say kindly and acquiescingly—

"Forty-one—forty-two—yes, forty-two years since I first saw him," he continues, reflectively, "running about in short, stiff, white petticoats and bare legs, and going bawling to his mother, because he tumbled up those steps to the hall-door, and cut his nose open."

I lift my face out of my muff, in which, for the sake of warmth, I have been hiding it, and, opening my mouth, give vent to a hearty and undutiful roar of laughter.

"Cut his nose open!" repeat I, indistinctly. "How pleased he must have been, and what sort of a nose was it? already hooked? It never could have been the conventional button, that I am sure of; yours was, I dare say, but his—never. Good Heavens!" (with a sudden change of tone, and disappearance of mirth) "here he is! Come to look for you, no doubt! I—I—think I may go now, may not I?"

"Go!" repeats he, looking at me with unfeigned wonder. "Why? It is more likely you that he has missed, you, who are no doubt his daily companion."

"Not quite daily," I answer, with a fine shake of irony, which, by reason of his small acquaintance with me, is lost on my friend. "Two, you know, is company, and three none. Yes, if you do not mind, I think it must be getting near luncheon-time. I will go."

CHAPTER IV.

"Friends, Romans, and countrymen!" say I, on that same afternoon, strutting into the school-room, with my left hand thrust oratorically into the breast of my frock, and my right loftily waving, "I wish to collect your suffrages on a certain subject. Tell me," sitting down on a hard chair, and suddenly declining into a familiar and colloquial tone, "have you seen any signs of derangement in father lately?"

"None more than usual," answers Algy, sarcastically, lifting his pretty, disdainful nose out of his novel. "If, as the Eton Latin Grammar says, ira is a brevis furor you, will agree with me that he is pretty often out of his mind, in fact, a good deal oftener than he is in it."

"Put down all your books!" say I, impressively. "Listen attentively. Bobby, stop see-sawing that chair, it makes me feel deadly sick. Ah! my young friend, you will rue the day when you kept me sitting on the top of that wall—"

"Well, then, father has sent a message by mother to the effect that I am to dine with them to-night—I, if you please—I!—you must own" (lengthening my neck as I speak, and throwing up my untidy flax head) "that sweet Nancies are looking up in the world."

"I believe," reply I, simpering, "that our future benefac—, no! I really must give up calling him that, or I shall come out with it to his face, as Bobby did last night. Well, then, Sir Roger asked me why I did not appear yesterday. I suppose he thought that I looked so very grown up, that they must be keeping me in pinafores by force."

Algy has risen. He is coming toward me. He has pulled me off my chair. He has taken me by the shoulders, and is turning me round to face the others.

"Allow me!" he says, bowing, and making me bow, too, "to introduce you to the future legatee!—Barbara, my child, you and I are nowhere. This depraved old man has clearly no feeling for symmetry of form or face; a long career of Begums has utterly vitiated his taste. To-morrow he will probably be clamoring for Tou Tou's company."

"Brat!" says Barbara, laughing, "where has the analogy between me and the man who pulled up the window in the train for the old woman gone to?"

"Mother said I was to look as nice as I could," say I, casting a rueful glance at the tea-board, at the large plum loaf, at the preparations for temperate conviviality. I have sat down on the threadbare blue-and-red hearth-rug, and am shading my face with a pair of cold pink hands, from the clear, quick blaze. "What am I to wear?" I say, gloomily. "None of my frocks are ironed, and there is no time now. I shall look as if I came out of the dirty clothes-basket! Barbara, dear, will you lend me your blue sash? Last time I wore mine the Brat upset the gum-bottle over my ends."

"Let us each have the melancholy pleasure of contributing something toward the decking of our victim," says Algy, with a grin; "have my mess-jacket!"

"Have as many beads as you can about you," puts in Bobby. "Begums always have plenty of beads."

A little pause, while the shifting flame-light makes small pictures of us on the deep-bodied teapot's sides, and throws shadowy profiles of us on the wall.

"Mother said, too, that I was to try and not say any of my unlucky things!" I remark, presently.

"Do not tell him," says Bobby, ill-naturedly, "as you told poor Captain Saunders the other day, that 'they always put the fool of the family into the army.'"

"I did not say so of myself," cry I, angrily. "I only told it him as a quotation."

"Abstain from quotations, then," retorts Bobby, dryly; "for you know in conversation one does not see the inverted commas."

"What shall I talk about?" say I, dropping my shielding hand into my lap, and letting the full fire-warmth blaze on eyes, nose, and cheeks. "Barbara, what did you talk about?"

"Whatever I talked about," replies Barbara, gayly, "they clearly were not successful topics, so I will not reveal what they were."

Barbara is standing by the tea-table, thin and willowy, a tea-caddy in one hand, and a spoon in the other, ladling tea into the deep-bodied pot—a spoonful for each person and one for the pot.

"I will draw you up a list of subjects to be avoided," says Algy, drawing his chair to the table, and pulling a pencil out of his waistcoat-pocket. "Here, Tou Tou, tear a leaf out of your copy-book—imprimis, old age."

"You are wrong there," cry I, triumphantly, "quite wrong; he is rather fond of talking of his age, harps upon it a good deal. He said to-day that he was an old wreck!"

"Of course he meant you to contradict him!" says Bobby, cackling, "and, from the little I know of you, I am morally certain that you did not—did you, now?"

"Well, no!" reply I, rather crestfallen; "I certainly did not. I would, though, in a minute, if I had thought that he wanted it."

"I wish," says Barbara, shutting the caddy with a snap, "that Providence had willed to send the dear old fellow into the world twenty years later than it did. In that case I should not at all have minded trying to be a comfort to him."

"He must have been very good-looking, must not he?" say I, pensively, staring at the red fire-caverns. "Very—before his hair turned gray. I wonder what color it was?"

Visions of gold yellow, of sunshiny brown, of warm chestnut locks, travel in succession before my mind's eye, and try in turn to adjust themselves to the good and goodly weather-worn face, and wide blue eyes of my new old friend.

"Tongs," replies Algy, with short contempt, looking up from his list of prohibitions.

"Very good-looking!" repeat I, dogmatically, entirely ignoring the last suggestion.

"Perhaps when this planet was young!" retorts he, with the superb impertinence of twenty.

"You talk as if he were eighty years old," cry I, with an unaccountably personal feeling of annoyance. "He is only forty-seven!"

"Well, I must be going, I suppose," cry I, leisurely rising, stretching, sighing, and beginning to collect the various articles of my wardrobe, scattered over the furniture. "Good-by, dear teapot! good-by, dear plum loaf! how I wish I was going to stay with you! It really is ten minutes past dressing-time, and father is always so pleased when one keeps him waiting for his soup."

"He would not say any thing to you to-day if you were late," says Bobby, astutely. "You might tumble over his gouty foot, and he would smile! Are we not the most united family in Christendom—when we have company?"

After all, I need not have disquieted myself; I am in very good time. When I open the drawing-room door, and make my entrance in the borrowed splendor of Barbara's broad blue-sash tails, and the white virginity of my own muslin frock, I find that neither of my parents have as yet made their appearance. Sir Roger has the hearth-rug to himself; at least he only shares it with Vick, and she is asleep; sitting very upright, it is true, with her thin tail round her toes, like a cat's, her head and whole body swaying from side to side in indisputable slumber. At sight of the chaste and modest apparition that the opened door yields to his gaze, an exclamation of pleasure escapes him—at least it sounds like pleasure.

"Ah! this is all right! You are here to-night at all events; but, by-the-by, what became of you yesterday?"

"What always becomes of me?" reply I, bluntly, lifting my grave gray eyes to his face, and to the hair which sweeps thick and waved above his broad brown forehead. (Tongs indeed!)

"I remember that you told me you had been cooking, but you cannot cook every night."

"Never when I can possibly help it," I reply, with emphasis. And no sooner are the words out of my mouth than I see that I have already transgressed my mother's commands, and given vent to one of "my unlucky things." I stand silent and ashamed, reflecting that no after-tinkering will mend my unfortunate speech.

"And to-night you could not help it?" he asks, after a slight, hardly perceptible pause.

I look up to answer him. He is forty-seven years old. He is a general, and a sir, and has been in every known land; has killed big and little beasts, and known big and little people, and I am nineteen and nobody, and have rarely been beyond our own park and parish, and my acquaintance is confined to half a dozen turnipy squires and their wives; and yet he is looking snubbed, and it is I that have snubbed him. Well, I cannot help it. Truth is truth; and so I answer, in a low voice:

"And you look upon it as a great penance?" he says, still with that half-disappointed accent.

"To be sure I do," reply I, briskly. "So does Barbara. Ask her if she does not. So would you, if you were I."

"Hush!" say I, hearing a certain heavy, well-known, slow footfall. "He is coming! I will tell you by-and-by—when we are by ourselves."

After all, how convenient an elderly man is! I could not have said that to any of the young squires!

His blue eyes are smiling in the fire-light, as, leaning one strong shoulder against the mantel-piece, he turns to face me more fully.

And then father enters, and I am dumb. Presently, dinner is announced, and we walk in; I on father's arm. He addresses me several times with great bonhomie and I respond with nervous monosyllables. Father is always suavity itself to us, when we have guests; but, when one is not in the habit of being treated with affability, it is difficult to enter into the spirit of the joke. Several times I catch our guest's frank eyes, watching me with inquiring wonder, as I respond with brief and low-voiced hurry to some of my parent's friendly and fatherly queries as to the disposition of my day. And I sit tongue-tied and hungry—for, thank God, I have always had a large appetite—dumb as the butler and footman—dumb as the racing-cups on the sideboard—dumber than Vick, who, being a privileged person, is standing—very tall—on her hind-legs, and pawing Sir Roger's coat-sleeve, with a small, impatient whine.

"Why, Nancy, child!" says father, helping himself to sweetbread, and smiling, "what made you in such a hurry to get away this morning out of the park?"

(Why can't he always speak in that voice? always smile?—even his nose looks a different shape.)

"Near—luncheon-time," reply I, indistinctly, with my head bent so low that my nose nearly touches the little square of bare neck that my muslin frock leaves exposed.

"Not a bit of it—half an hour off.—Why, Roger, I am afraid you had not been making yourself agreeable! eh, Nancy?"

"I was very agreeable, as it happened—rather more brilliant than usual, if possible, was not I? And, to clear my character, and prove that you thought so, you will take me out for another walk, some day, will not you?"

"Yes! with pleasure! when you like!" I answer heartily, and I neither mumble nor stutter, nor do I feel any disposition to drop my eyes. I like to look at him. For the rest of dinner I am absolutely mute, I make only one other remark, and that is a request to one of the footmen to give me some water. The evening passes. It is but a short one—at least, as regards the company of the gentlemen, for they sit late; father's port, I am told, not being to be lightly left for any female frippery. I retire to the school-room, and regale my brethren with lively representations of father's unexampled benignity. I also resume with Algy the argument about tongs, at the very point where I had dropped it. It lasts till prayer-time; and its monotony is relieved by personalities. The devil in the boys is fairly quiescent to-night, and our evening devotions pass over with tolerable peace; the only contretemps being that the Brat, having fallen asleep, remains on his knees when "Amen" raises the rest of the company from theirs, and has to be privily and heavily kicked to save him from discovery and ruin. Having administered the regulation embrace to father, and heartily kissed mother—not but what I shall see her again; she always comes, as she came when we were little, to kiss us in bed—I turn to find Sir Roger holding open the swing-door for us.

"Are you quite sure about it to-night?" I say, stretching out my hand to him to bid him good-night. "Ours on the right—yours on the left—do you see?"

"Yours on the right—mine on the left," he repeats, "Yes—I see—I shall make no more mistakes—unless I make one on purpose."

"Do not come without telling us beforehand!" I cry, earnestly. "I mean really: if you hold a vague threat of paying us a visit over our heads, you will keep us in a state of unnatural tidiness for days."

The others—boys and girls—have passed us: the servants have melted out of sight; so has mother; father is speaking to the butler in the passage—we are alone.

"Not I!" reply I, lightly. "I want to hear the end of the anecdote about father's nose! I cannot get over the idea of him in a stiff white petticoat: I thought of it at dinner, whenever I looked at him!"

"Nancy," he says, abruptly, taking possession of my other hand also, "why did you answer your father so shortly to-day? Why did you look so scared when he tried to joke with you?"

"Why do you speak in that sneering voice? It is not your own voice; I have known you only twenty-four hours, and yet I can tell that."

"I will not answer any more questions," reply I, recovering both hands with a sudden snatch: "and if you ask me any more, I will not take you out walking! there!"

CHAPTER V.

"A peck of March dust is worth a king's ransom," say I slowly next morning, as I stand by the window, trying to see clearly through the dimmed and tearful pane. "The king would have to do without his ransom to-day."

It is raining mightily; strong, straight, earnest rain, that harshly lashes the meek earth, that sends angry runlets down the gravel walks, that muddies the gold goblets of the closed crocuses.

"And you without your walk!" says Barbara, lifting her face from her stitching. "Poor Miss Nancy!"

"There is not enough blue sky to make a cat a pair of breeches!" cries Bobby, despondently, and with his usual vulgarity.

Sometimes I am tempted to fear that Bobby is hopelessly ungenteel—ungenteel for life. He has now taken possession of another window, and is consulting the eastern sky.

"A ransomless king, and a trouserless cat! That is about the state of the case!" say I, turning away from the window with a grin.

After all, now I come to think of it, I am nearly as vulgar as Bobby. But I am right. Through the day, through the long, light, cold evening, the posture of the weather changes not. To-day, Barbara, Algy, and I, are all constrained to dine; for have not we a dinner-party, or rather a mild simulation of one?—a squire or two, a squiress or two, a curate or two—such odd-come-shorts as can be got together in a scattered country neighborhood at briefest notice. Barbara and I, as it happens, are both late. It is five minutes past eight, when with the minor details of our toilets a good deal slurred, with a paucity of bracelets and lack of necessary pins, we hurriedly and sneakingly enter the drawing-room, and find all our guests already come together. Mother gives us an almost imperceptible glance of gentle reproach, but father is so occupied in bantering a strange miss—banter in which the gallant and the fatherly happily join to make that manner which is the envy and admiration of the neighborhood—that he seems unconscious of our entrance. An intuition, however, tells us that this is not the case, but that he is making a note of it. This depresses us so much that, until song and sherry have comforted and emboldened us, we have not spirits to make any effort toward the entertainment of our neighbors. We have been paired with a couple of curates. Mine is a strong-handed, ingenuous Ishmael, who tells everybody that he hates his trade, and that he thinks it is very hard that he may not get out of it, now that his elder brother is dead. I am thankful to say that his appetite is as vast as his shoulders; so, after I have told him that I love raw oysters, and that Barbara cannot sit in the room with a roast hare; and have heard in return that he does not care about brill, but worships John Dory, we slide into a gluttonous silence, and abide in it. Barbara's man of God is in a wholly different pattern to mine. He is a macerated little saint, with the eyes of a ferret and the heart of a mouse. As the courses pass by, in savory order, I, myself unemployed, watch my sister gradually reassuring, comforting, heartening him, as is her way with all weakly, maimed, and unhandsome creatures. She has succeeded in thawing him into a thin trickle of parochial talk, when mother bends her laced and feathered head in distant signal from the table-top, and off we go. We drink coffee, we drink tea, we pick clever little holes in our absent neighbors, in brisk duet and tortuous solo we hammer the blameless spinnet, we sing affecting songs about "fair doves," and "cleansing fires," and people "far away," and still our deliverers come not. They must hear our appealing melodies clearly through the walls and doors, but still they come not. Sunk in sloth and old port, still they come not. I seem to have said every possible thing that is to be said on every known subject to the young woman beside me, and now I am falling asleep. I feel it. Lulled by the warm glow diffused through the room, by the smell of the jonquils, lilies of the valley and daphnes, by the low even talk, I am slipping into slumber. The door opens, and I jump into wakefulness; Sir Roger to the rescue. I am afraid that I look at him with something not unlike invitation in my eyes, for he makes straight toward me.

"Wish me good-morning," say I, rubbing my eyes, "for I have been sweetly asleep. I fell asleep wondering which of you would come first—somehow I thought it would be you. Are you going to sit here? Oh! that is all right!" as he subsides into the next division of the ottoman to mine. "What have you been talking about?" I continue, with a contented, chatty feeling, leaning my elbow on the blue-satin ottoman-top; "any thing pleasant? Did not you hear our screams for help through the wall?"

Yes; they are all here now, at last; all, from father down to the curates; some sitting resolutely down, some standing uncertainly up. Barbara's protégé, with frightened stealth, is edging round the furniture to where she sits on a little chair alone. Barbara is locketless, braceletless, chainless, head-dressless! such was our unparalleled haste to abscond. Ornaments has she none but those that God has given her: a sweep of blond hair, a long, cool throat, and two smooth arms that lie bare and white as any milk on her lap. As he nervously draws near, she lifts her eyes with a lovely friendliness to his face. He is poor, slightly thought of, sickly, not over-clever; probably she will talk to him all the evening.

"Look at Barbara!" say I, with deep admiration, familiarly laying my hand on Sir Roger's coat-sleeve, to make sure of engaging his attention, "that is always her way! Did you ever see any thing so cruelly shy as that poor little man is? See! he is wriggling all over like an eel! He came to call the other day, and while he was talking to mother I watched him. He tore a pair of quite new tea-green gloves into thin strips, like little thongs! He must find it rather expensive work, if he makes many morning calls, must he not?"

"I am sure that you and Barbara would get on," continue I, loquaciously, leaning my head on my hand, and talking in that low, comfortable voice that our proximity warrants; "I cannot understand how it was that you did not make great friends that first night! I suppose that you are not poor and ugly and depressed enough for her to make much of you! Shall I make a sign to her to come over and talk to us?"

"Do not you think that she looks very comfortable where she is?" he asks, rather doubtfully.

"I am sure she would like you," I say, with a dogmatic shake of the head. "I told her that you were—well, that I got on with you, and we always like the same people."

"What do you mean? Oh! not in that way—" (with an unblushing heart-whole laugh). "Lucky for me that we do not."

"Why will you make me say things that sound mock-modest?" cry I, reddening a little this time. "You know perfectly well what I mean—it is not likely that any one would look at me when Barbara was by—you can have no notion," continue I, speaking very fast to avoid contradiction, "how well she looks when she is dancing—never gets hot, or flushed, or mottled, as so many people do."

"I grow purple," I answer, laughing—"a rich imperial purple, all over. If you had once seen me, you would never forget me."

He has settled himself with an air of extreme repose and enjoyment. We really are very comfortable.

"Well," say I, nothing loath, for I have always dearly loved the sound of my own voice, "do you see that man on the hearth-rug?—do not look at him this very minute, or he will know that we are speaking of him. I cannot imagine why father has asked him here to-night—he wants to marry Barbara; he has never said it, but I know he does: the boys—we all, indeed—call him Toothless Jack! he is not old really, I suppose—not more than fifty, that is; but for Barbara!—"

I think that Sir Roger is beginning to find me rather tiresome: evidently he is not listening: he has even turned away his head.

There is a movement among the guests, the first detachment are bidding good-night, the rest speedily do the like. Father follows his favorite miss into the hall, cloaks her with gallant care, and through the door I hear him playfully firing off parting jests at her as she drives away. Then he returns to the drawing-room. Sir Roger has gone to put on his smoking-coat, I suppose. Father is alone with his wife and his two lovely daughters. We make a faint movement toward effacing ourselves, but our steps are speedily checked.

"May I ask what induced you to keep my guests waiting half an hour for their dinner to-night?"

No manner of answer. How hooked his nose looks! how fearfully like a hawk he has grown all in a minute!

"When you have houses of your own," he continues with iced politeness, "you may of course treat your visitors to what vagaries you please, but as long as you deign to honor my roof with your presence, you will be good enough to behave to my guests with decent civility, do you hear?"

"Well, Roger, how is the glass? up or down? What is it doing? Are we to have a fine day to-morrow?"

For Roger apparently has got quickly into his smoking-coat: at least he is here: he has heard all. Barbara and I crawl away with no more spring or backbone in us than a couple of torpid, wintery flies.

Five minutes later, "Do you wonder that we hate him?" cry I, with flaming cheeks, holding a japanned candlestick in one hand, and Sir Roger's right hand in the other.

"I do not care if he does hear me!—yes, I do, though" (giving a great jump as a door bangs close to me).

Sir Roger is looking down at me with an expression of most thorough discomfiture and silent pain in his face.

"He did not mean it, Nancy!" he says, hesitatingly, and with a sort of look of shamed wonder in his friendly eyes.

A little pause, the position of the japanned candlestick and of Sir Roger's hand still remaining the same. "How I wish that you were my father instead!" I say with a sort of sob. He does not, as I fully expect, say, "So do I!" and I go to bed, feeling rather small, as one who has gushed, and whose gush has not been welcome to the recipient.

CHAPTER VI.

A fortnight has passed. Two Sundays, two Mondays, two Tuesdays, etc. Fourteen times have I sleepily laid head on pillow. Fourteen times have I yawningly raised it from my pillow. Fourteen times have I hungrily eaten my dinner, since the night when I stood in the hall with Sir Roger's hand in mine, raging against my parent. And Sir Roger is here still. After all, there is nothing like the tenacity of boyish friendship, is there?

I suppose that, to Sir Roger, father is still the manly, debonair youth that he remembers thirty years ago. In happy ignorance he slurs over the thirty intervening years of moroseness, and goes back to that blest epoch in which I have so much difficulty in believing, and about which he, walking beside me now and again through the tender, springing grass of the meadows, has told me many a tale. For our promised walk has come off, and so has many others like it.

He must be dotingly fond of father. It is the 15th of April. I dare say, O reader, that it seems to you much like any other date, but to me, through every back-coming year, it seems to gain fresh significance—the date that marks the most important day—take it for all in all—of my life, though, whether for good or ill, who shall say, until I am dead, and my life's sum reckoned up. I awake on that morning with no forecast of what is coming? I tear myself from my morning dreams with as sleepy unwillingness as usual. I eat my bread-and-butter with as stolidly healthy an appetite. I run with as scampering feet, as evenly-beating a heart as is my wont, with little Vick along the garden-walks, in the royal morning sun. For one of God's own days has come—one that must have lost his way, and strayed from paradise.

It has the steady heat of June, though we are only in mid-April, and the freshness of the prune. The leaves on the trees are but tender and tiny, and through them the sun sends his might. The tulips are all a-blaze and a-stare, making one blink with the dazzle of their odorless beauty: the frolicsome young wind is shaking out their balm from the hyacinth-bells, and the sweet Nancies—my flowers—blowing all together, are swaying and congéeing to the morning airs.

O wise men, who know all things, do you know this? Can you tell it me? Where does the flower hide her scent? From what full cup of hidden sweets does one suck it?

It is one of those days when one feels most convinced of being immortal—when the spirits of men stretch out longing arms toward the All-Good, the Altogether Beautiful—when souls thirst for God, yearn most deeply for the well of his unfathomed truth—when, to those who have lost, their dead come back in most pleasant, gentle guise. As for me, I have lost nothing and no one as yet. All my treasures are still about me; I can stretch out live hands, and touch them alive; none of my dear names are yet to be spoken sparingly with bated breath, as too holy for common talk. And yet I, too, as I walk and bask, and bend to smell the hyacinth-blooms, feel that same vague and most unnamed yearning—a delicate pain that he who has it would barter for no boisterous joy. The clocks tick out the scented hours, and with loud singing of happy birds, with pomp of flowers and bees, and freaked butterflies, God's day treads royally past.

It is afternoon, and the morning wind, heaving with too much fragrance, has lain down to sleep. A great warm stillness is on the garden and house. The sweet Nancies no longer bow. They stand straight up, all a-row, making the whole place honeyed. The school-room is one great nosegay. Every vase and jug, and cup, and pot and pan and pipkin that we can command, is crammed with heavy-headed daffodils, with pale-cheeked primroses, with wine-colored gilly-flowers, every thing that spring has thrust most plentifully into our eager hands.

He looks small and cold in consequence, and his little pert nose is tinged with a chilly pink. Half an hour ago, mother called me away to a private conference, exciting thereby a mighty curiosity not unmixed with envy in my brethren.

"Well, what was it? out with it," cries Algy, almost before I am inside the door again. Algy is sitting more than half—more than three-quarters out of the window, balancing himself with great nicety on the sill. He is in the elegant négligé of a decrepit shooting-jacket, no waistcoat, and no collar.

"What have you been doing to your face?" says Bobby, drawing nigh, and peering with artless interest into the details of my appearance; "it is the color of this" (pointing to a branch of red rhibes, which is hanging its drooped flowers, and joining its potent spice to the other flower-scents).

"Is it?" I answer, putting both hands to my cheeks, to feel their temperature. "I dare say! so would yours be, perhaps, if you had, like me, been having a—" I stop suddenly.

"I will not say what I was going to say," I cry, emphatically, "it was nonsensical!"

"But what has she told you, Nancy?" asks Barbara, who, enervated by the first hot day, is languishing in the rocking-chair, slowly see-sawing. "What could it have been that she might not as well have said before us all?"

"I will not, for one," says Bobby, doggedly, "I never made out a conundrum in my life, except, 'What is most like a hen stealing?'"

"It is not much like that," say I, demurely, "and, in fact, when one comes to think of it, it can hardly be called a conundrum at all!"

"I do not believe it is any thing worth hearing," remarks the Brat, skeptically, "or you would have come out with it long ago! you never could have kept in to yourself!"

"Not worth hearing!" cry I, triumphantly raising my voice, "is not it? That is all you know about it!"

"Do not wrangle, children," says Algy from the window; "but, Nancy, if you have not told us before the clock gets to the quarter" (looking impressively at the slowly-traveling hands), "I shall think it right to—"

What awful threats would have followed will never now be certainly known, for I interrupt.

"I will tell you! I mean to tell you!" I cry, excitedly, covering my face with my hands, and turning my back to them all; "only do not look at me! look the other way, or I cannot tell you."

"Will you promise," cry I, with indistinct emphasis from under my hands, "none of you to laugh—none, even Bobby!"

"What is the use of swearing?—you have only half a minute now. Well, I dare say it is nothing very funny. Yes, we will swear!"

"Sir Roger? What about him? There is not a smile on one of our faces: if you do not believe, look for yourself!—What about our future benefactor?"

"He is not our future benefactor," cry I, energetically, whisking swiftly round to face them again, and dropping my hands, "he never will be!—he does not want to be! He wants to—to—to marry me! there!"

The murder is out. The match is set to the gunpowder train. Now for the explosion!

The clock-hand reaches the quarter—passes it; but in all the assembly there is no sound. The westering sun shines in on four open mouths (the youthful Tou Tou is absent), on four pairs of stupidly-staring eyes. The rocking-chair has ceased rocking. Bobby's sneeze has stopped half-way. There is a petrified silence.

At length, "Marry you!" says the Brat, in a deeply-accented tone of low and awed disbelief. "Why, he was at school with father!"

"I wish to heavens that he had never been at school anywhere!" cry I, in a fury. "I am sick to death of hearing that he was at school with father. Will no one ever forget it?"

"He is for-ty-sev-en!" says Algy, at last closing his mouth, and speaking with slow impressiveness. "Nineteen from forty-seven! how many years older than you?"

"Do not count!" cry I, pettishly; "what is the use? not all the counting in the world will make him any younger."

"It is not true!" cries Bobby, with boisterous skepticism, jumping up from his seat, and making a plunge at me; "it is a hoax! she has been taking us all in! Really, Nancy, for a beginner, you did not do it badly!"

"It is not a hoax!" cry I, scornfully, standing scarlet and deeply ashamed, facing them all; "it is real, plain, downright, simple truth."

Another pause. No sound but the monotonous, unemotional clock, and the woodpecker's fluty laugh from the orchard.

"And so you really have a lover at last, Nancy?" says Algy, the corners of his mouth beginning to twitch in a way which looks badly for the keeping of his oath.

"Yes!" say I, beginning to laugh violently, but quite uncomfortably; "are you surprised? you know I always told you that if you half shut your eyes, and looked at me from a great way off, I really was not so bad-looking."

"You have distanced the Begums!" cries the young fellow, joining in my mirth, but with a good deal more enjoyment than I can boast.

"So I have!" I answer; and my sense of the ludicrous overcoming all other considerations, I begin to giggle with a good-will.

"Let us look at you, Nancy!" says the Brat, taking hold of me by both arms, and bringing the minute impertinence of his face into close neighborhood to mine. "I begin to think that there must be more in you than we have yet discovered! we never looked upon you as one of our most favorable specimens, did we?"

"Do not you remember old Aunt Williams?" reply I, merrily; "how she used to say 'I was not pretty, my dears, but I was a pleasant little devil!' perhaps I am a pleasant little devil!"

"Poor—dear—old fellow!" says Barbara, in an accent of the profoundest, delicatest, womanliest pity, "how sorry I am for him! Nancy, how will you break it to him most kindly? I am afraid he will be sadly hurt! will you speak to him, or do it by letter?"

Barbara has risen. We are all standing up, more or less; it is impossible to sit through such news; Barbara's garden-hat is in her hand. The warm and mellow sun that is making Africa's dreary expanse in the map on the wall, one broad fine sheet, is enkindling, too, the silk of her hair, the flower-petals of her cheeks, the blue compassion of her eyes. My pretty, tall Barbara! Let them say what they like, I am sure that somewhere—somewhere—you are pretty now!

"If you write," says Algy, still laughing, but with more moderation, "I should advise you to depute me to make a fair copy of the letter; else, from the extreme ambiguity of your handwriting, he will most likely mistake your drift, and imagine that you are saying yes."

Rivers of additional scarlet are racing to my cheeks, over my forehead—in among the roots of my hair—all around and about my throat, but I stand, looking the assembled multitude full in the face, fairly, well, and boldly.

"Listen!" I continue, holding up my right hand in deprecation, "let me speak!—do not interrupt me!—Bobby, I know that he was at school with father—Algy, I know that he is forty-seven—all of you, I know that his hair is gray, and that there are crows'-feet about his eyes—but still—but still—"

"Do you mean to say that you are in love with him?" breaks in Bobby, impressively.

Instances of enamored humanity have been rare in Bobby's experience. With the exception of Toothless Jack, he has never had a near and familiar view of an authentic specimen. I therefore see him now regarding me with a reverent interest, not unmixed with awe.

"I mean nothing so silly!" I answer, with lofty petulance. "I am a great deal too old for any such nonsense!"

"There I go with you," says Algy, not without grandeur. "I believe that it is the greatest humbug out, and that it rarely occurs between the ages of sixteen and sixty."

"Father's and mother's was a love-match," says Bobby, gravely. "Did not Aunt Williams tell us that they used always to sit hand-in-hand before they were married?"

"All married people grow to hate one another after a bit," say I, comprehensively; "it is only a question of time."

"But if you do not love him now, and if you are sure that you will hate him by-and-by," says Barbara, looking rather puzzled, "what makes you think of taking him?"

"It would be such a fine thing for all the family: I could give all the boys such a shove," say I, with homely shrewdness.

"They killed seven hundred head of game on his big day last year; I heard him tell father so," says Bobby, with his mouth watering.

"He must ride a stone heavier than I do," says Algy, thoughtfully, "his horses would certainly carry me: I wonder would he give me a mount now and then?"

"I would have you all staying with me always," I cry, warming with my theme, and beginning to dance, "all except father: he should come once a year for a week, if he was good, and not at all, if he was not."

"What will you call him, Nancy?" asks the Brat, inquisitively. "What shall we call him?"

"No he will not," I answer, composedly. "A person would have to bawl even louder than Bobby does, to make him hear: he has gone away for a week; he said he did not wish me to decide in a hurry: he has given me till this day week; I wish it were this day ten years—"

"This day week, then," says Algy, walking about with his hands in his pockets, and smiling to himself, "we may hope to see him return in triumph in a blue frock-coat, with the ring and the parson: at that age one has no time to lose."

"Haste to the wedding!" cries the Brat at the top of his voice, seizing me by both hands, and forcing me to execute an uncouth war-dance, in unwilling celebration of my approaching nuptials.

"I hope that there will be lots of almonds in the cake!" says Bobby, gluttonously.

CHAPTER VII.

The week's reprieve has ended; my Judgment Day has come. Never, never, surely, did seven days race so madly past, tumbling over each other's heels. Even Sunday—Sunday, which mostly contains at least forty-eight hours—has gone like a flash. Morning service, afternoon service, good looks, sermon to the servants, supper, they all run into one another like dissolving views. For the first time in my life, my sleep is broken. I fall asleep in a fever of irresolution. I awake in one. I walk about in one. I feed the jackdaw in one. I box Bobby's ears in one. My appetite (oh, portent!) flags. In intense excitement, who can eat yards of bread-and-butter, pounds of oatmeal-porridge, as has ever been my bucolic habit? Shall I marry Sir Roger, or shall I not? The birds, the crowing cocks, the church-bells, the gong for dinner, the old pony whinnying in the park, they all seem to say this. It seems written on the sailing clouds, on the pages of every book that I open. Armies of pros wage battle against legions of cons, and every day the issue of the fight seems even more and more doubtful.

The morning of the day has arrived, and I am still undecided. I dress in a perfect storm of doubts and questionings. I put on my gown, without the faintest idea of whether it is inside out, or the reverse. I go slowly down-stairs, every banister marked by a fresh decision. I open the dining-room door. Father's voice is the first thing that I hear; father's voice, raised and rasping. He is standing up, and has a letter in his hand; from the engaging blue of its color, and the harmony of its shape, too evidently a bill.

"I regret to have to hurt your feelings," he is saying, in that awful civil voice, at which we all—small and great—quake, "but the next time that this occurs" (pointing to the bill), "I must request you to find accommodation for yourself elsewhere, as really my poor house is not a fit place for a young gentleman with such princely views on the subject of expenditure."

The object of this pleasant harangue is Algy, who, also standing, with his face very white, his lips very much compressed, and his eyes flashing with a furious light, is fronting his parent on the hearth-rug.

Behind the tea-urn, mother is mingling her drink with tears, and making little covert signs to Algy, at all rates to hold his tongue.

My mind is made up, never to be unmade again. I will marry Sir Roger. He shall pay all Algy's debts, and forever dry mother's sad, wet eyes.

The weather of paradise is gone back to paradise. This day is very earthly. There has been a sharp, cold shower, and there is still a strong rain-wind, which has snapped a score of tulip-heads. Poor, brave Jour ne sols! Prone they lie on the garden-beds, defiled, dispetalled. Even the survivors are stained and dashed, and the sweet Nancies look pinched and small. If you were to go down on your knees to them, they could not give you any scent. I am walking up and down the room, in a state of the utmost agitation. My heart is beating so as to make me feel quite sick. My fingers are very hot, but hardly so hot as my face.

"For Heaven's sake do not make me laugh! do not!" cry I, nervously, "it would be too dreadful if I were to receive his overtures with a broad grin, would not it? There! is it gone? Do I look quite grave?"

I take half a dozen hurried turns along the floor, and try to think of all our most depressing family themes—father; Algy's college-bills; Tou Tou's shrunk face and thin legs; nothing will do. When I stop before the glass and consult it, that hysterical smile is there still.

"Do you remember the day, when we were children, that we all went to the dentist?" says the Brat, chuckling, "and father gave Bobby a New Testament because he had his eye-tooth out? Does to-day at all remind you of it, Nancy?"

"I had far rather have both my eye-teeth out, and several of my double ones, too," reply I, sincerely.

"I must not keep him waiting any longer," cry I, desperately. "Tell me!" (appealing piteously to them all), "do I look all right? do I look pretty natural?"

"Put on your bonnet," suggests Algy. "You look twenty years older in that, particularly when you cock it well over your nose, as you did last Sunday."

"You are all very unkind!" say I, in a whimpering voice, walking toward the door.

"And if he becomes too demonstrative," says the Brat, overtaking me with a rush before I reach it, "say—

Then I go. As I know perfectly well, that if I give myself time to think, I shall stand with the drawing-room door-handle in my grasp for half an hour, before I can make up my mind to enter, I take the bull by the horns, and whisking in suddenly and noisily, find myself tête-à-tête with my lover.

Certainly, I never felt such a fool in my life. How awful it will be if I burst out laughing in his face! It is quite as likely as not that I shall do it out of sheer hysterical fright. Oh, how different! how much nicer it was when we last parted! I had taken him to see the jackdaw, and the little bear that Bobby brought from foreign parts; and jacky had bitten his finger so humorously, and we had been so merry, and I had told him again how much I wished that he could change places with father. And now! I feel—more than see—that he is drawing nigh me. Through my eyelids—for I am very sure that I never lift my eyes—I get an idea of his appearance.

Under his present aspect I am much more disposed to be critical, and to pick holes in him, than I was under his former one. Any attempt at youthfulness, any effort at smartness, will not escape my vigilant reprobation—down-eyed and red-cheeked as I appear to be. But none such do I find. There is no false juvenility—there is no trace of dandyism in the plain and quiet clothes, in the hair sparsely sprinkled with snow, in the mature and goodly face.

An iron-gray, middle-aged gentleman stands before me, more vigorous, more full of healthy life than two-thirds of the puny youth, nourished on sherry and bitters, of the present small generation, but with no wish, no smallest effort to take away one from the burden of years that God has laid on his strong shoulders.

There is no doubt that I shall not speak first, so for a moment there is a profound silence. Then I find my hot hand in Sir Roger's where it has so often and so familiarly lain before, and I hear Sir Roger's voice addressing me.

Somehow I know that the bronze of his face is a little paled by emotion, but there is no sawny sentiment in his tone, none of the lover's whine. It is the same voice—as manly, as sustained—that made comments on Bobby's little bear. And yet, for the moment, I am physically unable to answer him. Who can answer the simplest question ever put with a lump the size of a cocoa-nut in their throat? My eyelids are still hopelessly drooped over my eyes, but, by some sense that is not eyesight, I am aware that there is a sort of shyness in his face, a diffidence in his address.

And then, somehow, there seems to me something so ludicrous in the sound of my own speech, that I tremble on the verge of a burst of loud and unwilling laughter.

"Speak out all your thought to me, whatever it is," he says, in a tone of grave entreaty, moved and tender, yet manly withal. "Look at me with the same friendly, fearless eyes that you did last week! I know, my dear, that you always think of others more than yourself, and I dare say that now you are afraid of hurting me! Indeed, you need not be! I am tough and well-seasoned; I have known what pain is before now—it would be very odd, at my time of life, if I had not! I can well bear a little more, and be the better for it, perhaps."

I stand stupidly silent. One's outer man or woman often does an injustice to one's inner feelings. As he speaks, my heart goes out to him, but I can find no words in which to dress my thought.

"Nancy!" in a tone of thorough distress. "I can bear any thing but seeing you shrink and shiver away from me, as I have seen you do from your father."

"You never will see that," reply I, laconically, gathering bravery enough to look him in the face, as I deliver this encouraging remark.

"Do you think," he says, beginning to walk restlessly about the room—(long ago he dropped my limp hand)—"that all this week I have had much hope? Every time that I have caught a glimpse of myself in the glass, I have said, 'Is this a face likely to take a child's fancy? Do you bear much resemblance to the hero of her storybooks?' My dear"—(stopping before me)—"you cannot think my presumption more absurd than I do myself."

"I do not think it at all absurd," reply I, beginning to speak quite stoutly, and to be rather diffuse than otherwise. "Perhaps I did, just at first, when they were all laughing, and saying about your having been at school with father; but now I do not in the least—I do not care what the boys say—I do not, really. I am not joking."

At my words he half stretches out his hand to take mine; but, as if repressing some strong impulse, withdraws it again, and speaks quietly, with a rather sober smile.

"I am afraid that one's soul ages more slowly than one's body, Nancy! Even at my age it has seemed difficult to me to be brought into hourly companionship with all that was most fresh and womanly, and spirited, and pretty."

"Pretty!" think I. "I wish the boys could hear him! they will never believe me if I tell them."

"And not wish to have it for my own, to take and make much of. I that have never had any thing very lovely or lovable in my life. And then, dear, it was all your good-nature, you did not know what you were doing; you seemed to find some little pleasure in my society—even chose it by preference now and then. My talk did not weary you, as I should have thought it would have done, and so I grew to think—to think—Bah!" (with a movement of impatience) "it was a foolish thought! what can there be in common between me and a child like you?"

"I think that there is a great deal," reply I, speaking very steadily, and so saying, I stretch out my hand and of my own accord put it in his again. He cannot well return it to me, so he keeps it.

"And yet it is impossible?" he says, with hesitating interrogation, while his steel-blue eyes look anxiously into mine.

"Is it?" say I, a wily smile beginning to creep over my features. "If it is, what was the use of asking me?" I have the grace to grow extremely red as I make this observation.

"Nancy!" seizing my other hand, too, and speaking in a hurried, low voice that slightly shakes with the force of his emotion, "what are you saying? You do not know what you are implying."

"Yes I do," reply I, firmly. "I know perfectly. And it is not impossible. Not at all, I should say."

Upon this explicit declaration an ordinary lover would have had me in his arms and smothered me with kisses before you could look round, but my lover is abnormal. He does nothing of the kind.

"Are you sure," he says, with an earnest gravity and imploring emphasis, "that you understand what you are doing? Are you certain, Nancy, that if we had not been friends, if you had not been loath to pain me, that you would not have answered differently? Think, child! think well of it! this is not a matter of months or even years, but of your whole long young life."

And put thus solemnly before me, the idea of the marriage state seems to me, hardly less weightily oppressive than the idea of eternity.

"How should I feel," he continues (he has put a hand on each of my shoulders, and is looking at me with a serious yet tender fixity), "if, by-and-by, in the years ahead of us, you came and told me that by my selfishness, taking advantage of your youth, I had destroyed your life?"

"And do you think," say I, with a flash of indignation, "that even if you had done it, I should come and tell you?"

"Are you quite sure that among all the men of your acquaintance, men nearer you in age, more akin in tastes, men not gray-haired, not weather-beaten, not past their best years—there is not one with whom you would more willingly spend your life than with me? If it is so, I beseech you to tell me, as you would tell your mother!"

"If there were," reply I, smiling broadly, a smile which greatly widens my mouth, and would show my dimples if I had any, "I should indeed be susceptible! The two curates that you saw the other night—the one who tore his gloves into strips, you know, and the other who ate so much—Toothless Jack—these are the sort of men among whom my lines have lain. Do you think I am likely to be very much in love with any of them?"

"I am very suspicious," he says, half apologetically, "but you have seen so little of the world, you have led such a nun's life! how can you answer for it that hereafter out in the world you may not meet some one more to your liking? You are a dear little, kindly, tender-hearted sort, and you do not tell me so, but you do not like me much, Nancy! Indeed, dear, I could far better do without you now, than see you by-and-by wishing me away and yet be unable to rid you of me."

"People can help falling in love," say I, with matter-of-fact common-sense. "If I belonged to you, of course I should never think of any one else in that way."

"I wish that you would not ask me any more questions," say I, interrupting him with a pout. "I am quite sure of every thing you can possibly think of."

"I will only ask one more—are you quite sure that it is not for your brothers' and sisters' sakes—not your own—that you are doing this? Do you remember" (with a smile half playful, half sad) "what you told me about your views of marriage on that first day when I found you in the kitchen-garden?"

"I hope to Heaven that you did not think I was hinting," say I, growing crimson; "it certainly sounded very like it, but I really and truly was not. I was thinking of a young man! I assure you" (speaking with great earnestness) "that I had as much idea of marrying you as of marrying father!"

Looking back with mature reflection at this speech, I think that it may be safely reckoned among my unlucky things.

"No," he says, wincing a little, a very little. "I know you had not; but—you have not answered my question."

For a moment I look down irresolute, then, through some fixed belief in him, I look up and tell him the plain, bare truth.

"I did think that it would be a nice thing for the boys," I say, "and so it will, there is no doubt; you will be as good as a fa—, as a brother to them; but—I like you myself besides, you may believe it or not as you please, but it is quite, quite, quite true."

"And I like you!" he answers very simply, and so saying, stoops, and with a sort of diffidence, kisses me.

"Well, how did it go off?" cries Bobby, curiously, when I next rejoin my compeers. "Did you laugh?"

"Laugh!" I echo, with lofty anger, "I do not know what you mean! I never felt in the least inclined." Then seeing my brethren look rather aghast at this sudden change in the wind, I add gayly: "Bobby, you must never again breathe a word about Sir Roger's having been at school with father; let it be supposed that he did without education."

CHAPTER VIII.

This is my wooing: thus I am disposed of. Without a shadow of previous flirtation with any man born of woman—without any of the ups and downs, the ins and outs of an ordinary love-affair, I place my fate in Sir Roger's hands. Henceforth I must have done with all girlish speculations, as to the manner of man who is to drop from the clouds to be my wooer. Well, I have not many day-dreams to relinquish. When I have built Spanish castles—in a large family, one has not time for many—a lover for myself has been less the theme of my aspirations than a benefactor for the family. One, who will exercise a wholesomely repressive influence over father, has been more than any thing the theme of my longings; on the unlikely hypothesis of my marrying at all. For, O friends, it has seemed to me most unlikely; I dare say that I might not have been over-difficult—might have thankfully and heartily loved some one not quite a Bayard, but one cannot love any thing—any odd and end—and, say what you will, the choice of a country girl, with a little dowry and a plain face, is but small. For—do not dislike me for it if you can help—I am plain. I know it by the joint and honest testimony of all my brethren. I have had no trouble in gathering the truth from them. A hundred times they have volunteered it, with that healthy disregard of any sickly sensitiveness which arms one against blows to one's vanity through all after-life. Yes: I am plain; not offensively so, not largely, fatly, staringly plain, but in a small, blond, harmless way. However, Sir Roger thinks me pretty. Did not he say so, in unmistakable English? I have tried darkly to hint this to the boys, but have been so decisively pooh-poohed that I resolve not to allude to the subject again. Not only am I plain now, but I shall remain plain to my life's end. Unlike the generality of ugly heroines, you will not see me develop and effloresce into beauty toward the end of my story.

The interval between my betrothal and my marriage is but short. On April 22d, I put my hand into Sir Roger's. On May 20th, I am to put it into his for good. When the bridegroom is forty-seven, and the bride one of six, why should there be any delay? Why should a man keep and lodge his daughter any longer than he can help, when he has found some one else willing to do it for him? This, I think, is father's view. And, meanwhile, father himself is more like an angel than a man. Not once do we hear the terrible polite voice that chills the marrow of our bones. Not once is his nose more than becomingly hooked. Not once does he look like a hawk. Another long bill comes in for Algy, and is dismissed with the benevolent comment that you cannot put gray heads upon green shoulders. I dine every day now; and father and I converse agreeably upon indifferent topics. Once—oh, prodigious!—we take a walk round the Home Farm together, and he consults me about the Berkshire pigs. Then comes a mad rush for clothes. I am involved in a whirlwind of haberdashery, Brussels lace, diamonds. It feels very odd—the becoming possessed of a great number of stately garments, to which Barbara has no fellows—Barbara and I, who hitherto have been always stitch for stitch alike. And meanwhile I see next to nothing of my future husband. This is chiefly my own doing.

"You will not mind," I say, standing before him one day in the drawing-room window, and speaking rather bashfully—somehow I do not feel so comfortably easy and outspoken with him as I did before the catastrophe—"you will not mind if I do not see much of you—do not go out walking—do not talk to you very much till—till it is over!"

"And why am I not to mind?" he asks, half jestingly, and yet a little gravely, too.

"You will have quite enough—too much of me afterward," I say, with a shy laugh, "and they—they will never have much of me again—never so much, at least—and" (with rather a tremble in my voice) "we have had such fun together!"

And so Sir Roger keeps away. Whether his self-denial costs him much, I cannot say. It never occurs to me at the time that it does. He may think me a very nice little girl, and that I shall be a great comfort to him, but he cannot care much about having any very long conversations with me—he that has seen so many lands, and known so many great and clever people, and read so many books. He has always been most undemonstrative to me. At his age, no doubt, he does not care much for the foolish endearments of lovers; so, with an easy conscience, I devote myself, for my short space, to the boys, to Barbara, to Vick, and the jackdaw. Once, indeed—just once—I have a little talk with him, and afterward I almost wish that I had not had it. We are sitting under a horse-chestnut-tree in the garden—a tree that, under the handling of the warm air, is breaking into a thousand tender faces. We did not begin by being tête-à-tête; indeed, several lately-occupied chairs intervene between us, but first one and then another has slipped away, and we are alone.

"Nancy!" says Sir Roger, his eyes following the Brat, who is lightly tripping up the stone steps, looking very small and agile in his white-flannel cricketing things, "what is that boy's real name? Why do you call him 'the Brat'?"

"Because he is such a Brat," reply I, fondly, picking up from the grass a green chestnut-bud that the squirrels or the rooks have untimely nipped. "Did you ever see any thing so little, so white and pert? He has sadly mistaken his vocation in life: he ought to have been a street Arab."

"One gets rather sick of one's surname," says my companion. "Except your father, hardly any one calls me Roger now! I should be glad to answer to it again."

He turns and looks at me with a kind of appeal as he says this. If he were not forty-seven and a man, I should say that he was coloring a little. After all, blushing is confined to no age. I have seen a veteran of sixty-five redden violently.

"Do you mean to say," cry I, looking rather aghast, and speaking, as usual, without thinking, "that you mean me to call you Roger! indeed, I could not think of such a thing! it would sound so—so disrespectful! I should as soon think of calling my father James."

"Should you?" he answers, turning away his face toward the garden-beds, where the blue forget-me-not is unrolling her sky-colored sheet, and the double daisies are stiffly parading their tight pink buttons. "Then call me what you like!"

I am not learned in the variations of his voice, as I am in those of father and Algy, in either of which I can at once detect each fine inflection of anger, contest, or pain; but, comparatively unversed as I am in it, there sounds to me a slight, carefully smothered, yet still perceptible, intonation of disappointment—mortification. I wish that the air would give me back my words; but that it never yet was known to do.

"I will try if you like," say I, cheerfully, but a little shyly, as, like the March Hare and the Hatter in the "Mad Sea Party," I move up past the empty chairs to the one next him. "I do not see, after all, why I should not get quite used to it in time! Roger! Roger! it is a name I have always been very partial to until" (laughing a little) "the Claimant threw discredit on all Rogers!"

He is looking at me again. After all, I must have been mistaken. There is no shadow of disappointment or mortification near him. He is smiling with some friendliness.

"You must never mind what I say," I continue, dragging my wicker chair along the shortly-shorn sward a little nearer to him. "Never! nobody ever does; I am a proverb and a by-word for my malapropos speeches. Mother always trembles when she hears me talking to a stranger. The first day that I dined after you came, Algy made me a list of things that I was not to talk about to you."

"A list of sore subjects?" says my lover, laughing. "But how did the boy know what were my sore subjects? What were they, Nancy?"

"Oh, I do not know! I have forgotten," reply I, in some confusion. "I've made some very bad shots."

And so we slip away from the subject; but, all the same, I wish that I had not said it.

We have come to the day before the wedding. My spirits, which held up bravely during the first two weeks of my engagement, have now fallen—fallen, like a wind at sundown. I am as limp, lachrymose, and lamentable, a young woman as you would find between the three seas. I have cried with loud publicity in full school-room conclave; I have cried with silent privacy in bed. I have cried over the jackdaw. I have cried over the bear. I have not cried over Vick, as I am to take her with me. To-day we have all cried—boys and all; and have moistened the bun-loaf and the gooseberry-jam at tea with our tears. Our spirits being now temporarily revived, I am undergoing the operation of trying my wedding-dress. I am having a private rehearsal, in fact, in mother's boudoir, with only mother, Barbara, and the maid, for audience.

"Mine is the most hopeless kind of ugliness," say I, with an admirable dispassionateness, as if I were talking of some one else, as, armed in full panoply, I stand staring at my white reflection in a long mirror let into the wall—staring at myself from top to toe—from the highest jasmine star of my wreath to the lowest edge of my Brussels flounce. "If I were very fat, I might fine down; if I were very thin, I might plump up; if I were very red, I might grow pale; if I were—hush! here are the boys. I would not for worlds that they should see me!"

So saying, I run behind the folding-screen—the screen which, through so many winter evenings, we have adorned with gay and ingenious pictures, and which, after having worked openly at it under her nose for a year and a half, we presented to mother as a surprise, on her last birthday.

"Come out, ostrich!" cries Algy, laughing. "Do you suppose that you are hidden? Did it never occur to you that we could see your reflection in the glass?"

"Did you ever see such a fool as I look?" say I, feeling very sneaky, and going through a few uncouth antics to disguise my confusion.

"Talk of me being a Brat," cries the Brat, triumphantly. "I am not half such a brat as you are! You look about ten years old!"

"Mark my words!" cries Bobby. "Wherever you go, on the Continent, you will be taken for a good little girl making a tour with her grandpapa!"

Bobby is speaking at the top of his voice; as, indeed, we have all of us rather a bad habit of doing. Bobby has the most excuse for it, as, being a sailor, I suppose that he has to bellow a good deal at the blue-jackets. In the present case, he has one more listener than he thinks. Sir Roger is among us. The door has been left ajar, and he, hearing the merry clamor, and having always the entrée to mother's room, has entered. By the pained smile on his face, I can see that he has heard.

"You are right, my boy," he says, quite gently, looking kindly at the unfortunate Bobby; "she does look very—very young!"

"I shall mend of that!" cry I, briskly, putting my arm through his, in anxious amends for Bobby's hapless speech. "We are a family who age particularly early. I have a cousin whose hair was gray at five-and-twenty, and I am sure that any one who did not know father, would say that he was sixty, if he was a day—would not they, mother?"

CHAPTER IX.

The preparations are ended; the guests are come; no great number. A few unavoidable Tempests, a few necessary Greys (I have told you, have not I, that my name is Grey?). The heels have been amputated from a large number of white satin slippers, preparatory to their being thrown after us. The school-children have had their last practice at the marriage-hymn.

I have resolved to rise at five o'clock on my wedding-morning, so as to make a last gloomy progress round every bird and beast and gooseberry-bush on the premises. I have exacted—binding her by many stringent oaths—a solemn promise from Barbara to make me, if I do not do so of my own accord, at the appointed hour. I am sunk in heavy sleep, and wake only very gradually, to find her, in conformity with her engagements, giving my shoulder reluctant and gentle pushes, and softly calling me.

"Is it five?" say I, sitting up and yawning. Then as the recollection of my position flashes across my mind, "I will not be married!" I cry, turning round, and burying all my face in my pillow again. "Nobody shall induce me! Let some one go and tell Sir Roger so."

"Sir Roger is not awake," replied Barbara, laughing rather sleepily, "you forget that."

And by the time he is awake, I have come to a saner mind. We dress, for the last time, alike. The thought that never again shall I have a holland frock like Barbara's is nearly too much for us both. We run quietly down-stairs, and out into as August a morning as God ever gave his poor pensioners.

We walk along soberly and silently, hand-in-hand, as we used to do when we were little children. My heart is very, very full. I may be going to be happy in my new life. I fully expect to be. At nineteen, happiness seems one's right, one's matter of course; but it will not be in the same way. This chapter of my life is ended, and it has been such a good chapter, so full of love, of healthy, strong affection, of interchanged, kind offices, and little glad self-denials, so abounding in good jokes and riotous laughter, in little pleasures that—looked back on—seem great; in little wholesome pains that—in retrospect—seem joys. And, as we walk, the birds

"Prefer soft anthems to the ears of men
To woo them from their beds, still murmuring
That men can sleep while they their matins sing.
Most divine service, whose so early lay
Prevents the eyelids of the blushing day."

The old singers have said many a fine and lovely thing about lusty spring. From their pages there seems to come a whiff of clean and healthy perfume from many dead Mays. In sweet and matterful verse they have sung their praises; but, oh! no singer, old or new—none, at least, that was but human—none but a God-intoxicated man could tell the glories of that serenely shining and suave morn.

One so seldom sees the best part of a summer day! Buried in swinish slumber, with window-curtains heedfully drawn, and shutters closely fastened, between us and it, we know nothing of the stately pageant spread outside our doors.

It is wasted; nay, not wasted, for the birds have it. It is so early, that the gardening-men are not yet come to their work. Every thing is as wet as though there had been a shower, but there has been none.

Talk of the earth moving round the sun—he himself the while stupidly stock-still—let them believe it who like; is not he now placidly sailing through the turquoise sea? Below, the earth is unfolding all her freshened meadows, bravely pied with rainbow flowers. There is a very small soft wind, that comes in honeyed puffs and little sighs, that wags the lilac-heads, and the long droop of the laburnum-blooms. The grass is so wet—so wet—as we swish through it, every blade a separate green sparkle. The young daisies give our feet little friendly knocks as we pass.

All round the old flowering thorn there is a small carpet, milk-white and rose-red, of strewn petals. Every flower that has a cup, is holding it brimful of cool dew. Vick is sitting on the top of the stone steps, her ears pricked, and her little black nose working mysteriously as she sniffs the morning air.

On the bright gravel walk stands the jackdaw, looking rather a funereal object in his black suit, on this gaudy-colored day; his gray head very much on one side, his round, sly eyes turned upward in dishonest meditation. A worse bird than Jacky does not hop. His life is one long course of larceny, and I know that if he had the gift of speech, he would also be a consummate liar. I kneel on the walk, and, holding out a bit of cake, call him softly and clearly, "Jacky! Jacky!" He snatches it rudely, with a short hoarse caw, puts one black foot on it, and begins to peck.

"Jacky! Jacky!" say I, sorrowfully, "I am going to be married! Oh, you know that? You may thank your stars that you are not."

As I speak, my tears fall on his sleek black wings and his dear gray head. I try to kiss him; but he makes such a spiteful peck at my nose, that I have to give up the idea. Thus one of my good-byes is over. By the time that they are all ended, and we have returned to the house, I am drowned in tears, and my appearance for the day is irretrievably damaged. My nose is certainly very red. It surprises even myself, who have known its capabilities of old. Bobby, always prosaic, suggests that I shall hold it in the steam of boiling water, to reduce the inflammation. But I have not the heart to try this remedy. It may be sky blue, for all I care. Nose or no nose, I am dressed now.

Instead of the costly artificial wreath that Madame Elise sent me, Barbara has made a little natural garland of my own flowers—my Nancies. I smell them all the time that I am being married. I have no female friends—Barbara has always been friend enough for me—so I have stipulated that I shall have no other bridesmaids but her and Tou Tou. They are not much to brag of in the way of a match. Algy indeed suggested that in order to bring them into greater harmony, Tou Tou shall clothe her thin legs with long petticoats, or Barbara abridge her garments to Tou Tou's length; but the proposition has met with as little favor in the family's eyes as did Squire Thornhill's proposal, that every gentleman should sit on a lady's lap, in the Vicar of Wakefield.

The guests are all off to the church. I follow with my parents. Mother is inclined to cry, until snubbed and withered into dry-eyedness by her consort. He is, however, all benignity to me. I catch myself wondering whether I can be his own daughter; whether I am not one of the train of neighboring misses who have sometimes made me the depository of their raptures about him.

We reach the church. I am walking up the aisle on red cloth: the wedding-hymn is in my ears, gayly and briskly sung, though it is a hymn, and not an Epithalamium: a vague idea of many people is in my head. I am standing before the altar—the altar smothered in flowers. The old vicar who christened me is to marry me. I have declined the intervention of all strange bishops and curates whatsoever. He is a clergyman of the old school, and spares us not a word of the ritual.

Truly in no squeamish age was the marriage-service composed! I know—that is, I could have told you if you had asked me—that I am standing beside a large and stately person, to whom, if neither God nor man interpose to prevent it, I shall, within five minutes, be lawfully wed; but I do not in the least degree realize it.

Now and again a strong sense of the ludicrous rushes over me. There seems to me something acutely ridiculous in the idea of myself standing here, so finely dressed—of the boys, demure and prim in their tall hats and Sunday coats, gathered to see me married—me of all people!

Like lightning-flash there darts into my head the recollection of the last time that I was married! when, long ago we were little children, one wet Sunday afternoon, for want of a job, I had espoused Bobby; and Algy, standing on a chair, with his night-gown on for a surplice, had married us. It is over now. I am aware that several persons of different genders have kissed me. I have signed my name. I am walking down the church-yard path, the bells jangling gayly above my head, drowning the sweet thrushes; and the school-children flinging bountiful garden flowers before my feet. It seems to me a sin to tread upon them. It goes to my heart. We reach the house. Vick comes out to meet us in a crawling, groveling manner, which owes its birth to the shame caused in her mind by the huge favor which my maid has tied round her little neck. We go into breakfast and feed—the women with easy minds; the men, with such appetites as the fear of impending speeches, of horrible shattered commonplaces leaves them.

I suppose that, despite my change of name, I cannot yet be wholly a Tempest; for, while I remain perfectly serene and calm during Sir Roger's few plain words, I am one red misery while Algy is returning thanks for the bridesmaids, which he does in so appallingly lame, stammering, and altogether agonizing a manner, that I have serious thoughts of slipping from my bridegroom's side under the friendly shade of the table, among its sheltering legs.

Thank God it is over, and I am gone to put on my traveling-dress! The odious parting moment has come. The carriage is at the door: the maid and valet are in the dickey. What a pity that they are not bride and bridegroom too! Vick has jumped in—alert and self-respecting again now that she has bitten off her favor.

I have begun my voluminous farewells. I have kissed them all round once, and am beginning again. How can one make up one's mind where to stop? with whom to end?

"Never you marry, Barbara!" say I, in a sobbing whisper, as I clasp her in my last embrace, greatly distorting my new bonnot, "it is so disagreeable!"

We are off, followed by a tornado of shoes—one, aimed with dexterous violence by that unlucky Bobby, goes nigh to cut the bridegroom's left eye open, as he waves his good-byes.

As we trot smartly away, I turn round in the carriage and look at them through my tears. There they all are! After all, what a nice-looking family! Even Tou Tou! there is something pretty about her, and standing as she is now, her legs look quite nice and thick.

We reach Dover before dinner-time. Sir Roger has gone out to speak to the courier who meets us there. I am left alone in our great stiff sitting-room at the Lord Warden. Instantly I rush to the writing-materials.

"What, writing already?" says my husband, reëntering, and coming over with a smile toward me. "Have you forgotten any of your finery?"

"No, no!" cry I, impulsively, spreading both hands over the sheet; "do not look! you must not look!"

"But you may," cry I, with one of my sudden useless remorses, holding out the note to him. "Do! I should like you to!—I do not know why I said it!—I was only sending them a line, just to tell them how dreadfully I missed them all!"

CHAPTER X.

I have been married a week. A week indeed! a week in the sense in which the creation of the world occupied a week!—seven geological ages, perhaps, but not seven days. We have been to Brussels, to Antwerp, to Cologne. We have seen—(with the penetrating incense odor in our nostrils, and the kneeling peasants at our feet)—the Descent from the Cross, the Elevation of the Cross—dead Christs manifold. Can it be possible that the brush which worthily painted Christ's agony, can be the same that descended to eternize redundant red fishwives, and call them goddesses? We have given ourselves cricks in the necks, staring up at the divine incompleteness of Cologne Cathedral. And all through Crucifixions, cathedrals, table d'hôtes, I have been deadly, deadly homesick—homesick as none but one that has been a member of a large family and has been out into the world on his or her own account, for the first time, can understand. When first I drove away through the park, my sensations were something like those that we all used to experience, on the rare occasions when father, as a treat, took one or other of us out on an excursion with him—the honor great, but the pleasure small.

It seems to myself, as if I had not laughed once since we set off!—yes—once I did, at the recollection of an old joke of Bobby's, that we all thought very silly at the time, but that strikes me as irresistibly funny now that it recurs to me in the midst of strange scenes, and of jokeless foreigners.

After forty, people do not laugh at absolutely nothing. They may be very easily moved to mirth, as, indeed, to do him justice, Sir Roger is; but they do not laugh for the pure physical pleasure of grinning. The weight of the absolute tête-à-tête of a honey-moon, which has proved trying to a more violent love than mine, is oppressing me.

At home, if I grew tired of talking to one, I could talk to another. If I waxed weary of Bobby's sea-tales, I might refresh myself with listening to the Brat's braggings about Oxford—with Tou Tou's murdered French lesson:

Now, if I do not converse with Sir Roger, I must remain silent. And, somehow, I cannot talk to him now as fluently as I used. Before—during our short previous acquaintance—where I used to pester the poor man with filial aspirations that he could not reciprocate, there seemed no end to the things I had to say to him. I felt as if I could have told him any thing. I bubbled over with silly jests.

It never occurred to me to think whether I pleased him or not; but now—now, the sense of my mental inferiority—of the gulf of years and inequalities that yawns between us—weighs like a lump of lead upon me.

I am in constant fear of falling below his estimate of me. Before I speak, I think whether what I am going to say will be worth saying, and, as very few of my remarks come up to this standard, I become extremely silent. Oh, if we could meet some one we knew—even if it were some one that we rather disliked than otherwise: some one that would laugh and have as few wits as I, and be young.

But it is too early in the year for many people to be yet abroad, and, so far, we have fallen upon no acquaintances. Once, indeed, at Antwerp, I see in the distance a man whose figure bears a striking resemblance to that of "Toothless Jack," and my heart leaps—detestable as I have always thought Barbara's aspirant; but on coming nearer the likeness disappears, and I relapse into depression.

Long ago, I had told my husband—on the first day I had made his acquaintance indeed—that I had no conversation, and now he is proving experimentally the truth of my confession. At home, our talk has always been made up of allusions, half-words, petrified witticisms, that have become part of our language. Each sentence would require a dictionary of explanation to any strange hearer. Now, if I wish to be understood, I must say my meaning in plain English, and very laborious I find it.

To-day, we are on our way from Cologne to Dresden; sixteen hours and a half at a stretch. This of itself is enough to throw the equablest mind off its balance.

We have a coupé to ourselves. This is quite opposed to my wishes, nor is it Sir Roger's doing, but Schmidt, the courier, knowing what is seemly on those occasions—what he has always done for all former freshly-wed couples whom he has escorted—secured it before we could prevent him. As for me, it would have amused me to see the people come in and out, to air my timid German in little remarks about the weather; albeit I have thus early discovered that the German, which we have been exhorted to talk among ourselves in the school-room, to perfect us in that tongue, bears no very pronounced likeness to the language as talked by the indigenous inhabitants. They will talk so fast, and they never say any thing in the least like Ollendorff.

Sixteen hours and a half of a tête-à-tête more complete and unbroken than any we have yet enjoyed. All day I watch the endless, treeless, hedgeless German flats fly past; the straight-lopped poplars, the spread of tall green wheat, the blaze of rape-fields—the villages and towns, with two-towered German churches, over and over, and over again. Oh, for a hill, were it no bigger than a molehill! Oh, for a broad-armed English oak!

At Minden we stop to lunch. The whole train pushes and jostles into the refreshment-room, and, in ten galloping minutes, we devour three filthy plats; a nauseous potage, a terrible dish of sickly veal, and a ragged Braten. Then a rush and tumble off again.

The day rolls past, dustily, samely, wearily. There have been flying thunder-storms—lightning-flashes past the windows. I hide my face in my dusty gloves to avoid seeing the quick red forks, and leave a smear on each grimy cheek. Every moment, I am a rape-field—a corn-field, a bean-field, farther from Barbara, farther from the Brat, farther from the jackdaw.

"This is rather a long day for you, child!" says Sir Roger, kindly, perceiving, I suppose, the joviality of the expression with which I am eying the German landscape. "The most tedious railway-journey you ever took, I suppose?"

"Yes," reply I, "far! It seems like three Sundays rolled into one, does not it? What time is it now?"

"I am so sorry for you, Nancy! what can one do for you?" says my husband, looking thoroughly discomfited, concerned, and helpless. "Would you care to have a book?"

"I cannot read in a train," reply I, dolorously, "it makes me sick!" Then feeling rather ashamed of my peevishness—"Never mind me!" I say, with a dusty smile; "I am quite happy! I—I—like looking out."

The day falls, the night comes. On, on, on! There is a bit of looking-glass opposite me. I can no longer see any thing outside. I have to sit staring at my own plain, grimed, bored face. In a sudden fury, I draw the little red silk curtain across my own image. Thank God! I can no longer see myself. Sir Roger ceases to try his eyes with the print of the Westminster, and closes it.

"I wonder," say I, pouring some eau-de-cologne on my pocket-handkerchief, and trying to cleanse my face therewith, but only succeeding in making it a muddy instead of a dusty smudge—"I wonder whether we shall meet any one we know at Dresden?"

"Is the Hôtel de Saxe the place where most English go?" inquire I, anxiously. "Ah, you do not know! I must ask Schmidt."

"I hope we shall," say I, straining my eyes to make out the objects in the dark outside. "We have been very unlucky so far, have not we?"

"Are you so anxious to meet people? are you so dull already, Nancy?" he asks, in that voice of peculiar gentleness which I have already learned to know hides inward pain.

"Oh, no, no!" cry I, with quick remorse. "Not at all! I have always longed to travel! At one time Barbara and I were always talking about it, making plans, you know, of where we would go. I enjoy it, of all things, especially the pictures—but do not you think it would be amusing to have some one to talk to at the tables d'hôte, some one English, to laugh at the people with?"

"Yes," he answers, readily, "of course it would. It is quite natural that you should wish it. I heartily hope we shall. We will go wherever it is most likely."

After long, long hours of dark rushing, Dresden at last. We drive in an open carriage through an unknown town, moonlit, silent, and asleep. German towns go to bed early. We cross the Elbe, in which a second moon, big and clear as the one in heaven, lies quivering, waving with the water's wave; then through dim, ghostly streets, and at last—at last—we pull up at the door of the Hôtel de Saxe, and the sleepy porter comes out disheveled.

"There is no doubt," say I, aloud, when I find myself alone in my bedroom, Sir Roger not having yet come up, and the maid having gone to bed—addressing the remark to the hot water in which I have been bathing my face, stiff with dirt, and haggard with fatigue. "There is no use denying it, I hate being married!"

CHAPTER XI.

We have been in Dresden three whole days, and as yet my aspirations have not met their fulfillment. We have met no one we know. We have borrowed the Visitors' Book from the porter, and diligently searched it. We have expectantly examined the guests at the tables d'hôte every day, but with no result. It is too early in the year. The hotel is not half full. Of its inmates one half are American, a quarter German, and the other quarter English, such as not the most rabidly social mind can wish to forgather with. At the discovery of our ill-success, Sir Roger looks so honestly crestfallen that my heart smites me.

"How eager you are!" I say, laying my hand on his, with a smile. "You are far more anxious about it than I am! I begin to think that you are growing tired of me already! As for me," continue I, nonchalantly, seeing his face brighten at my words, "I think I have changed my mind. Perhaps it would be rather a bore to meet any acquaintance, and—and—we do very well as we are, do not we?"

"Is that true, Nancy?" he says, eagerly. "I have been bothering my head rather with the notion that I was but poor company for a little young thing like you; that you must be wearying for some of your own friends."

"I never had a friend," reply I, "never—that is—except you! The boys"—(with a little stealing smile)—"always used to call you my friend—always from the first, from the days I used to take you out walking, and keep wishing that you were my father, and be rather hurt because I never could get you to echo the wish."

"And you are not much disappointed really?" he says, with a wistful persistence, as if he but half believed the words my lips made. "If you are, mind you tell me, child—tell me every thing that vexes you—always!"

"I will tell you every thing that happens to me, bad and good," reply I, quite gayly, "and all the unlucky things I say—there, that is a large promise, I can tell you!"

I am no longer dusty and grimy; quite spick and span, on the contrary; so freshly and prettily dressed, indeed, that the thought will occur to me that it is a pity there are not more people to see me. However, no doubt some one will turn up by-and-by. The weather is serenely, evenly fine. It seems as if no rain could come from such a high blue sky. It is late afternoon or early evening. Since dinner is over—dinner at the godless hour of half-past four—I suppose we must call it evening. Sir Roger and I are driving out in an open carriage beyond the town, across the Elbe, up the shady road to Weisserhoisch. The calm of coming night is falling with silky softness upon every thing. The acacias stand on each side of the highway, with the delicate abundance of their airy flowers, faintly yet most definitely sweet on the evening air.

I look up and see the crowded blooms drooping in pensive beauty above my head. The guelder-rose's summer snow-balls, and the mock-orange with its penetrating odor, whiten the still gardens as we pass. The billowy meadow-grass, the tall red sorrel, the untidy, ragged robin, all the yearly-recurring May miracles! What can I say, O my friends, to set them fairly before you?

Under the trees the townsfolk are walking, chatting low and friendly. A soldier has his arm round a fat-faced Mädchen's waist, an attention which she takes with the stolidity engendered by long habit. Dear, willing, panting dogs, are laboriously dragging the washer-women's little carts up-hill.

Vick does not answer verbally, but she stretches her small neck over the carriage-side, and gives a disdainful yet inquisitive smell at her low brethren. No words could express a fuller contempt for a dog that earns his own living.

The driver is taking his horses along very easily, but we do not care to hurry him. I have not felt so happy, so at ease, so gay, since I was wed.

"This is nice," say I, making a frantic snatch at a long acacia-droop; "how I wish they were all here!"

"Do you mean with us—now—in the carriage? Should not we be rather a tight fit?"

"Rather," say I, laughing too. "We should be puzzled how to pack them all, should not we? We would be like the animals in a Noah's ark."

"General," say I, impulsively, "it has just occurred to me, are not you sometimes deadly, deadly tired of hearing about the boys? I am sure I should be, if I were you. Confess! I will try not to be any angrier with you than I can help; but do not you sometimes wish that Algy and Bobby, and the Brat—not to speak of Tou Tou—were drowned in the Red Sea, or in the horse-pond, at home?"

"At least you gave me fair warning," he says, with a smile. "Do you remember telling me that whoever married you would have to marry all six?"

It was quite the broadest hint any one ever gave. The evening is deepening. We have reached Weisserhoisch. Now our faces are turned homeward again. As we pass the entrance to the Gardens of the Linnisches Bad, we see the lamps springing into light, and the people gayly yet quietly trooping in, while on the soft evening air comes the swell of merry music.

"Stop! stop!" cry I, springing up, excitedly. "Let us go in. I love a band! It is almost as good as a circus. May we, general? Do you mind? Would it bore you?"

Five minutes more, and we are sitting at a little round table, each with a tall green glass of Mai-Trank before us, and a brisk Uhlanenritt in our ears. I look round with a pleasant sense of dissipation. The still, green trees; the cluster of oval lamps, like great bright ostrich-eggs; the countless little tables like our own; the happy social groups; the waiters running madly about with bif-tecks; the great-lidded goblets of amber-colored Bohemian beer; the young Bavarian officers, in light-blue uniforms, at the next table to us—stalwart, fair-haired boys—I should not altogether mind knowing a few of them; and, over all, the arch of suave, dark, evening sky.

"What shall we have for supper?" cry I, vivaciously. "I never can see anybody eating without longing to eat too. Blutwurst! That means black-pudding, I suppose—certainly not that—how they do call a spade a spade in German! By-the-by, what are the soldiers having? Can you see? I think I saw a vision of prawns! I saw things sticking out like their legs. I must find out!"

I rise, on pretense of getting a little wooden stool from under an unoccupied table close to the object of my curiosity, and, as I stoop to pick it up, I fraudulently glance over the nearest warrior's shoulder. My sin finds me out. He turns and catches me in the act, and at the same time a young man—not a warrior, at least not in uniform, but in loose gray British clothes—turns, too, and fixes me with a stony, British stare. I am returning in some confusion, having moreover incidentally discovered that they were not prawns, when to my extreme surprise, I hear my husband addressing the young gentleman in gray.

"Why, Frank, my dear boy, is that you? Who would have thought of seeing you here?"

"As to that," replies the young man, stretching out a ready right hand, "who would have thought of seeing you? What on earth has brought you here?"

"Like the man in the parable, I have married a wife," he says; then, putting his hand kindly on the young fellow's shoulder—"Nancy, you have been wishing that we might meet some one we knew, have not you? Well, here is some one. I suppose that I must introduce you formally to each other. Lady Tempest—Mr. Musgrave."

Despite the searching, and, I should have thought, exhaustive examination of my appearance, that my new friend has already indulged in, he thinks good to look at me again, as he bows, and this time with a sort of undisguisable surprise in his great dark eyes.

"I must apologize," he says, taking off his hat. "I had heard that you were going to be married, but I am so behind the time, have been so out of the way of hearing news, that I did not know that it had come off yet."

He says this with a little of that doubtful stiffness, which sometimes owes its birth to shyness, and sometimes to self-consciousness; but he seems in no hurry to return to his friends, the big, blond soldiers. On the contrary, he draws a chair up to our table.

"Do they ever get prawns here?" say I, with apparent irrelevancy, not being able to disengage my mind from the thought of shell-fish, "or is it too far inland? I am so fond of them, and I fancied that these gentlemen—" (slightly indicating the broad, blue warrior-backs)—"were eating some."

"I did not mean to be seen: that person must have had eyes in the back of his head."

I relapse into silence, and fish for the sprigs of woodruff floating in my Mai-Trank, while the talk passes to Sir Roger. Presently I become aware that the stranger is addressing me by that new title which makes me disposed to laugh.

"Lady Tempest, have you seen those lamps that they have here, in the shape of flowers? Cockney sort of things, but they are rather pretty."

"No," say I, eagerly, dropping my spoon and looking up; "in the shape of flowers? Where?"

"You cannot see them from here," he answers; "they are over there, nearer the river."

"Will you spare Lady Tempest for five minutes?" says the young man, addressing my husband; "it is not a hundred yards off."

At my words Sir Roger had made a slight movement toward rising; but, at the stranger's, he resettles himself in his chair.

"Will you not come, too? Do!" say I, pleadingly; and, as I speak, I half stretch out my hand to lay it on his arm; then hastily draw it back, afraid and ashamed of vexing him by public demonstrations.

We set off; I with a strongish, but unexplained feeling of resentment against my companion.

"Where are they?" I ask, pettishly; "not far off, I hope! I do not fancy I shall care about them!"

"I did not suppose that you would," he replies, in an extremely happy tone; "would you like us to go back?"

We march on in solemn silence, not particularly pleased with each other. I am staring about me, with as greedily wondering eyes as if I were a young nun let loose for the first time. We pass a score—twoscore, threescore, perhaps—of happy parties, soldiers again, a bourgeois family of three generations, the old grandmother with a mushroom-hat tied over her cap—soldiers and Fräuleins coketteering. The air comes to our faces, dry, warm, and elastic, yet freshened by the river, far down in whose quiet heart all the lamps are burning again.

"Have you been here long?" says Mr. Musgrave, presently, in a formal voice, from which I see that resentment is not yet absent.

"Yes," say I, having on the other hand fully recovered my good-humor, "a good while—that is, not very long—three, four, three whole days."

"It seems more," reply I, looking frankly back at him in the lamplight, and thinking that he cannot be much older than Algy, and that, in consequence, it is rather a comfort not to be obliged to feel the slightest respect for him.

We have reached the flower-lamps. We are standing by the bed in which they are supposed to grow. There are half a dozen of them: a fuchsia, a convolvulus, lilies.

"I do not think much of them," say I, disparagingly, kneeling down to examine them. "What a villainous rose! It is like an artichoke!"

"I told you you would not like them," he says, not looking at the flowers, but switching a little stick nonchalantly about; then, after a moment: "How long did you say you had been abroad?"

"You asked me that before," reply I, sharply, rising from my knees, and discovering that the evening grass has left a disfiguring green trace on my smart trousseau gown.

"Because I cannot for the life of me recollect," reply I, looking up for inspiration to the stars, which the great bright lamps make look small and pale. "I must do a sum: what day of the month is this?—the 31st? Oh, thanks, so it is; and we were married on the 20th. It is ten days, then. Oh, it must be more—it seems like ten months."

I am looking him full in the face as I say this, and I see a curious, and to me puzzling, expression of inquiry and laughter in the shady darkness of his eyes.

"No," reply I, reddening with vexation at my own bêtise; "that is—yes—because we have been to so many places, and seen so many things—any one would understand that."

"In less than three weeks now," I reply, in an alert, or rather joyful tone; "at least I hope so—I mean" (again correcting myself)—"I think so."

"The boys—that is, my brothers—will soon be scattered to the ends of the earth; Algy has got his commission, and Bobby will soon be sent to a foreign station—he is in the navy, you will understand; and so we all want to be together once again before they go."

"You are not going home really, then?" inquires my companion, with a slight shade of disappointment in his tone; "not to Tempest—that is?"

"What a number of questions you do ask!" say I, impatiently. "Of what possible interest can it be to you where we are going?"

"Only that I shall be your nearest neighbor," replies he, stiffly; "and, as Sir Roger has hardly ever been down hitherto, I am rather tired of living next an empty house."

"Our nearest neighbor!" cry I, with animation, opening my eyes. "Not really? Well, I am rather glad! Only yesterday I was asking Sir Roger whether there were many young people about. And how near are you? Very near?"

"About as near as I well can be," answers he, dryly. "My lodge exactly faces yours."

"And do you mean to say," in a tone of attempted lightness that but badly disguises a good deal of hurt conceit, "that you never heard my name before?"

"Never! and, what is more, I do not think I know what it is now: I suppose I did not listen very attentively, but I do not think I caught it."

"And your tone says" (with a very considerable accession of huffiness) "that you are supremely indifferent as to whether you ever catch it."

"Catch it! you talk as if it were a disease. Well" (speaking demurely), "perhaps on the whole it would be more convenient if I were to know it."

"Who can pronounce his own name in cold blood?" he says, reddening a little. "I, for one, cannot—there—if you do not mind looking at this card—"

He takes one out of his pocket, and I stop—we are slowly strolling back—under a lamp, to read it:

"And Sir Roger has never mentioned me to you really?" he says, recurring with persistent hurt vanity to the topic. "How very odd of him!"

"Not in the least odd!" reply I, brusquely. "Why should he? He knew that I was not aware of your existence, and that therefore you would not be a very interesting subject to me; no doubt"—(smiling a little)—"I shall hear all about you from him now."

"And do you live here at this abbey"—(pointing to the card I still hold in my hand)—"all by yourself?"

"Do you mean without a wife?" he asks, with a half-sneering smile. "Yes—I have that misfortune."

"I was not thinking of a wife," say I, rather angrily. "It never occurred to me that you could have one! you are too young—a great deal too young!"

"Too young, am I? At what age, then, may one be supposed to deserve that blessing? forty? fifty? sixty?"

I feel rather offended, but cannot exactly grasp in my own mind the ground of offense.

"You seem to take offense rather easily," I say, ingenuously. "You looked quite cross when I said I did not think much of the flowers—and again when I said I had forgotten your name—and again when I told you, you were too young to have a wife: now, you know, in a large family, one has all that sort of nonsense knocked out of one."

"Nobody would mind whether one were huffy or not," continue I; "they would only laugh at one."

We have reached Sir Roger. I had set off on my little expedition feeling rather out of conceit with my young friend, and I return with those dispositions somewhat aggravated. We find my husband sitting where we left him, placidly smoking and listening to the band.

They have long finished the Uhlanenritt, and are now clashing out a brisk Hussarenritt, in which one plainly hears the hussars' thundering gallop, while the conductor madly waves his arms, as he has been doing unintermittingly for the last two hours.

"You were quite wise," say I, laying my hand on the back of his chair; "you had much the best of it! they were a great imposture!"

"Were they?" he says, taking his cigar out of his mouth, and lifting his handsome and severe iron-gray eyes to mine. "They were farther off than you thought, were not they? I began to think you had not been able to find them."

"Have we been so long?" I say, surprised. "It did not seem long! I suppose we dawdled. We began to talk—bah! it is growing chill! let us go home!"

As soon as I am in, I recollect that I have ungratefully forgotten to shake hands with my late escort.

"Good-night!" cry I, too, stretching out a compunctious hand, over Sir Roger and the carriage-side. "I am so sorry! I forgot all about you!"

"What hotel are you at?" asks Sir Roger, closing the carriage-door after him. "The Victoria? Oh, yes. We are at the Saxe. You must come and look us up when you have nothing better to do. Our rooms are number—what is it, Nancy? I never can recollect."

"No. 5," reply I. "But, indeed, it is not much use any one coming to call upon us, is it? For we are always out—morning, noon, and night."

With this parting encouragement on my part, we drive off, and leave our young friend trying, with only moderate success, to combine a gracious smile to Sir Roger, with a resentful scowl at me, under a lamp-post. We roll along quickly and easily, through the soft, cool, lamplit night.

"Well, how did you get on with him, Nancy?" asks Sir Roger. "Good-looking fellow, is not he?"

"Is he?" say I, carelessly. "Yes, I suppose he is, only that I never can admire dark men: I am so glad that all the boys are fair—I should have hated a black brother."

"How do you know that my hair was not coal-black before it turned gray?" he asks, with a smile. "It may have been the hue of the carrion-crow for all you know."

"I am sure it was not," reply I, stoutly; then, after a little pause, "I do not think that I did get on well with him—not what I call getting on—he seems rather a touchy young gentleman."

"You must not quarrel with him, Nancy," says Sir Roger, laughing. "He lives not a stone's-throw from us."

"Poor fellow!" with an accent of compassion. "He has never had much of a chance; he has been his own master almost ever since he was born—a bad thing for any boy—he has no parents, you know."

"Yes," reply I, "but then I asked him a great many questions: our conversation was rather like the catechism: the moment I stopped asking him questions, he began asking me!"

CHAPTER XII.

Three long days—all blue and gold—blue sky and gold sunshine—roll away. If Schmidt, the courier, has a fault, it is over-driving us. We visit the Grüne Gewölbe, the Japanese Palace, the Zwinger—and we visit them alone. Dresden is not a very large place, yet in no part of it, in none of its bright streets—in neither its old nor its new market, in none of its public places, do I catch a glimpse of my new acquaintance. Neither does he come to call. This last fact surprises me a little, and disappoints me a good deal. Our walk at the Linnisches Bad in the gay lamplight, his character, his conversation, even his appearance, begin to undergo a transformation in my mind. After all, he was not really dark—not one of those black men, against whom Barbara and I have always lifted up our testimonies; by daylight, I think his eyes would have been hazel. He certainly was very easy to talk to. One had not to pump up conversation for him, and I do not suppose that, as men go, he was really very touchy. One cannot expect everybody to be so jest-hardened and robustly good-tempered as the boys. Often before now I have only been able to gauge the unfortunateness of my speeches to men, by the rasping effect they have had on their tempers, and which has often taken me honestly by surprise.

"Again, Mr. Musgrave has not been to call," say I, one afternoon, on returning from a long and rather grilling drive, speaking in a slightly annoyed tone.

"Did you expect that he would?" asks Sir Roger, with a smile. "I think that, after the searching snub you gave him, he would have been a bolder man than I take him for, if he had risked his head in the lion's mouth."

"Am I such a lion?" say I, with an accent of vexation. "Did I snub him? I am sure I had no more idea of snubbing him than I had of snubbing you; that is the way in which I always cut my own throat!"

I draw a chair into the balcony, where he has already established himself with his cigar, and sit down beside him.

"I foresee," say I, beginning to laugh rather grimly, "that a desert will spread all round our house! your friends will disappear before my tongue, like morning mist."

After a pause, edging a little nearer to him, and, regardless of the hay-carts in the market below—laying my fair-haired head on his shoulder:

"What could have made you marry such a shrew? I believe it was the purest philanthropy."

"That was it!" he answers, fondly. "To save any other poor fellow from such an infliction!"

"Quite unnecessary!" rejoin I, shaking my head. "If you had not married me, it is very certain that nobody else would!"

Another day has come. It is hot afternoon. Sir Roger is reading the Times in our balcony, and I am strolling along the dazzling streets by myself. What can equal the white glare of a foreign town? I am strolling along by myself under a big sun-shade. My progress is slow, as my nose has a disposition to flatten itself against every shop-window—saving, perhaps, the cigar ones. A grave problem is engaging my mind. What present am I to take to father? It is this question which moiders our young brains as often as his birthday recurs. My thoughts are trailing back over all our former gifts to him. This year we gave him a spectacle-case (he is short-sighted); last year a pocket-book; the year before, an inkstand. What is there left to give him? A cigar-case? He does not smoke. A hunting-flask? He has half a dozen. A Norwegian stove? He does not approve of them, but says that men ought to be satisfied with sandwiches out shooting. A telescope? He never lifts his eyes high enough above our delinquencies to look at the stars. I cannot arrive at any approximation to a decision. As I issue from a china-shop, with a brown-paper parcel under my arm, and out on the hot and glaring flags, I see a young man come stepping down the street, with a long, loose, British stride; a young man, pale and comely, and a good deal worn out by the flies, that have also eaten most of me.

"How are you?" cry I, hastily shifting my umbrella to the other hand, so as to have my right one ready to offer him. "Are not these streets blinding? I am blinking like an owl in daylight!—so you never came to see us, after all!"

"Very likely!" reply I, taking him literally; "so likely that I have been expecting you every day."

"You seem to forget—confound these flies!"—(as a stout blue-bottle blunders into one flashing eye)—"you seem to forget that you told me, in so many words, to stay away."

"You were huffy, then!" say I, with an accent of incredulity. "Sir Roger was right! he said you were, and I could not believe it; he was quite sorry for you. He said I had snubbed you so."

"Snubbed me!" reddening self-consciously, and drawing himself up as if he did not much relish the application of the word. "I do not often give any one the chance of doing that twice!"

"You are not going to be offended again, I suppose," say I, apprehensively; "it must be with Sir Roger this time, if you are! it was he that was sorry for you, not I."

We look at each other under my green sun-shade (his eyes are hazel, by daylight), and then we both burst into a duet of foolish friendly laughter.

"I want you to give me your advice," say I, as we toddle amicably along, side by side. "What would be a nice present for a gentleman—an elderly gentleman—at least rather elderly, who has a spectacle-case, a pocket-book, an inkstand, six Church services, and who does not smoke."

"But he does smoke," says Mr. Musgrave, correcting me. "I saw him the other day."

"Sir Roger!" (indignantly). "No, indeed! do you think he wants spectacles? No! I was talking of my father."

"Your father? You are not, like me, a poor misguided orphan, then; you have a father."

"Any brothers? Oh, yes, by-the-by, I know you have! you held them up for my imitation the other day—half a dozen fellows who never take offense at any thing."

"No more they do!" cry I, firing up. "If I tell them when I go home, as I certainly shall, if I remember, that you were out of humor and bore malice for three whole days, because I happened to say that we were generally out-of-doors most of the day—they will not believe it—simply they will not."

"And have you also six sisters?" asks the young man, dexterously shifting the conversation a little.

"And are they all to have presents?—six and two is eight, and your father nine, and—I suppose you have a mother, too?"

"Nine and one is ten—ten brown-paper parcels, each as large as the one you now have under your arm—by-the-by, would you like me to carry it? What a lot you will have to pay for extra luggage!"

His offer to carry my parcel is so slightly and incidentally made, and is so unaccompanied by any gesture suited to the words, that I decline the attention. The people pass to and fro in the sun as we pace leisurely along.

"What do you say to taking a tour through the gallery?" he says, "or are you sick of the pictures?"

"Far from it," say I, briskly, "but, all the same, I cannot do it; I am going back at once to Sir Roger; we are to drive to Loschwitz: I only came out for a little prowl by myself, to think about father's present! Sir Roger cannot help me at all," I continue, marching off again into the theme which is uppermost in my thoughts. "He suggested a traveling-bag, but I know that father would hate that."

"To drive! this time of day!" cried Mr. Musgrave, in a tone of extreme disapprobation; "will not you get well baked?"

"I dare say," I answer, absently; then, in a low tone to myself, "why does not he smoke? it would be so easy then—a smoking-cap, a tobacco-pouch, a cigar-holder, a hundred things!"

"Is it quite settled about Loschwitz?" asks the young man, with an air of indifference.

"Quite," say I, still not thinking of what I am saying. "That is, no—not quite—nearly—a bag is useful, you know."

"I passed the Saxe just now," he says, giving his hat a little tilt over his nose, "and saw Sir Roger sitting in the balcony, with his cigar and his Times, and he looked so luxuriously comfortable that it seemed a sin to disturb him. Do not you think, taking the dust and the blue-bottles into consideration, that it would be kinder to leave him in peace in his arm-chair?"

"No, I do not," reply I, flatly. "I suppose he knows best what he likes himself; and why a strong, hearty man in the prime of life should be supposed to wish to spend a whole summer afternoon nodding in an arm-chair, any more than you would wish it yourself, I am at a loss to inquire!" The suggestion has irritated me so much that for the moment I forget the traveling-bag.

"When I am as old as he," replies the young man, coldly, shaking the ash off his cigar, "if I ever am, which I doubt, and have knocked about the world for as many years, and imperiled my liver in as many climates, and sent as many Russians, and Chinamen, and Sikhs to glory as he has, I shall think myself entitled to sit in an arm-chair—yes, and sleep in it too—all day, if I feel inclined."

I do not answer, partly because I am exasperated, partly because at this moment my eye is caught by an object in a shop-window—a traveling-bag, with its mouth invitingly open, displaying all manner of manly conveniences. I hastily furl my green umbrella, and step in. My squire does not follow me. I hardly notice the fact, but suppose that he is standing outside in the sun. However, when I reissue forth, I find that he has disappeared. I look up the street, down the street. There is no trace of him. I walk away, feeling a little mortified. I go into a few more shops: I dawdle over some china. Then I turn my steps homeward.

At a narrow street-corner, in the grateful shade cast by some tall houses, I come face to face with him again.

"Did not you wonder where I had disappeared to?" he asks; "or perhaps you never noticed that I had?"

"I thought that most likely you had taken offense again," reply I, with a laugh, "and that I had lost sight of you for three more days."

"I have been to the Hôtel de Saxe," he replies, with a rather triumphant smile on his handsome mustacheless lips. "I thought I would find out about Loschwitz."

"Find out what?" cry I, standing still, raising my voice a little, and growing even redder than the sun, the flies, the brown-paper parcel, and the heavy umbrella, have already made me. "There was nothing to find out! I wish you would leave things alone; I wish you would let me manage my own business."

"You have not been telling the general," continue I, in a tone of rapid apprehension, "that I did not want to go with him? because, if you have, it was a great, great mistake."

"I told him nothing of the kind," replies Mr. Musgrave, looking, like me, fierce, but—unlike me—cool and pale. "I was not so inventive. I merely suggested that sunstroke would most likely be your portion if you went now, and that it would be quite as easy, and a great deal pleasanter, to go three hours later."

We are standing in a little quiet street, all shade and dark shops. There are very few passers-by. I feel rather ashamed of myself, and my angry eyes peruse the pavement. Neither does he speak. Presently I look up at him rather shyly.

"Do you wish to go there?" he asks, with rather the air of a polite martyr. "I shall be happy to take you if you like."

"Do!" say I, heartily, "and let us try to be friends, and to spend five minutes without quarreling!"

We have spent more than five, a great deal more—thirty, forty, perhaps, and our harmony is still unbroken, uncracked even. We have sat in awed and chastened silence before the divine meekness of the Sistine Madonna. We have turned away in disgust from Jordain's brutish "Triumphs of Silenus," and tiresome repetitions of Hercules in drink. We have admired the exuberance of St. Mary of Egypt's locks, and irreverently compared them to the effects of Mrs. Allen's "World-wide Hair Restorer." We have observed that the forehead of Holbein's great Virgin is too high to please us, and made many other connoisseur-like remarks. I have pointed out to Mr. Musgrave the Saint Catherine which has a look of Barbara, and we have both grown rather tired of St. Sebastian, stuck as full of darts as a pin-cushion of pins. Now we are sitting down resting our eyes and our strained powers of criticism, and have fallen into easy talk.

"I am glad you are coming to dine at our table d'hôte to-night," say I, in a friendly tone. "It will be nice for the general to have an Englishman to talk to. I hope you will sit by him; he has been so much used to men all his life that he must get rather sick of having nothing but the chatter of one woman to depend upon."

"At least he has no one but himself to blame for that," replies the young fellow, laughing. "I suppose it was his own doing."

"How do you know that?" cry I, gayly, and then the recollection of my hint to Sir Roger—a remembrance that always makes me rather hot—comes over me, and causes me to turn my head quickly away with a red blush. "It certainly has a look of Barbara," I say, glancing toward the Saint Catherine, and rushing quickly into another subject.

"Has it?" he says, apparently unaware of the rapidity of my transition. "Then I wish I knew Barbara."

"She is not much like you, I suppose?" he says, turning from the saint's straight and strict Greek profile to the engaging irregularity of mine.

"Not exactly," say I, with emphasis. "Ah!" (in a tone of prospective triumph), "wait till you see her!"

"The Brat—that is one of my brothers, you know—is the one like me," I say, becoming diffuse, as I always do, when the theme of my family is started; "we are like! We can see it ourselves."

"There are not six," cry I, impatiently. "I do not know what put it into your head that there were six; there are only three."

"I am he in petticoats," say I, resuming the thread of my own narrative; "everybody sees the likeness. One day when he was three or four years younger, we dressed him up in my things—my gown and bonnet, you know—and all the servants took him for me; they only found him out because he held up his gown so awkwardly high, and gave it such great kicks to keep it out of his way, that they saw his great nailed boots! Sir Roger thought we were twins the first time he saw us."

"Sir Roger!" repeats the young man, as if reminded by the name of something he had meant to say. "Oh, by-the-by, if you will not think me impertinent for asking, where did you first fall in with Sir Roger? I should have thought that he was rather out of your beat; you do not hail from his part of the world, do you?"

"No," reply I, my thoughts traveling back to the day when we made taffy, and tumbled over each other, hot and sticky to the window, to see the dog-cart bearing the stranger roll up the drive. "I never saw him till this last March, when he came to stay with us."

"Yes," reply I, thinking of our godless jokes about his wig and his false calves, and smiling gently to myself; "he was an old friend of father's."

"Yes, he was at school with father," I answer; and the moment I have given utterance to the abhorred formula I repent.

"At school with him?" (speaking rather slowly, and looking at me, with a sort of flickering smile in lips and eyes). "Oh, I see!"

"There is nothing to understand," reply I, brusquely, and rising. "I am tired—I shall go home!"

We walk back rather silently; there is nothing so trying to eyes and mind as picture-seeing, and I am fagged, and also indefinitely, yet certainly, cross. As we reach the door of the Saxe, I hold out my hand.

"Now that we have come to the end of our walk," say I, "and that you cannot think that I am hinting to you, I will tell you that I think it was very ill-mannered and selfish of you not to insist on carrying this" (holding out the brown-paper parcel); "there is not one of the boys—not even Bobby, whom we always call so rough, who would have dreamed of letting a lady carry a parcel for herself, when he was by to take it. There! I am better now! I had to tell you; I wish you good-day!"

CHAPTER XIII.

"If he does not like it," say I, setting it on the floor, and regarding it from a little distance, with my head on one side, while friendly criticism and admiration meet in happy wedlock in my eyes, "I can give it to you; I had much rather make you a present than him."

"Then Heaven grant that it may find disfavor in his sight!" says Sir Roger, piously.

We are talking of the traveling-bag, which at last, in despair of any thing suitable occurring to my mind, I have bought, and now regard with a sort of apprehensive joy. The blinds are half lowered for the heat, but, through them and under them, the broad gold sunshine is streaming and pushing itself, washing the careful twists of my flax hair, the bag's stout red leather sides, and Sir Roger's nose, as he leans over it, with manly distrust, trying the clasp by many searching snappings.

"I never gave you a present in my life—never—did I?" say I, squatting down on the floor beside him, crumpling my nice crisp muslin frock with the recklessness of a woman who knows that there are many more such frocks in the cupboard, and to whom this knowledge has but newly come; "never mind! next birthday I will give you one—a really nice, handsome, rather expensive one—all bought with your own money, too—there!"

This is on the morning of our last day in Dresden. Yes! to-morrow we set off homeward. Our wedding-tour is nearly ended: tyrant Custom, which sent us off, permits us to rejoin our fellows. Well, it really has not been so bad! I do not know that I should care to have it over again—that is, just immediately; but it has gone off very well altogether—quite as well as most other people's, I fancy. These are my thoughts in the afternoon, as (Sir Roger having gone to the post-office, and I having made myself very hot by superintending the packing of the presents—most of them of a brittle, crackable nature) I am leaning, to cool myself, over our balcony, and idly watching the little events that are happening under my nose. The omnibus stands, as usual, in the middle of the square, about to start for Blasewitz. Mysterious 'bus! always about to start—always full of patient passengers, and that yet was never seen by mortal man to set off. As I watch it with the wondering admiration with which I have daily regarded it, I hear the door of our sitting-room open, and Vick give a little shrewish shrill bark, speedily changed into an apologetic and friendly whiffling and whoffling.

"Is that you?" cry I, holding on by the balcony, and leaning back to peep over my own shoulder into the interior. "Come out here, if it is."

"Sir Roger is out," I say, a second later, putting my hand into that of Mr. Musgrave (for it is he), as he comes stepping, in his usual unsmiling, discontented beauty, to meet me.

"I am seeing the people start for Blasewitz for the last time! it makes me quite low!" I say, replacing my arms on the balcony, and speaking with an irrepressibly jovial broad smile on my face that rather contradicts my words.

"You look low," he answers, ironically, standing beside me, and looking rather provoked at my urbanity.

"This time to-morrow we shall be off," say I, beginning to laugh out of pure light-heartedness, though there is no joke within a mile of me, and to count on my fingers; "this time the day after to-morrow we shall be at Cologne—this time the day after that we shall be getting toward Brussels—this time the day after that, we shall be getting toward Dover—this time the day after that—"

"You will all be rushing higgledy-piggledy, helter-skelter, into each other's arms," interrupts my companion, looking at me with a lowering eye.

"Algy, and the Brat, and—what is the other fellow's name?—Dicky?—Jacky?—Jemmy?—"

"Bobby," say I, correcting him. "But you are not quite right; the Brat will not be there!—worse luck—he is in Paris!"

"Well, Barbara will not be in Paris," says the young man, still in the same discontented, pettish voice. "She will be there, no doubt—well to the front—in the thickest of the osculations."

"That she will!" cry I, heartily. "But you must give up calling her Barbara; that is not at all pretty manners."

"We will make a bargain," he says, beginning to smile a little, but rather as if it were against his will and intention. "I will allow her to call me 'Frank,' if she will allow me to call her 'Barbara.'"

A little pause. Another person has got into the omnibus; it is growing extremely full.

"I hate last days," says my companion, hitting viciously at the iron balcony rails with his stick, and scowling.

"'The Last Days of Pompeii,'" say I, stupidly, and yet laughing again; not because I think my witticism good, which no human being could do, but because I must laugh for very gladness. Another longer pause. (Shall I present the bag the night we arrive, or wait till next day?)

"I have got a riddle to ask you," says Frank, abruptly, and firing the observation off somewhat like a bomb-shell.

"No reason whatever, only that I warn you beforehand I shall not understand it: I always shiver when people tell me a French anecdote; I never know when the point has arrived: I always laugh too soon or too late."

"Mon—premier—est—le—premier—de tout," he says, pronouncing each word very separately and distinctly. "Do you understand that?"

"Mon tout"—(turning his long, sleepy eyes sentimentally toward me)—"je ne saurai vous le dire."

"My whole—I cannot tell it you!—then why on earth did you ask me?" cry I, breaking out into hearty, wholesome laughter.

"Guessed it!" I echo, recovering my gravity. "Not I!—my first is the first of all—my second has no second—my whole, I cannot tell it you!—I do not believe it is a riddle at all! it is a hoax—a take-in, like 'Why does a miller wear a white hat?'"

"It is nothing of the kind," he answers, looking thoroughly annoyed. "Must I tell you the answer?"

"I shall certainly never arrive at it by my unassisted genius," I reply, yawning. "Ah! there is M. Dom going out riding! Alas! never again shall I see him mount that peacocking steed!"

"It is 'Adieu!'" says my companion, blurting it out in a rage, seeing that I will not be interested in or excited by it.

"Adieu!" repeat I, standing with my mouth wide open, looking perfectly blank. "How?"

"You do not see?" he says. (His face has grown scarlet.) "Well, you must excuse me for saying that you are rather—" He breaks off and begins again, very fast this time. "My first is the first of all—is not A the first letter in the alphabet? My second has no second—has God (Dieu) any second? My whole—I cannot say it to you—Adieu!"

The contrast between the sentimentality of the words, and the brusque and defiant anger of his tone, is so abrupt, that I am sorry to say, I laugh again: indeed, I retire from the balcony into the saloon inside, throw myself into a chair, and, covering my face with my handkerchief, roar—

"It is very good," say I, in a choked voice; "very—so civil and pretty—but it is not very funny, is it?"

I receive no answer. I am still in my pocket-handkerchief, and he might be gone, but that I hear his quick, angry breathing, and know, by instinct, that he is standing over me, looking like a handsome thunder-cloud. I dare not look up at him, lest another mad cachinnation, such as sometimes overtakes one for the punishment of one's sins in church, should again lay violent hands upon me.

"I think I like 'Why was Balaam like a Life-Guardsman?' better, on the whole," I say, presently, peeping through my fingers, and speaking with a suspicious tremble in my voice.

"I have no doubt it is far superior," he answers, in a fierce and sulky tone, that he in vain tries to make sound playful. "'Balaam like a Life-Guardsman?' and why was he, may I ask? Something humorous about his donkey, I suppose."

"Because he had a queer ass (cuirass)," reply I, again exploding, and hiding my face in the back of the chair.

"A queer ass!" (in a tone of the profoundest contempt); "you have no more sentiment in you than this table!" smiting it with his bare hand.

"I know I have not," say I, sitting up, and holding my hand to my side to ease the pain my excessive mirth has caused; "they always said so at home. Oh, here is the general! we will make him umpire, which is funniest, yours or mine!"

Sir Roger enters, and glances in some surprise from Frank's crimson face to my convulsed one.

"Oh, general, do we not look as if we had been having an affecting parting?" cry I, jumping up and running to him. "Do not I look as if I had been crying? Quite the contrary, I assure you. But Musgrave and I have been asking each other such amusing riddles—would you like to hear them? Mine is good, plain, vulgar English, but his is French, so we will begin with it—'Mon premier—'"

I stop suddenly, for Mr. Musgrave is looking at me with an expression simply murderous.

"Well, what are you stopping for? I am on the horns of expectation—'Mon premier—'"

"After all, it is not so funny as I thought," I answer, brusquely. "I think we will keep it for some wet Sunday afternoon, when we are short of something to do."

CHAPTER XIV.

The day of departure has really come. We have eaten our last bif-teck aux pommes frites, and drank our last cup of coffee in the Saxe. I have had my last look at the familiar square, at the great dome of the Frauen Kirchen, at the high houses with their dormer-windows, at the ugly big statue standing with its stiff black back rudely turned to the hotel, at the piled hay-carts. We are really and truly off. Our faces are set Barbara-ward, Bobby-ward, jackdaw-ward. I am in such rampaging spirits, that I literally do not know what to do with myself. I feel that I should like to tuck my tail, if I had one, between my legs, like Vick, and race round and round in an insane and unmeaning circle, as she does on the lawn at home, when oppressed by the overflow of her own gayety.

It seems to me as if there never had been such a day. I look at the sky as we drive along to the station. Call it sapphire, turquoise—indeed! What dull stone that ever lived darkling in a mine is fit to be named even in metaphor with this pale yet brilliant arch that so softly leans above us? It seems to me as if all the people we meet were handsome and well-featured—as if the Elbe were the noblest river that ever ran, carrying the sunlight in flakes of gold and diamond on its breast—as if all life were one long and kindly jest.

As we reach the station I see Mr. Musgrave standing on the pavement awaiting us, with a sort of mixed and compound look on his face.

"Here is Mr. Musgrave come to see us off!" I cry, jocundly. "Come to say 'Adieu!' ha! ha! I must not forget to ask him whether he has any more riddles."

"For Heaven's sake do not!" cries Sir Roger, smiling in spite of himself, yet seriously and earnestly desirous of checking my wit. "Let the poor boy have a little peace! He no more understands chaff than I understand Parsee."

I hop out of the carriage like a parched pea, scorning equally the step and Frank's hand extended to help me. I feel to-day as if I need only stand on tiptoe, and stretch out my arms in order to be able to fly.

"So you have come to see the last of us," I say, trying to pull a long face, and walking with him into the waiting-room.

"Yes; rather a mistake, is not it?" he says, somewhat gloomily, but loading himself at once, with ostentatious haste (in memory of my former reproof), with my bag, parasol, and novel.

"The day after—the day after—the day after to-morrow," say I, smiling cheerfully up in his dismal face. "You may fancy us just turning in at the park-gates—by-the-by, have you any message to send to the boys, to Barbara?"

"None to the boys," he answers, half smiling, too. "I hate boys: you may give my love to Barbara if you like, and if you are quite sure that she is like the St. Catherine."

"But when shall I see her?" he asks, roused into an eagerness which I think promises admirably for Barbara; "when are you coming home, really?"

"Keep a good lookout at your lodge," I say, gayly, "and you will no doubt see us arrive some fine day, looking very foolish, most probably—crawling along like snails, dragged by our tenants."

"Were you ever known to answer a plain question plainly since you were born?" he cries, petulantly. "When are you likely to come really?"

"'I know not! What avails to know?'" reply I, pompously spouting a line out of some forgotten poem that has lurked in my memory, and now struts out, to the anger and discomfiture of Mr. Musgrave.

Sir Roger and I get into a carriage—not a coupé this time—and dispose our myriad parcels above our heads, under our feet. Trucks roll, and porters bawl past; luggage is violently shot into vans. The last belated, panting passenger has got in. The doors are slammed-to. Off we go! The train is already in motion when the young man jumps on the step and thrusts in his hand for one parting shake.

"Mon tout," say I, screwing up my face into a crying shape, and speaking in a squeaky, pseudo-tearful voice, "je ne saurai vous le dire!"

Then he is hustled off by an indignant guard and three porters, and we see him no more. I throw myself back into my corner laughing.

"General," say I, "I think your young friend is nearly as soft-hearted as the girl in Tennyson who was

CHAPTER XV.

"How mother, when we used to stun
Her head wi' all our noisy fun,
Did wish us all a-gone from home;
But now that some be dead and some
Be gone, and, oh, the place is dumb,
How she do wish wi' useless tears
To have again about her ears
The voices that be gone!"

We have passed Cologne; have passed Brussels; have passed Calais and Dover; have passed London; we are drawing near home. How refreshing sounds the broad voice of the porters at Dover! Squeamish as I am, after an hour and three-quarters of a nice, short, chopping sea, the sight of the dear green-fustian jackets, instead of the slovenly blue blouses across-Channel, goes nigh to revive me. Adieu, O neatly aquiline, broad-shaved French faces! Welcome, O bearded Britons, with your rough-hewn noses!

To avoid the heat of the day, we go down from London by a late afternoon train. It is evening when, almost before the train has stopped, I insist on jumping out at our station. Imagine if through some accident we were carried on to the next by mistake!

Sir Roger has some considerable difficulty in hindering me from shaking hands with the whole staff of officials. One veteran porter, who has been here ever since I was born, has a polite but improbable trick of addressing every female passenger as "my lady." Well, with regard to me, at least, he is right now. I am "my lady." Ha! ha! I have not nearly got over the ridiculousness of this fact yet, though I have been in possession of it now these four whole weeks.

It has been a hot, parching summer day, and now that the night draws on all the flagging flowers in the cottage-borders are straightening themselves anew, and lifting their leaves to the dews. The pale bean-flowers, in the broad bean-fields, as we pass, send their delicate scent over the hedge to me, as if it were some fair and courteous speech. To me it seems as if they were saying, as plainly as may be, "Welcome home, Nancy!"

The sky that has been all of one hue during the live-long day—wherever you looked, nothing but pale, pale azure—is now like the palette of some God-painter splashed and freaked with all manner of great and noble colors—a most regal blaze of gold—wide plains of crimson, as if all heaven were flashing at some high thought—little feathery cloud-islands of tenderest rose-pink. We are coming very near now. There, down below, set round its hips with tall rushes, is our pool, all blood-red in the sunset! Can that be colorless water—that great carmine fire? There are our elms, with their heads in the sunset, too.

"General," say I, very softly, putting my hand through his arm, and speaking in a small tone of unutterable content, "I should like to kiss everybody in the world."

"Perhaps you would not mind beginning with me," returns he, gayly; then—for I look quite capable of it—glancing slightly over his shoulder at the vigilant couple in the dickey.

We are trotting alongside of the park-paling. I stand up and try to catch a glimpse between the coachman and footman, of the gate, to see whether they have come to meet me.

We are slackening our speed; we are going to turn in; the lodge-keeper runs out to open the gate; but no, it is needless. It is already open. I could have told her that. Here they all are!—Barbara, Algy, Bobby, Tou Tou.

"Here they are!" cry I, in a fidgety rapture. "Oh, general, just look how Tou Tou has grown; her frock is nearly up to her knees!"

"Do you think she can have grown that much in four weeks?" asks he, not contradictiously, but a little doubtfully, as Don Quixote may have asked the Princess Micomicona her reasons for landing at Ossime. "But pray, madam," says he, "why did your ladyship land at Ossime, seeing that it is not a seaport town?"

"I suppose not," I reply, a little disappointed. "I suppose that her frock must have run up in the washing."

To this day I have not the faintest idea how I got out of the carriage. My impression is that I flew over the side with wings which came to my aid in that one emergency, and then for evermore disappeared.

I do not know this time where I begin, or whom I end with. I seemed to be kissing them all at once. All their arms seem to be round my neck, and mine round all of theirs at the same moment. The only wonder is that, at the end of our greetings, we have a feature left among us. When at length they are ended—

"Well," say I, studiedly, with a long sigh of content, staring from one countenance to another, with a broad grin on my own. "Well!" and though I have been away four weeks, and been to foreign parts, and dined at table d'hôtes and seen Crucifixions and Madonnas, and seem to have more to tell than could be crowded into a closely-packed twelvemonth of talk, this is all I can find to say.

Bobby is the first to regain the use of his tongue. He says, "My eye!" (oh, dear and familiar expletive, for a whole calendar month I have not heard you!)—"my eye! what a swell you are!"

Meanwhile Sir Roger stands aloof. If he ever thought of himself, he might be reasonably and equitably huffy at being so entirely neglected, for I will do them the justice to say that I think they have all utterly forgotten his existence: but, as he never does, I suppose he is not; at least there is only a friendly entertainment, and no hurt dignity, in the gentle strength of his face.

In the exuberance of my happiness, I have given him free leave to kiss Barbara and Tou Tou, but the poor man does not seem to be likely to have the chance.

"Are not you going to speak to the general?" I say, nudging Barbara. "You have never said 'How do you do?' to him."

Thus admonished, they recover their presence of mind and turn to salute him. There are no kissings, however, only some rather formal hand-shakings; and then Algy, as being possessed of the nearest approach to manners of the family, walks on with him. The other three adhere to me.

"Well," say I, for the third time, holding Barbara by one hand, and resting the other on Bobby's stout arm, dressed in cricketing-flannel, while Tou Tou backs before us with easy grace. "Well, and how is everybody? How is mother?"

"And HE? Is anybody in disgrace now? At least of course somebody is, but who?"

In disgrace, indeed! we are 'Barbara, child,' and 'Algy, my dear fellow,' and 'Bobby, love.'"

"Bobby!" cries Tou Tou, in a high key of indignation at this monstrously palpable instance of unveracity, and nearly capsizing, as she speaks, into a rabbit-hole, which, in her backward progress—we are crossing the park—she has not perceived.

"Well," replies Bobby, candidly, "that last yarn may not be quite a fact, I own that; but I appeal to you, Barbara, is not it true i' the main? Are not we all 'good fellows,' and 'dear boys?'"

"I am thankful to say that we are," replies Barbara, laughing; "but how long we shall remain so is quite another thing."

"I have brought a present for him," say I, rather nervously; "do you think he will be pleased?"

"He will say that he very much regrets that you should have taken the trouble to waste your money upon him, as he did last birthday, when we exerted ourselves to lay out ten shillings and sixpence on that spectacle-case," answers Bobby, cheerfully.

"It is a—a traveling-bag," reply I, with a little hesitation, looking imploringly from Barbara to Bobby. "Do you think he will like it?"

"A traveling-bag!" echoes Bobby; then, a little bluntly, "but he never travels!"

"No more he does!" reply I, feeling a good deal crestfallen. "I thought of that myself; it was not quite my own idea—it was the general's suggestion!"

"The general!" says Bobby, "whew—w!" (with a long whistle of intelligence)—"well, he ought to know what he likes and dislikes, ought not he? He ought to understand his tastes, being the same age, and having been at schoo—"

"Look!" cry I, hastily, breaking into the midst of these soothing facts, which are daily becoming more distasteful to me, and pointing to the windows of the house, which are all blazing in the sunset, each pane sending forth a sheaf of fire, as if some great and mighty feast were being held within. "I see you are having an illumination in honor of us."

"Yes," answers Bobby, kindly entering into my humor, "and the reason why father did not come to meet you at the gate was that he was busy lighting the candles."

My spirits are so dashed by the more implied than expressed disapproval of my brethren, that I resolve to defer the presentation of the bag till to-morrow, or perhaps—to-morrow being Sunday, always rather a dark day in the paternal calendar—till Monday.

Dinner is over, and, as it is clearly impossible to stay in-doors on such a night, we are all out again. The three elders—father, mother, and husband—sitting sedately on three rustic chairs on the dry gravel-walk, and we young ones lying about in different attitudes of restful ease, on rugs and cloaks that we have spread upon the dewy grass. We are not far off from the others, but just so far as that our talk should be out of ear-shot. In my own mind, I am not aware that Sir Roger would far rather be with us, listening to our quick gabble, and laughing with us at our threadbare jests, which are rewarded with mirth so disproportioned to their size, than interchanging sober talk with the friend of his infancy. Once or twice I see his gray eyes straying a little wistfully toward us, but he makes no slightest movement toward joining us. I should like, if I had my own way, to ask him to come to us, to ask him to sit on the rugs and make jokes too, but some sort of false shame, some sneaky shyness before the boys, hinders me. I am leaning my elbow on the soft fur of the rug, and my head on my hand, and am staring up at the stars, cool and throbbing, so like little stiletto-holes pricked in heaven's floor, as they steal out in systems and constellations on the night.

"There is dear old Charles Wain," say I, affectionately; "I never knew where to look for him in Dresden; how nice it is to be at home again!"

"Nancy!" says Algy, gravely, "do you know I have counted, and that is the sixteenth time that you have made that ejaculation since your arrival! Do you know—I am sorry to have to say it—that it sounds as if you had not enjoyed your honey-moon very much?"

"It sounds quite wrong, then," cry I, coming down from the stars, and speaking rather sharply. "I enjoyed it immensely; yes, immensely!"

I say this with an emphasis which is calculated to convince not only everybody else, but even myself.

"Come, now," cries Bobby, who is farthest off from me, and, to remedy this disadvantage, begins to travel quickly, in a sitting posture, along the rugs toward me, "tell the truth—gospel truth, mind!—the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you, God. Would you like to be setting off on it over again, to-morrow morning?"

"Of course not," reply I, angrily; "what a silly question! Would any one like to begin any thing over again, just the very minute that they had finished it? You might as well ask me would I like to have dinner over again, and begin upon a fresh plate of soup."

"When I marry," continues Bobby, lying flat on his back, with his hands clasped under his head (we all laugh)—"when I marry, no one shall succeed in packing me off to foreign parts, with my young woman. I shall take her straight home, as if I was not ashamed of her, and we will have a dance, and make a clean sweep of our own cake."

"Nancy!" cries Tou Tou, innocently, joining in the conversation for the first time, "did any one take him for your grandfather, as the Brat said they would?"

"Of course not!" cry I, crossly, making a spiteful lunge, as I speak, at a startle-de-buz, which has lumbered booming into my face. "Who on earth supposed they would really?"

Tou Tou collapses, with a hazy impression of having been snubbed, and there is a moment's silence. A faint, fire-like flush still lingers in the west—all that is left of the dazzling pageant that the heavens sent to welcome me home. I am looking toward it—away from my brothers and sisters—away from everybody—across the indistinct garden-beds—across the misty park, and the dark tree-tops, when a voice suddenly brings me back.

"Nancy, child!" it says, "is not it rather damp for you? Would you mind putting this on?"

I look up in a hurry, and see Sir Roger stooping over me, with an outspread cloak in his hands.

"Oh, thank you!" cry I, hurriedly, reddening—I do not quite know why—and with that same sort of sneaky feeling, as if the boys were laughing; "I am not one much apt to catch cold—none of us are—but I will, if you like."

So saying, I drew it round my shoulders. Then he goes, in a minute, without a second's lingering, back to the gravel-walk, to his wicker-chair, to grave, dry talk, to the friend of his infancy! I have an uncomfortable feeling that there is a silent and hidden laugh among the family.

"Barbara, my treasure!" says Algy, presently, in a mocking voice, "might I be allowed to offer you our umbrella, and a pair of goloshes to defend you from the evening dews?"

"Hush!" cries Barbara, gently pushing him away, and stretching out her hand to me. She is the only one that understands. (Oh, why, why did I ever laugh at him with them? What is there to laugh at in him?)

"My poor Barbara!" continues Algy, in a tone of affected solicitude. "If you had not a tender brother to look after you, your young limbs might be cramped with rheumatism, and twitched with palsy, before any one would think of bringing you a cloak."

"Wait a bit!" say I, recovering my good-humor with an effort, reflecting that it is no use to be vexed—that they mean nothing—and that, lastly, I have brought it on myself!

"Wait for what?" asks Barbara, laughing. "Till Toothless Jack has grown used to his new teeth?"

"By-the-by," cries Bobby, eagerly, "that was since you went away, Nancy: he has set up a stock of new teeth—beauties—like Orient pearl—he wore them in church last Sunday for the first time. We tell Barbara that he has bought them on purpose to propose in. Now, do not you think it looks promising?"

"We do not mean, however," says Algy, lighting a cigar, "to let Barbara go cheap! Now that we have disposed of you so advantageously, we are beginning to be rather ambitious even for Tou Tou."

"We think," says Bobby, giving a friendly but severe pull to our youngest sister's outspread yellow locks, "that Tou Tou would adorn the Church. Bishops have mostly thin legs, so it is to be presumed that they admire them: we destine Tou Tou for a bishop's lady!"

Hereupon follows a lively fire of argument between Bobby and his sister; she protesting that she will not espouse a bishop, and he asseverating that she shall. It lasts the best part of a quarter of hour, and ends by reducing Tou Tou to tears.

"But come," says Algy, taking his cigar out of his mouth, throwing his head back, and blowing two columns of smoke out of his nose, "let us take up our subject again where we dropped it. I should be really glad if I could get you to own that you and he"—(indicating my husband by a jerk of his head)—"grew rather sick of each other! Whether you own it or not, I know you did; and it would give me pleasure to hear it. You need not take it personally. I assure you that it is no slur upon him—everybody does. I have talked to lots of fellows who have gone through it, and they all say the same."

"Nancy!" says Bobby, abandoning, at length, his persecution of Tou Tou, and pretending not to hear her last persevering assertion of her determination not to be episcopally wed—"tell the truth, and shame the devil. It would be different if we were strangers, but we that have sported with you since you wore frilled trousers and a bib—come now—did you, or did you not, kneel three times a day, like the prophet Daniel, looking eastward or westward, or whichever way it did look, and yearn for us, and Jacky, and the bun-loaf—come, now?"

"Well, yes," say I, reluctantly making the admission. "I do not say that I did not! Of course, after having been used to you all my life, it would have been very odd if I had not missed you rather badly; but that is a very different thing from being sick of him!"

"Well, we will not say sick," returns Algy, with the air of one who is making a handsome concession, "it is a disagreeable, bilious expression, but it would be useless to try and convince me that any human affection could stand the wear and tear of twenty-eight whole days of an absolute duet and not be rather the worse for it!"

"But it was not an absolute duet," cry I, raising my voice a little, and speaking with some excitement; "you are talking about what you do not know! you are quite wrong."

"Well, it is not the first time in my life that I have been that," he says, philosophically; "but come—who did you the Christian office of interrupting it? tell us."

"I told you in my letters," say I, rather petulantly. "I certainly mentioned—yes, I know I did—we happened at Dresden to fall in with a friend of the general's—at least, a person he knew."

"Pretty," answer I, laughing. "Ah! what a rage he would be in, if he could hear such an epithet applied to him!"

"A young, well-looking, man-friend!" says Algy, slowly recapitulating all my admissions as he lies gently puffing on the rug beside me. "Well?"

"Well!" echo I, rather snappishly. "Nothing! only that I wanted to show you that it was not quite such a duet as you imagined! Of course—Dresden is not a big place—of course we met very often, and went here and there together."

"Sir Roger was there, too, of course," reply I, still a little crossly, "except once or twice—certainly not more than twice—he said he did not feel inclined to come, and so we went without him."

"You left him at home, in fact!" says Algy, with a rather malicious smile, "out of harm's way, while you and the young friend marauded about the town together; it must have been very lively for him, poor man! Oh, fie! Nancy, fie!"

"We did not do any thing of the kind," cry I, now thoroughly vexed and uncomfortable. "I wish you would not misunderstand things on purpose! there is not any fun in it! Both times I wanted him to come! I asked him particularly!"

"And, if I may make so bold as to inquire," asks Bobby, striking in, "how did the young friend call himself? What was his name?"

"Musgrave," reply I, shortly. "Frank Musgrave!" for the stream of my conversation seems dried.

"Was he nice? Should we like him?" ask Tou Tou, who has recovered her equanimity, dried her tears, and forgotten the bishop.

"That is a very different thing!" says Barbara, laughing. "But was he nice in himself?"

"No," say I, "I do not think he was: at least, he wanted a great deal of alteration."

"I think he was nice, too, in a way," say I, rather compunctiously. "I used to tell him about all of you, and—I dare say it was pretense—but he seemed to like to hear about you! When I came away, he sent his love to Barbara; he would not send any messages to you boys—he said he hated boys!"

Another short silence. The elders have gone in to tea. Through the windows, I see the lamplight shining on the tea-cups.

"Algy!" say I, in a rather low voice, edging a little nearer to where he lies gracefully outspread, "you did not mean it, really? You do not think I—I—I—neglected the general, do you?—you do not think I—I—liked to be away from him?"

"My lady!" replies he, teasingly, "I think nothing! I only know what your ladyship was good enough to tell me!"

CHAPTER XVI.

Well, no one will deny that Sunday comes after Saturday; and it was Saturday evening, when the heavens painted themselves with fire, and the sun lit up all the house-windows to welcome us home. Sunday is not usually one of our blandest days, but we must hope for the best.

"General," say I, standing before him, dressed for morning church, after having previously turned slowly round on the point of my toes, to favor him with the back view of as delightful a bonnet, and as airily fresh and fine a muslin gown, as ever young woman said her prayers in—"by-the-by, do you like my calling you general?"

"At least I understand who you mean by it," he says, a little evasively; "which, after all, is the great thing, is not it?"

"It is my own invention," say I, rather proudly; "nobody put it into my head, and nobody else calls you by it, do they?"

"Yes," he says, "for about a year, most people did; I was general a year before my brother died."

"Your brother died?" cry I, again repeating his words, and arching my eyebrows, which have not naturally the slightest tendency toward describing a semicircle. "What! you had a brother, too, had you? I never knew that before."

"No more than you are," he answers, smiling. "No, I was not born in the purple; for thirty-seven years of my life I earned my own bread—and rather dry bread too."

"If I had come here seven years ago," he says, taking both my pale yellow hands in his light gray ones, and looking at me with eyes which seem darker and deeper than usual under the shade of the brim of his tall hat—"by-the-by, you would have been a little girl then—as little as Tou Tou—"

"Yes," interrupt I, breaking in hastily; "but, indeed, I never was a bit like her, never. I never had such legs—ask the boys if I had!"

"I did not suppose that you had," he answers, bursting into a hearty and most unfeigned laugh! "but" (growing grave again), "Nancy, suppose that I had come here then! I should have had no shooting to offer the boys—no horses to mount Algy—no house worth asking Barbara to—"

"No more you would!" say I, too much impressed with surprise at this new light on Sir Roger's past life to notice the sort of wistfulness and inquiry that lurks in his last words; then, after a second, perceiving it: "And you think," say I, loosing my hands from his, and growing as pink as the delicate China rose-bud that is peeping round the corner of the trellis in at the window, "that there would not have been as much inducement then for me to propose to you, as there was in the present state of things!"

I am laughing awkwardly as I speak; then, eagerly changing the conversation, and rushing into another subject: "By-the-by, I had something to say to you—something quite important—before we digressed."

"O general!" taking hold of the lapel of his coat, and looking up at him with appealing earnestness, "do you know that I have made up my mind to give him the bag to-day! it is no use putting off the evil day—it must come, after supper—they all say after supper!"

"Well, I want you to talk to him all day, and get him into a good-humor by then, if you can, that is all!"

"That is all!" repeats my husband, with the slightest possible ironical accent. Then we go to church. It is too near to drive, so we all walk. The church-yard elms are out in fullest leaf above our heads. There are so many leaves, and they are so close together, that they hide the great brown rooks' nests. They do not hide the rooks themselves. It would take a good deal to do that. Dear pleasant-spoken rooks, talking so loudly and irreverently about their own secular themes—out-cawing the church-bells, as we pace by, devout and smart, to our prayers. Last time I walked up this path, it was hidden with red cloth, and flowers were tumbling under my feet. Ah! red cloth comes but once in a lifetime. It is only the queen who lives in an atmosphere of red cloth and cut flowers.

We are in church now. The service is in progress. Can it be only five Sundays ago that I was standing here as I am now, watching all the little well-known incidents? Father standing up in frock-coat and spectacles, keeping a sharp lookout over the top of his prayer-book, to see how late the servants are. The ill-behaved charity-boys emulously trying who shall make the hind-legs of his chair squeak the loudest on the stone floor. Toothless Jack leering distantly at Barbara from the side aisle. Something apparently is amusing him. He is smiling a little. I see his teeth. They, at least, are new. They were not here five weeks ago. The little starved curate—the one who tore his gloves into strips—loses his place in the second lesson, and madly plunges at three different wrong verses in succession, before he regains the thread of his narrative.

We have come to the sermon. The text is, "I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come." No sooner is it given out than Algy, Bobby, and Tou Tou, all look at me and grin; but father, who has a wily way of establishing himself in the corner of the pew, so as to have a bird's-eye view of all our demeanors, speedily frowns them down into a preternatural gravity. Ah, why to-day, of all days, did they laugh? and why to-day, of all days, did the servants file noisily in, numerous and out of breath, in the middle of the psalms? I tremble when I think of the bag.

Well, who will may laugh again now: we are out in the sunshine, with the church-yard grass bowing and swaying in the wind, and the little cloud-shadows flying across the half-effaced names of the forgotten dead, who lie under their lichen-grown tombs.

"Did you see his teeth?" asks Tou Tou, joining me with a leap, almost before I am outside the church-porch.

"They are not comfortable yet," remarks Bobby, gravely, as he walks beside me carrying my prayer-book. "I could see that: he was taking them out, and putting them in again, with his tongue all through the Litany."

"When once he has secured Barbara, I expect that they will go back with the box for good and all—eh, Barbara?" say I, laughing, as I speak; but Barbara is out of ear-shot. She is lingering behind to shake hands with the curate, and ask all the poor old people after their diseases. I never can recollect clearly who has what. I always apportion the rheumatism wrongly, but she never does. There she stands just by the church-gate, with the little sunny lights running up and down upon her snow-white gown, shaking each grimy old hand with a kind and friendly equality.

The day rolls by; afternoon service; walk round the grounds; early dinner (we always embitter our lives on Sundays by dining at six, which does the servants no good, and sours the tempers of the whole family); then prayers. Prayers are always immediately followed by that light refection which we call supper.

As the time approaches, my heart sinks imperceptibly lower in my system than the place where it usually resides.

says Algy, solemnly, putting his arm round my shoulders, as, the prayer-bell having rung, we set off for the wonted justicing-room.

"Have a pull at my flask," suggests Bobby, seriously; "there is some cognac left in it since the day we fished the pool. It would do you all the good in the world, and, if you took enough, you would feel able to give him ten bags, or, indeed, throw them at his head at a pinch."

"But what will you do with it meanwhile?" cry I, anxiously; "he must not see it first."

"Hang it round his neck while he is at prayers," bursts out Bobby, with the air of a person who has had an illumination; "you know he always pretends to have his eyes shut."

"And at 'Amen,' he would awake to find himself famous," says Algy, pseudo-pompously.

But this suggestion, although I cannot help looking upon it as ingenious, I do not adopt.

Prayers on Sunday are a much finer and larger ceremonial than they are on week-days. In the first place, instead of a few of the church prayers quickly pattered, which are ended in five minutes, we have a whole long sermon, which lasts twenty. In the second place, the congregation is so much greater. On week-days it is only the in-door servants; on Sundays it is the whole staff—coachman, grooms, stablemen. I think myself that it is more in the nature of a parade, to insure that none of the establishment are out sweethearting, than of a religious exercise. Usually I am delighted when the sermon is ended. Even Barrow or Jeremy Taylor would sound dull and stale if fired off in a flat, fierce monotone, without emphasis or modulation. To-night, at every page that turns, my heart declines lower and lower down. It is ended now; so is the short prayer that follows it. We all rise, and father stands with his hawk-eyes fixed on the servants, as they march out, counting them. The upper servants are all right; so are the housemaids, cookmaids, and lesser scullions. Alas! alas! there is a helper wanting.

Having listened to and disbelieved the explanation of his absence, father leads the way into supper, but the little incident has taken the bloom off his suavity.

Sir Roger has deposited the bag—still wrapped in its paper coverings—on a chair, in a modest and unobtrusive corner of the dining-room, ready for presentation. He did this just before prayers. As we enter the room, father's eyes fall on it.

"What is that?" he cries, pointing with his forefinger, and turning severely to the boys. "How many times have I told you that I will not have parcels left about, littering the whole place? Off with it!"

"If you please, father," say I, in a very small and starved voice, "it is not the boys', it is mine."

"Yours, is it?" with a sudden change of tone, and return to amenity. "Oh, all right!" (Then, with a little accent of sudden jocosity)—"One of your foreign purchases, eh?"

We sit round the snowy table, in the pleasant light of the shaded lamps, eating chicken-salad, and abasing and rifling the great red pyramids of strawberries and raspberries, but talking not much. We young ones never can talk out loud before father. He has never heard our voices raised much above a whisper. I do not think he has an idea what fine, loud, Billingsgate voices his children really have. He has said grace—we always have a longer, gratefuller grace than usual on Sundays—and has risen to go.

"Now for it!" cries Bobby, wildly excited, and giving me an awful dig in the ribs with his elbow.

"Shall I get it?" asks the general, in an encouraging whisper. "Cheer up, Nancy! do not look so white! it is all right."

He rises and fetches it, slips it quickly out of its coverings, and puts it into my hand. Father has reached the door, I run after him.

"Father!" cry I, beginning again, and holding my gift out nervously toward him, "here's—here's—here's a bag!"

This is my address of presentation. I hear the boys tittering at the table behind me—a sound which, telling me how ill I am speeding, makes my confusion tenfold worse. I murmur, helplessly and indistinctly, something about his never traveling, and my knowing that fact—and having been always sure that he would hate it—and then I glance helplessly round with a wild idea of flight. But at the same moment an arm of friendly strength comes round my shoulders—a friendly voice sounds in my buzzing ears.

"James," it says, simply and directly, "she has brought you a present, and she is afraid that you will not care about it."

"A present!" echoes my father, the meaning of the inexplicable object which has suddenly been thrust into his grasp beginning to dawn upon him. "Oh, I see! I am sure, my dear Nancy"—with a sort of embarrassed stiffness that yet means to be gracious—"that I am extremely obliged to you, extremely; and though I regret that you should have wasted your money on me—yet—yet—I assure you, I shall always prize it very highly."

"Shake hands!" cries Algy, pouring me out a glass of claret. "Now, perhaps, you have some faint idea of what I felt when I had to return thanks for the bridesmaids."

"Nancy!" cries Bobby, holding out the fruit to which he alludes, and speaking in a wobbly, quivering voice, with a painfully literal imitation of my late address, "here's—here's—here's a peach!"

"I like you!" I say, creeping up quite close to him. "You were the only one that came to help me. If it had not been for you, I should be there still!"

CHAPTER XVII.

The bag-affair is quite an old one now—a fortnight old. The bag itself has, I believe, retired into the decent privacy of a cupboard, nor is it much more likely to reissue thence than was one of the frail nuns built into the wall in the old times likely to come stepping out again. Bobby has at length ceased to offer me every object which it devolves upon him to hand me, with a quavering voice and a prolonged stammer, since, though I was at first excellently vulnerable by this weapon of offense, I am now becoming hornily hard and indifferent to it. We have stepped over the boundaries of June into July.

Yes, June has gone to look for all its dead brothers, wherever—since they say nothing is ever really lost—they lie with their stored sweets. To me, this has been as merry and good a June as any one of my nineteen.

Sir Roger is beginning to talk of going home—his home, that is—but rather diffidently and tentatively, as if not quite sure whether the proposal will meet with favor in my eyes. He need not be nervous on this point. I, too, am rather anxious and eager to see my house—my house, if you please!—I, who have never hitherto possessed any larger residence than a doll's house, whose whole front wall opened at once, giving one an improbably simultaneous view of kitchen-range, best four-poster, and drawing-room chairs. I have, it is true, seen photographs of my new house, photographs of its east front, of its west front—photographs, in its park, of the great old cedar; in its gardens, of its woody pool—but, to tell you the truth, I want to see it. I have already planned a house-warming, and invited them all to it, a house-warming in which—oh, absurd!—I shall sit at the head of the table, and father and mother only at the sides—I shall tell the people who they are to take in to dinner, and nod my head from the top when dessert is ended.

To-day I am going to write and secure the Brat's company—that is, later in the day—but now it is quite, quite early, even the letters have not come in. We have all—viz., the boys, the girls, and I—risen (in pursuance of a plan made overnight) preternaturally early, almost as early as I did on my wedding-morning, and are going out to gather mushrooms in the meadow, by the river. Indignation against the inhabitants of the neighboring town is what has torn us from our morning dreams, the greedy townsfolk, by whom, on every previous occasion, we have found our meadow rifled before we could reach it. To-day we shall, at least, meet them on equal terms. We are all rather gapy at first, more especially Algy, who has deferred the making of the greater part of his toilet till his return, looks disheveled, and sounds grumbling. But before long both gapes and grumbles depart.

Who would see the day when he is old, and stale, and shabby, when, like us, they could come out to meet him as he walks across the meadow with a mantle of dew wrapped round him, and a garland of paling rose-clouds, that an hour ago were crimson, about his head?

The place toward which we tend is at some little distance, and our road thither leads through all manner of comely rustic places, flowered fields, where the buttercups crowd their little varnished cups, and the vigilant ox-eyes are already wakefully staring up from among the grass-spears; a little wood; a deep and ruddy-colored lane, along whose unpruned hedges straggle the riches of the wild-rose, most delicately flushed, as if God in passing had called her very good, and she had reddened at his praise; where the honey-suckle, too, is holding stilly aloft the open cream-colored trumpets and closed red trumpet-buds of her heaven-sweet crown.

In an instant Tou Tou is scrawling and scrambling like a great spider up the steep bank: in an instant more she is tugging, tearing, devastating; while the faint petals that no mightiest king can restore, but that any infant with a touch can destroy, are showering in scented ruin around her. It gives me a pain to see it, as if I saw some sentient thing in agony. I think I feel, with Walter Savage Landor—

"I never pluck the rose; the violet's head
Hath shaken with my breath upon its bank
And not reproached me: the ever-sacred cup
Of the pure lily hath between my hands
Felt safe, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold."

"You will have your basket filled before we get there," I say, remonstrating, but she does not heed me.

Hot and scratched—at least I am glad that in their death-pain they were able to scratch her—she still tugs and mauls. I walk on. We reach the meadow. Well, at least to-day we are in time. It has the silence and solitude of the dawn of Creation's first still day, broken only by the sheep that are cropping

The slow, smooth river washes by, sucking in among the rushes. Our footsteps show plainly shaped as we step along through the hoary dew. We separate—going one this way, one that—and, in silence and gravity, pace with bent heads and down-turned eyes through the fine, short grass. Excitement and emulation keep us dumb, for let who will—blasé and used up—deny it, but there is an excitement, wholesome and hearty, in seeking, and a joy pure and unadulterated in finding, mushrooms in a probable field in the hopeful morning; whether the mushroom be a patriarch whose gills are browned with age, and who is big enough to be an umbrella for the fairy people, or a little milk-white button, half hidden in daisies and trefoil. Sometimes a cry of rage and anguish bursts from one or other of us who has been the dupe of a puff-ball family, and who is satiating his or her revenge by stamping on the deceiver's head, and reducing its fair, round proportions to a flat and fleshy pulp. We search long and diligently, and our efforts are blessed with an unwonted success. By the time that the sun has attained height enough in the heavens to make his power tyrannically felt, our baskets are filled. Tou Tou has to throw away her wild-roses, limp and flaccid, into the dust of the lane. We walk home, singing, and making poor jokes, as is our wont. As we draw near the house with joyful foretastes of breakfast in our minds, with redly-flushed cheeks and merry eyes, I see Sir Roger leaning on the stone balustrade of the terrace, looking as if he were watching for us, and, indeed, no sooner does he catch sight of us, than he comes toward us.

"Do you like mushrooms?" cry I, at the top of my voice, long before I have reached him, holding up my basket triumphantly. "See, I have got the most of anybody, except Tou Tou!"

"Do you like mushrooms?" I repeat, lifting the lid, and giving him a peep into the creamy and pink-colored treasures inside, "oh, you must! if you do not, I shall have a divorce! I could not bear a difference of opinion upon such a subject."

I have never given him time to speak, and now I look with appealing laughter into his silent face.

"Why, what is the matter?" I cry, with an abrupt change of tone. "What has happened? How odd you look!"

"Nothing has happened," he answers, trying to smile, but I see that it is quite against the grain, "only that I have had some not very pleasant news."

"It is not any thing about—about the Brat!" cry I, stopping suddenly, seizing his arm with both hands, and turning, as I feel, extremely pale, while my thoughts fly to the only one of my beloveds that is out of my sight.

"Then I do not much care who is dead?" I answer, unfeelingly, drawing a long breath; "he is the only person out of this house whose death would afflict me much, and I do not think that there is any one besides us that you are very devoted to, is there?"

"Why are you so determined that some one is dead?" he asks, smiling again, but this time a little more naturally; "is there nothing vexatious in the world but death?"

"Yes," say I, laughing, despite myself, as my thoughts revert to my late employment, "there are puff-balls!"—then, ashamed of having been flippant, and afraid of having been unsympathetic, I add hastily: "I wish you would tell me what it is! I am sure, when I hear, I shall be vexed too; but you see as long as I do not know what it is, I cannot, can I?"

"There is no time now," he says, glancing toward father, whose head appears through the dining-room windows. "See! they are going to breakfast!—afterward I will tell you—afterward—and child—" (putting his hands on my shoulders, and essaying to look at me with an altogether cheered and careless face,) "do not you worry your head about it!—eat your breakfast with an easy mind; after all, it is nothing very bad!—it could not be any thing very bad, as long as—." He stops abruptly, and adds hastily, "let us have a look at your mushrooms! well, you have a quantity!"

"Yes, have not I?" say I, triumphantly, "more than any of them, except Tou Tou—." Then, not quite satisfied with the impression our late talk has left upon me: "General!" say I, lowering my face and reddening, "I hope you do not think that I am quite a baby because I like childish things—gathering mushrooms—running about with the boys—talking to Jacky. I can understand serious things too, I assure you. I think I could enter into your trouble—I think, if you gave me the chance, that you would find that I could!"

Then a sort of idiotic false shame overtakes me, and without waiting for his answer I disappear.

CHAPTER XVIII.

I meet Bobby retiring to the kitchen to cook his mushrooms himself. He invites me to join him, but I refuse. It is the first time in the annals of history that I was ever known to say no to such an offer. Bobby regards me with reproachful anger, and makes a muffled remark, the drift of which I understand to be that, though I may pretend not to be, I am grown fine, as he always said I should. To-day it seems to me as if breakfast would never end. It is one of our fixed laws that no one shall leave the table until father gives the signal by saying grace. Sometimes, when he is in one of his unfortunate moods, he keeps us all staring at our empty cups and platters for half an hour. To-day I watch with warm anxiety the progress downward of the tea in his cup. At last he has come to the grounds. He lays down the Times. We all joyfully half bow our heads, in expectation of the wonted "For what we have received," etc., but speedily and disappointedly raise them again.

"Jane, can you spare me another cup?" and reburies himself in a long leader. Behind the shelter of the great sheet, I make a hideous contortion across the table at Sir Roger, who has fallen with great docility into our ways, and is looking back at me now with that gentle, steadfast serenity which is the leading characteristic of his face, but which this morning is, I cannot help thinking, a good deal disturbed, hard as he is trying to hide it. There are, thank Heaven, no more false starts. Next time that he lays down the paper, we are all afraid to bend our heads, for fear that the movement shall break the charm, and induce him to send for a fourth cup—he has already had three—but no! release has come at last.

Almost before we have reached "thankful," there is a noise of several chairs pushed back. Before you could say "knife!" we are all out of the room. All but Sir Roger! In deference, I suppose, to the feelings of the friend of his infancy, and not to appear too anxious to leave him—Sir Roger ought to have married Barbara, they two are always thinking of other people's feelings—he delays a little, and indeed they emerge together and find me sitting on one of the uncomfortable, stiff hall-chairs, on which nobody ever sits. To my dismay, I hear father say something about the chestnut colt's legs, and I know that another delay is in store for me. Sir Roger comes over to me, and takes his wide-awake from the stand beside me.

I make a second hideous face. Often have I been complimented by the boys, on the flexibility of my features.

"I shall be back in ten minutes," he says, in a low voice; "will you wait for me in the morning-room?"

"I suppose I must," say I, reluctantly, with a disgusted and disappointed drawing down of the corners of my mouth.

Ten minutes pass; twenty, five-and-twenty! Still he has not come back. I walk up and down the room; I look out the window at the gardeners rolling the grass; I rend a large and comely rose into tatters, while all manner of unpleasant possibilities stalk along in order before my mind's eye. Perhaps Tempest is burnt down. Perhaps some bank, in which he has put all his money, has broken. Perhaps he has found out that his brother is not really dead after all! I dismiss this last worst suggestion as improbable. The door opens, and he enters.

"Here you are!" I cry, making a joyous rush at him. "I thought you were never coming! Please, is that your idea of ten minutes?"

"I could not help it," he answers; "he kept me talking; I could not get away any sooner."

"Why did you go?" say I, dutifully. "Why did not you say, when he asked you, 'No, I will not?' He would have done it to you as soon as look at you."

"That would have been so polite to one's host and father-in-law, would not it?" he answers, a little ironically. "After all, Nancy, where is the use of vexing people for nothing?"

"Not people generally," reply I, still chafed; "but I should like some one who was not his child, and in whom it would not be disrespectful, to pay him out for keeping us all as he did this morning; he knew as well as possible that we were dying to be off; that was why he had that last cup: he did not want it any more than I did. He did not drink it; did not you see? he left three-quarters of it."

Sir Roger does not answer, unless a slight shrug and a passing his hand across his face with a rather dispirited gesture be an answer. I feel ashamed of my petulance.

"Do you feel inclined to tell me about your ill news?" I say, gently, going over to him, and putting my hand on his shoulder. "I have been making so many guesses as to what it can be?"

"Have you?" he says, looking up. "I dare say. Well, I will tell you. Do you remember—I dare say you do not—my once mentioning to you that I had some property in the West Indies—in Antigua?"

"To be sure I do; I recollect I had not an idea where Antigua was, and I looked out for it at once in Tou Tou's atlas."

"Well, a fortnight—three weeks ago—it was when we were in Dresden, I had a letter telling me of the death of my agent out there. I knew nothing about him personally—had never seen him—but he had long been in my poor brother's employment, and was very highly thought of by him."

"Poor brother!" think I; "well, thank Heaven! at least he has not revived; he would not be 'poor' if he had," but I say only, "Yes?" with a delicately interrogative accent.

"And to-day comes this letter"—(pulling one out of his pocket)—"telling me that now that his affairs have been looked into, they are found to be in the greatest confusion—that he has died bankrupt, in fact; and not only that, but that he has been cheating me right and left for years and years, appropriating the money which ought to have been spent on the estate to his own uses; and, as misfortunes never come single, I also hear"—(unfolding the sheet, and glancing rather disconsolately over it)—"that there has been a hurricane, which has destroyed nearly all the sugar-canes."

The thought of Job and his successive misfortunes instantly occurs to me—the Sabeans, the Chaldeans, the great wind from the wilderness—but being a little doubtful as to his example having a very consoling effect, with some difficulty, and at the cost of a great pressure exercised on myself, I abstain from mentioning him.

"To make a long story short," continues Sir Roger, "and not to bother you with unnecessary details—"

"But indeed they would not bother me," interrupt I, eagerly, putting my hand through his arm, and turning my face anxiously up to him; "I should enjoy hearing them. I wish you would not think that all sensible, sober things bother me."

"My dear," he says, gently pinching my cheek, "I think nothing of the kind, but I know that not all the explanations in the world will alter the result, which is, that I shall not get a farthing from the property this year, and very likely not next either."

"You do not say so!" cry I, trying to impart a tragic tone to my voice, and only hoping that my face looks more distressed and aghast than it feels.

To tell you the truth, I am mightily relieved. At this period of my history, money troubles seem to me the lightest and airiest of all afflictions. I have sat down, and Sir Roger is walking up and down, with a restlessness unlike his usual repose; on his face there is a vexed and thwarted look, that is unfamiliar to me. The old parrot sits in the sun, outside his cage, scratching his head, and chuckling to himself. Tou Tou's voice comes ringing from the garden. It has a tone of mingled laughter and pain, which tells me that she is undergoing severe and searching discipline at the hands of Bobby.

"I suppose," say I, presently, speaking with some diffidence, "that that is all. Of course I do not mean to say that it is not very bad, but is there nothing worse?"

"You know," say I, still hesitatingly, "I have not an idea how well off you are; I mean, how much a year you have. Mercenary as I am"—(laughing nervously)—"I never thought of asking you; but I suppose, even if the earth were to open and swallow Antigua—even if there were no such things as West Indies—we should still have money enough to buy us bread and cheese, should not we?"

"Well, it is to be hoped so," he answers, a gleam of amusement flashing like a little sunshiny arrow across his vexation; "it would be a bad lookout for you and me, would not it, considering the size of our appetites, if we should not?"

A little pause. Tou Tou's voice again. The anguish has conquered the laughter, and is now mixed with a shrill treble wrath. Polly is alternately barking like Vick, and laughing with a quiet amusement at his own performance.

"Do you think," say I, still airing my opinion with timidity, as one that has no great opinion of their worth, "that it does one much good to be rich beyond a certain point?—that a large establishment, for instance, gives one much pleasure? I am sure it does not in our case; if you were to know the number of nails that the servants and their iniquities have knocked into mother's coffin—yes, and father's, too."

"Have they?" (a little absently). He is still pacing up and down restlessly—to and fro—along and across—he that is usually so innocent of fidget or fuss. "Nancy," he says, half seriously, half in rueful jest, "if you want a thing done, do it yourself: mind that, all your life. I am a standing instance of the disadvantage of having let other people do it for me. The fact is, I ought to have gone out there long ago, to look after things myself."

"If you had been there, you could not have stopped the hurricane coming, any more than Canute could stop the waves," say I, filching a piece of history from "Little Arthur," and pushing it to the front.

"Not the hurricane—no; but the hurricane was the lesser evil. I might have done something to avert, or, at least, lessen the greater one. To tell the truth, I meant to have gone out there this spring—had, indeed, almost fixed upon a day for starting, when—you stopped me."

"Yes," he says, pausing in his walk in front of me, and looking at me with a face full of sunshine, content, and laughter; a face whence hurricanes, West Indies, and agents have altogether fled; "you called me a 'beast', and the expression startled me so much—I suppose from not being used to it—that it sent the West Indies, yes, and the East ones too, clean out of my head."

"I hope," say I, anxiously, "that you will never tell any one that I said that. They would think that I was in the habit of calling people 'beasts', and indeed—indeed, I very seldom use so strong a word, even to Bobby."

"Well," he says, not heeding my request, not, I am sure, hearing it, and resuming his walk, "what is done cannot be undone, so there is no use whining about it, Nancy" (again stopping before me, and this time taking my face in his two hands). "Will you mind much, or will you not?—do you ever mind any thing much, I wonder?" (eagerly and wistfully scanning my face, as if trying to read my character through the mask of my pale skin, and small and unremarkable features). "Well, there is no help for it—as I did not go then, I must go now."

No need now to dress my voice in the tones of factitious tragedy—no need to lengthen my face artificially. It feels all of a sudden quite a yard and a half long. Polly has stopped barking: he is now calling, "Barb'ra! Barb'ra!" in father's voice, and he hits off the pompous severity of his tone with such awful accuracy, that did not my eyes assure me to the contrary, I could swear that my parent was in the room.

After a moment I rise, throw my arms round Sir Roger, and lay my head on his breast—a most unwonted caress on my part, for we are not a couple by any means given to endearments.

"Do not go!" I say in a coaxing whisper, "do nothing of the kind!—stay at home!"

"And will you go instead of me?" he asks with a gentle irony, stroking, the while, my plaits as delicately as if he were afraid that they would come off, which indeed, indeed, they would not.

"By myself," say I, laughing, but not raising my head. "Oh! of course; nothing I should like better, and I should be so invaluable in mending the sugar-canes, and keeping the new agent on his P's and Q's, should not I?"

"Stay!" say I, again whispering, as being more persuasive; "where would be the use of going now? It would be shutting the stable-door after the steed was stolen, and—" (this in a still lower voice)—"we are beginning to get on so nicely, too."

"Beginning!" he echoes, with a half-melancholy smile, "only beginning? have not we always got on nicely?"

"And if we are poorer," continue I, insinuatingly, "I believe we shall get on better still. I am sure that poor people are fonder of one another than rich ones—they have less to distract them from each other."

I have now raised my head, and perceive that Sir Roger does not look very much convinced.

"But granting that poverty is better than riches, do you believe that it is, Nancy?—for my part I doubt it—for myself I will own to you that I have found it pleasant not to be obliged to look at sixpence upon both sides; but that," he says with straightforward simplicity, "is perhaps because I have not long been used to it—because once, long ago, I wanted money badly—I would have given my right hand for it, and could not get it!"

"What did you want it for?" cry I, curiously, pricking my ears, and for a moment forgetting my private troubles in the hope of a forthcoming anecdote.

"Ah! would not you like to know?" he says, playfully, but he does not explain: instead, he goes on: "Even granting that it is so, do you think it would be very manly to let a fine estate run to ruin, because one was too lazy to look after it? Do you think it would be quite honest—quite fair to those that will come after us?"

"Those that will come after us!" cry I, scornfully, making a face for the third and last time this morning. "And who are they, pray? Some sixteenth cousin of yours, I suppose?"

"Nancy," he says, gravely, but in a tone whose gentleness takes all harshness from the words, "you are talking nonsense, and you know as well as I do that you are!"

"And when," say I, in as lamentable a voice as King Darius sent down among the lions in search of Daniel—"how soon, I mean, are we to set off?"

"We!" he cries, a sudden light springing into his eyes, and an accent of keen pleasure into his voice. "Do you mean to say that you thought of coming too?"

"But would you like to come?" he asks, seizing my hands, and pressing them with such unconscious eagerness, that my wedding-ring makes a red print in its neighbor-finger.

O friends, I wish to Heaven that I had told a lie! It would have been, I am sure, one of the cases in which a lie would have been justifiable—nay, praiseworthy, too. But, standing there, under the truth of his eyes, I have to be true, too.

"Like!" say I, evasively, casting down my eyes, and fiddling uneasily with one of the buttons of his coat, "it is hardly a question of 'like,' is it? I do not imagine that you like it much yourself?—one cannot always be thinking of what one likes."

The pressure of his fingers on mine slackens; and, though, thanks to my wedding-ring, it was painful, I am sorry. After a minute:

"But you have not," say I, trying to speak in a tone of light and airy cheerfulness, "answered my question yet—how soon we must set off? You know what a woman always thinks of first—her clothes, and I must be seeing to my packing."

"The sooner the better," he answers, with a preoccupied look. "Not later than ten days hence!"

Again my jaw falls. He has altogether loosed my hands now, and resumed his walk. I sit down by the table, lean my elbows on it, and push my fingers through my hair in most dejected musing. Polly has been dressing himself; turning his head over his shoulder, and arranging his feathers with his aquiline nose. He has finished now, and has just given vent, in a matter-of-fact, unemotional voice, to an awful oath! There is the sound of brisk feet on the sunny gravel outside. Bobby's face looks in at the window—broad, sunburnt, and laughing.

"Well! what is up now?" cries he, catching a glimpse of my disconsolate attitude. "You look as if the fungi had disagreed with you!"

"Then appearances are deceitful," reply I, trying to be merry, "for they have not."

He has only glanced in upon us in passing: he is gone again now. I rebury my hands in my locks, which, instead of a highly-cultivated garden, I am rapidly making into a wilderness.

"I suppose," say I, in a tone which fitly matches the length of my face, "that Bobby will have got a ship before I come back; I hope they will not send him to any very unhealthy station—Hong-Kong, or the Gold Coast."

"And how long"—(still in the same wretched and resignedly melancholy voice)—"shall we have to stay there?"

A good long pause. My elbows are growing quite painful, from the length of time during which they have been digging into the hard marqueterie table, and my hair is as wild as a red Indian's. Ten days! ten little galloping days, and then seventeen long, slow, monstrous ones! Seventeen days at sea! seventeen days and seventeen nights, too—do not let us forget that—of that deadly nausea, of that unspeakable sinking of all one's inside to the very depths of creation—of the smell of boiling oil, and the hot, sick, throbbing of engines!

"I hope," say I, in a voice so small that I hardly recognize it for my own, "that I shall not be quite as ill all the way as I was crossing from Calais to Dover; and the steward," continue I, in miserable meditation, "kept telling me all the while what a fine passage we were having, too!"

Another pause. I am still thinking of the horrid theme; living over again my nearly-forgotten agonies.

"Do you remember," say I, presently, "hearing about that Lady Somebody—I forget her name—but she was the wife of one Governor-General of India, and she always suffered so much from sea-sickness that she thought she should suffer less in a sailing-vessel, and so returned from India in one, and just as she came in sight of the shores of England she died!"

As I reach this awful climax, I open my eyes very wide, and sink my voice to a tragic depth.

"The moral is—" says Sir Roger, stopping beside me, laying his hand on my chair back, and regarding me with a mixture of pain and diversion in his eyes, "stick to steam!"

CHAPTER XIX.

"Roger," says father, in that laboriously amiable voice in which he always addresses his son-in-law, "sorry to interrupt you, but could you come here for a minute—will not keep you long."

(How can he speak in that flippantly cheerful voice, with the prospect of seventeen days' sea before him?)

"It is here," say I, picking it up from the window-seat, and handing it to him with lugubrious solemnity.

As he reaches the door, following father, he turns and nods to me with a half-humorous smile.

He is gone, and I return to my former position, and my former occupation, only that now—the check of Sir Roger's presence being removed—I indulge in two or three good hearty groans. To think how the look of all things is changed since this morning!

As we came home through the fields singing, if any one had given me three wishes, I should have been puzzled what to ask—and now! All the good things I am going to lose march in gloomy procession before my mind. No house-warming! It will have to be put off till we come back, and, by the time that we come back, Bobby will almost certainly have been sent to some foreign station for three or four years. And who knows what may happen before he returns? Perhaps—for I am in the mood when all adversities seem antecedently probable—he will never come back. Perhaps never again shall I be the willing victim of his buffets, never again shall I buffet him in return.

And the sea! It is all very fine for Sir Roger to take it so easily, to laugh and make unfeeling jokes at my expense! He does not lie on the flat of his back, surrounded by the horrid paraphernalia of sea-sickness. He walks up and down, with his hands in his pockets, smoking a cigar, and talking to the captain. He cares nothing for the heaving planks. The taste of the salt air gives him an appetite. An appetite! Oh, prodigious! I must say I think he might have been a little more feeling, might have expressed himself a little more sympathetically.

By dint of thinking over Sir Roger's iniquities on this head, I gradually work myself up into such a state of righteous indignation and injury against him, that when, after a longish interval, the door again opens to readmit him, I affect neither to see nor hear him, nor be in any way conscious of his presence. Through the chinks of my fingers, dolorously spread over my face, I see that he has sat down on the other side of the table, just opposite me, and that he is smiling in the same unmirthful, gently sarcastic way, as he was when he left me.

"Nancy," he says, "I have been thinking what a pity it is that I have not a yacht! We might have taken our own time then, and done it enjoyably—made quite a pleasure-trip of it."

"Yes," he answers, a little sadly, "no two people look at any thing in quite the same way, do they?—not even husband and wife."

"Do you know," he says, leaning his arms and his crossed hands on the table between us, and steadfastly regarding me, "that I never saw you look miserable before, never? I did not even know that you could!"

"I am not miserable," I answer, rather ashamed of myself, "that is far too strong a word! Of course I am a little disappointed." Then I mumble off into an indistinctness, whence the nouns "House—warming," "Bobby," "Gold Coast," crop out audibly.

"After all," he says, still regarding me, and speaking kindly, yet a little coldly too, "you need not look so woebegone. They say second thoughts are best, do not they? Well, I have been thinking second thoughts, and—I have altered my mind."

"You are going to stay at home?" cry I, at the top of my voice, jumping up in an ecstasy, and beginning to clap my hands.

"No," he says, gently, "not quite that, as I explained to you before, that is impossible: but—do not be downcast—something nearly as good. I am going to leave you at home!"

To leave me at home! My first feeling is one of irrepressible relief. No sea! no steward! no courtesying ship! no swaying waves after all! Then comes a quick and strong revulsion, shame, mortification, and pain.

"To—leave—me—at home!" I repeat slowly, hardly yet grasping the idea, "to—go—without—me!—by yourself?"

"By myself," he answers, gently. "You see, it is no new thing to me. I have been by myself for forty-seven years."

"But you are not by yourself any longer," I cry, eagerly. "Why do you talk as if you were? Do you count me for nothing?"

"For nothing?" he answers, smiling quietly. "I am glad of an excuse to be rid of you for a bit—that is it!"

"But is that it?" cry I, excitedly, rising and running round to him. "If you are sure of that—if you will swear it to me—I will not say another word. I will hold my tongue, and try to bear as well as I can, your having grown tired of me so soon—but—" speaking more slowly, and hesitating, "if—if—it is that you fancied—you thought—you imagined—that I did not want to come with you—"

"My dear," he says, laughing not at all bitterly, but with a genuine amusement, "I should have been even less bright than I am, if I had not gathered that much."

I sink down on a chair, and cover my face with my hands. My attitude is the same as it was ten minutes ago, but oh, how different are my feelings! What bitter repentance, what acute self-contempt, invade my soul! As I so sit, I feel an arm round my waist.

"Nancy," says Sir Roger, "it was ill-naturedly said; do not fret about it; you were not in the least to blame. I should not like you half so much—should not think nearly so well of you, if you had been willing to give up all your own people, to throw them lightly over, all of a sudden, for a comparative stranger, treble your age, too"—(with a sigh)—"like me."

He generously ignores the selfish fear of sea-sickness, of personal suffering, which had occupied the fore-front of my mind.

"It will be much, much better, and a far more sensible plan for both of us," he continues, cheerfully. "Where would be the use of exposing you to the discomfort and misery of what you hate most on earth for no possible profit? I shall not be long away, shall be back almost before you realize that I am gone, and meanwhile I should be far happier thinking of you merry, and enjoying yourself with your brothers and sisters at Tempest, than I should be seeing you bored and suffering, with no one but me to amuse you—you know, dear—" (smiling pensively); "do not be angry with me, it was no fault of yours; but you did grow rather tired of me at Dresden."

"I did not! I did not!" cry I, bursting into a passion of tears, and asseverating all the more violently because I feel, with a sting of remorse, that there is a tiny grain of truth—not so large a one as he thinks, but still a grain in his accusations. "It seemed rather quiet at first—I had always been used to such a noisy house, and I missed the boys' chatter a little, perhaps; but indeed, INDEED, that was all!"

"You shall not leave me behind," say I, still weeping with stormy bitterness. "I will not be left behind! What business have you to go without me? Am I to be only a fair-weather wife to you? to go shares in all your pleasant things, and then—when any thing hard or disagreeable comes—to be left out. I tell you" (looking up at him with streaming eyes) "that I will not! I WILL NOT!"

"My darling!" he says, looking most thoroughly concerned, I do not fancy that crying women have formed a large part of his life-experience—"you misunderstand me! I will own to you, that five minutes ago I did you an injustice; but now I know, I am thoroughly convinced, that you would follow me without a murmur or a sulky look to the world's end—and" (laughing) "be frightfully sea-sick all the way; but" (kindly patting my heaving shoulder) "do you think that I want to be hampered with a little invalid? and, supposing that I took you with me, whom should I have to look after things at Tempest, and keep them straight for me against I come home?"

"I know what it is," I cry, passionately clinging round his neck, "you think I do not like you! I see it! twenty times a day, in a hundred things that you do and leave undone! but indeed, indeed, you never were more mistaken in all your life! I will own to you that I did not care very much about you at first. I thought you good, and kind, and excellent, but I was not fond of you; but now, every day, every hour that I live, I like you better! Ask Barbara, ask the boys if I do not! I like you ten thousand times better than I did the day I married you!"

"Like me!" he repeats a little dreamily, looking with a strong and bitter yearning into my eyes; then, seeing that I am going to asseverate, "for God's sake, child," he says, hastily, "do not tell me that you love me, for I know it is not true! you can no more help it than I can help caring for you in the idiotic, mad way, that I do! Perhaps, on some blessed, far-off day, you may be able to say so, and I to believe it, but not now!—not now!"

CHAPTER XX.

With feet as heavy and slowly-dragging as those of some unwieldy old person, with drooped figure, and stained and swollen face, I enter the school-room an hour later to tell my ill-news.

"Enter a young mourner!" says Algy, facetiously, in unkind allusion to the gloom of my appearance, which is perhaps heightened by the black-silk gown I wear.

"What is up?" cries Bobby, advancing toward me with an overpowering curiosity, not unmixed with admiration, legible on his burnt face; "what has summoned those glorious sunset tints into your eyes and nose?"

"Which of Turner's pictures," says Algy, putting up his hand in the shape of a spy-glass to one eye, and critically regarding me through it, "is she so like in coloring? the 'Founding of Carthage,' or 'The Fighting Temeraire?'"

"Shame! shame!" cries Bobby, in a mock hortatory tone, trying to swell himself out to the shape and bulk of our fat rector, and to speak in his wheezy tone, "that a young woman so richly dowered with the good things of this life; a young woman with a husband and a deer-park in possession, and a house-warming in prospect—"

"But I have not," interrupt I, speaking for the first time, and with a snuffliness of tone engendered by much crying.

"Have not a house-warming in prospect," reply I, with distinct malignity. A moment's silence. My bomb-shell has worked quite as much havoc as I expected.

"What do you mean?" cries Tou Tou, shrilly; "it was only last night that you were asking me for the Brat's address that you might invite him."

"And tell him to bring a judiciously-selected assortment of undergraduate friends with him," supplements Bobby, loudly.

"That throws a great deal of light on the matter, does it not?" says Algy, ironically.

"Nancy!" cries Bobby, seizing both my hands, and looking me in the face with an air of irritated determination, "if you do not this moment stop sighing like a windmill and tell us what is up, I will go to Sir Roger, hanged if I will not, and ask him what he means by making you cry yourself to a jelly!"

At this bold metaphor applied to my own appearance, the tears begin again to start to my eyes.

"Do not!" cry I, eagerly, catching at his wrists in detention, "it was not his fault! he could not help it; but" (mopping first one eye and then the other, and finishing by a dolorous blast on my nose) "but I am so disappointed, every thing is so changed, and I know I shall miss him so much!" I end with a break in my voice, and a long whimper.

"The ge-general!" reply I, indistinctly, from the recesses of a drenched pocket-handkerchief.

"But what is going to happen to him? where is he going to? I wish that you would be a little more intelligible," cry they all, impatiently.

"He is going to the West Indies, to Antigua," reply I, lifting my face and speaking with a slow dejection.

"Perhaps," says Bobby, in a loud aside to Tou Tou, "perhaps he has got another wife out there—a black one—and he thinks it is her turn now!"

Barbara says, "Hush!" and Tou Tou is beginning to embark on a long argument to prove that a man cannot have more than one wife at a time, when she is summarily hustled into silence, for I speak again.

"He has some property in the West Indies—I knew he had before—" (with a passing flash of pride in my superior information)—"I dare say you did not—and he has to go out there to look after it."

"By himself, worse luck!" reply I, despondently, reinterring my countenance in my pocket-handkerchief.

"And you decline to accompany him? Well, I think you are about right!" says Algy, rising, lounging over to the empty hearth, and looking at his face with a glance of serious fondness in the glass that hangs above the mantel-shelf.

"I do nothing of the kind!" cry I, indignantly, "I have not the chance! he will not take me!"

I am not looking at him, nor, indeed, in his direction at all; but I am aware that Bobby is giving Tou Tou a private and severe nudge, which means "Attend! here is confirmation of my theory for you!" and that the idea of the hypothetical black lady is again traversing his ingenuous mind.

"I wish you would mention it, Nancy! the suggestion would come best from you, would not it?"

"And you are to be left alone at Tempest? Is that the plan?" asks Algy, turning his eyes from his own face, and fixing them on the less interesting object of mine.

It may be my imagination, but I cannot help fancying that there is a tone of slight and repressed exultation in his voice; and also that a look of hope and bright expectation is passing from one to another of the faces round me. All but Barbara's! Barbara always understands.

"All alone?" cries Tou Tou, opening her ugly little eyes to their widest stretch. "Nobody but the servants in the house with you? Will not you be very much afraid of ghosts?"

"She need never be alone, unless she chooses," says Bobby, winking with dexterous slightness at the others; "there is the beauty of having three kind little brothers!"

"The moment you feel at all lonely," says Algy, emphasizing his remarks by benevolent but emphatic strokes with his flat hand on my shoulder, "send for us! one of us is sure to be handy! If it will be any comfort to Sir Roger, I shall be most happy to promise him that I will keep all his horses in exercise next winter!"

"I am sorrier than I was before," says Bobby, reflectively, "that the heavy rains have drowned so many of the young birds."

"O Nancy!" cries Tou Tou, ecstatically clasping her hands, "have a Christmas-tree!"

"And Sir Roger's not being at home will be a good excuse for not asking father," cries Algy, catching the prevailing excitement.

"I will not have one of you!" cry I, rising with a face pale, as I feel with anger—with flashing eyes and a trembling voice, "not one of you shall enter his doors, except Barbara!—I hate you all!—you are all g—g—glad that he is going, and I—I never was so sorry for any thing in my life before!"

I end in a passion of tears. There is a silence of consternation on the late so jubilant assembly.

remarks Bobby, presently, veiling his discomfiture in vulgarity, and launching into uncouth and low-lived rhyme:

CHAPTER XXI.

However, not all the hot tears in the world—not all the swelled noses and boiled-gooseberry eyes avail to alter the case. Not even all my righteous wrath against the boys profits—and I do keep Bobby at arms'-length for a day and a half. No one who does not know Bobby understands how difficult such a course of proceeding is; for he is one of those people who ignore the finer shades of displeasure. The more delicately dignified and civilly frosty one is to him, the more grossly familiar and hopelessly, obtusely friendly is he. I have made several more efforts to change Sir Roger's decision, but in vain. He makes the case more difficult by laying his refusal chiefly on his own convenience; dilating on the much greater speed and ease with which he will be able to transact his business, if alone, than if weighted by a woman, and a woman's paraphernalia, and also on the desirability of having in me a locum tenens for himself at Tempest. But, in my soul, I know that both these are hollow pretenses to lighten the weight on my conscience.

"But," say I, with discontented demurring, "you have been away often before! how did Tempest get on then?"

"Very middling, indeed! last time I was away the servants gave a ball in the new ballroom—so my friends told me afterward, and the time before, the butler took the housekeeper a driving-tour in my T.-cart. I should not have minded that much—but I suppose he was not a very good whip, and so he threw down one of my best horses, and broke his knees!"

"Well, they shall not give a ball!" say I, resolutely, "but"—(in a tone of melancholy helplessness)—"they may throw down all the horses, for any thing I can do to prevent them! A horse's knees would have to be very much broken before I should perceive that they were!"

"You must get Algy to help you," he says, kindly. "It is an ill wind that blows nobody good, is not it? Poor boy!"—(laughing)—"You must not expect him to be very keen about my speedy return."

We are at Tempest—Sir Roger and I. It has been his wish to establish me there before his departure; and now it is the gray of the evening before his setting off, and we are strolling through the still park. Vick is racing, with idiotic ardor, through the tall green bracken, after the mottled deer, yelping with shrill insanity, and vainly imagining that she is going to overtake them. The gray rabbits are scuttling across the grass rides in the pale light: as I see them popping in and out of their holes, I cannot help thinking of Bobby. Apparently, Sir Roger also is reminded of him.

"Nancy," he says, looking down at me with a smile of recollected entertainment, "have you forgiven Bobby yet for leaving you sitting on the wall? I remember, in the first blaze of your indignation, you vowed that never should he fire a gun in your preserves!—do you still stick to it, or have you forgiven him?"

"That I have not!" cry I, heartily. "None of them shall shoot any thing! Why should they? Every thing shall be kept for you against you come back!"

I have not considered this aspect of the question, so remain silent. We walk on without speaking for some moments. The deer, in lofty pity for Vick, have stopped to allow her to get nearer to them. With their fine noses in the air, and their proud necks compassionately turned toward her, they are waiting, while she pushes, panting and shrieking, through the stout fern-stems; then, leap cruelly away in airy bounds.

"By Christmas!" interrupt I, aghast, "one, two, three, four, five months—but you must!—you MUST!" clasping both hands on his arm.

"I hope I shall, certainly," replies he; "but one never knows what may happen! If I am not—"

"But you must," repeat I urgently, and apparently resolved that he shall never reach the end of his sentence; "if you are not—I warn you—you may not like it—I dare say you will not—but—I shall come to look for you!"

"In a sailing-vessel, like the governor-general's wife?" asks he with a smile.

And now he is gone! gone in the first freshness of the morning! This year, I seem fated to witness the childhood of many summer days. The carriage that bears him away is lost to sight—dwindled away to nothing among the park-trees. Five minutes ago, my arms were clinging with a tightness of a clasp that a bear might have admired round his neck. I was too choked with tears to say much, and kept repeating with the persistence of a guinea-fowl, but without the distinctness, "Come back! come back!"

"Good-by, my Nancy!" he says, holding me a little from him, that he may the better consider my face, "be quite—quite happy, while I am away—indeed, that will be the way to please me best, and be a little glad to see me when I come back!"

And now he is gone; and I am left standing at the hall-door with level hand shading my eyes from the red sun—with a smeared face—with the butler and two footmen respectfully regarding my affliction—(they do not like to disappear, till they have shut the door—I do not like to ask them to retire, and I do not like to lose the last glimpse) so there I remain—nineteen—a grass widow, and—ALONE! I shall not, however, be alone for long; for this evening Barbara is coming. Algy is to bring her, and to stay a few days on his way to Aldershott. All day long, I wander with restless aimlessness about the house, my big house—so empty, so orderly in its stateliness—so frightfully silent! Ah! the doll's house whose whole front came out at once was a better companion—much more friendly, and not half so oppressive. In almost every room, I cry profusely—disagreeable tears of shame and remorse and grief—only, O friends! I will tell you now, what I would not tell myself then, that the grief, though true, was not so great as either of the other feelings. I lunch in the great dining-room, with tall full-length Tempests eying me with constant placidity from the walls; with the butler and footman still trying respectfully to ignore my swelled nose and bunged-up eyes.

As evening draws on—evening that is to bring some voices, some sound of steps to me and my great dumb house—I revive a little. If it were Bobby that were coming, my mind would be weighted by the thought of the repression his spirits would need, but Algy's mirth is several shades less violent, and Barbara is never jarringly joyful. So I change my dress, bathe my face, make my maid retwist my hair, and prepare to be chastenedly and moderately glad to see them.

At least there will be some one to occupy two more of these numberless chairs; two more for the stolid family portraits to eye; two voices, nay three, for I shall speak then, to drown the sounding silence.

It is time they should be here. The carriage went to the station more than an hour ago. I sit down in a window-seat that commands the park, and look along the drive by which the general went this morning.

Dear Roger! I will practise calling him "Roger" when I am by myself, and then perhaps I may be able to address him by it when he comes home. I will say, "How are you, Roger?"

I have fallen into a pleasant reverie, with my head leaned against the curtain, in which I see myself giving glib utterance to this formula, as I stand in a blue gown—Roger likes me in blue—and a blue cap—I look older in a cap—while he precipitates himself madly—

My reverie breaks off. Some one has entered, and is standing by me. It is a footman, with a telegram on a salver. Albeit I know the trivial causes for which people employ the telegraph-wires nowadays, I never can get over my primal deadly fear of those yellow envelopes, that seem emblems and messengers of battle, murder, and sudden death. As I tear it open, a hundred horrible impossible possibilities flash across my brain. Algy and Barbara have both been killed in a railway-accident, and have telegraphed to tell me so; the same fate has happened to Roger, and he has adopted the same course.

"Algernon Grey to Lady Tempest.

"Cannot come: not allowed. He has turned nasty."

The paper drops into my lap, as I draw a long breath of mingled relief and disappointment. A whole long evening—long night of this solitude before me! perhaps much more, for they do not even say that they will come to-morrow! I must utter my disappointment to somebody, even if it is only the footman.

"They are not coming!" say I, plaintively; then, recollecting and explaining myself, "I mean, they need not send in dinner! I will not have any!" I cannot stand another repast—three times longer than the last too—for one can abridge luncheon, seated in lorn dignity between the staring dead on the walls, and the obsequious living.

As soon as the man is fairly out of the room, I cry again. Yes, though my hair is readjusted, though I spent more than a quarter of an hour in bathing my eyes, and restoring some semblance of white to their lids, though I had resolved—and without much difficulty, too, hitherto—to be dry-eyed for the rest of the evening. What does it matter what color my eyelids are? what size my nose is? or how beblubbered my cheeks? Not a soul will see them, except my maid, and I am naturally indifferent as to the effect I produce upon her. I look at the clock on the mantel-piece. It has stopped—ornamental clocks mostly do—but even this trivial circumstance adds to my affliction. I instantly take out my pocket-handkerchief, and begin to cry again. Then I look at my watch; a quarter-past seven only—and my watch always gains! Two hours and three-quarters before I can, with the smallest semblance of decency, go to bed. Meanwhile I am hungry. Though my husband has deserted me, though my brother and sister have failed me, my appetite has done neither.

Faithful friend! never yet was it known to quit me, and here it is! I decide to have tea in my own boudoir. Tea is informal, and one need not be waited on at it. When it comes, I try to dawdle over it as much as possible, to sip my tea with labored slowness, and bite each mouthful with conscientious care. When I have finished, I think with satisfaction that I cannot have occupied less than half an hour. Again I consult my watch. Exactly twelve minutes. It is now five minutes to eight; two hours and five minutes more! I sigh loudly, and putting on my hat stroll out into the wide and silent garden. It is as yet unfamiliar to me. I do not know where half the walks lead. I have no favorite haunts, no chosen spot of solitude and greenery, where old and pleasant thoughts meet me. Many such have I at home, but none here. I wander objectlessly, pleasurelessly about with Vick—apparently sharing my depression—trotting subduedly, with tail half-mast high, at my heels, and at length sit down on a bench under a mulberry-tree. The scentless flame of the geraniums and calceolarias fills, without satisfying my eyes; the gnats' officious hum offends my ears; and thoughts in comparison of which the calceolarias are sweet and the gnats melodious, occupy my mind.

Sir Roger will most likely be drowned on his voyage out. Bobby will almost certainly be sent to Hong-Kong, and, as a natural consequence, die of a putrid fever. Algy has just entered the army; there can be no two opinions as to our going to war immediately with either Russia or America. Algy will probably be among the first to fall, and will die, grasping his colors, and shouting "Victory!" or "Westminster Abbey!" or perhaps both.

I have not yet decided what he shall be shouting, when the current of my thoughts is turned by seeing some one—thank Heaven, not a footman, this time!—advancing across the sward toward me. Surely I know the nonchalant lounge of that walk—the lazy self-consciousness of that gait, though, when last I saw it, it was not on dewy English turf, but on the baking flags of a foreign town. It is Mr. Musgrave. Until this moment I have ungratefully forgotten his existence, and all the interesting facts he told me connected with his existence—how his lodge faces ours—how he has no father nor mother, and lives by himself at an abbey. Alas! in this latter particular, can I not feel for him? Am I not living by myself at a hall?

Vick recognizes him at about the same moment as I do. Having first sprung at him with that volubility of small but hostile yaps, with which she strikes terror into the hearts of tramps, she has now—having smelt him to be not only respectable, but an acquaintance—changed her behavior to a little servile whine and a series of high jumps at his hand.

"It is you, is it?" cry I, springing up and running to meet him with an elate sensation of company and sociability; "I had quite forgotten that you lived near here. I'm so glad!"

At my happy remark as to having been hitherto oblivious of his existence, his face falls in the old lowering way I remember so well, and that brings back to me so forcibly the Prager Strasse, the Zwinger, the even sunshine, that favored my honey-moon; but at the heartily-expressed joy at seeing him, with which I conclude, he cheers up again. If he had known that I was in so reduced a state that I should have enjoyed a colloquy with a chimney-sweep, and not despised exchanging opinions with a dustman, he would not have thought my admission worth much.

"So you have come at last," he says, holding my hand, and looking at me with those long dark eyes that I would swear were black had not a conscientious and thorough daylight scrutiny of them assured me long ago that they were hazel.

"Yes," say I, cheerfully; "I told you you would catch sight of us, sooner or later, if you waited long enough."

"No," say I; "we did not give them the chance. But how do you know? Were you peeping out of your lodge? If I had remembered that you lived there, I would have been on the lookout for you."

"You had, of course, entirely forgotten so insignificant a fact?" he says, with a tone of pique.

That happy one! how well I recollect it! I feel quite fondly toward it; it reminds me so strongly of the Linkesches Bad, of the brisk band, and of Roger smoking and smiling at me with his gray eyes across our Mai-trank.

"Yes," I say, contritely, "I am ashamed to say I had—quite; but you see I have had a good many things to think of lately."

At this point it strikes me that he must have forgotten that he has my hand, so I quietly, and without offense, resume it.

"Yes," say I, lachrymosely; "is not it dreadful? I never was so miserable in my life; I do not think I ever was by myself for a whole night before, and"—(lowering my voice to a nervous whisper)—"they tell me there is a ghost somewhere about. Did you ever hear of it?—and the furniture gives such cracks!"

"And—he has gone by himself?" he continues, still harping on the same string, as if unable to leave it.

"Yes," reply I, laconically, hanging my head, for this is a topic on which I feel always guilty, and never diffuse.

"H'm!" he says, ruminatingly, and as if addressing the remark more to himself than to me. "I suppose it is difficult to get out of old habits, and into new ones, all of a sudden."

"I do not know what you mean by old habits and new habits," cry I, angrily; "if you think he did not want me to go with him, you are very much mistaken; he would have much rather that I had."

"But you," looking at me penetratingly, and speaking with a sort of alacrity, "you did not see it? I remember of old" (with a smile) "your abhorrence of the sea."

"You are wrong again," say I, reddening, and still speaking with some heat, "I wished to go—I begged him to take me. However sick I had been, I should have liked it better than being left moping here, without a soul to speak to!"

"I confess myself puzzled; if you were dying to go, and he were dying to take you, how comes it that you are sitting at the present moment on this bench?"

"I see," say I, tartly, "that you have still your old trick of asking questions. I wish that you would try to get the better of it; it is very disadvantageous to you, and very trying to other people!"

The trees that surround the garden are slowly darkening. The shadows that intervene between the round masses of the sycamore-leaves deepen, deepen. A bat flitters dumbly by. Vick, to whose faith all things seem possible, runs sharply barking and racing after it. We both laugh at the fruitlessness of her undertaking, and the joint merriment restores suavity to me, and assurance to him.

"Not? well, then—I am really afraid this is a question again, but I cannot help it. If you will not volunteer information, I must ask for it—who is to be your companion?"

"I suppose they will take turns," say I, relapsing into dejection, as I think of the precarious nature of the society on which I depend; "sometimes one, sometimes another, whichever can get away best—they will take turns."

"And who is to have the first turn?" he asks, leaning back in the corner of the seat, so as to have a fuller view of my lamentable profile; "when is the first installment of consolatory relatives to arrive?"

"Algy and Barbara were to have come to-day," reply I, feeling a covert resentment against something of faintly gibing in his tone, but being conscious that it is not perceptible enough to justify another snub, even if I had one ready, which I have not.

"Now is not that a silly question?" cry I, tartly, venting the crossness born of my desolation on the only person within reach; "if they had, should I be sitting moping here with nobody but Vick to talk to?"

"You forget me! may I not run in couples even with a dog?" he asks, with a little bitter laugh.

"I did not forget you," reply I, coolly; "but you do not affect the question one way or another—you will be gone directly and—when you are—"

"Thank you for the hint," he cries springing up, picking up his little stick off the grass and flushing.

"You are not going?" cry I, eagerly, laying my hand on his coat-sleeve, "do not! why should you? there is no hurry. Let me have some one to help me to keep the ghosts at bay as long as I can!" then, with a dim consciousness of having said something rather odd, I add, reddening, "I shall be going in directly, and you may go then."

He reseats himself. A tiny air is ruffling the flower-beds, giving a separate soft good-night to each bloom.

"Very brutal of Algy and Barbara, then!" he says, more in the way of a reflection than a remark.

"Very brutal of father, you should say!" reply I, roused by the thought of my parent to a fresh attack of active and lively resentment.

"He would not let them come!" say I, explanatorily, "for what reason? for none—he never has any reasons, or if he has, he does not give them. I sometimes think" (laughing maliciously) "that you will not be unlike him, when you grow old and gouty."

"You have no father, have you?" continue I, presently; "no, I remember your telling me so at the Linkesches Bad. Well" (laughing again, with a certain grim humor), "I would not fret about it too much, if I were you—it is a relationship that has its disadvantages."

"On whatever other heads I may quarrel with Providence, at least no one can accuse me of ever murmuring at its decrees in this respect."

We have risen. The darkness creeps on apace, warmly, without damp or chillness; but still, on it comes! I have to face the prospect of my great and gloomy house all through the lagging hours of the long black night!

"Not certainly, at all!" reply I, with an energetic despondence in my voice; "quite the contrary! most likely not! most likely not the day after either, nor the day after that—"

"And if they do not" (with an accent of sincere compassion), "what will you do?"

"What I have done to-day, I suppose," I answer dejectedly; "cry till my cheeks are sore! You may not believe me" (passing my bare fingers lightly over them as I speak), "but they feel quite raw. I wonder" (with a little dismal laugh) "why tears were made salt!—they would not blister one half so much if they were fresh water."

He has drawn a pace or two nearer to me. In this light one has to look closely at any object that one wishes specially and narrowly to observe; and I myself have pointed out the peculiarities of my countenance to him, so I cannot complain if he scrutinizes me with a lengthy attention.

"It is going to be such a dark night!" I say, with a slight shiver; "and if the wind gets up, I know that I shall lie awake all night, thinking that the gen—that Roger is drowned! Do you not think" (looking round apprehensively) "that it is rising already? See how those boughs are waving!"

We both look for an instant at the silent flower-beds, at the sombre bulk of the house.

"But they will!" cry I, petulantly; "they must! I cannot do without them! I believe some people do not mind being alone—not even in the evenings, when the furniture cracks and the door-handles rattle. I dare say you do not; but I hate my own company; I have never been used to it. I have always been used to a great deal of noise—too much, I have sometimes thought, but I am sure that I never shall think so again!"

"You have said that three times," I cry, irritably. "You seem to take a pleasure in saying it. If they do not—well, what?"

"I will not say what I was going to say," he answers, shortly. "I shall only get my nose bitten off if I do."

We walk in silence toward the house, the wet grass is making my long gown drenched and flabby. We have reached the garden-door whence I issued, and by which I shall return.

"You must go now, I suppose," say I, reluctantly. "You will be by yourself too, will not you? Tell me" (speaking with lowered confidential tone), "do your chairs and tables ever make odd noises?"

"You might as well tell me before you go what the remark that I quenched was? One always longs to hear the things that people are going to say, and do not! Have no fear! your nose is quite safe!"

"It is nothing much," he answers, with self-conscious stiffness, looking down and poking about the little dark pebbles with his cane; "nothing that you would care about."

"Care about!" echo I, leaning my back against the dusk house-wall, and staring up at the sombre purple of the sky. "Well, no! I dare say not! What should I care to hear now? I am sure I should be puzzled to say! But, as I have been so near it, I may as well be told."

"As you will!" he answers, with an air of affected carelessness. "It is only that, if they do not come to-morrow—"

"If you wish—if you like—if it would be any comfort to you—I shall be happy—I mean I shall be very glad to come up again about the same time to-morrow evening."

"Will you?" (eagerly, with a great accession of exhilaration in my voice). "Are you serious? I shall be so much obliged if you will, but—"

"It is impossible that any one can say any thing," he interrupts, hastily. "There could be no harm in it!"

"Harm!" repeat I, laughing. "Well, hardly! I cannot fancy a more innocent amusement."

Though my speech is in agreement with his own, the coincidence does not seem to gratify him.

"Did I?" answer I, again throwing back my head, and looking upward, as if trying to trace my last preposition among the clouds; "but—but—where could I have put a 'but'?—oh, I know! but you will most likely forget! Do not!" I continue, bringing down my eyes again, and speaking in a coaxing tone. "If you do, it will be play to you, but death to me; the thought of it will keep me up all the day!"

"Will it?" in a tone of elated eagerness. "You are not gibing, I suppose? it does not sound like your gibing voice!"

"Not it!" reply I, gloomily. "My gibing voice is packed away at the bottom of my imperial. I do not think it has been out since we left Dresden. Well, good-night! What do you want to shake hands again for? We have done that twice already. You are like the man who, the moment he had finished reading prayers to his family, began them all over again. Mind you do not forget! and" (laughing) "if you cannot come yourself, send some one else! any one will do—I am not particular, but I must have some one to speak to!"

Almost before my speech is finished, Frank is out of sight. With such rapid suddenness has he disappeared round the house-corner. I stand for a moment, marveling a little at his hurry. Five minutes ago he seemed willing enough to dawdle on till midnight. Then I go in, and forget his existence.

CHAPTER XXII.

Suppose that in all this world, during all its ages, there never was a case of a person being always in an ill-humor. I believe that even Xantippe had her lucid intervals of amiability, during which she fondled her Socrates. At all events, father has. On the day after my disappointment, one such interval occurs. He relents, allows Algy and Barbara to have the carriage, and sends them off to Tempest.

Either Mr. Musgrave becomes aware of this fact, or, as I had anticipated, he forgets his promise, for he never appears, and I do not see him again till Sunday. By Sunday my cheeks are no longer raw; the furniture has stopped cracking—seeing that no one paid any attention to it, it wisely left off—and the ghosts await a fitter opportunity to pounce.

I have heard from Sir Roger—a cheerful note, dated Southampton. If he is cheerful, I may surely allow myself to be so too. I therefore no longer compunctiously strangle any stray smiles that visit my countenance. I have taken several drives with Barbara in my new pony-carriage—it is a curious sensation being able to order it without being subject to fathers veto—and we have skirted our own park, and have peeped through his close wooden palings at Mr. Musgrave's, have strained our eyes and stretched our necks to catch a glimpse of his old gray house, nestling low down among its elms. (Was there ever an abbey that did not live in a hollow?) With bated breath, lest the groom behind should overhear me, I have slightly sketched to Barbara the outline of an idea for establishing her in that weather-worn old pile—an idea which I think was born in my mind as long ago as the first evening that I saw its owner at the Linkesches Bad, and heard that he had an abbey, and that it was over against my future home.

Barbara does not altogether deny the desirability of the arrangement; she is not, however, so sanguine as I as to its feasibility, and she positively declines to consent to enter actively into it until she has seen him. This will be on Sunday. To Sunday, therefore, I look forward with pious haste.

Well, it is Sunday now—the Sunday of my first appearance as a bride at Tempest church. A bride without her bridegroom! A pang of mortification and pain shoots through me, as this thought traverses my soul. I look at myself dissatisfiedly in the glass. Alas! I am no credit to his taste. If, for this once. I could but look taller, personabler, older!

It is a sultry day, without wind or freshness, and with a great deal of sun; but in spite of this, I put on a silk gown, rich and heavy, as looking more married than the cobweb muslins in which I have hitherto met the summer heat. On my head I place a sedately feathered bonnet, which would not have misbecome mother. I meet Algy and Barbara in my boudoir. They are already dressed. I examine Barbara with critical care, and with a discontented eye, though to a stranger her appearance would seem likely to inspire any feeling rather than dissatisfaction, for she looks as clean and fair and chastely sweet as ever maiden did. Ben Jonson must have known some one like her when he wrote:

"Have you seen but a bright lily grow
Before rude hands have touched it?
Have you marked but the fall of the snow
Before the soil hath smutched it?
Have you felt the wool of the beaver
Or swan's-down ever?
Or have smelled of the bud of the brier,
Or the nard in the fire?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
Oh so white, oh so soft, oh so sweet is she?"

But all the same, having a bonnet on, she is distinctly less like Palma Vecchio's St. Catherine, to which in my talk with Frank I compared her, than she was bareheaded this morning at breakfast. Who in the annals of history ever heard of a saint in a bonnet?

"I wish that people might be allowed to go to church without their bonnets these hot Sundays," I say, grumblingly. "You especially, Barbara."

"For Heaven's sake," says Algy, gravely, putting back his shoulders and throwing out his chest, as he draws on a pair of exact gray gloves, "do not let us make ourselves to stink in the nostrils of the inhabitants by any eccentricities of conduct, on this our first introduction to them. If we consulted our own comfort, there is no doubt that we should reduce our toilets by a good many more articles than a bonnet—in fact—" (with an air of reflection), "I shudder to think where we should stop!"

We are in church now. I have run the gantlet of the observation of all the parishioners, and have been unable to look calmly unaware of it; on the contrary, have grown consciously rosy red, and have walked over hastily between the open sittings. But now I have reached the shelter of our own seat, near the top of the church, with all the gay bonnets behind me, and only the pulpit, the spread-eagle reading-desk, and the gaudy stained window in front. As soon as I am established—almost sooner, perhaps—I turn my eyes in search of Mr. Musgrave. I know perfectly where to look for him, as he drew a plan of Tempest church and the relative position of our sittings, with the point of his stick on the gravel in the gardens close to the Zwinger at Dresden, while we sat under the trees by the little pool, feeding the pert sparrows and the intimate cock-chaffinch that resort thither. He is not there!

Barbara may be crowned with any abomination, in the way of a bonnet, that ever entered into the grotesque imagination of a milliner to conceive—coal-scuttle, cottage, spoon—for all that it matters. The organ strikes up, a file of chorister-boys in dirty surplices—Tempest is a more pretentious church than ours—and a brace of clergy enter. All through the Confession I gape about with vacant inattention—at the grimy whiteness of the choir; at the back of the organist's head; at the parson, a mealy-mouthed fledgling, who, with his finger on his place in the prayer to prevent his losing it, is taking a stealthy inventory of my charms.

Suddenly I hear the door, which has been for some time silent, creak again in opening. Footsteps sound along the aisle. I look up. Yes, it is he! walking as quickly and noiselessly as he can, and looking rather ashamed of himself, while patches of red, blue, and golden light, from the east window, dance on his Sunday coat and on the smooth darkness of his hair. I glance at Barbara, to give her notice of the approach of her destiny, but my glance is lost. Barbara's stooped head is hidden by her hands, and her pure thoughts are away with God. As a pis aller, I look at Algy. No absorption in prayer on his part baffles me. He is leaning his elbow on his knee, and wearily biting the top of his prayer-book. He returns my look by another, which, though wordless, is eloquent. It says, in raised eyebrow and drooped mouth, "Is that all? I do not think much of him?"

The church is full and hot. The windows are open, indeed, but only the infinitesimally small chink that church-windows ever do open. The pew-opener sedulously closes the great door after every fresh entrance. I kneel simmering through the Litany. Never before did it seem so long! Never did the chanted, "We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!" appear so endlessly numerous.

Under cover of my arched hands, shading my eyes, I peep at one after another of the family groups. Most of them are behind me indeed, but there are still a good many that I can get a view of sideways. Among these, the one that oftenest engages my notice is a small white woman, evidently a lady—and, at the moment I first catch sight of her, with closed eyes and drawn-in nostrils, inhaling smelling-salts, as if to her, too, church was up-hill work this morning—in a little seat by herself. At the other pews one glance a piece satisfies me, but, having looked at her once, I look again. I could not tell you why I do it. There is nothing very remarkable about her in the matter of either youth or beauty, and yet I look.

The service is ended at length, but eagerly as I long for the fresh air, we are—whether to mark our own dignity, or to avoid further scrutiny on the part of our fellow-worshipers—almost the last to issue from the church. At the porch we find Mr. Musgrave waiting. A sort of mauvaise honte and a guilty conscience combine to disable me from promptly introducing him to my people, and before I recover my presence of mind, Algy has walked on with Barbara, and I am left to follow with Frank.

He does not seem in one of his most sunshiny humors, but perhaps the long morning service, so trying in its present arrangement of lengthy prayers, praises, and preaching, to a restless and irritable temper, is to blame for that.

"I suppose," he says, speaking rather stiffly, "that I must congratulate you on the arrival of the first detachment."

"Of your family. I understood you to say that there were to be relays of them during all Sir Roger's absence."

"It is to be hoped so, I am sure," I say, devoutly; "especially" (looking up at him with mock reproach) "considering the way in which my friends neglect me. You never came, after all! No!" (seeing the utter unsmilingness of his expression, and speaking hastily), "I am not serious; I am only joking! No doubt you heard that they had come, and thought that you would be in the way. But, indeed you would not. We had no secrets to talk; we should not have minded you a bit."

"I did hear that they had arrived," he answers, still speaking ungraciously, "but even if I had not, I should not have come!"

Again I look up at him, this time in honest astonishment, awaiting the solution of his enigma.

"There is no particular use in making one's self cheap, is there?" he says, with a bitter little laugh. "What is the use of going to a place where you are told that any one else will do as well?"

A pause. I walk along in silent wonderment. So he actually was happy again! We have left the church-yard. We are in the road, between the dusty quicks of the hedgerows. The carriages bowl past us, whirling clouds of dust down our throats. One is trotting by now, a victoria and pair of grays, and in it, leaning restfully back, and holding up her parasol, is the lady I noticed in church. Musgrave knows her apparently. At least, he takes off his hat.

"Who is she?" I say, with a slightly aroused interest. "I was wondering in church. I suppose she is delicate, as she sat down through the psalms."

At the moment I address him, Mr. Musgrave is battling angrily with an angrier wasp, but no sooner has he heard my question than he ceases his warfare, and allows it to buzz within half an inch of his nose, as he turns his hazel eyes, full of astonished inquiry, upon me.

"You do not say so!" reply I, ironically. "I am sure I am very glad to hear it, but I am not very much wiser than I was before."

"Is it possible," he says, looking rather nettled at my tone, and lowering his voice a little, as if anxious to confine the question to me alone—a needless precaution, as there is no one else within hearing—"that you have never heard of her?"

"Never!" reply I, in some surprise; "why should I?—has she ever done any thing very remarkable?"

The victoria is quite out of sight now—quite out of sight the delicately poised head, the dove-colored parasol.

"You are joking, of course," says Frank, presently, turning toward me, and still speaking in that needlessly lowered key. "It is so long since I have seen you, that I have got out of the habit of remembering that you never speak seriously; but, of course, you have heard—I mean Sir Roger has mentioned her to you!"

"He has not!" reply I, speaking sharply, and raising my voice a little. "Neither has he mentioned any of the other neighbors to me! He had not time." No rejoinder. "Most likely," continue I, speaking with quick heat, for something in his manner galls me, "he did not recollect her existence."

He is looking down at the white dust which is defiling his patent-leather boots, and smiling slightly.

"How do you know—what reason have you for thinking that he was aware that there was such a person?" I ask, with injudicious eagerness.

"I have no reason—I think nothing," he answers, coldly, with an air of ostentatious reserve.

"Are those two"—(slightly indicating by a faint nod the figures in front of us)—"the two you expected?—Are these—what are their names?—Algy and Barbara?"

"Yes," say I, smiling, with recovered equanimity; "Algy and Barbara." A little pause. "You can judge for yourself now," say I, laughing rather nervously, "whether I spoke truth—whether Barbara is as like the St. Catherine as I told you." For a moment he does not answer. "Of course," I say, rather crestfallen, "the bonnet makes a difference; the likeness is much more striking when it is off."

"The St. Catherine!" he repeats, with a puzzled air, "what St. Catherine? I am afraid you will think me very stupid, but I really am quite at sea."

"Do you mean to say," cry I, reddening with mortification, "that you forget—that you do not remember that St. Catherine of Palma Vecchio's in the Dresden Gallery that I always pointed out to you as having such a look of Barbara? Well, you have a short memory!"

"Have I?" he answers, dryly; "perhaps for some things; for others, I fancy that mine is a good deal longer than yours."

"It might easily be that," I answer, recovering from my temporary annoyance and laughing; "I suppose you mean for books and dates, and things of that kind. Well, you may easily beat me there. The landing of William the Conqueror, and the battle of Waterloo, were the only two dates I ever succeeded in mastering, and that was only after the struggle of years."

"Dates!" he says, impatiently, "pshaw! I was not thinking of them! I was thinking of Dresden!"

"Are you so sure that you could beat me there?" ask I, thoughtfully; "I do not know about that! I think I could stand a pretty stiff examination; but perhaps you are talking of the pictures and the names of the artists. Ah, yes! there you are right; with me they go in at one ear, and out at another. Only the other day I was racking my brain to think of the name of the man that painted the other Magdalen—not Guido's—I was telling Algy about it. Bah! what is it? I know it as well as my own."

"Battoni! oh, yes! thanks—of course! so it is!—Algy" (raising my voice a little)—"Battoni!"

"Well, what about him?" replies Algy, turning his head, but not showing much inclination to slacken his speed or to join Frank and me.

"The Magdalen man—you know—I mean the man that painted the Magdalen, and whose name I could not recollect last night, Algy. Barbara! how fast you are walking!" (speaking rather reproachfully)—"stop a moment! I want to introduce you to Mr. Musgrave."

"Surely," think I, glancing at Barbara's face, slightly flushed by the heat, and still gently grave with the sobriety of expression left by devotion, "he must see the likeness now!" To insure his having the chance of telling her that he does, I fall behind with Algy.

CHAPTER XXIII.

Claret cup has washed the dust from our throats; cold lamb and mayonnaise have restored the force of body and equanimity of mind which the exhausted air and long-drawn Gregorian chants of Tempest Church destroyed. Frank is lunching with us. He had accompanied us to our own gates, and had then made a feint of leaving, but I had pressed him, with an eagerness proportioned to the seriousness of my design upon him, to accompany us, and he had yielded with a willing ease.

I cannot help thinking that Algy does not look altogether pleased with the arrangement, but after all, it is my house, and not Algy's. It is the first time that I have entertained a guest since the far-off childish birthdays, when the neighbors' little boys and girls used to be gathered together to drink tea out of the doll's tea service. In the afternoon, we all walk to church again, and in the same order. Barbara and Algy in front, Frank and I behind. I had planned differently, but Algy is obtuse, Barbara will come into the manœuvres, and Frank seems simply indifferent. So it happens, that all through the park, and up the bit of dusty white road we are out of ear-shot of the other two.

"A sky worthy of Dresden!" says Mr. Musgrave, throwing back his head and looking up at the pale blue sultriness above our heads—the waveless, stormless ether sea—as we pace along, with the church-bells' measured ding-dong in our ears, and the cool ripe grasses about our feet.

"Dear Dresden!" say I, pensively, with a sigh of mixed regret and remorse, as I look back on the sunshiny hours that at the time I thought so long, in that fair, white foreign town.

"Dear Groosegarten!" cry I, thinking of the long pottering stroll that Roger and I had taken one evening up and down its green alleys, and that then I had found so tedious.

"Dear Weisserhirsch!" say I, half sadly. "Dear white acacias! dear drives under the acacias!"

"Drives under the acacias!" echoes Frank, dropping his accent of sentimentalism, and speaking rather sharply. "We never had any drives under the acacias! We never had any drives at all, that I recollect!"

"You had not, I dare say," reply I, carelessly, "but we had. They are the things that I look back at with the greatest pleasure of any thing that happened there!"

Frank does not apostrophize as "dear" any other public resort; indeed, he turns away his head, and we walk on without uttering a word for a few moments.

"By-the-by," say I, with a labored and not altogether successful attempt at appearing to speak with suddenness and want of premeditation, "what did you mean this morning, about that la—about Mrs. Huntley?"

"I meant nothing," he answers, but the faint quiver of a smile about his mouth contradicts his words.

"That is not true!" reply I, with impatient brusqueness; "why were you surprised at my not having heard of her?"

"What is the use of so many falsehoods?" cry I, indignantly; "at least I would choose some better time than when I was going to church for telling them. What reason have you for supposing that—that Roger knows more about her than I—than Barbara do?"

"How persistent you are!" he says, with that same peculiar smile—not latent now, but developed—curbing his lips and lightening in his eyes. "There is no baffling you! Since you dislike falsehoods, I will tell you no more. I will own to you that I made a slip of the tongue; I took it for granted that you had been told a certain little history, which it seems you have not been told."

The blood rushes headlong to my face. It feels as if every drop in my body were throbbing and tingling in my cheeks, but I look back at him hardily.

More silence. Swish through the buttercups and the yellow rattle; a lark, miles above our heads, singing the music he has overheard in heaven. Frank does not seem inclined to speak again.

"Your story is not true," say I, presently, laughing uncomfortably, and unable to do the one wise thing in my reach, and leave the subject alone—"but untrue stories are often amusing, more amusing than the true ones. You may tell yours, if you like."

A few steps more. How quickly we are getting through the park! We shall reach the church, and I shall not have heard. I shall sit and stand and kneel all through the service with the pain of that gnawing curiosity—that hateful new vague jealousy aching at my heart.

"I hate your hints! I hate your innuendoes!" I say, passionately. "I have always lived with people who spoke their thoughts straight out! Tell me this moment! I will not move a step from this spot till you do."

"I have nothing worth speaking of to tell," he answers, slightly. "It is only that never having had a wife myself, I have taken an outsider's view; I have taken it for granted that when two people marry each other they make a clean breast of their past history—make a mutual confession of their former—"

"But supposing," cry I, eagerly, "that they have nothing to tell, nothing to confess—"

"Likely or not," cry I, excitedly, "it was true in my case. If you had put me on the rack, I could have confessed nothing!"

"I do not see the analogy," he answers, coldly; "you are—what did you tell me? nineteen?—It is to be supposed"—(with a rather unlovely smile)—"that your history is yet to come; and he is—forty-seven! We shall be late for church!"—with a glance at Algy's and Barbara's quickly diminishing figures.

"I do not care whether we are late or not!" cry I, vehemently, and stamping on the daisy-heads as I speak. "I will not stir until you tell me."

"There is really no need for such excitement!" returns he with a cold smile; "since you will have it, it is only that rumor—and you know what a liar rumor is—says that once, some years ago, they were engaged to marry each other."

"And why did not they?" speaking with breathless panting, and forgetting my stout asseveration that the whole tale is a lie.

"Because—mind, I vouch for nothing, I am only quoting rumor again—because—she threw him over."

"You are surprised!" he says, quickly, and with what sounds to me like a slightly annoyed inflection of voice; "it does seem incredible, does not it? But at that time, you see, he had not all the desirables—not quite the pull over other men that he has now; his brother was not dead or likely to die, and he was only General Tempest, with nothing much besides his pay."

"Threw—him—over!" repeat I, slowly, as if unable yet to grasp the sense of the phrase.

"We shall certainly be late; the last bell is beginning," says Frank, impatiently.

I move slowly on. We have reached the turnstile that gives issue from the park to the road. The smart farmers' wives, the rosy farmers' daughters, are pacing along through the powdery dust toward the church-gate.

"A widow indeed, and desolate, eh? No! I believe she has a husband somewhere about, but she keeps him well out of sight—away in the colonies. He is there now, I fancy."

"And why is not she with him?" cry I, indignantly; but the moment that the words are out of my mouth, I hang my head. Might not she ask the same question with regard to me?

CHAPTER XXIV.

"More callers," say I, hearing the sound of wheels, and running to the window; "I thought we must have exhausted the neighborhood yesterday and the day before!" I add, sighing.

"Whoever they are," says Barbara, anxiously, lifting her head from the work over which it is bent, "mind you do not ask after their relations! Think of the man whose wife you inquired after, and found that she had run away with his groom not a month before!"

"That certainly was one of my unlucky things," answer I, gravely; then, beginning to laugh—"and I was so determined to know what had become of her, too."

I am still looking out. It is a soft, smoke-colored day; half an hour ago, there was a shower—each drop a separate loud patter on the sycamore-leaves—but now it is fair again. A victoria is coming briskly up the drive; servants in dark liveries; a smoke-colored parasol that matches the day.

"Shall I ring, and say 'not at home?'" asks Barbara, stretching out her hand toward the bell.

"No, no!" cry I, hurriedly, in an altered voice, for the parasol has moved a little aside, and I have seen the face beneath.

In two minutes the butler enters and announces "Mrs. Huntley," and the "plain woman—not very young—about thirty—who cannot be very strong, as she sat down through the Psalms," enters.

At first she seems uncertain which to greet as bride and hostess; indeed, I can see that her earliest impulse is to turn from the small insignificance in silk, to the tall little loveliness in cotton, and as I perceive it, a little arrow—not of jealousy, for, thank God, I never was jealous of our Barbara—never—but of pain at my so palpable inferiority, shoots through all my being. But Barbara draws back, and our visitor perceives her error. We sit down, but the brunt of the talk falls on Barbara. I am never glib with strangers, and I throw in a word only now and then, all my attention and observation having passed into my eyes. A plain woman, indeed! I have always been convinced of the unbecomingness of church, but now more than ever am I fully persuaded of it. And yet she is not pretty! Her mouth is very wide, that is perhaps why she so rarely laughs; her nose cannot say much for itself; her cheeks are thin, and I think—nay, let me tell truth—I hope that in a low gown she would be scraggy, so slight even to meagreness is she! But how thoroughly made the most of! What a shapeless pin-cushion fit my gown seems beside the admirable French sit of hers! How hard, how metallic its tint beside the indefinite softness of that sweep of smoke-color! What a stiff British erection my hair feels beside the careless looseness of these shining twists! What a fine, slight hand, as if cut in faint gray stone!

At each fresh detail that I note, Musgrave's anecdote gains ever more and more probability; and my heart sinks ever lower and more low.

One hope remains to me. Perhaps she may be stupid! Certainly she is not affording.

How heavily poor Barbara is driving through the fine weather and the Times! and how little more than "yes" and "no" does she get! I take heart. Roger loves people who talk—people who are merry and make jests. It was my most worthless gabble that first drew him toward me. Cheered and emboldened by this thought, I swoop down like a sudden eagle to the rescue.

"You know Rog—, my husband, do not you?" I say, with an abrupt bluntness that contrasts finely with the languid gentleness with which her little remarks steal out like mice. Mine rushes forth like a desolating bomb-shell.

"You knew him in India, did not you?" say I, unable to resist the temptation of seizing this opportunity to gratify my curiosity, drawing my chair a little nearer hers, and speaking with an eagerness which I, in vain, try to stifle.

(Well, she is baffling! when she does not say "yes" affirmatively, she says it interrogatively.)

"All the same he did not like it," I go on, with amicable volubility; "but I dare say you know that. They say—" (reddening as I feel, perceptibly, and nervously twisting my pocket-handkerchief round my fingers)—"that people are so sociable in India: now, I dare say you saw a good deal of him."

She is smiling again. There is not a shade of hesitation or unreadiness in her low voice, nor does the faintest tinge of color stain the fine pallor of her cheeks.

"Your husband, too, is out—" I pause; not sure of the locality, but she does not help me, so I add lamely, "somewhere, is not he?"

"In the West Indies!" cry I, with animation, drawing my chair yet a little nearer hers, and feeling positively friendly; "why, that is where mine is too!"

"We are companions in misfortune," cry I, heartily; "we must keep up each other's spirits, must not we?"

A noise of feet coming across the hall—of manly whistling makes itself heard. The door opens and Algy enters. It is clear that he is unaware of there being any stranger present, for his hat is on his head, his hands are in his pockets, and he only stops whistling to observe:

"Well, Nancy! any more aborigines?" then he breaks suddenly off, and we all grow red—he himself beaming of as lively a scarlet as the new tunic that he tried on last night. I make a hurried and confused presentation, in which I manage to slur over into unintelligibility and utter doubtfulness the names of the two people made known to one another.

"One more aborigine, you see!" says Mrs. Huntley, to my surprise—after the experience I have had of her fine taste in monosyllables—beginning the conversation. I look at her with a little wonder. Her voice is quite as low as ever, but there is an accent of playfulness in it; and on her face a sparkle of esprit, whose possible existence I had not conjectured. Certainly, she showed no symptom of playfulness or esprit during our late talk. I have yet to learn that to some women, the presence of a man—not the man, but a man—any man—is what warm rain is to flowers athirst. I am still marveling at this metamorphosis, when the door again opens, and another guest is announced—an old man, as great a stranger to us as is the rest of the neighborhood, but of whom we quickly discover that he is deadly, deadly deaf. For five minutes, I bawl at him a series of remarks, each and all of which he misunderstands. He does it so invariably, that I come at length to the conclusion that he is doing it on purpose, and stop talking in a huff. Then Barbara takes her turn—Barbara can always make deaf people hear better than I do, though she does not speak to them nearly so loud, and I rest on my oars. Owing to my position between the two couples, I can hear what is passing between Algy and Mrs. Huntley.

To tell the truth, I do not take much pains to avoid hearing it, for surely they can have no secrets. They are sitting rather close together, and speaking in a low key, but I am so used to his voice, and her articulation is so distinct, that I do not miss a word.

"I think I had the pleasure of seeing you in church, last Sunday," Algy says, rather diffidently; not having yet quite recovered from the humiliation engendered by his unfortunate remark.

"Yes, I saw you," with a delicate inflection of voice, which somehow confines the application of the remark to him. "I made up my mind—one takes ideas into one's head, you know—I made up my mind that you were a soldier; one can mostly tell."

He laughs the flattered, fluttered laugh, that my rough speech was never known to provoke in living man.

"We—we—found out who you were," he says, laughing again, with a little embarrassment, and edging his chair nearer hers; "we asked Musgrave!"

"Have you any children?" cry I, suddenly, bundling with my usual fine tact head-foremost into the conversation (where I am clearly not wanted, and altogether forgetting Barbara's warning injunction) with my unnecessary and malapropos query. For a moment she looks only astonished; then an expression of pain crosses her face, and a slight contraction passes over her features. Evidently, she had a child, and it is dead. She is going to cry! At this awful thought, I grow scarlet, and Algy darts a furious look at me. What have I said? I have outdone myself. How far worse a case than the fugitive wife whose destiny I was so resolute to learn from her injured husband!

"It is of no consequence," she answers, speaking with some difficulty, and with a slight but quite musical tremor in her voice—very different from the ugly gulpings and catchings of the breath which always set off my tears—"but the fact is, that I have one little one—and—and—she no longer lives with me; my husband's people have taken her; I am sure that they meant it for the best; only—only—I am afraid I cannot quite manage to talk of her yet" (turning away from me, and looking up into Algy's face with a showery smile). Then, as if unable to run the risk of any other further shock to her feelings, she rises and takes her leave; Algy eagerly attending her to the door.

The old deaf gentleman departs at the same time, loading Barbara with polite parting messages to her husband, and bowing distantly to me. Algy reënters presently, looking cross and ruffled.

"You really are too bad, Nancy!" he says, harshly, throwing himself into the chair lately occupied by Mrs. Huntley. "You grow worse every day—one would think you did it on purpose—riding rough-shod over people's feelings."

I stand aghast. Formerly, I used not to mind rough words; but I think Roger must have spoilt me; they make me wince now.

"But—but—it was not dead!" I say, whimpering; "it had only gone to visit its grandmother."

"Never you mind, my Nancy!" says Barbara, in a whisper, drawing me away to the window, and pressing her soft, cool lips, to the flushed misery of my cheeks; "she was not hurt a bit! her eyes were as dry as a bone!"

CHAPTER XXV.

One more day is gone. We are one day nearer Roger's return. This is the way in which I am growing to look at the flight of time; just as, in Dresden, I joyfully marked each sunset, as bringing me twenty-four hours nearer home and the boys. And now the boys are within reach; at a wish I could have them all round me; and still, in my thoughts, I hurry the slow days, and blame them for dawdling. With all their broad, gold sunshine, and their rainbow-colored flowers, I wish them away.

Alas! that life should be both so quick and so lagging! It is afternoon, and I am lying by myself on a cloak at the bottom of the punt—the unupsettable, broad-bottomed punt. My elbow rests on the seat, and a book is on my lap. But, in the middle of the pool, the glare from the water is unbearably bright, but here, underneath those dipping, drooped trees, the sun only filters through in little flakes, and the shade is brown, and the reflections are so vivid that the flags hardly know which are themselves—they, or the other flags that grow in the water at their feet.

A while ago I tried to read; but a private vexation of my own—a small new one—interleaved with its details each page of the story, and made nonsense of it. I have shut the volume, therefore, and, with my hat tilted over my eyes, and my cheek on my hand, am watching the long blue dragon-flies, and the numberless small peoples that inhabit the summer air. All at once, I hear some one coming, crashing and pushing through the woody undergrowth. Perhaps it is Algy come to say that he has changed his mind, and that he will not go after all! No! it is only Mr. Musgrave. I am a little disappointed, but, as my fondness for my own company is always of the smallest, I am able to smile a sincere welcome.

"It is you, is it?" I say, with a little intimate nod. "How did you know where I was?"

"And so you found her at home?" I say, with a feeling of pleased curiosity, as to the details of the interview. (He cannot well have volunteered the abbey already, can he?)

"I suppose I may come in," he says, hardly waiting my permission to jump into the punt, which, however, by reason of the noble broadness of its bottom, is enabled to bid defiance to any such shock. "She was making a flannel petticoat for an old woman," he goes on, sitting down opposite me, and looking at me from under his hat-brim, with gravely shining eyes; "herring-boning, she called it. She has been teaching me how to herring-bone. I like Barbara."

"How kind of you!" I say, ironically, and yet a little gratified too. "And does she return the compliment, may I ask?"

"She would like you better still if you were to lose all your money, and one of your legs, and be marked by the small-pox," I say, thoughtfully; "to be despised, and out at elbows, and down in the world, is the sure way to Barbara's heart."

I had meant to have drawn for him a pleasant and yet most true picture of her sweet disinterestedness, but his uneasy vanity takes it amiss.

"As it entails being enrolled among the blind and lame," he says, smiling sarcastically, and flushing a little, "I am afraid I shall never get there."

A moment ago I had felt hardly less than sisterly toward him. Now I look at him with a disgustful and disapprobative eye. What a very great deal of alteration he needs, and, with that face, and his abbey, and all his rooks to back it, how very unlikely he is to get it! Well, I at least will do my best!

We both remain quiet for a few moments. Vick sits at the end of the punt, a shiver of excitement running all over her little white body, her black nose quivering, and one lip slightly lifted by a tooth, as she gazes with eager gravity at the distant wild-ducks flying along in a row, with outstretched necks, making their pleasant quacks. How low they fly; so low that their feet splash in the water, that makes a bright spray-hue in the sun!

"So I should gather," laughing a little at the obviousness of my last piece of information.

"And yet," say I, looking down through the clear water at a dead tree-bough lying at the bottom, and sighing, "he is going to dine out to-night—to dine with Mrs. Huntley."

"Tell me," cry I, impulsively, raising myself from my reclining pose, and sitting upright, "you will understand better than I do—perhaps it is my mistake—but, if you had seen a person only once for five or ten minutes, would you sign yourself 'Yours very sincerely' to them?"

"Her name is Zéphine," say I again, leaning over the boat-side and pulling my forefinger slowly to and fro through the warm brown water.

How near the swans are drawing toward us! One, with his neck well thrown back, and his wings raised and ruffled, sailing along like a lovely snow-white ship; another, with less grace and more homeliness, standing on his head, with black webs paddling out behind.

"You were quite wrong on Sunday—quite," say I, speaking with sudden abruptness, and reddening.

"On Sunday!" (throwing his luminous dark eyes upward to the light clouds and faint blue of the August sky above us, as if to aid his recollection), "nothing more likely—but what about?"

"About—Roger," I answer, speaking with some difficulty ("and Mrs. Huntley," I was going to add, but some superstition hinders me from coupling their names even in a sentence).

"I dare say"—carelessly—"but what new light have you had thrown upon the matter?"

"Asked her!" repeats he, with an accent of profound astonishment. "Asked the woman whether she had been engaged to him, and jilted him? Impossible!"

"No! no!" cry I, with tremulous impatience, "of course not; but I asked her whether she used not to know him in India, and she said, 'Yes, we met several times,' just like that—she no more blushed and looked confused than I should if any one asked me whether I knew you!"

"You certainly have a way of putting things very strongly," he says in a rather low voice, "convincingly so!"

"Well, no—o—" I answer, reluctantly; "but I said, 'He is in the West Indies,' and she answered 'Yes,' or 'Indeed,' or 'Is he?' I forget which, but at any rate it implied that it was news to her."

A pike leaps not far from us, and splashes back again. I watch to see whether the widening faint circles will have strength to reach us, or whether the water's smile will be smoothed and straightened before it gets to us.

"Did Mrs. Huntley happen to say" (leaning lazily back, and speaking carelessly), "how she liked her house?"

"She has only just got into it," he answers, slightly; "only about a fortnight, that is."

"I wonder," say I, ruminatingly, "what brought her to this part of the world, for she does not seem to know anybody."

"We ought to be friends, ought not we?" say I, beginning to laugh nervously, and looking appealingly toward him, "both of us coming to sojourn in a strange land! It is a curious coincidence our both settling here in such similar circumstances, at almost the same time, is not it?"

Again he has thrown his head back, and is perusing the sky, his hands clasped round one lifted knee.

"What is a coincidence?" he says, languidly. "I do not think I quite know—I am never good at long words—two things that happen accidentally at the same time, is not it?"

How still the world is to-day! The feathery water-weeds sway, indeed, to and fro, with the motion of the water, but the tall cats'-tails, and all the flags, stand absolutely motionless. I feel vaguely ruffled, and take up my forgotten book. Holding it so as to hide my companion's face from me, I begin to read ostentatiously. He seems content to be silent; lying on the flat of his back, at the bottom of the punt, staring at the sky, and declining the overtures, and parrying the attacks, of Vick, who, having taken advantage of his supine position to mount upon his chest, now stands there wagging her tail, and wasting herself in efforts, mostly futile, but occasionally successful, to lick the end of his nose. A period of quiet elapses, during which, for the sake of appearances, I turn over a page. By-and-by, he speaks.

"Algy is your eldest brother, is not he?—get away, you little beast!"—(the latter clause, in a tone of sudden exasperation, is addressed, not to me, but to Vick, and tells me that my pet dog's endeavors have been crowned with a tardy prosperity.)

"Why?" cry I, again letting fall my volume, and yielding to a curiosity as irresistible as unwise; for he had meant me to ask, and would have been disobliged if I had not.

"We all have our hobbies, don't you know?" he says, shifting his eyes from the sky, and fixing them on the less serene, less amiable object of my face—"some people's is old china—some Elzevir editions—I have a mania for clocks—I have one in every room in my house—by-the-by, you have never been over my house—Mrs. Huntley's—she is a dear little woman, but she has her fancies, like the rest of us, and hers is—eldest sons!"

"But she is married!" exclaim I, stupidly. "What good can they do her, now?"—then, reddening a little at my own simplicity, I go on, hurriedly: "But he is such a boy!—younger than you—young enough to be her son—it can be only out of good-nature that she takes notice of him."

"Yes—true—out of good-nature!" he echoes, nodding, smiling, and speaking with that surface-assent which conveys to the hearer no impression less than acquiescence.

"Boys are not much in her way, either," he pursues, carelessly; "generally she prefers such as are of riper years—much riper!"

"How spiteful you are!" I say, glad to give my chafed soul vent in words, and looking at him with that full, cold directness which one can employ only toward such as are absolutely indifferent to one. "How she must have snubbed you!"

"Yes," he says, smiling still, though his face has whitened, and a wrathy red light has come into his deep eyes; "in the pre-Huntley era, I laid my heart at her feet—by-the-way, I must have been in petticoats at the time—and she kicked it away, as she had, no doubt, done—others."

The camel's backbone is broken. This last innuendo—in weight a straw—has done it. I speak never a word; but I rise up hastily, and, letting my novel fall heavily prone on the pit of its stomach at the punt-bottom, I take a flying leap to shore—toward shore, I should rather say—for I am never a good jumper—Tou Tou's lean spider-legs can always outstride me—and now I fall an inch or two short, and draw one leg out booted with river-mud. But I pay no heed. I hurry on, pushing through the brambles, and leaving a piece of my gown on each. Before I have gone five yards—his length of limb and freedom from petticoats giving him the advantage over me—he overtakes me.

"What has happened? at this rate you will not have much gown left by the time you reach the house."

To my excited ears, there seems to be a suspicion of laughter in his voice. I disdain to answer. The path we are pursuing is not the regular one; it is a short cut through the wood. At its widest it is very narrow; and, a little ahead of us, a bramble has thrown a strong arm right across it, making a thorny arch, and forbidding passage. By a quick movement, Mr. Musgrave gets in advance of me, and, turning round, faces me at this defile.

The red-anger light has died out of his eyes. They look softer, and yet less languid, than I have ever seen them before; and there is subdued appeal and entreaty in his lowered voice. At the present moment, I distinctly dislike him. I think him altogether trying and odious, and I should be glad—yes, glad, if Vick were to bite a piece out of his leg; but, at the same time, I cannot deny that I have seldom seen any thing comelier than the young man who now stands before me, with the green woodland lights flickering about the close-shorn beauty of his face—he is well aware that his are not features that need planting out—while a lively emotion quickens all his lazy being.

"New friends, then—friends, at all events!" coming a step nearer, and speaking without a trace of sneer, sloth, or languor.

"Not until you tell me my offense—not until you own that we are friends!" (in a tone of quick excitement, and almost of authority, that, in him, is new to me).

"Then we shall stay here all night!" reply I, with a fine obstinacy, plumping down, as I speak, on the wayside grass, among the St. John's-worts, and the red arum-berries. In a moment he has stepped aside, and is holding the stout purple bramble-stem out of my way.

"Pass, then!" he says, in a tone of impatience, frowning a little; "as you have said it, of course you will stick to it—right or wrong—or you would not be a woman; but, whether you confess it or not, we are friends!"

"We are NOT!" cry I, resolute to have the last word, as I spring up and fly past him, with more speed than dignity, lest he should change his mind, and again detain me.

CHAPTER XXVI.

The swallows are gone: the summer is done: it is October. The year knows that I am in a hurry, and is hasting with its shortened days—each day marked by the loss of something fair—toward the glad Christmas-time—Christmas that will bring me back my Roger—that will set him again at the foot of his table—that will give me again the sound of his foot on the stairs, the smile in his fond gray eyes. So I thought yesterday, and to-day I have heard from him; heard that though he is greatly loath to tell me so, yet he cannot be back by Christmas; that I must hear the joy-bells ring, and see the merry Christmas cheer alone. It is true that he earnestly and insistantly begs of me to gather all my people, father, mother, boys, girls, around me. But, after all, what are father, mother, boys, girls, to me? Father never was any thing, I will do myself that justice, but at this moment of sore disappointment as I lean my forehead on the letter outspread on the table before me, and dim its sentences with tears, I belittle even the boys. No doubt that by-and-by I shall derive a little solace from the thought of their company; that when they come I shall even be inveigled into some sort of hilarity with them; but at present, "No."

There are some days on which all ills gather together as at a meeting. This is one. Barbara is prostrated by a violent headache, and is in such thorough physical pain that even she cannot sympathize with me. Mr. Musgrave never makes his now daily appearance—he comes, as I jubilantly notice, as regularly as the postman—until late in the afternoon. All day, therefore, I must refrain myself and be silent. And I am never one for brooding with private dumbness over my woes. I much prefer to air them by expression and complaint. About noon it strikes me that, faute de mieux, I will go and see Mrs. Huntley, tell her suddenly that Roger is not coming back, and see if she looks vexed or confused or grieved. Accordingly, soon after luncheon, I set off in the pony-carriage. It is a quiet sultry-looking unclouded day. One uniform livery of mist clothes sky and earth, dimming the glories of the dying leaves, and making them look dull and sodden. Every thing has a drenched air: each crimson bramble-leaf is clothed in rain-drops, and yet it is not raining. The air is thick and heavy, and one swallows it like something solid, but it is not raining: in fact, it is an English fine day.

Under the delusive idea that it is warm, or at least not cold, I have protected my face with no veil, my hands with no mittens; so that, long before I reach the shelter of the Portugal laurels that warmly hem in and border Mrs. Huntley's little graveled sweep, the end of my nose feels like an icy promontory at a great distance from me, and my hands do not feel at all. Mrs. Huntley is at home. Wise woman! I knew that she would be. I suppose that I follow on the footsteps of the butler more quickly than is usual, for, as the door opens, and before I can get a view of the inmate or inmates, I hear a hurried noise of scrambling, as of some one suddenly jumping up. For a little airy woman who looks as if one could blow her away—puff!—like a morsel of thistle-down or a snowball, what a heavy foot Mrs. Huntley has! The next moment, I am disabused. Mrs. Huntley has clearly not moved. It was not she that scrambled. She is lying back in a deep arm-chair, her silky head gently denting the flowered cushion, the points of two pretty shoes slightly advanced toward the fire, and a large feather fan leisurely waving to and fro, in one white hand. Beyond the fan movement she is not doing any thing that I can detect.

"How do you do?" say I, bustling in, in a hurry to reach the fire. "How comfortable you look! how cold it is!—Algy!!" For the enigma of the noise is solved. It was Algy who shuffled and scuffled—yes, scuffled up from the low stool which he has evidently been sharing with the pretty shoes—at Mrs. Huntley's feet, on to his long legs, on which he is now standing, not at all at ease. He does not answer.

"Algy!" repeat I, in a tone of the profoundest, accentedest surprise, involuntarily turning my back upon my hostess and facing my brother.

"Well, what about me?" he cries tartly, irritated (and no wonder) by my open mouth and tragical air.

"The fly from the White Hart," he answers, trying to laugh, but looking confused and angry.

"But I mean—I thought you told me, when I asked you to Tempest this week, that you could not get away for an hour!"

"No more I could," he answers impatiently, yet stammering; "quite unexpected—did not know when I wrote—have to be back to-night."

"Will not you come nearer the fire?" says Mrs. Huntley, in her slow sugared tones, with a well-bred ignoring of our squabble. "I am sure that you must be perished with cold."

I recollect myself and comply. As I sit down I catch a glimpse of myself in the glass. It is indeed difficult to abstain from the sight of one's self, however little fond one may be of it, so thickly is the room set round with rose-draped mirrors. For the moment, O friends, I will own to you that I appear to myself nothing less than brutally ugly. I know that I am not so in reality, that the disfigurement is only temporary, but none the less does the consciousness deeply, deeply depress me. My nose is of a lively scarlet, which the warmth of the room is quickly deepening into a lowering purple. My quick passage through the air has set my hat a little awry, giving me a falsely rakish air, and the wind has loosened my hair—not into a picturesque and comely disorder, but into mere untidiness. And, meanwhile, how admirably small and cool her nose looks! What rest and composure in her whole pose! What a neat refinement in the disposition of her hair! What a soft luxury in her dress! Even my one indisputable advantage of youth seems to me as dirt. Looking at the completeness of her native grace, I despise youth. I think it an ill and ugly thing in its green unripeness. I look round the room. After the thick outside air, saturated with moisture, I think that the warm atmosphere would, were my spirit less disquieted, lull me quickly to sleep. How perfumed it is, not with any meretricious artificial scents, but with the clean and honest smell of sweet live flowers. Yes, though I am aware that Mrs. Huntley has no conservatory, yet hot-house flowers and airy ferns are scattered about the room in far greater profusion than in mine, with all Roger's imposing range of glass—scattered about here, there, and everywhere; not as if they were a rare and holiday treat, but a most common, every-day occurrence. There is not much work to be seen about, and not a book! On the other hand, lounging-chairs, suited to the length or shortness of any back; rococo photograph stands, framing either a great many men, or a few men in a great many attitudes; soothing pictures—décolleté Venuses, Love's greuze heads—tied up with rose-ribbon, and a sleepy half-light. On a small table at the owner's elbow, a blue-velvet jeweler's case stands open. On its white-satin lining my long-sighted eyes enable me to decipher the name of Hunt and Roskell; and it does not need any long sight to observe the solid breadth of the gold band bracelet, set with large, dull turquoises and little points of brilliant light, which is its occupant. As I note this phenomenon, my heart burns within me—yea, burns even more hotly than my nose. For father keeps Algy very tight, and I know that he has only three hundred pounds a year, besides his pay.

"I have had such bad news to-day," I say, suddenly, looking my vis-à-vis full and directly in the face.

So far she certainly shows no signs of emotion. Her fan is still waving with slow steadiness. I see the diamonds on her hands (whence did they owe their rise, I wonder?) glint in the fire-light.

There is not a particle of sorrow in face or tone: only the counterfeit grief of an utterly indifferent acquaintance. My heart feels a little lightened.

"And have you no better luck, either?" I say, more cheerfully. "Is there no talk of your—of Mr. Huntley coming back?"

What to say next? I have had enough of asking after her child. I will not fall into that error again. Ask who all the men in the rococo frames are?—which of them, or whether any, is Mr. Huntley? On consideration, I decide not to do this either; and, after one or two more stunted attempts at talk, I take my leave. I ask Algy to accompany me just down the drive, and with a most grudging and sulky air of unwillingness he complies. Alas! he always used to like to be with us girls. The ponies are fresh, and we have almost reached the gate before I speak, with a difficult hesitation.

He does not answer. He is looking the other way, and turns only the back of his head toward me.

He has turned his face to me now. I cannot complain, but indeed, as it now is, I prefer the back of his head, so white and headstrong does he look.

"I wish to God," he says, in a voice of low anger, "that you would be so obliging as to mind your own business, and allow me to mind mine!"

"But it is mine!" I cry, passionately; "what right has she to be sitting all day with young men on stools at her feet?—she, a married woman, with her husband—"

"This comes extremely well from you," he says, in a voice of concentrated anger, with a bitterly-sneering tone; "how is Musgrave?"

Before I can answer, he has jumped out, and is half-way back to the house. But indeed I am dumb. Is it possible that he makes such a mistake?—that he does not see the difference?

For the next half-mile, I see neither ponies, nor misty hedges, nor wintry high-road, for tears. I used to get on so well with the boys!

CHAPTER XXVII.

When I return home, I find that Barbara is still no better. She is still lying in her darkened room, and has asked not to be disturbed. And even my wrongs are not such as to justify my forcing myself upon the painful privacy of a sick-headache. How much the better am I then than I was before my late expedition? I have brought home my old grievance quite whole and unlightened by communication, and I have got a new and fresh one in addition, with absolutely no one to whom to impart it; for, even when Frank comes, I will certainly not tell him. I am too restless to remain in-doors over the fire, though thoroughly chilled by my late drive, and resolve to try and restore my circulation by a brisk walk in the park.

The afternoon is still young, and the day is mending. A wind has risen, and has pulled aside the steel-colored cloud-curtain, and let heaven's eyes—blue, though faint and watery—look through. And there comes another strong puff of autumnal wind, and lo! the sun, and the leaves float down in a sudden shower of amber in his light. I march along quickly and gravely through the long drooped grass—no longer sweet and fresh and upright, in its green summer coat—through the frost-seared pomp of the bronze bracken, till I reach a little knoll, whose head is crowned by twelve great brother beeches. From time immemorial they have been called the Twelve Apostles, and under one apostle I now stand, with my back against his smooth and stalwart trunk.

How beaming is death to them! Into what a glorious crimson they decline! My eyes travel from one tree-group to another, and idly consider the many-colored majesty of their decay. Over all the landscape there is a look of plaintive uncontent. The distant town, with its two church-spires, is choked and effaced in mist: the very sun is sickly and irresolute. All Nature seems to say, "Have pity upon me—I die!"

It is not often that our mother is in sympathy with her children. Mostly when we cry she broadly laughs; when we laugh and are merry she weeps; but to-day my mood and hers match. The tears are as near my eyes as hers—as near hers as mine.

say I, aloud, stretching out my right arm in dismal recitation. We had the hymn last Sunday, which is what has put it into my head:

"How you made me jump!" cry I, descending with an irritated leap to prose, and at least making the leaves say something entirely different from what they had ever been known to say before.

He—it is Musgrave, of course—has joined me, and is leaning his flat back also against the apostle, and, like me, is looking at the mist, at the red and yellow leaves—at the whole low-spirited panorama.

"She is ill," say I, lamentably, drawing a portrait in lamp-black and Indian-ink of the whole family; "we are all ill—Barbara is ill!"

"And I have got a heartache," say I, more for the sake of preserving the harmony of my sketch, and for making a pendant to Barbara, than because the phrase accurately describes my state.

"Poor me, indeed!" cry I, with emphasis, and to this day I cannot make up my mind whether the ejaculation were good grammar or no.

"I have had such bad news," I continue, feeling, as usual, a sensible relief from the communication of my grief. "Roger is not coming back!"

The words are the same as those employed by Mrs. Huntley; but there is much more alacrity and liveliness in the tone.

"Not at all!" repeat I, scornfully, looking impatiently at him; "that is so likely, is not it?"—then "No not at all"—I continue, ironically, "he has run off with some one else—some one black!" (with a timely reminiscence of Bobby's happy flight of imagination).

"Not till after Christmas," reply I, sighing loudly, "which is almost as bad as not at all."

"I told you that before?" cry I, opening my eyes, and raising my voice; "why, how could I? I only heard it myself this morning!"

"It could have been no one else," retort I, hastily. "I have told no one—no one at least from whom you could have heard it."

"All the same, I did hear it" (with a quiet persistence); "now, who could it have been?" throwing back his head, elevating his chin, and lifting his eyes in meditation to the great depths of burning red in the beech's heart, above him—"ah!"—(overtaking the recollection)—"I know!"

I laugh with insulting triumph. "Well, that is a bad hit! What a pity that you did not fix upon some one else! I have once or twice suspected you of drawing the long bow—now I am sure of it! As it happens, I have just come from Mrs. Huntley, and she knew no more about it than the babe unborn!"

I am looking him full in the face, but, to my surprise, I cannot detect the expression of confusion and defeat which I anticipate. There is only the old white-anger look that I have such a happy knack of calling up on his features.

"I am a consummate liar!" he says, quietly, though his eyes flash. "Every one knows that; but, all the same, she did tell me."

He makes no answer, but, lifting his hat, begins to walk quickly away. For a hundred yards I allow him to go unrecalled; then, as I note his quickly-diminishing figure and the heavy mists beginning to fold him, my resolution fails me; I take to my heels and scamper after him.

"Stop!" say I, panting as I come up with him, "I dare say—perhaps—you thought you were speaking truth!—there must, must be some mistake!"

"Tell me!" cry I, posting on alongside of him, breathless and distressed—"when was it? where did you hear it? how long ago?"

"Yes, you did," cry I, passionately, asseverating what I have so lately and passionately denied. "You know you did; but when was it? how was it? where was it?"

"It was nowhere," he answers with a cold, angry smile. "I was drawing the long bow!"

I stop in baffled rage and misery. I stand stock-still, with the long, dying grass wetly and limply clasping my ankles. To my surprise he stops too.

"I wish you were dead!" I say tersely, and it is not a figure of speech. For the moment I do honestly wish it.

"Do you?" he answers, throwing me back a look of hardly inferior animosity; "I dare say I do not much mind." A little pause, during which we eye each other, like two fighting-cocks. "Even if I were dead," he says, in a low voice—"mind, I do not blame you for wishing it—sometimes I wish it myself—but even if I were, I do not see how that would hinder Sir Roger and Mrs. Huntley from corresponding."

"They do not correspond," cry I, violently; "it is a falsehood!" Then, with a quick change of thought and tone: "But if they do, I—I—do not mind! I—I—am very glad—if Roger likes it! There is no harm in it."

"Do you always stay at home?" cry I, in a fury, goaded out of all politeness and reserve by the surface false acquiescence of his tone; "do you never go away? I wish you would! I wish"—(speaking between laughing and crying)—"that you could take your abbey up on your back, as a snail does its shell, and march off with it into another county."

"What have I done to you?" I cry, falling from anger to reproach, "that you take such delight in hurting me? You can be pleasant enough to—to other people. I never hear you hinting and sneering away any one else's peace of mind; but as for me, I never—never am alone with you that you do not leave me with a pain—a tedious long ache here"—(passionately clasping my hands upon my heart).

"I!" repeat I, positively laughing in my scorn of this accusation. "I hint! I imply! why, I could not do it, if I were to be shot for it! it is not in me!"

He does not immediately answer; still, he is looking aside, and his color changes.

"Ask mother, ask the boys, ask Barbara," cry I, in great excitement, "whether I ever could wrap up any thing neatly, if I wished it ever so much? Always, always, I have to blurt it out! I hint!"

"Hint! no!" he repeats, in a tone of vexed bitterness. "Well, no! no one could accuse you of hinting! Yours is honest, open cut and thrust!"

"If it is," retort I, bluntly, still speaking with a good deal of heat, "it is your own fault! I have no wish to quarrel, being such near neighbors, and—and—altogether—of course I had rather be on good terms than bad ones! When you let me—when you leave me alone—I almost—sometimes I quite like you. I am speaking seriously! I do."

"You do not say so?" again turning his head aside, and speaking with the objectionable intonation of irony.

"At home," pursue I, still chafing under the insult to my amiability, "I never was reckoned quarrelsome—never! Of course I was not like Barbara—there are not many like her—but I did very well. Ask any one of them—it does not matter which—they will all tell you the same—whether I did not!"

"I was nothing of the kind," cry I, very angry, and yet laughing: the laughter caused by the antagonism of the epithet with the many recollected blows and honest sounding cuffs that I have, on and off, exchanged with Bobby.

The sun has quite gone now: sulky and feeble, he has shrunk to his cold bed in the west, and the victor-mist creeps, crawls, and soaks on unopposed.

With the triple agility of health, youth, and indignation, I scurry away through the melancholy grass, and the heaped and fallen leaves, home.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Ding-dong bell! ding-dong bell! The Christmas bells are ringing. Christmas has come—Christmas as it appears on a Christmas card, white and hard, and beset with puffed-out, ruffled robins. Only Nature is wise enough not to express the ironical wish that we may have a "merry one."

For myself, I have but small opinion of Christmas as a time of jollity. Solemn—blessed, if you will—but no, not jovial. At no time do the dead so clamor to be remembered. Even those that went a long time ago, the regret for whose departure has settled down to a tender, almost pleasant pain; whom at other times we go nigh to forget; even they cry out loud, "Think of us!"

When all the family is gathered, when the fire burns quick and clear, and the church-bells ring out grave and sweet, neither will they be left out. But, on the other hand, to one who has paid his bills, and in whose family Death's cannon have as yet made no breaches, I do not see why it may not be a season of moderate, placid content.

Festivity! jollity! never! I have paid my bills, and there are no gaps among my people. Sometimes I tremble when I think how many we are; one of us must go soon. But, as yet, when I count us over, none lacks. Father, mother, Algy, Bobby, the Brat, Tou Tou. Slightly as I have spoken of them to myself, and conscientiously as I have promised myself to derive no pleasure from their society, and even to treat them with distant coolness, if they are, any of them, and Bobby especially—it is he that I most mistrust—more joyfully disposed than I think fitting, yet my heart has been growing ever warmer and warmer at the thought of them, as Christmas-time draws nigh; and now, as I kiss their firm, cold, healthy cheeks—(I declare that Bobby's cheeks are as hard as marbles), I know how I have lied to myself.

Father is not in quite so good a humor as I could have wished, his man having lost his hat-box en route, and consequently his nose is rather more aquiline than I think desirable.

"Do not be alarmed!" says Bobby, in a patronizing aside, introducing me, as if I were a stranger, to father's peculiarities; "a little infirmity of temper, but the heart is in the right place."

"I knew he would not," cry I, rather crestfallen. Then, with sudden exasperation: "I wish I had not given it to him; he always hated it. I wish I had given it to Roger instead."

"Never you mind!" cries Bobby, while his round eyes twinkle mischievously; "I dare say he has got one by now, a nice one, all beads and wampums, that the old Begum has made him."

I laugh, but I also sigh. What a long time it seems since I was jealous of Bobby's Begum! We are a little behind father, whispering with our heads together, while he, in his raspingest voice, is giving his delinquent a month's warning. That tone! it still makes me feel sneaky.

"Bobby," say I, putting my arm through his substantial one, and speaking in a low tone of misgiving, "how is he? how has he been?"

"We have been a little fractious," replies Bobby, leniently—"a little disposed to quarrel with our bread-and-butter; but, as you may remember, my dear, from your experience of our humble roof, Christmas never was our happiest time."

The storm is rising: at least father's voice is. It appears that the valet is not only to go, but to go without a character.

"Never you mind," repeats Bobby, reassuringly, seeing me blench a little at these disused amenities, pressing the hand that rests on his arm against his stout side; "it is nothing to you! bless your heart, you are the apple of his eye."

"Because I am going to Hong-Kong, and he hears that they are keeping two nice roomy graves open all the time there!"

"You are not?" (in a tone of keen anxiety and pain); then, with a sudden change of tone to a nervous and constrained amenity: "Yes, it is a nice-sized room, is not it? My only fault with it is, that the windows are so high up that one cannot see out of them when one is sitting down."

For father, having demolished his body-servant, and reduced mother to her usual niche-state, now turns to me, and, in his genialest, happiest society-manner, compliments me on my big house.

That is a whole day ago. Since then, I have grown used to seeing father's austere face, unbent into difficult suavity, at the opposite end of the dinner-table to me, to hearing the well-known old sound of Tou Tou's shrieks of mixed anguish and delight, as Bobby rushes after her in headlong pursuit, down the late so silent passages; and to looking complacently from one to another of the holiday faces round the table, where Barbara and I have sat, during the last noiseless month, in stillest dialogue or preoccupied silence.

I love noise. You may think that I have odd taste; but I love Bobby's stentor laugh, and Tou Tou's ear-piercing yells. I even forget to think whether their mirth passes the appointed bounds I had set it. I have mislaid my receipt of cold repression. My heart goes out to them.

I have been a little disturbed as to how to dispose of father during the day, but he mercifully takes that trouble off my hands. Providence has brought good out of evil, congenial occupation out of the hat-box. He has spent all the few daylight-hours in telegraphing for it to every station on the line; in telling several home-truths to the porters at our own station, which—it being Christmas-time, and they consequently all more or less tipsy—they have taken with a bland playfulness that he has found a little trying; and, lastly, in writing a long letter to the Times. And I, meanwhile, being easy in my mind on his score, knowing that he is happy, am at leisure to be happy myself. In company with my brother, I have spent all the little day in decorating the church, making it into a cheerful, green Christmas bower. We always did it at home.

The dusk has come now—the quick-hurrying, December dusk, and we have all but finished. We have had to beg for a few candles, in order to put our finishing touches here and there about the sombre church. They flame, throwing little jets of light on the glossy laurel-leaves that make collars round the pillars' stout necks; on the fresh moss-beds, vividly green, in the windows; on the dull, round holly-berries. In the glow, the ivy twines in cunning garlands round the rough-sculptured font, and the oak lectern; and, above God's altar, a great white cross of hot-house flowers blooms delicately, telling of summer, and matching the words of old good news beneath it, that brought, as some say, summer, or, at least, the hope of summer, to the world.

Yes, we have nearly done. The Brat stands on the top of a step-ladder, dexterously posing the last wintry garland; and all we others are resting a moment—we and our coadjutors. For we have two coadjutors. Mr. Musgrave, of course. Now, at this moment, through the gray light, and across the candles, I can see him leaning against the font, while Barbara kneels with bent head at his feet, completing the ornamentation of the pedestal. I always knew that things would come right if we waited long enough, and coming right they are—coming, not come, for still, he has not spoken. I have consulted each and all of my family, father excepted, as to the average length of time allotted to unspoken courtship, and each has assigned a different period; the longest, however, has been already far exceeded by Frank. Tou Tou, indeed, adduces a gloomy case of a young man, who spent two years and a half in dumb longing, and broke a blood-vessel and died at the end of them; but this is so discouraging an anecdote, that we all poo-poohed it as unauthentic.

"Perhaps he does not mean to speak at all!" says the Brat, starting a new and hazardous idea; "perhaps he means to take it for granted!"

"Walk out with her, some fine morning," says Algy, laughing, "and say, like Wemmick, 'Hallo! here's a church! let's have a wedding!'"

"It would be a good thing," retorts the Brat, gravely, "if there were a printed form for such occasions; it would be a great relief to people."

This talk did not happen in the church, but at an evening séance overnight. Our second coadjutor is Mrs. Huntley.

"I am afraid I am not very efficient," she says, with a pathetic smile. "I can't stand very long, but, if I might be allowed to sit down now and then, I might perhaps be some little help."

And sat down she has, accordingly, ever since, on the top pulpit-step. It seems that Algy cannot stand very long, either; for he has taken possession of the step next below the top one, and there he abides. Thank Heaven! they are getting dark now! If legitimate lovers, whose cooing is desirable and approved, are a sickly and sickening spectacle, surely the sight of illegitimate lovers would make the blood boil in the veins of Moses, Miriam, or Job.

Bobby, Tou Tou, and I, having no one to hang over us, or gawk amorously up at us, are sitting in a row in our pew. Bobby has garlanded Tou Tou preposterously with laurel, to give us an idea, as he says, of how he himself will look by-and-by, after some future Trafalgar. Now, he is whispering to me—a whisper accompanied by one of those powerful and painful nudges, with which he emphasizes his conversation on his listener's ribs.

"Look at him!" indicating his elder brother, and speaking with a tone of disgust and disparagement; "did you ever see such a beast as he looks?"

"Not often!" reply I, readily, with that fine intolerance which one never sees in full bloom after youth is past.

"I say, Nancy!" with a second and rather lesser nudge, "if ever you see any symptoms of—of that—" (nodding toward the pulpit) "in me—"

"Well, that is as it may be, but if you do, mind what I tell you—do not say any thing to anybody, but—put an end to me! it does not matter how; smother me with bolsters; run your bodkin up to its hilt in me—"

"Even if I did," interrupt I, laughing, "I should never reach any vital part—you are much too fat!"

"I should not be so fat then," returns he, gravely, amiably overlooking the personality of my observation; "love would have pulled me down!"

The Brat has nearly finished. He is nimbly descending the ladder, with a long, guttering dip in his right hand.

"The other two—" begins Bobby, thoughtfully, turning his eyes from pulpit to font.

"I do not mind them half so much," interrupt I, indulgently; "they are not half so disgusting."

"Has he done it yet?" (lowering his cheerful loud voice to an important whisper).

"I am beginning to think that your old man's plan was the best, after all," continues Bobby, affably. "I thought him rather out of date, at the time, for applying to your parents, but, after all, it saved a great deal of trouble, and spared us a world of suspense."

I am silent; swelling with a dumb indignation at the epithet bestowed on my Roger; but unable to express it outwardly, as I well know that, if I do, I shall be triumphantly quoted against myself.

"Who will break it to Toothless Jack?" says Bobby, presently, with a laugh; "after all the expense he has been at, too, with those teeth! it is not as if it were a beggarly two or three, but a whole complete new set—thirty-two individual grinders!"

"It is a thousand pities that they should be allowed to go out of the family," says Bobby, warmly. "Tou Tou, my child—" (putting his arm round her shoulders)—"a bright vista opens before you!—your charms are approaching maturity!—with a little encouragement he might be induced to lay his teeth—two and thirty, mind—at your feet!"

Tou Tou giggles, and asserts that she will "kick them away, if he does." Bobby mildly but firmly remonstrates, and points out to her the impropriety and ingratitude of such a line of conduct. But his arguments, though acute and well put, are not convincing, and the subject is continued, with ever-increasing warmth, all the way home.

CHAPTER XXIX.

It is Christmas-day—a clean white Christmas, pure and crisp. Wherever one looks, one's eyes water cruelly. For my part, I am very thankful that it did not occur to God to make the world always white. I hate snow's blinding livery. Each tiniest twig on the dry harsh trees is overladen with snow. It is a wonder that they do not break under it; nor is there any wind to shake down and disperse it. Tempest is white; the church is white: the whole world colorless and blinding. I have been in the habit of looking upon Vick as a white dog; to-day she appears disastrously dark—dirty brunette. Soap-and-water having entirely failed to restore her complexion. Bobby kindly proposes to pipeclay her.

We have all been to church, and admired our own decorations. And through all the prayer and the praise, and the glad Christmas singing, my soul has greatly hungered for Roger. Yes, even though all the boys are round me—Bobby on this side, the Brat on that—Algy directly in front; all behaving nicely, too; for are not they right under father's eyes? Yes, and, for the matter of that, under the rector's too, as he towers straight above us, under his ivy-bush—the ivy-bush into which Bobby was so anxious yesterday to insert some misletoe.

Church is over now, and the short afternoon has also slipped by. We are at dinner; we are dining early to-night—at half-past six o'clock, and we are to have a dance for the servants afterward. Any hospitality to my equals I have steadily and stoutly declined, but it seems a shame to visit my own loneliness on the heads of the servants, to whom it is nothing. They have always had a Christmas-dance in Roger's reign, and so a dance they are to have now. We have religiously eaten our beef and plum-pudding, and have each made a separate little blue fire of burnt brandy in our spoon.

It is dessert now, and father has proposed Roger's health. I did not expect it, and I never was so nearly betrayed into feeling fond of father in my life. They all drink it, each wishing him something good. As for me, I have been a fool always, and I am a fool now. I can wish him nothing, my voice is choked and my eyes drowned in inappropriate tears; only, from the depths of my heart, I ask God to give him every thing that He has of choicest and best. For a moment or two, the wax-lights, the purple grapes, the gleaming glass and shining silver, the kindly, genial faces swim blurred before my vision. Then I hastily wipe away my tears, and smile back at them all. As I raise my glistening eyes, I meet those of Mr. Musgrave fixed upon me—(he is the only stranger present). His look is not one that wishes to be returned; on the contrary, it is embarrassed at being met. It is a glance that puzzles me, full of inquiring curiosity, mixed with a sort of mirth. In a second—I could not tell you why—I look hastily away.

"I wonder what he is doing now, this very minute!" says Tou Tou, who is dining in public for the first time, and whose conversation is checked and her deportment regulated by Bobby, who has been at some pains to sit beside her, and who guides her behavior by the help of many subtle and unseen pinches under the table; from revolting against which a fear of father hinders her, a fact of which Bobby is most basely aware.

"Had not you better telegraph?" asks Algy, with languid irony (Algy certainly is not quite so nice as he used to be). "Flapping away the blue-tailed fly, with a big red-and-yellow bandana, probably."

"They are all wrong, are not they, Nancy?" says Bobby, in a lowered voice, to me, on whose left hand he has placed himself; "he is sitting in his veranda, is not he? in a palm hat and nankeen breeches, with his arm around the old Wampoo."

"I dare say," reply I, laughing. "I hope so," for, indeed, I am growing quite fond of my dusky rival.

The ball is to be in the servants' hall; it is a large, long room, and thither, when all the guests are assembled, we repair. We think that we shall make a greater show, and inspire more admiration, if we appear in pairs. I therefore make my entry on father's arm. Never with greater trepidation have I entered any room, for I am to open the ball with the butler, and the prospect fills me with dismay. If he were a venerable family servant, a hoary-headed old seneschal, who had known Roger in petticoats, it would have been nothing. I could have chattered filially to him; but he is a youngish man, who came only six months ago. On what subjects can we converse? I feel small doubt that his own sufferings will be hardly inferior in poignancy to mine.

The room is well lit, and the candles shine genially down from the laurel garlands and ivy festoons which clothe the walls. They light the faces and various dresses of a numerous assembly—every groom, footman, housemaid, and scullion, from far and near. The ladies seem largely to preponderate both in number and aplomb; the men appearing, for the more part, greatly disposed to run for shelter behind the bolder petticoats; particularly the stablemen. The footmen, being more accustomed to ladies' society, are less embarrassed by their own hands, and by the exigencies of chivalry. This inversion of the usual attitude of the sexes, will, no doubt, be set more than right when we have retired. The moment has arrived. I quit father's arm—for the first time in my life I am honestly sorry to drop it—and go up to my destined partner.

"Ashton," say I, with an attempt at an easy and unembarrassed smile, "will you dance this quadrille with me?"

How calm he is! how self-possessed. Oh, that he would impart to me the secret of his composure! I catch sight of the Brat, who is passing at the moment.

"Brat!" cry I, eagerly, snatching at his coat-sleeve, like a drowning man at a straw. "Will you be our vis-à-vis?"

Off he goes in search of one, and Ashton and I remain tête-à-tête. I suppose I ought to take his arm, and lead him to the top of the room. After a moment of hot hesitation, I do this. Here we are, arrived. Oh, why did I ask him so soon? Two or three minutes elapse before the Brat's return.

A pause. Everybody is choosing partners. Tou Tou, grinning from ear to ear, is bidding a bashful button-boy to the merry dance. Father—do my eyes deceive me?—father himself is leading out the housekeeper. Evidently he is saying something dignifiedly humorous to her, for she is laughing. I wish that he would sometimes be dignifiedly humorous to us, or even humorous without the dignity. Barbara, true to her life-long instincts, is inviting the clergyman's shabby, gawky man-of-all-work, at whom the ladies'-maids are raising the nose of contempt. Mr. Musgrave is soliciting a kitchen-wench.

"I hope," with bald affability, in desperation of a topic, "that you will all enjoy yourselves!"

Praise God! here is the Brat at last! Owing, I suppose, to the slenderness and fragile tenuity of his own charms, the Brat is a great admirer of fine women, the bigger the better; quantity, not quality; and, true to his colors, he now arrives with a neighboring cook, a lady of sixteen stone, on his arm.

We take our places. While chassezing and poussetting, thank Heaven, a very little talk goes a very long way. My mind begins to grow more easy. I am even sensible of a little feeling of funny elation at the sound of the fiddles gayly squeaking. I can look about me and laugh inwardly at the distant sight of Tou Tou and the button-boy turning each other nimbly round; of father, in the fourth figure, blandly backing between Mrs. Mitchell and a cook-maid.

We have now reached the fifth. At the few balls I have hitherto frequented it has been a harmless figure enough; hands all round, and a repetition of l'été. But now—oh, horror! what do I see? Everybody far and near is standing in attitude to gallopade. The Brat has his little arm round the cook's waist—at least not all the way round—it would take a lengthier limb than his to effect that; but a bit of the way, as far as it will go. An awful idea strikes me. Must Ashton and I gallopade too? I glance nervously toward him. He is looking quite as apprehensive at the thought that I shall expect him to gallopade with me, as I am at the thought that he will expect me to gallopade with him. I do not know how it is that we make our mutual alarm known to each other, only I know that, while all the world is gallopading round us, we gallopade not. Instead, we take hands, and jig distantly round each other.

The improvised valse soon ends, and I look across at the Brat. Gallant boy! the beads of perspiration stand on his young brow, but there is no look of blenching! When the time comes he will be ready to do it again.

As I stand in silent amusement watching him, having, for the moment, no dancing duties of my own, I hear a voice at my elbow, Bobby's, who, having come in later than the rest of us, has not been taking part in the dance.

"Nancy! Nancy!" in a tone of hurried excitement, "for the love of Heaven look at father! If you stand on tiptoe you will be able to see him; he has been gallopading! When I saw his venerable coat-tails flying, a feather would have knocked me down! You really ought to see it" (lowering his voice confidentially), "it might give you an idea about your own old man, and the old Wam—"

The duty part of the evening is over now. We have all signalized ourselves by feats of valor. I have scampered through an unsociable country-dance with the head coachman, and have had my smart gown of faint pink and pearl color nearly torn off my back by the ponderous-footed pair that trip directly after me. We have, in fact, done our duty, and may retire as soon as we like. But the music has got into our feet, and we promise ourselves one valse among ourselves before we depart.

The Brat is the only exception. He still cleaves to his cook; dancing with her is a tour de force, on which he piques himself. Mrs. Huntley and Algy are already flying down the room in an active, tender embrace. I have been asked as long ago as before dinner by Mr. Musgrave. I was rather surprised and annoyed at his inviting me instead of Barbara; but as, with this exception, his conduct has been unequivocally demonstrative, I console myself with the notion that he looks upon me as the necessary pill to which Barbara will be the subsequent jam.

The first bars of the valse are playing when Bobby comes bustling up. Healthy jollity and open mirth are written all over his dear, fat face.

"I am engaged to Mr. Musgrave," reply I, with a graceless and discontented curl of lip, and raising of nose.

"All right!" says Bobby, philosophically, walking away; "I am sure I do not mind, only I had a fancy for having one more spin with you."

"So you shall!" cry I, impulsively, with a sharp thought of Hong-Kong, running after him, and putting his solid right arm round my waist.

Away we go in mad haste. Like most sailors, Bobby dances well. I am nothing very wonderful, but I suit him. In many musicless waltzings of winter evenings, down the lobby at home, we have learned to fit each other's step exactly. At our first pausing to recover breath, I become sensible of a face behind me, of a fierce voice in my ear.

"Had not you better call Bobby out!" cry I, with a jeering laugh, tired of his eternal black looks. "You really are too silly! I wish I had a looking-glass here to show you your face!"

Repartee is never Frank's forte. This is all that he now finds with which to wither me. However, even if he had any thing more or more pungent to say, I should not hear him, for I am beginning to dance off again.

"What a fool he is to care!" says Bobby, contemptuously; "after all, he is an ill-tempered beast! I suppose if one kicked him down-stairs it would put a stop to his marrying Barbara, would not it?"

It is over now. The last long-drawn-out notes have ceased to occupy the air. As far as we are concerned, the ball is over, for we have quitted it. We have at length removed the gêne of our presence from the company, and have left them to polka and schottische their fill until the morning. We have reached our own part of the house. My cheeks are burning and throbbing with the quick, unwonted exercise. My brain is unpleasantly stirred: a hundred thoughts in a second run galloping through it. I leave the others in the warm-lit drawing-room, briskly talking and discussing the scene we have quitted, and slip away through the door, into a dark and empty adjacent anteroom, where the fire lies at death's door, low and dull, and the candles are unlighted.

I draw the curtains, unbar the shutters, and, lifting the heavy sash, look out. A cold, still air, sharp and clear, at once greets my face with its frosty kisses. Below me, the great house-shadow projects in darkness, and beyond it lies a great and dazzling field of shining snow, asleep in the moonlight.

Snow-trees, snow-bushes, sparkle up against the dusk quiet of the sky. No movement anywhere! absolute stillness! perfect silence! It is broken now, this silence, by the church-clock with slow wakefulness chiming twelve. Those slow strokes set me a thinking. I hear no longer the loud and lively voices next door, the icy penetration of the air is unfelt by me, as I lean, with my elbow on the sill, looking out at the cold grace of the night. My mind strays gently away over all my past life—over the last important year. I think of my wedding, of my little live wreath of sweet Nancies, of our long, dusty journey, of Dresden.

With an honest, stinging heart-pang, I think of my ill-concealed and selfish weariness in our twilight walks and scented drives, of the look of hurt kindness on his face, at his inability to please me. I think of our return, of the day when he told me of the necessity for his voyage to Antigua, and of my own egotistic unwillingness to accompany him. I think of our parting, when I shed such plenteous tears—tears that seem to me now to have been so much more tears of remorse, of sorrow that I was not sorrier, than of real grief. In every scene I seem to myself to have borne a most shabby part.

My meditations are broken in upon by a quick step approaching me, by a voice in my ear—Algy's.

"You are here, are you? I have been looking for you everywhere! Why, the window is open! For Heaven's sake let me get you a cloak! you know how delicate your chest is. For my sake, do!"

It is too dark to see his face, but there is a quick, excited tenderness in his voice.

"My chest delicate!" cry I, in an accent of complete astonishment. "Well, it is news to me if it is! My dear boy, what has put such an idea into your head? and if I got a cloak, I should think it would be for my own sake, not yours!"

He has been leaning over me in the dusk. At my words he starts violently and draws back.

"It is you, is it?" he says, in an altered voice of constraint, whence all the mellow tenderness has fled.

CHAPTER XXX.

How are unmusical people to express themselves when they are glad? People with an ear and a voice can sing, but what is to become of those who have not? Must they whoop inarticulately? For myself, I do not know one tune from another. I am like the man who said that he knew two tunes, one was "God save the Queen," and the other was not. And yet to-day I have as good a heart for singing as ever had any of the most famous songsters. In tune, out of tune, I must lift up my voice. It is as urgent a need for me as for any mellow thrush. For my heart—oh, rare case!—is fuller of joy than it can hold. It brims over. Roger is coming back. It is February, and he has been away nearly seven months. All minor evils and anxieties—Bobby's departure for Hong-Kong, Algy's increasing besotment about Mrs. Huntley, and consequent slight estrangement from me—(to me a very bitter thing)—Frank's continued silence as regards Barbara—all these are swallowed up in gladness.

When he is back, all will come right. Is it any wonder that they have gone wrong, while I only was at the helm? My good news arrived only this morning, and yet, a hundred times in the short space that has elapsed since then, I have rehearsed the manner of our meeting, have practised calling him "Roger," with familiar ease, have fixed upon my gown and the manner of my coiffure, and have wearied Barbara with solicitous queries, as to whether she thinks that I have grown perceptibly plainer in the last seven months, whether she does not think one side of my face better looking than the other, whether she thinks—(with honest anxiety this)—that my appearance is calculated to repel a person grown disused to it. To all which questions, she with untired gentleness gives pleasant and favorable answers.

The inability under which I labored of refraining from imparting bad news is tenfold increased in the case of good. I must have some one to whom to relate my prosperity. It will certainly not be Mrs. Huntley this time. Though I have struggled against the feeling as unjust, and disloyal to my faith in Roger, I still cannot suppress a sharp pang of distrust and jealousy, as often as I think of her, and of the relation made to me by Frank, as to her former connection with my husband. Neither am I in any hurry to tell Frank. To speak truth, I am in no good-humor with him or with his unhandsome shilly-shallying, and unaccountable postponement of what became a duty months ago.

Never mind! this also will come right when Roger returns. The delightful stir and hubbub in my soul hinder me from working or reading, or any tranquil in-door occupation; and, as afternoon draws on, fair and not cold, I decide upon a long walk. The quick exercise will perhaps moderately tire me, and subdue my fidgetiness by the evening, and nobody can hinder me from thinking of Roger all the way.

Barbara has a cold—a nasty, stuffy, choky cold; so I must do without her. Apparently I must do without Vick too. She makes a feint, indeed, of accompanying me half-way to the front gate, then sits down on her little shivering haunches, smirks, and when I call her, looks the other way, affecting not to hear. On my calling more peremptorily, "Vick! Vick!" she tucks her tail well in, and canters back to the house on three legs.

So it comes to pass that I set out quite alone. I have no definite idea where to go—I walk vaguely along, following my nose, as they say, smiling foolishly, and talking to myself—now under my breath—now out loud. A strong southwest wind blows steadily in my face: it sounded noisy and fierce enough as I sat in the house; but there is no vice or malevolence in it—it is only a soft bluster.

Alternate clouds and sunshine tenant the sky. The shadows of the tree-trunks lie black and defined across the road—branches, twigs, every thing—then comes a sweep of steely cloud, and they disappear, swallowed up in one uniform gray: a colorless moment or two passes, and the sun pushes out again; and they start forth distinct and defined, each little shoot and great limb, into new life on the bright ground. I laugh out loud, out of sheer jollity, as I watch the sun playing at hide-and-seek with them.

What a good world! What a handsome, merry, sweetly-colored world! Unsatisfying? disappointing?—not a bit of it! It must be people's own fault if they find it so.

I have walked a mile or so before I at length decide upon a goal, toward which to tend—a lone and distant cottage, tenanted by a very aged, ignorant, and feudally loyal couple—a cottage sitting by the edge of a brown common—one of the few that the greedy hand of Tillage has yet spared—where geese may still stalk and hiss unreproved, and errant-tinker donkeys crop and nibble undisturbed—

It is altogether a choice and goodly walk; next to nothing of the tame high-road. The path leads through a deep wooded dell; over purple plough-lands; down retired lanes.

After an hour and a quarter of smartish walking, I reach the door. There are no signs of ravaging children about. Long, long ago—years before this generation was born—the noisy children went out; some to the church-yard; some, with clamor of wedding-bells, to separate life. I knock, and after an interval hear the sound of pattens clacking across the flagged floor, and am admitted by an old woman, dried and pickled, by the action of the years, into an active cleanly old mummy, and whose fingers are wrinkled even more than time has done it, by the action of soapsuds. I am received with the joyful reverence due to my exalted station, am led in, and posted right in front of the little red fire and the singing kettle, and introduced to a very old man, who sits on the settle in the warm chimney-corner, dressed in an ancient smock-frock, and with both knotted hands clasped on the top of an old oak staff. He is evidently childish, and breaks now and then into an anile laugh at the thought, no doubt, of some dead old pot-house jest. A complication arises through his persisting in taking me for a sister of Roger's, who died thirty years ago, in early girlhood, and addressing me accordingly. I struggle a little for my identity, but, finding the effort useless, resign it.

"This poor ould person is quoite aimless," says his wife with dispassionate apology; "but what can you expect at noinety-one?"

"He's very fatiguin' on toimes!—that he is!" she continues, eying him with contemplated candor—"he crumbles his wittles to that extent that I 'ave to make him sit upo' the News of the World."

As it seems to me that the conversation is taking a painful direction, I try to divert it by telling my news; but the bloom is again taken off it by the old man, who declines to be disabused of the idea that the Peninsular is still raging, and that it is Roger's grandfather who is returning from that field of glory. After a few more minutes, during which the old wife composedly tells me of all the children she has buried—she has to think twice before she can recollect the exact number—and in the same breath remarks, "How gallus bad their 'taters were last year," I take my departure, and leave the old man still nodding his weak old head, and chuckling to the kettle.

On first leaving the house, I feel dashed and sobered. The inertness and phlegmatic apathy of dry and ugly old age seem to weigh upon and press down the passionate life of my youth, but I have not crossed a couple of ploughed fields and seen the long slices newly ploughed, lying rich and thick in the sun; I have not heard two staves of the throstle's loud song, before I have recovered myself. I also begin to sing. I am not very harmonious, perhaps, I never am; and I wander now and then from the tune; but it is good enough for the stalking geese, my only audience, except a ragged jackass, who, moved by my example, lifts his nose and gives vent to a lengthy bray of infinite yearning.

I am half-way home now. I have reached the wood—Brindley Wood; henceforth I am not very likely to forget its name. The path dips at once and runs steeply down, till it reaches the bottom of the dell, along which a quick brook runs darkling. In summer, when the leaves are out, it is twilight here at high noonday. Hardly a peep of sky to be seen through the green arch of oak and elm; but now, through the net-work of wintry twigs one looks up, and sees the faint, far blue, for the loss of which no leafage can compensate. Winter brownness above, but a more than summer green below—the heyday riot of the mosses. Mossed tree-trunks, leaning over the bustling stream; emerald moss carpets between the bronze dead leaves; all manner of mosses; mosses with little nightcaps; mosses like doll's ferns; mosses like plump cushions; and upon them here and there blazes the glowing red of the small peziza-cups.

I am still singing; and, as no wind reaches this shadowed hollow, I have taken off my hat, and walk slowly along, swinging it in my hand. It is a so little-frequented place, that I give an involuntary start, and my song suddenly dies, when, on turning a corner, I come face to face with another occupant. In a moment I recover myself. It is only Frank, sitting on a great lichened stone, staring at the brook and the trees.

"You seem very cheerful!" he says, rising, stretching out his hand, and not (as I afterward recollect) expressing the slightest surprise at our unlikely rencontre. "I never heard you lift up your voice before."

"That is all that you know about it," reply I, brusquely, rather resenting the accusation. "I have not been at all in good spirits all this—this autumn and winter, not, that is, compared to what I usually am."

"I am in good spirits to-day, I grant you," continue I, more affably; "it would be very odd if I were not. I should jump out of my skin if I were quite sure of getting back into it again; I have had such good news."

"I will give you three guesses," say I, trying to keep grave, but breaking out everywhere, as I feel, into badly-suppressed smiles.

"Something about the boys, of course!"—(half fretfully)—"it is always the boys."

"The fair Zéphine is no more!—by-the-by, I suppose I should have heard of that."

"Nothing about Barbara!"—(with a slight momentary pang at the ease and unconcern with which he mentions her name).—"By-the-by, I wish you would give up calling her 'Barbara;' she never calls you 'Frank!' There, you have had your three guesses, and you have never come within a mile of it—I shall have to tell you—Roger is coming back!" opening my eyes and beginning to laugh joyously.

"Soon?" with a quick and breathless change of tone, that I cannot help perceiving, turning sharply upon me.

He receives this information in total silence. He does not attempt the faintest or slightest congratulation.

"I wish I had not told you!" cry I, indignantly; "what a fool I was to imagine that you would feel the slightest interest in any thing that did not concern yourself personally! Of course" (turning a scarlet face and blazing eyes full upon him), "I did not expect you to feel glad—I have known you too long for that—but you might have had the common civility to say you were!"

We have stopped. We stand facing each other in the narrow wood-path, while the beck noisily babbles past, and the thrushes answer each other in lovely dialogue. He is deadly pale; his lips are trembling, and his eyes—involuntarily I look away from them!

"I am not glad!" he says, with slow distinctness; "often—often you have blamed me for hinting and implying for using innuendoes and half-words, and once—once, do you recollect?—you told me to my face that I lied! Well, I will not lie now; you shall have no cause to blame me to-day. I will tell you the truth, the truth that you know as well as I do—I am not glad!"

Absolute silence. I could no more answer or interrupt him than I could soar up between the dry tree-boughs to heaven. I stand before him with parted lips, and staring eyes fixed in a stony, horrid astonishment on his face.

"Nancy," he says, coming a step nearer, and speaking in almost a whisper, "you are not glad either! For once speak the truth! Hypocrisy is always difficult to you. You are the worst actress I ever saw—speak the truth for once! Who is there to hear you but me? I, who know it already—who have known it ever since that first evening in Dresden! Do you recollect?—but of course you do—why do I ask you? Why should you have forgotten any more than I?"

Still I am silent. Though I stand in the free clear air of heaven, I could not feel more choked and gasping were I in some close and stifling dungeon, hundreds of feet underground. I think that the brook must have got into my brain, there is such a noise of bubbling and brawling in it. Barbara, Roger, Algy, a hundred confused ideas of pain and dismay jostle each other in my head.

"Why do you look at me so?" he says, hoarsely. "What have I done? For God's sake, do not think that I blame you! I never have been so sorry for any one in my life as I have been for you—as I was for you from the first moment I saw you! I can see you now, as I first caught sight of you—weariness and depression in every line of your face—"

I can bear no more. At his last words, a pain like a knife, sharp to agony, runs through me. It is the grain of truth in his wicked, lying words that gives them their sting. I was weary; I was depressed; I was bored. I fling out my arms with a sudden gesture of despair, and then, throwing myself down on the ground, bury my face in a great moss cushion, and put my fingers in my ears.

"How shameful of you!" I cry, bursting into a passion of tears. "What sort of women can you have lived among? what a hateful mind you must have! And I thought that you were a nice fellow, and that we were all so comfortable together!"

He has drawn back a pace or two, and now stands leaning against one of the bent and writhen trunks of the old trees. He is still as pale as the dead, and looks all the paler for the burning darkness of his eyes.

"Is it possible," he says, in a low tone of but half-suppressed fury, "that you are going to pretend to be surprised?"

"Pretend!" cry I, vehemently; "there is no pretense about it! I never was so horribly, miserably surprised in all my life!"

And then, thinking of Barbara, I fall to weeping again, in utter bitterness and discomfiture.

"It is impossible!" he says, roughly. "Whatever else you are, you are no fool; and a woman would have had to be blinder than any mole not to see whither I—yes, and you, too—have been tending! If you meant to be surprised all along when it came to this, why did you make yourself common talk for the neighborhood with me? Why did you press me, with such unconventional eagerness to visit you? Why did you reproach me if I missed one day?"

"And now," he continues, with deepening excitement, "now that you reap your own sowing, you are surprised—miserably surprised!"

"I am!" cry I, incoherently. "You may not believe me, but it is true—as true as that God is above us, and that I never, never was tired of Roger!"

"Yes," he says, sardonically, "about as true. But, be that as it may, you must at least be good enough to excuse me from expressing joy at his return, seeing that he fills the place which I am fool enough to covet, and which, but for him, might—yes, say what you please, deny it as much as you like—would have been mine!"

"It never would!" cry I, passionately. "If you had been the last man in the world—if we had been left together on a desert island—I never should have liked you, never! I never would have seen more of you than I could help! There is no one whose society I grow so soon tired of. I have said so over and over again to the boys."

"What good reason can you give me for preferring you to him?" I ask, my voice trembling and quivering with a passionate indignation; "I am here, ready to listen to you if you can! How are you such a desirable substitute for him? Are you nobler? cleverer? handsomer? unselfisher?—if you are" (laughing bitterly), "you keep it mighty well hid."

"It is a lie," I cry, with growing vehemence, "a vile, base, groundless lie, to say that I am not glad he is coming back! Barbara knows—they all know how I have been wearying for him all these months. I was not in love, as you call it, when I married him—often I have told him that—and perhaps at Dresden I missed the boys a little—he knows that too—he understands! but now—now—" (clasping my hands upon my heart, and looking passionately upward with streaming eyes), "I want no one—no one but him! I wish for nothing better than to have him—him only!—and to-day, until I met you—till you made me loathe myself and you, and every living thing—it seemed to me as if all the world had suddenly grown bright and happy and good at the news of his coming."

"Even if I had not liked him," pursue I, finding words come quickly enough now, and speaking with indignant volubility, as, having risen, I again face him—"even if I had wanted to flirt with some one, why on earth should I have chosen you?" (eying him with scornful slowness, from his wide-awake to his shooting-boots), "you, who never even amused me in the least! Often when I have been talking to you, I have yawned till the tears came into my eyes! I have been afraid that you would notice it. If I had known" (speaking with great bitterness), "I should have taken less pains with my manners."

He does not answer a word. What answer can he make? He still stands under the wintry tree, white to lividness; drops of cold sweat stand on his brows; and his fine nostrils dilate and contract, dilate and contract, in an agony of anger and shame.

"What could have put such an idea into your head?" cry I, clasping my hands, while the tears rain down my cheeks, as—my thoughts again flying to Barbara—I fall from contempt and scorn to the sharpest reproach. "Who would have thought of such a thing? when there are so many better and prettier people who, for all I know, might have liked you. What wicked perversity made you fix upon me who, even if I had not belonged to any one else, could never, never have fancied you!"

"Is that true?" he says, in a harsh, rough whisper; "are you sure that you are not deceiving yourself? are you sure that under all your rude words you are not nearer loving me than you think?—that it is not that—with that barrier between us—you cannot reconcile it to your conscience—"

"Quite, quite sure!" interrupt I, with passionate emphasis, looking back unflinchingly into the angry depths of his eyes, "it has nothing to say to conscience! it has nothing to say to the wrongness of it" (crimsoning as I speak). "If it were quite right—if it were my duty—if it were the only way to save myself from hanging" (reaching after an ever higher and higher climax), "I never, NEVER could say that I was fond of you! I do not see what there is to be fond of in you! before God, I do not!"

"There!" he says, hoarsely stretching out his hand, as if to ward off a blow, "that will do!—stop!—you will never outdo that!"

Down in the loneliness of this dell, the twilight is creeping quickly on: when once it begins it tarries not. Out in the open country I dare say that it is still broad daylight; but here, the hues of the moss carpet are growing duller, and the brook is darkening. In a sudden panic, I hastily catch up my hat, which has fallen to the ground, and without a word or look of farewell, begin to run fast along the homeward path. Before I have gone ten yards he has overtaken me. His face is distorted by passion out of all its beauty.

"Nancy," he says, in a voice rendered almost unrecognizable by extreme agitation, walking quickly alongside of me, "we are not going to part like this!"

"What does it matter what I call you?" he cries, impatiently; "of what consequence is such a trifle? I will call you by what name you please, but for this once you must listen to me. I know, as well as you do, that it is my last chance!"

The path is beginning to rise. After mounting the slope, we shall soon be out of the wood, and in the peopled open again.

"How can I help it, if I have gone mad?" he cries violently, evidently driven to desperation by the shortness of the time before him.

All this time we are posting along in mad haste. Thank God! the high-road is in sight, the cheerful, populous, light high-road. The trees grow thinner, and the path broadens. Even from here, we can plainly see the carts and carters. He stops, and making me stop, too, snatches both my hands.

"Nancy!" he says, harshly, stooping over me, while his eyes flame with a haggard light. "Yes, I will call you so this once—to me now you are Nancy! I will not call you by his name! Is it possible? You may say that it is my egotism; but, at a moment like this, what is the use of shamming—of polite pretense? Never, never before in all my life have I given love without receiving it, and I cannot believe"—(with an accent of passionate entreaty)—"that I do now! Feeling for you as I do, do you feel absolutely nothing for me?"

"Feel!" cry I, driven out of all moderation by disgust and exasperation. "Would you like to know how I feel? I feel as if a slug had crawled over me!"

His face contracts, his eyes darken with a raging pain. He throws my hands—the hands a moment ago so jealously clasped—away from him.

"Thank you!" he says, after a pause, in a stiff voice of constraint. "I am satisfied!"

"And a very good thing too!" say I, sturdily, still at boiling-point, and diminishing with quick steps the small space still intervening between me and the road.

"Stay!" he says, overtaking me once again, as I reach it, and laying his hand in detention on my arm. "One word more! I should be sorry to part from you—such friends as we have been"—(with a sneer)—"without one good wish. Lady Tempest, I hope"—(smiling with malevolent irony)—"that your fidelity will be rewarded as it deserves."

"I have no doubt of it!" reply I, steadily; but even as I speak, a sharp jealous pain runs through my heart. Thank God! he cannot see it!

CHAPTER XXXI.

Yes, here out in the open it is still quite light; it seems two hours earlier than it did below in the dark dingle—light enough as plainly to see the faces of those one meets as if it were mid-day. I suppose that my late companion and I were too much occupied by our own emotions to hear, or at least notice the sound of wheels approaching us; but no sooner have I turned and left him, before I have gone three paces, than I am quickly passed by an open carriage and pair of grays—quickly, and yet slowly enough for me to recognize the one occupant. As to her—for it is Mrs. Huntley—she must have seen me already, as I stood with Mr. Musgrave on the edge of the wood, exchanging our last bitter words.

It is impossible that she could have helped it; but even had it been possible—had there been any doubt on the subject, that doubt would be removed by the unusual animation of her attitude, and the interest in her eyes, that I have time to notice, as she rolls past me.

I avert my face, but it is too late. She has seen my hat thrown on anyhow, as it were with a pitchfork—has seen my face swollen with weeping, and great tears still standing unwiped on my flushed cheeks. What is far, far worse, she has seen him, too. This is the last drop in an already over-full cup.

There is nothing in sight now—not even a cart—so I sit down on a heap of stones by the road-side, and, covering my hot face with my hands, cry till I have no more eyes left to cry with. Can this be the day I called good? Can this be that bright and merry day, when I walked elate and laughing between the deep furrows, and heard the blackbird and thrush woo their new loves, nor was able myself to refrain from singing?

My brain is a black chaos of whirling agonies, now together, now parting; so that each may make their separate sting felt, and, in turn, each will have to be faced. Preëminent among the dark host, towering above even the thought of Barbara, is the sense of my own degradation. There must have been something in my conduct to justify his taking me so confidently for the bad, light woman he did. One does not get such a character for nothing. I have always heard that, when such things happen to people, they have invariably brought them on themselves. In incoherent misery, I run over in my head, as well as the confusion of it will let me, our past meetings and dialogues. In almost all, to my distorted view, there now seems to have been an unseemly levity. Things I have said to him; easy, familiar jokes that I have had with him; not that he ever had much sense of a jest—(even at this moment I think this incidentally)—course through my mind.

Our many tête-à-têtes to which, at the time, I attached less than no importance: through many of which I unfeignedly, irresistibly gaped; our meetings in the park—accidental, as I thought—our dawdling saunters through the meadows, as often as not at twilight; all, all recur to me, and, recurring, make my face burn with a hot and stabbing shame.

And Roger! This is the way in which I have kept things straight for him! This is the way in which I have rewarded his boundless trust! he, whose only fear was lest I should be dull! lest I should not amuse myself! Well, I have amused myself to some purpose now. I have made myself common talk for the neighborhood! He said so. I have brought discredit on Roger's honored name! Not even the consciousness of the utter cleanness of my heart is of the least avail to console me. What matter how clean the heart is, if the conduct be light? None but God can see the former; the latter lies open to every carelessly spiteful, surface-judging eye. And Barbara! Goaded by the thought of her, I rise up quickly, and walk hastily along the road, till I reach a gate into the park. Arrived there, and now free from all fear of interruption from passers-by, I again sit down on an old dry log that lies beneath a great oak, and again cover my face with my hands.

What care I for the growing dark? the darker the better! Ah! if it were dark enough to hide me from myself! How shall I break it to her—I, who, confident in my superior discernment, have always scouted her misgivings and turned into derision her doubts? If I thought that she would rave and storm, and that her grief would vent itself in anger, it would not be of half so much consequence. But I know her better. The evening has closed in colder. The birds have all ceased their singing, and I still sit on, in the absolute silence, unconscious—unaware of any thing round me; living only in my thoughts, and with a resolution growing ever stronger and stronger within me. I will not tell her! I will never tell any one. I, that have hitherto bungled and blundered over the whitest fib, will wade knee-deep in falsehoods, before I will ever let any one guess the disgrace that has happened to me. Oh that, by long silence, I could wipe it out of my own heart—out of the book of unerasable past deeds!

Of course, by the cessation of his visits, Barbara will learn her fate in time. In time. Yes! but till then—till the long weeks in their lapse have brought the certainty of disappointment and mistake? How can I—myself knowing—watch her gentle confidence (for latterly her doubts—and whose would not?—have been set at rest) decline through all the suffering stages of uneasy expectation and deferred hope, to the blank, dull sickness of despair? How, without betraying myself, see her daily with wistful eyes looking—with strained ears listening—for a face and a step that come not? If she were one to love lightly, one of the many women who, when satisfied that it is no longer any use to cry and strive for the unattainable, the out of reach, clip and pare their affections to fit the unattainable, the within reach—! But I know differently.

Hitherto, whenever love has been offered to her—and the occasions have been not few—she has put it away from her; most gently, indeed, with a most eager desire to pour balm and not vinegar into the wounds she has made; with a most sincere sorrow and a disproportioned remorse at being obliged to cause pain to any living thing; yet, with a quiet and indifferent firmness, that left small ground for lingering hopes. And now, having once loved, she will be slow to unlove again.

It is quite dark now—as dark, at least, as it will be all night—and two or three stars are beginning to quiver out, small and cold, in the infinite distances of the sky. The sight of them, faintly trembling between the bare boughs of the trees, is the first thing that calls me back to the consciousness of outward things. Again I rise, and begin to walk, stumbling through the long wet knots of the unseen grass, toward the house. But when I reach it—when I see the red gleams shining through the chinks of the window-shutters—my heart fails me. Not yet can I face the people, the lights—Barbara! I turn into the garden, and pace up and down the broad, lonely walks: I pass and repass the cold river-gods of the unplaying fountain. I stand in the black night of the old cedar's shade. On any other day no possible consideration would have induced me to venture within the jurisdiction of its inky arms after nightfall; to-day, I feel as if no earthly or unearthly thing would have power to scare me. How long I stay, I do not know. Now and then, I put up my hands to my face, to ascertain whether my cheeks and eyes feel less swollen and burning; whether the moist and searching night-air is restoring me to my own likeness. At length, I dare stay no longer for fear of being missed, and causing alarm in the household. So I enter, steal up-stairs, and open the door of my boudoir, which Barbara and I, when alone, make our usual sitting-room. The candles are unlit; and the warm fire—evidently long undisturbed—is shedding only a dull and deceiving light on all the objects over which it ranges. So far, at least, Fortune favors me. Barbara and Vick are sitting on the hearth-rug, side by side. As I enter, they both jump up, and run to meet me. One of them gives little raptured squeaks of recognition. The other says, in a tone of relief and pleasure:

"Here you are! I was growing so frightened about you! What can have made you so late?"

"It was so—so—pleasant! The thrushes were singing so!" reply I, thus happily inaugurating my career of invention.

"Where have you been?" she asks, in a tone of ever-increasing surprise. "Did you go farther than you intended?"

"I went—to see—the old Busseys," reply I, slowly; inwardly pondering, with a stupid surprise, as to whether it can possibly have been no longer ago than this very afternoon, that the old man mistook me for the dead Belinda—and that I held the old wife's soapy hand in farewell in mine; "the—old—Busseys!" I repeat, "and it took—me a long—long time to get home!"

"You are cold!" she says, anxiously. "I hope you have not had a chill—" (taking my hands in her own slight ones)—"yes—starved!—poor dear hands; let me rub them!" (beginning delicately to chafe them).

Something in the tender solicitude of her voice, in the touch of her gentle hands, gives me an agony of pain and remorse. I snatch away my hands.

Again she looks at me, with a sort of astonishment, a little mixed with pain; but she does not say any thing. She goes over to the fire, and stoops to take up the poker.

"Do not!" cry I, hastily, "there is plenty of light!—I mean—" (stammering) "it—it—dazzles me, coming in out of the dark."

As I speak, I retire to a distant chair, as nearly as possible out of the fire-light, and affect to be occupied with Vick, who has jumped up on my lap, and—with all a dog's delicate care not to hurt you really—is pretending severely to bite every one of my fingers. Barbara has returned to the hearth-rug. She looks a little troubled at first; but, after a moment or two, her face regains its usual serene sweetness.

"And I have been here ever since you left me!" she says, presently, with a look of soft gayety. "I have had no visitors! Not even"—(blushing a little)—"the usual one."

"No?" say I, bending down my head over Vick, and allowing her to have a better and more thorough lick at the bridge of my nose than she has ever enjoyed in her life before.

"Why should not you, rather?" she says, laughing a little. "It is not such a very unusual occurrence?"

"Do you think not?" I say, in a voice whose trembling is painfully perceptible to myself. "You do not think I—I—" ("You do not think I meet him on purpose," I am going to say; but I break off suddenly, aware that I am betraying myself).

"He will come earlier to-morrow to make up for it"—she says, in a low voice, more to herself than to me—"yes"—(clasping her hands lightly in her lap, while the fire-light plays upon the lovely mildness of her happy face, and repeating the words softly)—"yes, he will come earlier to-morrow!"

I cannot bear it. I rise up abruptly, trundling poor Vick, to whom this reverse is quite unexpected, down on the carpet, and rushing out of the room.

It is evening now—late evening, drawing toward bedtime. I am sitting with my back to the light, and have asked for a shade for the lamp, on the plea that the wind has cut my eyes—but, in spite of my precautions, I am well aware that the disfigurement of my face is still unmistakably evident to the most casual eye; and, from the anxious care with which Barbara looks away from me, when she addresses me, I can perceive that she has observed it, as, indeed, how could she fail to do? If Tou Tou were here, she would overwhelm me with officious questions—would stare me crazy, but Barbara averts her eyes, and asks nothing.

We have been sitting in perfect silence for a long while; no noise but the click of Barbara's knitting-pins, the low flutter of the fire-flame, and the sort of suppressed choked inward bark, with which Vick attacks a phantom tomcat in her dreams.

"Barbara!" say I, with a hard, forced laugh, "I am going to ask you a silly question: tell me, did you ever observe—has it ever struck you that there was something rather—rather offensive in my manner to men?"

Her knitting drops into her lap. Her blue eyes open wide, like dog-violets in the sun; she is obliged to look at me now.

"Offensive!" she echoes, with an accent of the most utter surprise and mystification. "Good Heavens, no! What has come to the child? Oh!"—(with a little look of dawning intelligence)—"I see! You mean, do not you smite them too much? Are not you sometimes a little too hard upon them?"

Vick is either in hot pursuit of, or hot flight from, the tomcat; all her four legs are quivering and kicking in a mimic gallop.

"Do you remember," say I, again speaking, and again prefacing my words by an uneasy laugh, "how the boys at home used always to laugh at me, because I never knew how to flirt, nor had any pretty ways? Do you think"—(speaking slowly and hesitatingly)—"that boys—one's brothers, I mean—would be good judges of that sort of thing?"

"As good as any one else's brothers, I suppose," she says, with a low laugh, but still looking puzzled; "but why do you ask?"

"Has any one been accusing you?" she says, a little curiously, "But no! who could? You have seen no one, not even—"

"No, no!" interrupt I, shrinking from the sound of the name that I know is coming; "of course not; no one!"

The clock strikes eleven, and wakes Vick. Barbara rises, rolls up her knitting, and, going over to the fireplace, stands with one white elbow resting on the chimney-piece, and slender neck drooped, pensively gazing at the low fire.

"Do you know," she says, with a half-confused smile, that is also tinged with a little anxiety, "I have been thinking—it is the first time for three months that he has not been here at all, either in the morning, the afternoon, or the evening!"

"I think," she says, with a rather embarrassed laugh, "that he must have heard you were out, and that that was why he did not come. You know I always tell you that he likes you best."

She says it, as a joke, and yet her great eyes are looking at me with a sort of wistfulness, but neither to them nor to her words can I make any answer.

CHAPTER XXXII.

Next morning I am sitting before my looking-glass—never to me a pleasant article of furniture—having my hair dressed. I am hardly awake yet, and have not quite finished disentangling the real live disagreeables which I have to face, from the imaginary ones from which my waking has freed me. At least, in real life, I am not perpetually pursued, through dull abysses, by a man in a crape mask, from whom I am madly struggling to escape, and who is perpetually on the point of overtaking and seizing me.

It was a mistake going to sleep at all last night. It would have been far wiser and better to have kept awake. The real evils are bad enough, but the dream ones in their vivid life make me shiver even now, though the morning sun is lying in companionable patches on the floor, and the birds are loudly talking all together. Do no birds ever listen?

Distracted for a moment from my own miseries, by the noise of their soft yet sharp hubbub, I am thinking this, when a knock comes at the door, and the next moment Barbara enters. Her blond hair is tumbled about her shoulders; no white rose's cheeks are paler than hers; in her hand she has a note. In a moment I have dismissed the maid, and we are alone.

"I want you to read this!" she says, in an even and monotonous voice, from which, by an effort whose greatness I can dimly guess, she keeps all sound of trembling.

I have risen and turned from the glass; but now my knees shake under me so much that I have to sit down again. She comes behind me, so that I may no longer see her: and putting her arms round my neck, and hiding her face in my unfinished hair, says, whisperingly:

"Do you mean to say that he has had the insolence to write to you," I cry, in a passion of indignation, forgetting for the moment Barbara's ignorance of what has occurred, and only reminded of it by the look of wonder that, as I turn on my chair to face her, I see come into her eyes.

"Have not you been expecting him every day to write to me?" she asks, with a little wonder in her tone; "but read!" (pointing to the note, and laughing with a touch of bitterness), "you will soon see that there is no insolence here."

I had quite as lief, in my present state of mind, touch a yard-long wriggling ground-worm, or a fat wood-louse, as paper that his fingers have pressed; but I overcome my repulsion, and unfold the note.

"Dear Miss Grey:

"Can I do any thing for you in town? I am going up there to-morrow, and shall thence, I think, run over to the Exhibition. I have no doubt that it is just like all the others; but not to have seen it will set one at a disadvantage with one's fellows. I am afraid that there is no chance of your being still at Tempest when I return. I shall be most happy to undertake any commissions.

"Yours sincerely,

"F. Musgrave"

The note drops from my fingers, rolls on to my lap, and thence to the ground. I sit in stiff and stupid silence. To tell the truth, I am trying strongly to imagine how I should look and what I should say, were I as ignorant of causes as Barbara thinks me, and to look and speak accordingly.

She kneels down beside me, and softly drawing down my face, till it is on a level with hers, and our cheeks touch, says in a tone of gentle entreaty and compassion, as if I were the one to be considered—the prime sufferer:

"Do not fret about it, Nancy! it is of no—no consequence!—there is no harm done!"

"It is all my fault!" cry I, suddenly finding passionate words, starting up, and beginning to walk feverishly to and fro—"all!—there never was any one in all this world so blind, so ill-judging, so miserably mistaken! If it had not been for me, you never would have thought twice of him—never; and I"—(beginning to speak with weeping indistinctness)—"I thought it would be so nice to have you near me—I thought that there was nothing the matter with him, but his temper; many men are ill-tempered—nearly all. If" (tightly clinching my hands, and setting my teeth) "I had had any idea of his being the scoundrel that he is—"

"But he is not," she interrupts quickly, wincing a little at my words; "indeed he is not! What ill have we heard from him? If you do not mind" (laying her hand with gentle entreaty on my arm), "I had rather, far rather, that you did not say any thing hard of him! I was always so glad that you and he were such friends—always—and I do not know why—there is no sense in it; but I am glad of it still."

"Not friends!" she echoes, slowly repeating my words; then, seeing the expression of my face, stops suddenly.

"Are you sure," cry I, feverishly snatching her hands and looking with searching anxiety into her face, "that you spoke truth just now?—that you do not mind much—that you will get over it!—that it will not kill you?"

"Kill me!" she says, with a little sorrowful smile of derision; "no, no! I am not so easily killed."

"Are you sure?" persist I, with a passionate eagerness, still reading her tear-stained face, "that it will not take the taste out of every thing?—that it will not make you hate all your life?—it would me."

"Quite sure!—certain!" she says, looking back at me with a steady meekness, though her blue eyes brim over; "because God has taken from me one thing—one that I never had any right to expect—should I do well, do you think, to quarrel with all that He has left me?"

"Even if my life were spoilt," she goes on, after a moment or two, her voice gaining firmness, and her face a pale serenity, "even if it were—but it is not—indeed it is not. In a very little while it will seem to me as good and pleasant and full as ever; but even if it were" (looking at me with a lovely confidence in her eyes), "it would be no such very great matter—this life is not every thing!"

"No one has been to blame," she continues, with a gentle persistence. "I should like you to see that! There has been only a—a—mistake"—(her voice failing a little again), "a mistake that has been corrected in time, and for which no one—no one, Nancy, is the worse!"

CHAPTER XXXIII.

So this is the way in which Barbara's hope dies! Our hopes have as many ways of dying as our bodies. Sometimes they pine and fall into a slow consumption, we nursing, cockering, and physicking them to the last. Sometimes they fall down dead suddenly, as one that in full health, with his bones full of marrow, and his eyes full of light, drops wordless into the next world unaware. This last has been Barbara's case. When she thought it healthiest, and most vigorous in its stalwart life, then the death-mark was on it. To most of us, O friends, troubles are as great stones cast unexpectedly on a smooth road; over which, in a dark night, we trip, and grumblingly stumble, cursing, and angrily bruising our limbs. To a few of us, they are ladders, by which we climb to God; hills, that lift us nearer heaven—that heaven, which, however certainly—with whatever mathematical precision—it has been demonstrated to us that it exists not here, nor there, nor yet anywhere, we still dimly, with yearning tears and high longings, grasp at. Barbara has always looked heavenward. In all her mirth, God has mixed. Now, therefore, in this grief that He has sent her—this ignoble grief, that yet cuts the none less deeply for being ignoble, and excluding the solace of human sympathy, she but thrusts her hand with a fuller confidence in his, and fixes her sweet eyes with a more reverent surety on the one prime consoler of humankind, who, from his Cross, has looked royally down the toiling centuries—the king, whom this generation, above all generations, is laboring—and, as not a few think, successfully—to discrown. To her, his kingship is as unquestioned as when heretics and paynims burnt to prove it.

Often, since then, in those vain longings that come to each of us, I suppose, I tried in after-days—sometimes I try now, to stretch my arms out wide-backward toward the past—to speak the words that would have been as easily spoken then as any other—that no earthly power can ever make spoken words now, of sympathy and appreciation to Barbara.

I did say loving things, but they seem to me now to have been but scant and shabby. Why did not I say a great many more? Oh, all of you who live with those that are dearer to you than they seem, tell them every day how much you love them! at the risk of wearying them, tell them, I pray you: it will save you, perhaps, many after-pangs.

I think that, at this time, there are in me two Nancys—Barbara's Nancy, and Roger's Nancy; the one so vexed, thwarted, and humiliated in spirit, that she feels as if she never could laugh quite heartily again; the other, so utterly and triumphantly glad, that any future tears or trials seem to her in the highest degree improbable. And Barbara herself is on the side of this latter. From her hopeful speech and her smiles, you would think that some good news had come to her—that she was on the eve of some long-looked-for, yet hardly-hoped prosperity. Not that she is unnaturally or hysterically lively—an error into which many, making such an effort and struggle for self-conquest, would fall. Barbara's mirth was never noisy, as mine and the boys' so often was. Perhaps—nay, I have often thought since, certainly—she weeps as she prays, in secret; but God is the only One who knows of her tears, as of her prayers. She has always been one to go halves in her pleasures, but of her sorrows she will give never a morsel to any one.

Her very quietness under her trouble—her silence under it—her equanimity—mislead me. It is the impulse of any hurt thing to cry out. I, myself, have always done it. Half unconsciously, I am led by this reasoning to think that Barbara's wound cannot be very deep, else would she shrink and writhe beneath it. So I talk to her all day, with merciless length, about Roger. I go through all the old queries. I again critically examine my face, and arrive—not only at the former conclusion, that one side is worse-looking than the other, but also that it looks ten years older.

I have my flax hair built in many strange and differing fashions, and again unbuilt: piled high, to give me height; twisted low, in a vain endeavor to liken me to the Greeks; curled, plaited, frizzed, and again unfrizzed. I institute a searching and critical examination of my wardrobe, rejecting this and that; holding one color against my cheek, to see whether my pallor will be able to bear it; turning away from another with a grimace of self-disgust.

And this is the same "I," who thought it so little worth while to win the good opinion of father's blear-eyed old friend, that I went to my first meeting with him with a scorched face, loose hair, tottering, all through prayers, on the verge of a descent about my neck, and a large round hole, smelling horribly of singeing, burnt in the very front of my old woolen frock.

His coming is near now. This very day I shall see him come in that door. He will sit in that chair. His head will dent that cushion. I shall sit on a footstool at his feet. The better to imagine the position, I push a footstool into the desired neighborhood to Roger's arm-chair, and already see myself, with the eye of faith, in solid reality occupying it. I rehearse all the topics that will engage my tongue. The better to realize their effect upon him, I give utterance out loud to the many greetings, to the numberless fond and pretty things with which I mean to load him.

He always looked so very joyful when I said any little civil thing to him, and I so seldom, seldom did. Ah! we will change all that! He shall be nauseated with sweets. And then, still sitting by him, holding his hand, and with my head (dressed in what I finally decide upon as the becomingest fashion) daintily rested on his arm, I will tell him all my troubles. I will tell him of Algy's estrangement, his cold looks and harsh words. Without any outspoken or bitter abuse of her, I will yet manage cunningly to set him on his guard against Mrs. Huntley. I will lament over Bobby to him. Yes, I will tell him all my troubles—all, that is, with one reservation.

"You will be better by yourselves," she says, gently, when she announces her intention of going. "He will like it better. I should if I were he. It will be like a new honey-moon."

"That it will not," reply I, stoutly, recollecting how much I yawned, and how largely Mr. Musgrave figured in the first. "I have no opinion of honey-moons; no more would you if you had had one."

"Should not I?" speaking a little absently, while her eyes stray through the window to the serene coldness of the sky, and the pallid droop of the snow-drops in the garden-border.

"You are sure," say I, earnestly, taking her light hand in mine, "that you are not going because you think that you are not wanted now—that now, that I have my—my own property again" (smiling irrepressibly), "I can do very well without you."

"Quite sure, Nancy!" looking back into my eager eyes with confident affection.

"When you quarrel," she answers, her face dimpling into a laugh, "I will come and make it up between you."

"You must come before then," say I, with a proud smile, "or your visit is likely to be indefinitely postponed."

CHAPTER XXXIV.

"Gertrude. Is my knight come? O the Lord, my band! Sister, do my cheeks look well? Give me a little box o' the ear, that I may seem to blush."—Eastward Hoe.

She is gone now. The atmosphere of the house seems less clear, less pure, now that she has left it. As she drives away, it seems to me, looking after her, that no flower ever had a modester face, a more delicate bloom. If I had time to think about it, I should fret sorely after her, I should grievously miss her; but I have none.

The carriage that takes her to the station is to wait half an hour, and then bring back Roger. There is, therefore, not more than enough time for me to make the careful and lengthy toilet, on which I have expended so much painstaking thought. I have deferred making it till now, so that I may appear in perfect dainty freshness, as if I had just emerged from the manifold silver papers of a bandbox, before him when he arrives—that not a hair of my flax head may be displaced from its silky sweep; that there may be no risk of Vick jumping up, and defiling me with muddy paws that know no respect of clothes.

I take a long time over it. I snub my maid more than I ever did in my life before. But I am complete now; to the last pin I am finished. Perhaps—though this does not strike me till the last moment—perhaps I am rather, nay, more than rather, overdressed for the occasion. But surely this, in a person who has not long been in command of fine clothes, and even in that short time has had very few opportunities of airing them, is pardonable.

You remember that it is February. Well, then, this is the warm splendor in which I am clad. Genoa velvet, of the color of a dark sapphire, trimmed with silver-fox fur; and my head crowned with a mob-cap, concerning which I am in doubt, and should be nervously glad to have the boys here to enlighten me as to whether it is very becoming or rather ridiculous. The object of the mob-cap is to approximate my age to Roger's, and to assure all such as the velvet and fur leave in doubt, that I am entitled to take my stand among the portly ranks of British matrons.

"Algy was right," say I, soliloquizing aloud, as I stand before the long cheval glass, with a back-hair glass in one hand, by whose aid I correct my errors in the profile, three-quarters or back view; "mine is not the most hopeless kind of ugliness. It is certainly modifiable by dress."

So saying, I lay down the hand-glass, and walk sedately down-stairs, holding my head stiffly erect, and looking over my shoulder, like a child, at the effect of my blue train sweeping down the steps after me.

Arrived in my boudoir, I go and stand by the window, though there are yet ten minutes before he is due. Once I open the casement to listen, but hastily close it again, afraid lest the wintry wind should ruffle the satin smoothness of my hair, or push the mob-cap awry. Then I sit carefully down, and, harshly repulsing an overture on the part of Vick to jump into my lap, fix my eyes upon the dark bare boughs of the tall and distant elms, from between which I shall see him steal into sight. The time ticks slowly on. He is due now. Five more lame, crawling minutes—ten!—no sign of him. Again I rise, unclose the casement, and push my matronly head a little way out to listen. Yes! yes! there is the distant but not doubtful sound of a horse's four hoofs smartly trotting and splashing along the muddy road. Three minutes more, and the sun catches and brightly gleams on one of the quickly-turning wheels of the dog-cart as it rolls toward me, between the wintry trees.

At first I cannot see the occupants; the boughs and twigs interpose to hide them; but presently the dog-cart emerges into the open. There is only one person in it!

At first I decline to believe my own eyes. I rub them. I stretch my head farther out. Alas! self-deception is no longer possible: the groom returns as he went—alone. Roger has not come!

The dog-cart turns toward the stables, and I run to the bell and pull it violently. I can hardly wait till it is answered. At last, after an interval, which seems to me like twenty minutes, but which that false, cold-blooded clock proclaims to be two, the footman enters.

"Sir Roger has not come," I say more affirmatively than interrogatively, for I have no doubt on the subject. "Why did not the groom wait for the next train?"

"What! all the way from Bishopsthorpe?" cry I, incredulously, thinking of the five miry miles that intervene between us and that station. "Impossible!"

I feel the color rushing away from my cheeks, and turn quickly aside, that my change of countenance may not be perceived.

"Mrs. Huntley was at the gate, my lady, and Sir Roger got down to speak to her, and bid James drive on and tell your ladyship he would be here directly."

He is gone, and I need no longer mind what color my face is, nor what shape of woeful jealousy my late so complacent features assume.

So this is what comes of thinking life such a grand and pleasant thing, and this world such a lovely, satisfying paradise! Wait long enough—(I have not had to wait very long for my part)—and every sweet thing turns to gall-like bitterness between one's teeth! The experience of a few days ago might have taught me that, one would think, but I was dull to thick-headedness. I required two lessons—the second, oh how far harsher than even the first!

In a moment I have taken my resolution. I am racing up-stairs. I have reached my room. I do not summon my maid. One requires no assistance to enable one to unbuild, deface, destroy. In a second—in much less time than it takes me to write it—I have torn off the mob-cap, and thrown it on the floor. If I had done what I wished, if I had yielded to my first impulse, I should also have trampled upon it; but from the extremity of petulance, I am proud to be able to tell you that I refrain. With rapid fingers I unbutton my blue-velvet gown, and step out of it, leaving it in a costly heap on the floor. Then I open the high folding-doors of the wardrobe, and run my eye over its contents; but the most becoming is no longer what I seek. For a moment or two I stand undecided, then my eye is caught by a venerable garment, loathly and ill-made, which I had before I married, and have since kept, more as a relic than any thing else—a gown of that peculiar shade of sallow, bilious, Bismarck brown, which is the most trying to the paleness of my skin. Before any one could say "Jack Robinson," it is down, and I am in it. Then, without even a parting smooth to the hair, which the violent off-tearing of my cap must have roughened and disheveled, I go down-stairs and reënter the boudoir. As I do so, I catch an accidental glimpse of myself in a glass. Good Heavens! Can three minutes (for I really have not been longer about it) have wrought such a monstrous metamorphosis? Is every woman as utterly dependent for her charms upon her husk as I am? Can this sad, sallow slip of a girl be the beaming, shapely, British matron I contemplated with so innocently pleased an eye half an hour ago? If, in all my designs, I could have the perfect success which has crowned my efforts at self-disfigurement, I should be among the most prosperous of my species.

I sit down as far from the window as the dimensions of the room will allow, call Vick, who comes at first sneakingly and doubtful of her reception, up on my lap, and take a book. It is the one nearest to my hand, and I plunge into it haphazard in the middle.

This is the sentence that first greets me: "Her whole heart was in her boy. She often feared that she loved him too much—more than God himself—yet she could not bear to pray to have her love for her child lessened."

Not a very difficult one to construe, is it? and yet, having come to the end, and found that it conveyed no glimmering of an idea to my mind, I begin it over again.

"Her whole heart was in her boy. She often feared that she loved him too much—more than God himself—yet she could not bear to pray to have her love for her child lessened."

"Her whole heart was in her boy," etc. I go through this process ten times. I should go through it twenty, or even thirty, for I am resolved to go on reading, but at the end of the tenth, my ear—unconsciously strained—catches the sound of a step at the stair-foot. It is not the footman's. It is firmer, heavier, and yet quicker.

Eight weary months is it since I last heard that footfall. My heart pulses with mad haste, my cheeks throb, but I sit still, and hold the book before my eyes. I will not go to meet him. I will be as indifferent as he! When he opens the door, I will not even look round, I will be too much immersed in the page before me.

The door-handle is turning. I cannot help it! Against my will, my head turns too. With no volition of my own—against my firmest intention—my feet carry me hastily toward him. My arms stretch themselves out. Thank God! thank God! whatever happens afterward, I shall still thank God, and call him good for allowing it. I am in Roger's embrace. No more mistakes! no more delays! he is here, and I am kissing him as I never kissed any one—as I certainly never kissed him in my life before.

Well, I suppose that in every life there are some moments that are absolutely good—that one could not mend even if one were given the power to try! I suppose that even those who, looking back over their history, say, most distinctly and certainly, "It was a failure," can yet lay the finger of memory on some such gold minutes—it may be only half a dozen, only four, only two—but still on some.

This is one of my gold moments, one of those misplaced ones that have strayed out of heaven, where, perhaps, they are all such—perhaps—one can't be sure, for what human imagination can grasp the idea of even a day, wholly made of such minutes?

I have forgotten Mrs. Huntley—Mr. Musgrave. Every ill suspicion, every stinging remembrance, is dead or fallen into a trance. All bad thoughts have melted away from the earth. Only joyful love and absolute faith remain, only the knowledge that Roger is mine, and I am his, and that we are in each other's arms. I do not know how long we remain without speaking. I do not imagine that souls in bliss ever think of looking at the clock. He is the first to break silence. For the first time for eight months I hear his voice again—the voice that for so many weeks seemed to me no better than any other voice—whose tones I now feel I could pick out from those of any other living thing, did all creation shout together.

"Let me look at my wife!" he says, taking my countenance in his tender hands, as if it were made of old china, and would break if he let it fall. "I feel as if I had never had a wife before, as if it were quite a new plaything."

I make no verbal answer. I am staring up with all my eyes into his face, thinking, with a sort of wonder, how much goodlier, younger, statelier it is than it has appeared to me in any of those dream-pictures, which yet mostly flatter.

"My wife! my wife!" he says, speaking the words most softly, as if they greatly pleased him, and replacing with carefullest fingers a stray and arrant lock that has wandered from its fellows into my left eye. "What has come to you? Had I forgotten what you were like? How pretty you are! How well you look!"

"Do I?" say I, with a pleasant simper; then, with a sudden and overwhelming recollection of the bilious gingery frock, and the tousled hair, "No, nonsense!" I say, uneasily, "impossible! You are laughing at me! Ah!"—(with a sigh of irrepressible regret and back-handed pride)—"you should have seen me half an hour ago! I did look nice then, if you like."

"Why nicer than now?"—(with a puzzled smile that both plays about his bearded lips and gayly shines in his steel-gray eyes).

"Oh, never mind! never mind!" reply I, in some confusion, "it is a long story; it is of no consequence, but I did."

"Nancy!" he says, with a sort of hesitating joy, a diffident triumph in his voice, "do you know, I believe you have kept your promise! I believe, I really believe, that you are a little glad to see me!"

"Are you glad to see me, is more to the purpose?" return I, descending out of heaven with a pout, and returning to the small jealousies and acerbities of earth, and to the recollection of that yet unexplained alighting at Aninda's gate.

He seems to think that no asseverations, no strong adjectives or intensifying adverbs, no calling upon sun and moon and stars to bear witness to his gladness, can increase the force of those two tiny words, so he adds none.

"I wonder, then," say I, in a rather sneaky and shamefaced manner, mumbling and looking down, "that you were not in a greater hurry to get to me?"

"In a greater hurry!" he repeats, in an accent of acute surprise. "Why, child, what are you talking about? Since we landed, I have neither slept nor eaten. I drove straight across London, and have been in the train ever since."

"But—between—this—and the—station?" suggest I, slowly, having taken hold of one of the buttons of his coat; the very one that in former difficulties I used always to resort to.

"You mean about my walking up?" he says readily, and without the slightest trace of guilty consciousness, indeed with a distinct and open look of pleasure; "but, my darling, how could I tell how long she would keep me? poor little woman!" (beginning to laugh and to put back the hair from his tanned forehead). "I am afraid I did not bless her when I saw her standing at her gate! I had half a mind to ask her whether another time would not do as well, but she looked so eager to hear about her husband—you know I have been seeing him at St. Thomas—such a wistful little face—and I knew that she could not keep me more than ten minutes; and, altogether when I thought of her loneliness and my own luck—"

"Are you so sure she is lonely?" I say, with an innocent air of asking for information, and still working hard at the button; "are people always lonely when their husbands are away?"

He looks at me strangely for a moment; then, "Of course she is lonely, poor little thing!" he says, warmly; "how could she help it?"

"Most men," say I, jealously, "would not have thought it a hardship to walk up and down between the laurustinus with Mrs. Zéphine, I can tell you!"

"Would not they?" he answers, indifferently. "I dare say not! she always was a good little thing!"

"Excellent!" reply I, with a nasty dryness, "bland, passionate, and deeply religious!"

Again he looks at me in surprise—a surprise which, after a moment's reflection, melts and brightens into an expression of pleasure.

"Did you care so much about my coming that ten minutes seemed to make a difference?" he asks, in an eager voice. "Is it possible that you were in a hurry for me?"

Why cannot I speak truth, and say yes? Why does an objectlessly lying devil make its inopportune entry into me? Through some misplaced and crooked false shame I answer, "Not at all! not at all! of course a few minutes one way or the other could not make much difference; I was only puzzled to know what had become of you?"

He looks a shade disappointed, and for a moment we are both silent. We have sat down side by side on the sofa. Vick is standing on her hinder legs, with her forepaws rested on Roger's knee. Her tail is wagging with the strong and untiring regularity of a pendulum, and a smirk of welcome and recognition is on her face. Roger's arm is round me, and we are holding each other's hands, but we are no longer in heaven. I could not tell you why, but we are not. Some stupid constraint—quite of earth—has fallen upon me. Where are all those most tender words, those profuse endearments with which I meant to have greeted him?

"And so it is actually true!" he says, with a long-drawn sigh of relief; his eyes wandering round the room, and taking in all the familiar objects; "there is no mistake about it! I am actually holding your real live hand" (turning it gently about and softly considering the long slight fingers and pink palm)—"in mine! Ah! my dear, how often, how often I have held it so in my dreams! Have you ever" (speaking with a sort of doubtfulness and uncertain hope)—"have you ever—no, I dare say not—so held mine?"

The diffident passion in his voice for once destroys that vile constraint, dissipates that idiotic sense of bashfulness.

"Scores of times!" I answer, letting my head drop on his shoulder, and not taking the trouble to raise it again.

"I never used to think myself of a very nervous turn!" he says, presently, with a smile. "Nancy, you will laugh at me, but I assure you upon my honor that all the way home I have been in the most abject and deadly fright: at every puff of wind I thought we were infallibly going to the bottom: whenever the carriage rocked in the least to-day on the way down, I made up my mind we were going to smash! Little woman, what can a bit of a thing like you have done to me to make me seem so much more valuable to myself than I have ever done these eight-and-forty years?"

I think no answer to this so suitable and seemly as a dumb friction of my left cheek against the rough cloth of the shoulder on which it has reposed itself.

"Talk to me, Nancy!" he says, in a quiet half-whisper of happiness. "Let me hear the sound of your voice! I am sick of my own; I have had a glut of that all these weary eight months; tell me about them all! How are they all? how are the boys?" (with a playful smile of recollection at what used to be my one subject, the one theme on which I was wont to wax illimitably diffuse). But now, at the magic name no pleasant garrulity overcomes me; only the remembrance of my worries; of all those troubles that I mean now to transfer from my own to Roger's broad shoulders, swoop down upon me.

"The Brat has gone back to Oxford," I say, gloomily; "Bobby has gone to Hong-Kong, and Algy has gone to the dogs—or at least is going there as hard as he can!"

"To the dogs?" (with an accent of surprise and concern); "what do you mean? what has sent him there?"

"You had better ask Mrs. Zéphine," reply I, bitterly, thinking, with a lively exasperation, of the changed and demoralized Algy I had last seen—soured, headstrong, and unhinged.

"Zéphine!" (repeating the name with an accent of thorough astonishment), "what on earth can she have to say to it?"

"Ah, what?" reply I, with oracular spite; then, overcome with remorse at the thought of the way in which I was embittering the first moments of his return, I rebury my face in his shoulder.

"I will tell you about that to-morrow," I say; "to-day is a good day, and we will talk only of good things and of good people."

He does not immediately answer. My remark seems to have buried him in thought. Presently he shakes off his distraction and speaks again.

"And Barbara? how is she? She has not" (beginning to laugh)—"she has not gone to the dogs, I suppose!"

"No," say I, slowly, not thinking of what I am saying, but with my thoughts wandering off to the greatest and sorest of my afflictions, "not yet."

"And" (smiling) "your plan. See what a good memory I have—your plan of marrying her to Musgrave, how does that work?"

"My plan!" cry I, tremulously, while a sudden torrent of scarlet pours all over my face and neck. "I do not know what you are talking about! I never had any such plan! Phew!" (lifting up the arm that is round my waist, hastily removing it, rising and going to the window), "how hot this room grows of an afternoon!"

CHAPTER XXXV.

So the king enjoys his own again, and Roger is at home. Not yet—and now it is the next morning—has his return become real to me. Still there is something phantom and visionary about it: still it seems to me open to question whether, if I look away from him for a moment, he may not melt and disappear into dream-land.

All through breakfast I am dodging and peeping from behind the urn to assure myself of the continued presence and substantial reality of the strong shoulders and bronze-colored face that so solidly and certainly face me. As often as I catch his eye—and this is not seldom, for perhaps he too has his misgivings about me—I smile, in a manner, half ashamed, half sneaky, and yet most wholly satisfied.

The sun, who is not by any means always so well-judging, often hiding his face with both hands from a wedding, and hotly and gaudily flaming down on a black funeral, is shining with a temperate February comeliness in at our windows, on our garden borders; trying (and failing) to warm up the passionless melancholy of the chilly snow-drop families, trying (and succeeding) to add his quota to the joy that already fills and occupies our two hearts.

"How fine it is!" I cry, flying with unmatronly agility to the window, and playing a waltz on the pane. "That is right! I should have been so angry if it had rained; let us come out at once—I want to hear your opinion about the laurels; they want cutting badly, but I could not have them touched while you were away, though Bobby's fingers—when he was here—itched to be hacking at them. Come, I have got on my strong boots on purpose!—at once."

"At once?" he repeats, a little doubtfully turning over the letters that lie in a heap beside his plate. "Well, I do not know about that—duty first, and pleasure afterward. Had not I better go to Zéphine Huntley's first, and get it over?"

"To Zéphine Huntley's?" repeat I, my fingers suddenly breaking off in the middle of their tune, as I turn quickly round to face him; the smile disappearing from my face, and my jaw lengthening; "you do not mean to say that you are going there again?"

"Yes, again!" he answers, laughing a little, and slightly mimicking my tragic tone; "why not, Nancy?"

I make no answer. I turn away and look out; but I see a different landscape. It looks to me as if I were regarding it through dark-blue glass.

"I have got a whole sheaf of letters and papers from her husband for her," pursues Roger, apparently calmly, and utterly unaware of my discomfiture, "and I do not want to keep her out of them longer than I can help."

Still I make no rejoinder. My fingers stray idly up and down the glass; but it is no longer a giddy waltz that they are executing—if it is a tune at all, it is some little dirge.

"What has happened to you, Nancy?" says Roger, presently, becoming aware of my silence, rising and following me; "what are you doing—catching flies?"

Once again he regards me with that look of unfeigned surprise, tinged with a little pain which yesterday I detected on his face. When I look at him, when my eyes rest on the brave and open honesty of his, my ugly, nipping doubts disappear.

"Do not go," say I, standing on tiptoe, so that my hands may reach his neck, and clasp it, speaking in my most beguiling half-whisper; "why should you fetch and carry for her? let John or William take her letters. Are you so sure" (with an irresistible sneer) "that she is in such a hurry for them?—stay with me this one first day!—do, please—Roger."

It is the first time in all my history that I have succeeded in delivering myself of his Christian name to his face—frequently as I have fired it off in dialogues with myself, behind his back. It shoots out now with the loud suddenness of a mismanaged soda-water cork.

"Roger!" he repeats, in an accent of keen pleasure, catching me to his heart; "what! I am Roger, after all, am I? The 'general' has gone to glory at last, has he?—thank God!"

"I will ring and tell John at once," say I, with subtile amiability, disengaging myself from his arms, and walking quickly toward the bell.

"Stay!" he says, putting his hand on me in detention, before I have made two steps; "you must not! it is no use! John will not do, or William either: it is a matter of business. I have" (sighing) "to go through many of these papers with her."

"What possible concern is it of yours?" ask I, throwing the reins on the neck of my indignation, and urging that willing steed to a sharp gallop, crimsoning as I speak, and raising my voice, as has ever been our immemorial wont in home-broils. "For my part, I never saw any good come of people putting their fingers into their neighbors' pies!"

"Not even if those neighbors are the oldest friends they have in the world?" he says, gently, yet eying with some wonder—perhaps apprehension, for odd things frighten men—the small scarlet scold who stands swelling with ruffled feathers, and angry eyes, winking to keep the tears out of them, before him.

"I thought father was the oldest friend you had in the world!" say I, with a jealous tartness; "you always used to tell us so."

"Some of my oldest friends, then," he answers, looking a little amused, "since you will have me so exact."

"If Mrs. Huntley is the oldest friend you have in the world," say I, acrimoniously, still sticking to his first and most offensive form of expression, and heavily accenting it, "I wonder that you never happened to mention her existence before you went."

"So do I," he says, a little thoughtfully. "I am not much of a friend, am I? but—" (looking at me with that sincere and hearty tenderness which, as long as I am under its immediate influence, always disarms me) "my head was full of other things; and people drop out of one's life so; I had neither seen nor heard of her since—since she married."

("Since she was engaged to you," say I, mentally interlining this statement, "and threw you over because you were not rich enough! why cannot you be honest and say so?") but aloud I give utterance to nothing but a shrewish and disbelieving "Hm!"

A pause. I do not know what Roger is thinking of, but I am following out my own train of thought; the fruit of which is this observation, made with an air of reflection:

"Rich! poor Huntley! that is the very last thing his worst enemy could accuse him of! why, he was obliged to run the constable two years ago."

"But I suppose," say I, slowly, "that he was better off—well off once—when she married him, for instance?"

"How did you know that?" he asks, a little surprised. "Who told you? Yes; at that time he was looked upon as quite a parti."

"Better off than you, I suppose?" say I, still speaking slowly, and reading the carpet. "I mean than you were then?"

"He might easily have been that? I had nothing but my younger son's portion and my pay; why, Nancy, I had an idea that I had told you that before."

"He is badly off now, then," say I, presently, with a faintly triumphant accent.

"About as badly off as it is possible to be," answers Roger, very gravely; "that is my business with his wife; she and I are trying to make an arrangement with his creditors, to enable him to come home."

"To come home!" echo I, raising my eyebrows in an artless astonishment; "but if he does come home, what will become of Algy and the rest of them?"

"The rest of whom?" asks Roger, but there is such a severity in his eye as he puts the question that it is not too much to say I dare not explain. The one thing hated of Roger's soul—the one thing for which he has no tolerance, and on which he brings to bear all the weight of his righteous wrath, is scandal. Not even me will he allow to nibble at a neighbor's fame.

"Is she much changed since you saw her last?" pursue I presently, with infantile guilelessness; "was her hair red then? some people say it used to be black!"

I raise my eyes to his face as I put this gentle query, in order the better to trace its effect; but the concern that I see in his countenance is so very much greater than any that I had intended to have summoned that I have no sooner hurled my dart than I repent me of having done it.

"Nancy!" he says, putting one hand under my chin, and stroking my hair with the other—"am I going to have a backbiting wife? Child! child! there was neither hatred nor malice in the little girl I found sitting at the top of the wall."

"Nancy," he says again, in a voice of most thorough earnestness, "I have a favor to ask of you—I know when I put it that way, that you will not say 'No;' if you do not mind, I had rather you did not abuse Zéphine Huntley!—for the matter of that, I had rather you did not abuse any one—it does not pay, and there is no great fun in it; but Zéphine specially not."

"Why specially?" cry I, breathing short and speaking again with a quick, raised voice. "I know that it is a bad plan abusing people, you need not tell me that, I know it as well as you do, and I never did it at home, before I married, never!—none of them ever accused me of it—I was always quite good-natured about people, quite; but why she specially? why is she to be more sacred than any one else?"

"It is an old story," he answers, passing his hand across his forehead with what looks to me like a rather weary gesture and sighing, "I do not know why I did not tell you before—did not I ever?—no, by-the-by, I remember I never did; well, I will tell you now, and then you will understand!"

"Do not!" cry I, passionately, putting my fingers in my ears, and growing scarlet, while the tears rush in mad haste to my eyes, for I imagine that I well know what is coming. "I do not want to hear! I had rather not! I hate old stories." He looks at me in silent dismay. "I mean," say I, seeing that some explanation is needed, "that I know all about it!—I have heard it already! I have been told it."

"Never mind by whom!" reply I, removing my fingers from my ears, and covering with both hot hands my hotter face. "I have been told it! I have heard it, and, what is more, I will not hear it again!"

CHAPTER XXXVI.

When I rose this morning, I did not think that I should have cried before night; indeed, nothing would have seemed to me so unlikely. Cry! on the day of Roger's first back-coming! absurd! And yet now the morning is still quite young, and I have wept abundantly.

I am always rather good at crying. Tears with me do not argue any very profound depth of affliction. My tears have always been somewhat near my eyes, a fact well known to the boys, whom my pearly drops always leave as stolid and unfeeling as they found them. But the case is different with Roger. Either he is ignorant, or he has forgotten the facility with which I weep, and his distress is proportioned to his ignorance.

My eyes are dried again now, though they and my nose still keep a brave after-glow; and Roger and I are at one again. But, for my part, on this first day, I think it would have been pleasanter if we had never been at two. However, smiling peace is now again restored to us, and no one, to look at us, as we sit in my boudoir after breakfast, would think that we,

NANCY:

A NOVEL.

BY RHODA BROUGHTON.

AUTHOR OF "'GOOD-BYE, SWEETHEART!'" "RED AS A ROSE IS SHE," ETC., ETC.

NEW YORK: D. APPLETON & COMPANY, 549 & 551 BROADWAY. 1874.

CONTENTS