THE PROFESSOR’S EXPERIMENT




                        MRS. HUNGERFORD’S NOVELS

  ‘_Mrs. Hungerford has well deserved the title of being one of the most
  fascinating novelists of the day. The stories written by her are the
  airiest, lightest, and brightest imaginable, full of wit, spirit, and
  gaiety; but they contain, nevertheless, touches of the most exquisite
  pathos. There is something good in all of them._’—ACADEMY.

  =A MAIDEN ALL FORLORN=, and other Stories. Post 8vo., illustrated
    boards, 2s.; cloth limp, 2s. 6d.

‘There is no guile in the novels of the authoress of “Molly Bawn,” nor
any consistency or analysis of character; but they exhibit a faculty
truly remarkable for reproducing the rapid small-talk, the shallow but
harmless “chaff” of certain strata of modern fashionable
society.’—_Spectator._

  =IN DURANCE VILE=, and other Stories. Post 8vo., illustrated boards,
    2s.; cloth limp, 2s. 6d.

‘Mrs. Hungerford’s Irish girls have always been pleasant to meet upon
the dusty pathways of fiction. They are flippant, no doubt, and often
sentimental, and they certainly flirt, and their stories are told often
in rather ornamental phrase and with a profusion of the first person
singular. But they are charming all the same.’—_Academy._

  =A MENTAL STRUGGLE.= Post 8vo., illustrated boards, 2s.; cloth limp,
    2s. 6d.

‘She can invent an interesting story, she can tell it well, and she
trusts to honest, natural, human emotions and interests of life for her
materials.’—_Spectator._

  =A MODERN CIRCE.= Post 8vo., illustrated boards, 2s.; cloth limp, 2s.
    6d.

‘Mrs. Hungerford is a distinctly amusing author.... In all her books
there is a “healthy absenteeism” of ethical purpose, and we have derived
more genuine pleasure from them than probably the most earnest student
has ever obtained from a chapter of “Robert Elsmere.”’—_Saturday
Review._

  =MARVEL.= Post 8vo., illustrated boards, 2s.; cloth, 2s. 6d.

‘The author has long since created an imaginary world, peopled with more
or less natural figures; but her many admirers acknowledge the easy
grace and inexhaustible _verve_ that characterize her scenes of
Hibernian life, and never tire of the type of national heroine she has
made her own.’—_Morning Post._

  =LADY VERNER’S FLIGHT.= Crown 8vo., cloth extra, 3s. 6d.; post 8vo.,
    illustrated boards, 2s.; cloth limp, 2s. 6d.

‘There are in “Lady Verner’s Flight” several of the bright young
people who are wont to make Mrs. Hungerford’s books such very
pleasant reading.... In all the novels by the author of “Molly Bawn”
there is a breezy freshness of treatment which makes them most
agreeable.’—_Spectator._

  =THE RED-HOUSE MYSTERY.= Crown 8vo., cloth extra, 3s. 6d.

‘Mrs. Hungerford is never seen to the best advantage when not dealing
with the brighter sides of life, or seeming to enjoy as much as her
readers the ready sallies and laughing jests of her youthful personages.
In her present novel, however, the heroine, if not all smiles and mirth,
is quite as taking as her many predecessors, while the spirit of
uncontrolled mischief is typified in the American heiress.’—_Morning
Post._

  =THE THREE GRACES.= 2 vols., crown 8vo., 10s. net.

‘It is impossible to deny that Mrs. Hungerford is capable of writing a
charming love-story, and that she proves her capacity to do so in “The
Three Graces.”’—_Academy._

LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY.




                                  THE
                         PROFESSOR’S EXPERIMENT
                               =A Novel=


                                   BY

                            MRS. HUNGERFORD

                               AUTHOR OF
    ‘MOLLY BAWN,’ ‘THE RED-HOUSE MYSTERY,’ ‘THE THREE GRACES,’ ‘LADY
                         VERNER’S FLIGHT,’ ETC.

[Illustration]

                            IN THREE VOLUMES

                                VOL. II.


                                =London=
                      CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
                                  1895




                                  THE

                         PROFESSOR’S EXPERIMENT




                              CHAPTER XXI.

  ‘Confidence imparts a wondrous inspiration to its possessor. It bears
  him on in security, either to meet no danger or to find matter of
  glorious trial.’


The girl seems powerfully affected by the determination she has come to,
so much so as to be almost on the point of fainting. Wyndham, catching
her by the arm, presses her back into the garden-chair.

‘Not a word,’ says he. ‘Why should you tell me?’

‘I must, I will!’ She sits up, and with marvellous strength of will
recovers herself. ‘There is very little to tell,’ says she faintly. ‘I
have lived all my life in one house. As a little child I came to it.
Before that I remember nothing. If’—she looks at him—‘I tell you names
and places, you will keep them sacred? You will not betray me?’ Her
glance is now at once wistful and frightened.

‘I shall certainly not do that,’ says he gravely. ‘But why speak if you
need not?’

‘I don’t know.’ She pauses, clasping her hands tightly together, and
then at last, ‘I want to tell you.’

‘Well, tell me,’ says Wyndham gently.

‘The name of the people I lived with was Moore,’ says she, speaking at
once and rapidly, as if eager to get rid of what she has volunteered to
tell. ‘They called me Moore, too—Ella Moore—though I know, I am sure, I
did not belong to them.’

‘Ella?’

‘Yes, Ella; I think’—hesitatingly—‘that is my real Christian name,
because far, far back someone’—pressing her hand to her head, as though
trying to remember—‘used to call me Elly, someone who was not Mrs.
Moore. It was not her voice. And Moore—that is not my name, I know.’ Her
tone has grown quite firm. ‘Mrs. Moore always called herself my aunt;
but I don’t think she was anything to me. She was kind sometimes,
however, and I was sorry when she died. She had a husband, and I lived
with them ever since I can remember anything.’

‘Perhaps you were Mr. Moore’s niece.’

‘Oh, not that!’ She grows very pale, and makes a quick gesture of
repulsion with her hands. ‘Not that. No, thank God!’ She pauses, and he
can see that she has begun to tremble as if at some dreadful thought.
‘She, Mrs. Moore, died two months ago, and after that he—she was hardly
in her grave—and he—Oh, it is horrible!’—burying her face in her hands.
‘But he—he told me he wanted to marry me.’ She struggles with herself
for a moment, and then bursts into wild tears. One can see that the
tears are composed of past cruel memories, of outraged pride as well as
grief.

‘Oh, monstrous!’ says Wyndham hurriedly. He begins to pace rapidly up
and down the walk, coming back to her when he finds her more composed.

‘It is true, though,’ cries she miserably. ‘Oh, how I hate to think of
it!’—emphatically. ‘When I said no, that I’d rather die than marry
him—and I would—he was furious. A fortnight afterwards he spoke to me
again, saying he had ordered the banns to be called; and when I again
said I would never consent, he locked me in a room, and said he would
starve me to death unless I gave in. I’—clenching her small white
teeth—‘told him I would gladly starve in preference to that. And for
three nights and two days I did starve. He brought me nothing; but I did
not see him, and that kept me alive. On the third day he came again, and
again I defied him, and then—then—’ She cowers away from Wyndham, and
the hot flush of shame dyes her cheek. ‘Then—he beat me.’

‘The — scoundrel!’ says Wyndham between his teeth.

‘He beat me,’ says the girl, dry sobs breaking from her lips, ‘until my
back and arms were blue and swollen; and then he asked me again if I
would give in and marry him, and I—’

Here she pauses, and stands back as if confronting someone. She is
looking past Wyndham and far into space. It is plain that that past
horrible, degrading scene has come back to her afresh. The gross
indignity, the abominable affront, is again a present thing. Again the
blows rain upon her slender arms and shoulders; again the brute is
demanding her submission; and again, in spite of hunger, and pain, and
fear, she is defying him. Her head is well upheld, her hands clenched,
her large eyes ablaze. It is thus she must have looked as she defied the
cowardly scoundrel, and the effect is magnificent.

‘I said “No” again.’ The fire born of that last conflict dies away, and
she falls back weakly into the seat behind her. ‘That night I ran away.
I suppose in his rage he forgot to lock the door after him, and so I
found the matter easy. It was a wet night and very cold. I was tired,
half dead with hunger and with bitter pain. That was the night—’

She comes to a dead stop here, and turns her face away from him. A shame
keener than any she has known before, even in this recital made to him,
is filling her now. But still she determines to go on.

‘That was the night your servant found me!’

‘Poor child!’ says Wyndham. His sympathy—so unexpected—coming on her
terrible agitation, breaks her down. She bursts into a storm of sobs.

‘I would to God,’ says she, ‘that I had died before he found me!
Yes—yes, I would, though I know it was His will, and His alone, that
kept me alive, half dead from cold and hunger as I was. I can’t bear to
think of that night, and what you must have thought of me! It was
dreadful—dreadful! You shrank from me because I courted death so openly.
Yes—yes, you did’—combating a gesture on his part—‘but you did not know
how near I was to it at that moment. I was famished, bruised, homeless—I
was almost senseless. I knew only that I could not return to that man’s
house, and that there was no other house to go to. That was all I knew,
through the unconsciousness that was fast overtaking me. To die seemed
the best thing—and to die in that warm room. I was frozen. Oh, blame me,
despise me, if you like, but anyone would have been glad to die, if they
felt as homeless and as starving as I did that night!’

‘Who is blaming you?’ says Wyndham roughly. ‘Good heavens! is there a
man on earth who could blame you, after hearing so sad a story? Because
you have met one brute in your life, must you consider all other men
brutes?’

His manner is so vehement that Ella, thinking he is annoyed with her,
shrinks from him.

‘Don’t be angry with me,’ says she imploringly.

‘Angry with you!’ says he impatiently. ‘There is only one to be angry
with, and that is that devil. Where does he live?’

She gives him the road, and the number of the house where she had lived
with the Moores—a road of small houses, chiefly occupied by artisans and
clerks; a road not very far from the Zoological Gardens.

‘But what are you going to do?’ asks she nervously. ‘You will not tell
him I am here?’

‘Of course not. But it is quite necessary that a fellow like that should
feel there is a law in the land.’

‘But if you say anything about me,’ says she in a tone now thoroughly
frightened, ‘he will search me out, no matter in what corner of the
earth I may be.’

‘I don’t think so, once I have spoken to him,’ says the barrister
grimly.

‘You mean’—she looks at him timidly—‘you think that if—’ She breaks off
again. ‘He told me that his wife, who he said was my aunt, had made him
guardian over me, and that he would be my master for ever.’

‘Even supposing all that were true, and Mrs. Moore were your aunt—which
I doubt—and had left her husband guardian over you, still, there are
limits to the powers of guardians.’

‘Then if you see him, you think’—with trembling anxiety—‘you can tell
him that he has no hold over me?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘And I shall be free?’

‘Quite free.’

Ella leans forward. Her hands are upon her knees and are tightly
clenched. She is thinking. Suddenly a soft glow overspreads her face.
She lifts her eyes to his, and he can see that a wonderful
brilliance—the light of hope—has come into them.

‘It is too good to be true,’ says she slowly.

‘Oh no, I hope not. But I wish I had a few more particulars, Miss Moore.
I am afraid’—seeing a shade upon her face—‘I shall be obliged to call
you that until I have discovered your real name. And to do that you must
help me. Have you no memory that goes farther back than the Moores? You
spoke of someone who used to call you Elly—’

‘It was a woman,’ says she quickly. ‘Often—often in my dreams I see her
again. She used to kiss me—I remember that.’

It is such a sad little saying—once, long ago, so long ago that she can
scarcely remember it, some woman used to kiss her! But, evidently, since
that tender kisses had not fallen to the poor child’s lot.

‘But she died. I saw her lying dead. I thought she was asleep. She was
very beautiful—I remember that, too. I don’t want to see anyone dead
again. Death,’ says she with a shudder, ‘is horrible!’

This, coming from one who had braved its terrors voluntarily so very
lately, causes Wyndham to look at her in some surprise.

‘Yes!’ says he. ‘And yet that night when the Professor gave you
something that might have led to death, were you frightened then?’

‘I think I have explained that,’ says she, with a slight touch of
dignity.

‘True.’ He continues the slow pacing to and fro upon the garden-path
that he has taken up occasionally during this interview. ‘There is
nothing more, then, that you can tell me? The lady of whom you speak,
who used to kiss you, was perhaps your mother?’

‘I think so—I believe it,’ says the girl. She turns to him a face
flushed and gratified. ‘Mr. Wyndham, it was kind of you to call her
that—a lady! To me, too, she seems a lady, and, besides that, an angel.’

A lady! Wyndham’s kindly instincts go out to this poor waif and stray
with an extreme sense of pity. A lady! Very likely, but perhaps no wife.
The mother, if a lady, has certainly left the gentle manners of good
birth to this poor child, but nothing else. A vindictive anger against
the vices of this life in which he lives, and a still greater anger
against the _bétises_ of society that would not admit this girl into
their ranks, however faultless she may be, because of a blot upon her
birth, stirs his soul. That she is one of the great unknown seems very
clear to him, but does not prevent his determination to hunt out that
scoundrel Moore and break his hold over the girl. In the meantime, it
would be well for her to mix with her kind.

‘About a companion,’ says he. ‘You told me you were anxious to continue
your studies. I think I know a lady—elderly, refined, and gentle—who
would be able to help you. You could go out with her.’

‘I shall not go out of this house,’ says the girl. She has begun to
tremble again. ‘Mr. Wyndham, do not ask me to do that. Even’—slowly, but
steadily—‘if you did ask me, I should refuse. I will not go where I can
be found. This lady you speak of, if she will come and live with me, and
teach me—I should like that; but—’

‘You will require very little teaching, I think,’ says Wyndham, who has
been struck by the excellence of both her manners and her speech,
considering her account of her former life.

‘I know nothing,’ says she calmly; ‘but, as I told you, I had read a
good deal, and for the past three years I used to go as nursery
governess to a Mrs. Blaquiere, who lived in Westmoreland Road. I used to
lunch with her and the children, and she was very kind to me; and she
taught me a good deal in other ways—society ways.’

‘You were an apt pupil,’ says he gravely, a little doubtfully, perhaps.

‘I liked the way she talked, and it seemed to come very easy to me after
awhile,’ says the girl indifferently, not noticing his keen glance at
her. ‘But this governess—this companion?’ asks she. ‘Will she want to go
out—to be amused? If so, I could not have her. I shall never go out of
this place until—’

‘Until?’ asks he.

‘You tell me that man has no longer any power over me. I’—she looks at
him, and again terror whitens her face—‘I am sure you are wrong, and
that he has the power to drag me away from this, if he finds me.’

‘I should advise you not to dwell on that until I have found him,’ says
Wyndham, a little stiffly. The successful barrister is a little thrown
back upon himself by being told that he will undoubtedly find himself in
the wrong. ‘But this Mrs. Blaquiere, who was so kind to you—why do you
not apply to her for protection?’

‘She and her husband and the children all went to Australia in the early
part of last spring, and so I lost sight of them.’

‘Lost your situation, too?’—regarding her carefully.

‘Yes; and I had no time to look for another. Mrs. Moore grew ill then,
and I had to attend her day and night until she died. The rest I have
told you.’

‘I see,’ says Wyndham. ‘Tell me again this man Moore’s address.’ He
writes it now in his pocket-book, though it was written well into his
brain before; but he wished to see if she would falter about it the
second time.

He bids her good-bye presently, refusing her timid offer of tea.

At the gate he finds Mrs. Denis, presumably tying up a creeper, but most
undoubtedly on the look-out for him.

‘Good-evening, yer honour.’

‘Good-evening’—shortly. Wyndham is deep in thought, and by no means in a
good temper. He would have brushed by her; but, armed with a garden
rake, a spade, and a huge clipper, Mrs. Denis is not lightly to be dealt
with.

‘Askin’ yer pardon, sir, ’tis just a word I want wid ye. Miss Ella, the
crathure—ye’re going to let her stay here, aren’t ye?’

‘Yes,’ says Wyndham gruffly.

‘The saints be praised!’ says Mrs. Denis piously. ‘Fegs! ’tis a good
heart ye have, sir, in spite of it all.’ What the ‘all’ is she leaves
beautifully indefinite. ‘An’, sure, ’twas meself tould Denis—that ould
raprobate of a fool o’ mine—that ye’d niver turn her out. “For where
would she go,” says I, “if he did—a born lady like her?” An’ there’s
plenty o’ room for her here, sir.’

‘I dare say,’ says Wyndham, feeling furious. ‘But for all that, I can’t
have all the young women in Ireland staying in my house just because
there is room for them.’

‘God forbid, yer honour! All thim young women would play the very divil
wid the Cottage, an’’—thoughtfully—‘aitch other too. Wan at a time, sir,
is a good plan, an’ I’m glad it’s Miss Ella has had the first of it.’

This remarkable speech is met by Wyndham with a stony glare that goes
lightly over the head of Mrs. Denis. That worthy woman is too much
elated with the news she has dragged out of him to care for glares of
any sort. Childless, though always longing for a child—and especially
for a daughter—Mrs. Denis’s heart had gone out at once to the pretty
waif that had been cast into her life in so strange a fashion. And now
she hastens back to the house to get ‘her Miss Ella a cup o’ tay, the
crathure!’ and wheedle out of her all the news about the ‘masther.’




                             CHAPTER XXII.

  ‘Tell me how to bear so blandly the assuming ways of wild young
  people!

  ‘Truly they would be unbearable if I had not also been unbearable
  myself as well.’—GOETHE.


When Mr. Crosby had told the Barrys that he would come down next day for
a game of tennis, they had not altogether believed in his coming, so
that when they see him from afar off, through the many holes in the
hedge, walking towards them down the village street, surprise is their
greatest sentiment.

‘Susan,’ says Dominick solemnly, pausing racket in hand, ‘it must be
you. I always told you your face was your fortune, and a very small one
at that. You’ll have to marry him, and then we’ll all go and live with
you for ever. That’ll be a treat for you, and will doubtless make up for
the fact that he is emulating the Great Methuselah. If I can say a good
word for you, I—Oh, how d’ye do, Mr. Crosby? Brought your racket, too, I
see. Carew, now we’ll make up a set: Mr. Crosby and—’

‘Miss Susan, if I may,’ says Crosby, looking into Susan’s charming face
whilst holding her hand in greeting. There are any amount of greetings
to be got through when you go to see the Barrys. They are all always _en
évidence_, and all full of life and friendliness. Even little Bonnie
hurries up on his stick, and gives him a loving greeting. The child’s
face is so sweet and so happily friendly that Crosby stoops and kisses
him.

‘Certainly you may,’ says Susan genially; ‘but I’m not so good a player
as Betty. She can play like anything. But to-day she has got a bad cold
in her head. Well’—laughing—‘come on; we can try, and, after all, we can
only be beaten.’

They are, as it happens, and very badly, too, Mr. Crosby, though no
doubt good at big game, being rather a tyro at tennis.

‘I apologize,’ says he, when the game is at an end, and they have all
seated themselves upon the ground to rest and gather breath; ‘I’m afraid
Su—Miss Susan—you will hardly care to play with me again.’

‘I told you you could call me Susan,’ says she calmly. ‘Somehow, I
dislike the Miss before it. Betty told you Miss Barry sounded like Aunt
Jemima, but I think Miss Susan sounds like Jane.’

‘Poor old Jane! And she’s got such an awful nose!’ says Betty. ‘I think
I’d rather be like Aunt Jemima than her.’

‘Susan hasn’t got an awful nose,’ says Bonnie, stroking Susan’s dainty
little Grecian appendage fondly. ‘It’s a nice one.’

‘Susan is a beauty,’ says Betty; ‘we all know that. Even James went down
before her. Poor James! I wonder what he is doing now.’

‘Stewing in the Soudan,’ says Carew.

‘He was always in one sort of stew or another,’ says Dominick, ‘so it
will come kindly to him. And after Susan’s heartless behaviour—’

‘Dom!’ says Susan, in an awful tone. But Mr. Fitzgerald is beyond the
reach of tones.

‘Oh, it’s all very well your taking it like that now,’ says he; ‘but
when poor old James was here it was a different thing.’

‘It was not,’ says Susan indignantly.

‘Are you going to deny that he was your abject slave—that he sat in your
pocket from morning till night—well, very nearly night? That he followed
you from place to place like a baa-lamb? That you did not encourage him
in the basest fashion?’

‘I never encouraged him. Encourage him! That boy!’

‘Don’t call him names, Susan, behind his back,’ says Betty, whose
mischievous nature is now all afire, and who is as keen about the
baiting of Susan as either Carew or Dom. ‘Besides, what a boy he is! He
must be twenty-two, at all events.’ This seems quite old to Betty.

‘What did you do with the keepsake he gave you when he was going away?’
asks Carew. He is lying flat upon the warm grass, his chin upon his
palms, and looks up at Susan with judicial eyes. ‘What was it? I forget
now. A lock of his lovely hair?’

‘No,’ says Betty; ‘a little silver brooch—an anchor.’

‘That means hope,’ says Dominick solemnly. ‘Susan, he is coming back
next year. What are you going to say to him?’

‘Just exactly what everybody else is going to say to him,’ says Susan,
who is now crimson. ‘And I didn’t want that horrid brooch at all.’

‘Still, you took it,’ says Betty. ‘I call that rather mean, to take it,
and then say you didn’t want it.’

‘Well, what was I to do?’

‘Refuse it, mildly but firmly,’ says Mr. Fitzgerald. ‘The acceptance of
it was, in my opinion, as good as the acceptance of James. When he does
come back, Susan, I don’t see how you are to get out of being Mrs.
James. That brooch is a regular binder. How does it seem to you, Mr.
Crosby?’

‘You see, I haven’t heard all the evidence yet,’ says Crosby, who is
looking at Susan’s flushed, half-angry, wholly-delightful face. James,
whoever he is, seems to have been a good deal in her society at one
time.

‘There’s no evidence,’ says she wrathfully, ‘and I wish you boys
wouldn’t be so stupid! As for the brooch, I hate it; I never wear it.’

‘Well, if ever anyone gives me a present I shall wear it every day and
all day long,’ says Betty. ‘What’s the good of having a lover if people
don’t know about it?’

‘Is that so?’ says Mr. Fitzgerald, regarding her with all the air of one
to whom now the road seems clear. ‘Then the moment I become a
millionaire—and there seems quite an immediate prospect of it just now—I
shall buy you the Koh-i-Noor, and you shall wear it on your beauteous
brow, and proclaim me as your unworthy lover to all the world.’

‘I will when I get it,’ says Betty, with tremendous sarcasm.

‘The reason you won’t wear it,’ says Carew, alluding to Susan’s despised
brooch, ‘is plain to even the poor innocents around you. Girls, in spite
of all Betty has said, seldom wear their keepsakes. They get cotton wool
and wrap them up in it, and peep at them rapturously on Christmas Day or
Easter Sunday, or on the beloved one’s birthday, or some other sacred
occasion. What’s James’s birthday, Susan?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Susan; ‘and I don’t know, either, why you tease me
so much about him. He is quite as little to me as I am to him.’ Her
voice is trembling now. They have gone a little too far perhaps, or is
the memory of James ‘stewing in the Soudan’ too much for her? Whichever
it is, Mr. Crosby is growing anxious for her; but all the youngsters are
now in full cry, and the proverbial cruelty of brothers and sisters is
well known to many a long-suffering girl and boy.

‘Oh, Susan,’ says Betty, ‘where does one go to when one tells
naughty-naughties? Dom; do you remember the evening just before James
went abroad, when he went into floods of tears because she wouldn’t give
him a rosebud she had in her dress? It took Dom, and me, and Carew, and
a pint of water to restore him.’

At this they all laugh, even Susan, though very faintly and very
shamefacedly. Her pretty eyes are shy and angry.

‘He wanted a specimen to take out with him to astonish the natives,’
says Carew. ‘You were the real specimen he wanted to take out with him,
Susan, but as that was impracticable just then (it will probably be
arranged next time), he decided on taking the rosebud instead.’

‘He wanted nothing,’ says Susan, whose face is now bent over Bonnie’s as
if to hide it. ‘He didn’t care a bit about me.’

‘Indeed he did, Susan.’

A fresh element has fallen into the situation. Everyone looks round. The
voice is the voice of Jacky—Jacky, who, up to this, has been as usual
buried in a book. This time the burial has been deeper than ever, as the
day before yesterday someone had lent him Mr. Stevenson’s enthralling
‘Treasure Island,’ from which no one can ever extract themselves until
the very last page is turned. Jacky, since he first began it, has been
practically useless, but just now a few fragments of the conversation
going on around him have filtered to his brain.

Now, in his own peculiarly disagreeable way he adores Susan, and
something has led him to believe that those around her are now
depreciating her powers of attraction, and that she is giving in to them
for want of support. Well, he will support her. Poor old Jacky! he comes
nobly forward to her rescue, and as usual puts his foot in it.

‘He liked you better than anyone,’ says he, in his slow, ponderous
fashion, glaring angrily at Betty, with whom he carries on an undying
feud. ‘Why, don’t you remember how he used to hunt you all over the
garden to kiss you!’

Tableau!

Betty leads the way after about a moment’s awful pause, and then they
all go off into shrieks of laughter. Jacky, alone, sullen, silent, not
understanding, stands as if petrified. Susan has pushed Bonnie from her,
and has risen to her feet. Her face is crimson now; her eyes are full of
tears. Involuntarily Crosby rises too.

‘He used not,’ says poor Susan. Alas! this assertion is not quite true.
‘And even if he did, you’—to the horrified Jacky—‘should not have told
it. You, Jacky’—trembling with shame—‘I wouldn’t have believed it of
you! It was hateful of you! You’—with a withering glance around—‘are all
hateful, and—and—’

She chokes, breaks down, and runs with swift-flying feet into the small
shrubbery beyond, where lies a little summer-house in which she can hide
herself.




                             CHAPTER XXIII.

  ‘Tears are often to be found where there is little sorrow.’


An embarrassed silence falls upon the group she leaves behind her. It
had not occurred to them that she would care so much. They had often
chaffed her before. It must—it must have been Mr. Crosby’s being there
that had put her out like that. To tell the truth, they are all
penitent—Betty perhaps more than the others. But even her remorse sinks
into insignificance before Jacky’s. His takes the nature of a wrathful
attack upon the others, and ends in a storm of tears.

‘You’ve been teasing her, you know you have—and she’s mad with me now.
And I didn’t mean anything. And she’s crying, I know she is. And you’re
all beasts—beasts!’

It is at this point that his own tears break forth, and, like Susan, he
flees from them—but, unlike Susan, howling.

‘I didn’t know; I didn’t think she’d care,’ says Betty, in a frightened
tone. ‘We often teased her before;’ and she might have said more, but an
attack of sneezing lays her low.

‘But before a stranger!’ says Carew anxiously. ‘I am afraid, Mr. Crosby,
it is because you were here.’

‘It isn’t a bit like Susan to care like that,’ says Dom. ‘I
say’—contritely—‘I’m awfully sorry. I wonder where she is, Betty.’

‘In the summer-house. She always goes there when she’s vexed or
worried.’

‘Why don’t you go to her, then?’

‘I can’t. I’ve a cold. I’ll wait awhile,’ says Betty, holding back.

‘I think, as it has been my fault,’ says Crosby quietly, ‘that I had
better be the one to apologize. Where is this summer-house of which you
speak?’

‘Right round there,’ says Betty eagerly, pointing to the corner of the
house.

‘Just behind the rose-trees,’ says Dom, giving him a friendly push
forward.

‘You can’t miss her,’ says Carew, who is dying to give him an
encouraging clap on the shoulder. They are all evidently very anxious to
get the task of ‘making it up’ with Susan on to any other shoulders than
their own.

‘Well, I think I’ll take a little hostage with me, or shall we say a
peace-offering?’ says Crosby, catching up Bonnie, and starting with him
for Susan’s hiding-place. ‘Any way, I’ve got a pioneer,’ says he. ‘He’ll
show me the way.’

The way is short and very sweet. Along a gravelled pathway, between
trees of glowing roses, to where in the distance is a tiny house, made
evidently by young, untutored hands, out of young and very unseasoned
timber.

A slender figure is inside it—a figure flung miserably into one of the
corners, and crying perhaps, after all, more angrily than painfully.

‘Now, what on earth are you doing that for?’ says Crosby. He seats
himself on the rustic bench beside her, and places Bonnie on her knee.
It seems to him that that will be the best way to bring down her hands
from her eyes. And he is not altogether wrong. It is impossible to let
her little beloved one fall off her knees, so quickly, if reluctantly,
she brings down her right hand so as to clasp him securely.

‘What are you crying about?’ goes on Crosby, very proud of the success
of his first manœuvre. ‘Because somebody wanted to kiss you? You will
have a good deal of crying at that rate, Susan, before you come to the
end of your life.’

He is laughing a little now, and as Bonnie has climbed up on her knees,
and is pulling away the other hand from her face, Susan feels she may as
well make the best of a bad situation.

‘It wasn’t so much that,’ says she. ‘Though’—anxiously—‘Jacky
exaggerated most dreadfully. As to my objecting to their teasing me
about James McIlveagh—you have not seen him, or you would understand me
better. It is not only that he is uninteresting, but that he is awful!
His nose is like an elephant’s trunk, and his eyes are as small as the
head of a pin. And his clothes—his trousers—I don’t know where he got
his trousers, but Dom used to say his mother made them in her spare
moments. Not that one would care about a person’s trousers, of course,’
says Susan, with intense earnestness, ‘if he was nice himself; but James
wasn’t nice, and I was never more glad in my life than when he went
away.’

‘He’s coming back, however.’

‘Yes, I know, and I’m sorry for it, if they are going to tease me all
day long about him, as they are doing now. I think’—with a hasty glance
at him, born of the fact that she knows her eyes are disfigured by
crying—‘you might have tried to stop them.’

‘Well, you see, I hardly knew what to do at first,’ says Crosby, quite
entering into the argument. ‘And when I did, it was a little too late.
Of course it seemed to me a very possible thing that you might have
given your heart to this young man with the nose and the unfortunate
trousers who is stewing in the Soudan.’

‘You might have known by my manner that I hated them to tease me about
him,’ says Susan, very little appeased by his apology.

‘I’ll know better next time,’ says Crosby humbly. ‘But when I heard he
had been following you about like a baa-lamb, and that you had taken
that anchor from him, and that he used to—’

He is checked by a flash from Susan’s eyes. There is a pause. Then
suddenly she presses her face into Bonnie’s flaxen hair, and bursts into
smothered laughter.

‘Well, I don’t care! He did once, all round the gooseberry bushes; and I
threw a spade at him, and it hit him on the head, and I thought I had
killed him. I’—with another glance at Crosby, now from between Bonnie’s
curls—‘was dreadfully frightened then. But now I almost wish I had. Any
way, he never tried to—he never, I mean’—confusedly—‘hunted me again.’

‘I begin to feel sincerely sorry for James,’ says Crosby. ‘He seems to
me to have led but a sorry life before he started for the Soudan. When
he comes home next year, what will you do? He may be quite’—he looks at
her and smiles—‘a mighty hunter by that time.’

Susan laughs.

‘Like you,’ says she.

Crosby looks at her. It is a ready answer, and with another might convey
a certain meaning, but with Susan never.

‘Ah, I’m afraid of gooseberry bushes,’ says he. ‘They have thorns in
them. James, you see, surpasses me in valour. Talking of valour reminds
me of those you have left behind you, and who have sent me here as their
plenipotentiary, to extract from you a promise of peace. They are all
very sorry they annoyed you so much about the redoubtable James; and
they desired me to say so. I was afraid to come by myself, so I brought
Bonnie with me. Bonnie, tell her to come back with me now, and say:
“Peace is restored with honour.” Say it for her, Bonnie.’

‘“Peace is restored with honour,”’ repeats Bonnie sweetly.

‘There, that settles it,’ says Crosby. ‘He knows his lesson. So do you;
come back and forgive us all.’

‘Oh, I can’t,’ says Susan. ‘They would know I had been crying. Look at
my eyes; they are quite red.’

‘They are not, indeed,’ says Mr. Crosby, after an exhaustive
examination. ‘They are quite blue.’

‘Oh yes, that, of course’—impatiently. ‘But, well—really, how are they?’
She leans towards him, and gazes at him out of the blue eyes with an
extraordinary calm. ‘Would they know I had been crying?’

‘They would not,’ says Crosby. ‘It is I alone who am in that secret.
And, by the way, Susan’—stopping her as they both rise—‘that is the
second secret we have between us; we are becoming quite fashionable—we
are growing into a society, you and I.’

‘I wish you would forget that first secret,’ says Susan, blushing a
little. ‘And, anyhow, I hope you won’t tell the others that you found
me—you know—crying.’

‘Ah, that makes me remember our first secret,’ says Crosby. ‘You know
that on that never-to-be-forgotten memorable occasion you said you
trusted me.’

‘Did I?’ Susan is blushing furiously now. ‘How can I recollect all the
silly things I said then? I have forgotten them all—and I’m sure you
have, too.’

‘Not one of them,’ says Crosby. ‘They are now classed with my most
priceless memories. “Go and steal no more,” you said—and I haven’t up to
this.’

Susan laughs in spite of herself.

‘Well, at all events I can trust you, then, not to betray me to them.’
She points to the late temple of her tears.

‘You can trust me for that or anything else in the wide world,’ says
Crosby.

He takes up Bonnie again, and they go slowly back to the others.




                             CHAPTER XXIV.

                   ‘So bright a tear in Beauty’s eye,
                   Love half regrets to kiss it dry.’


As Susan appears, the guilty ones upon the tennis-ground move
simultaneously towards her, Betty with a shy little rush, and holding
out to her her racket.

‘Come and have another game, Susan, and you, too, Mr. Crosby.’

‘Yes, do,’ says Carew. ‘Tea will be here in a moment.’ He evidently
holds this out as an inducement to Crosby to remain. Mr. Fitzgerald
nobly backs him up.

‘Also Aunt Jemima!’ he says enthusiastically.

This joke, if it is meant for one, is a dead failure. No one even
smiles. Susan, who is feeling a little shy, and is horribly conscious
that, in spite of Crosby’s assurances, her eyes are of a very tell-tale
colour, is fighting with her brain for some light, airy, amusing remark
that may prove to all present that she had only run away from them in
mere search of physical exercise, when suddenly the rather forced smile
dies upon her lips, and her eyes become fixed on some object over there
on her right.

‘What is it, Susan—a ghost?’ asks Dom, who is equal to most occasions.

‘No,’ says Susan, in a low voice. ‘But—this is the third time. And look
over there, at that sycamore-tree in the Cottage garden. Do you see
anything?’

‘See what? “Is there visions about?” asks Dom. ‘Really, Susan, you ought
to consider our nerves. Is it the “Bogie Man,” or—’

‘It is a girl,’ says Susan. ‘There, there again! Her face is between
those two big branches. Mr. Crosby’—eagerly—‘don’t you see her?’

‘I do,’ cries Carew suddenly. ‘Oh, what a lovely face!’

It may be remembered that the Rectory and the Cottage are only divided
by a narrow road and two high walls. At the farthest end of the Cottage
grounds some tall trees are standing—a beech, two elms, and a sycamore.
All these uprear themselves well above the walls, and cast their shadows
in summer, and their leaves in winter, down on the road beneath. They
can be distinctly seen from the Rectory tennis-court, and, indeed, add a
good deal of charm to it, the road being so narrow, and the walls so
much of a height, that strangers often think the trees on the Cottage
lawn are actually belonging to the Rectory.

‘Yes, I see too,’ says Crosby, leaning forward.

‘Yes, yes!’ cries Betty. ‘But is it a girl?’

And now a little silence falls upon them.

Over there, peeping out between the leaves of the soft sycamore-tree, is
a face. There is nothing to tell if it be a boy’s or a girl’s face, as
nothing can be seen but the shapely head; and its soft abundant tresses
of chestnut hair are so closely drawn back into a knot behind that they
are hidden by the crowding branches. The eyes are gleaming, the lips
slightly parted. So might a Hamadryad look, peering through swaying
leaves.

‘It’s the prisoner,’ says Jacky, in an awestruck tone.

‘The apparition, you mean,’ corrects Mr. Fitzgerald severely.
‘Prisoners, as a rule, have bodies, spooks have none. Jacky, you lucky
creature, you have seen a ghost.’

‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ asks Betty in an anxious tone.

‘A most pertinent question?’ says Fitzgerald, who is taking the
situation with anything but the seriousness that is so evidently
demanded of it. ‘But, as I have before remarked, there is no body to go
by, and naturally no clothes. It is therefore unanswerable.’

Crosby has said nothing. He is, indeed, deeply occupied with the face.
So this is Wyndham’s tenant. A very lovely one.

Again a slight doubt arises in his mind about his friend. And yet
Wyndham had seemed thoroughly honest in his explanation.

‘I know it’s a girl,’ says Susan, with decision. ‘Jacky has seen her;
and what a pretty one! Oh, there, she’s gone!’ And, indeed, the
Hamadryad, as if becoming suddenly conscious of the fact that they are
looking at her, draws back her head and disappears. ‘I’m afraid she saw
us,’ says Susan contritely. ‘She must have thought us very rude. I’ll
ask father to let me call on her, I think. She must be very lonely
there. And even if she is only Mrs. Moriarty’s niece, still, she must
have been educated to make her look like that.’

‘Perhaps,’ says Crosby, speaking with apparent carelessness, and looking
direct at Susan, ‘she might not like to be called upon. I have been
given to understand that she is not a niece of Mrs. Moriarty’s, and—’

‘No, but what, then?’ asks Carew.

‘A tenant of Mr. Wyndham’s. He is a friend of mine, you know; and he
told me lately he had grown very tired of the Cottage, and was willing
to take a tenant for it. This lady is, I presume, the tenant.’

‘The more reason why we should call upon her,’ says Susan.

‘But isn’t she very young,’ says Betty, ‘to be a tenant all by herself?’

This startling suggestion creates a slight pause.

‘To be young is not to be beyond misfortune,’ says Crosby at last, in a
grave and very general tone. ‘No doubt this young lady has lost her
father and mother, and is obliged to—er—do without them.’

This is distinctly lame.

‘Poor thing!’ says Susan sympathetically.

‘We might ask her over here sometimes,’ says Carew.

‘But if she has lost her parents lately,’ puts in Crosby hastily, ‘she
might, perhaps—one should not even with the best intentions force one’s
self upon people in such deep grief as hers.’

‘She wasn’t in mourning, any way,’ says Betty, who can always tell you
to a pin what anyone is wearing; ‘she had a little blue bow near her
neck.’

Crosby recovers from this blow with difficulty.

‘At all events,’ says he, ‘I have heard through Wyndham that she desires
privacy at present. No doubt when she feels equal to receiving visitors
she will let us all know.’

‘No doubt,’ says Dominick, who has been studying Mr. Crosby closely, and
with covert amusement.

‘I’ll ask Mr. Wyndham about her,’ says Susan. ‘I think she would be
happier if she could tell about her sorrow. One should be roused from
one’s griefs, father says. And even if out of mourning—I didn’t see any
blue bow, Betty—still, I am sure she must be sad at heart.’

‘Well, consult your father about it,’ says Crosby, as a last resource.
In spite of his affection for Wyndham, he has doubts about his tenant.

At this point Jane appears, bringing a tray, on which are cups and
saucers, teapot and cream ewer, some bread-and-butter and sponge-cake.
Susan had spent the morning making the sponge-cake on the chance of Mr.
Crosby’s coming. They had decided in conclave that it would be better to
have tea out here on the pleasant grass (though there is no table on
which to put the tray) rather than in the small and rather stuffy
drawing-room. They had had a distinct fight over it with Miss Barry; but
Dominick, who can succeed in anything but his exams, overcame her, and
carried the day.

‘Put the tray down here,’ says Betty, with quite an air, seeing that
Susan has given way a little beneath the want of the table—‘down here on
the grass near me. I’ll pour out the tea’—this with a withering glance
at Susan, who is slightly flushed, and apparently ashamed of herself.
‘We haven’t any rustic table yet, Mr. Crosby,’ says Betty, with immense
aplomb, ‘but were going to have one shortly’—this with all the admirable
assurance of a fashionable dame who has just been ordering a garden
tea-table from one of the best London houses. She nods and smiles at
him. ‘Dom is going to make it. Susan’—with a freezing glance at that
damsel—‘do you think you could manage to cut the sponge-cake?’

‘Cut it!’ says Jacky, who is sharp to see that the idolized Susan is
being sat upon, and who still feels that he owes her reparation of some
sort. ‘Why couldn’t she cut it? She made it.’

Susan bursts out laughing. It is too much, and they all follow suit.

‘What! you made it?’ cries Crosby, taking up a knife and beginning a
vigorous attack upon it. ‘Why didn’t you make it bigger when you were
about it? The fact that it is your handiwork has, judging by myself,
made us all frightfully hungry. Thank Heaven, there is still
bread-and-butter, or I don’t know what would become of us.’

They are all laughing still—indeed, their merriment has quite reached a
height—when Susan, looking over her shoulder, nearly drops her cup and
saucer, and sits up as if listening.

‘Someone is coming,’ says she.

‘Aunt Jemima,’ indignantly declares Betty, who is sitting up too.

Tramp, tramp, tramp comes a foot along the gravel path that skirts the
side of the house away from them. Tramp, tramp; evidently two of the
heaviest feet in Christendom are approaching.

‘You’re right,’ whispers Dom; ‘’tis “the fa’ o’ her fairy feet.” Aunt
Jemima, to a moral.’

And Aunt Jemima it is, sweeping round the house with her head well up,
and the desire to impress, that they all know so fatally well, full upon
her.

‘Don’t stir, Mr. Crosby; I really beg you won’t. This is a rather
_al-fresco_ entertainment, but I know you will excuse these wild
children.’ Here the wild children gave way silently, convulsively.

‘It is the most charming entertainment I have been at for years,’ says
Crosby pleasantly. ‘Where will you sit? Here?’ He is quite assiduous in
his attentions, especially about the rug on which she is to sit—not his
rug, at all events; Susan has half of that.

‘Thank you,’ says Miss Barry, ‘but I need not trouble you; I do not
intend to stay. I merely came out to see if these remarkably
ill-mannered young people were taking care of you.’

She speaks with a stiff and laboured smile upon her lips, but an evident
determination to be amiable at all risks.

‘Won’t you have a cup of tea, Aunt Jemima?’ asks Susan timidly.

‘No, thank you, my love. Pray don’t trouble about me. I’—with a crushing
glance at poor Susan—‘have no desire whatever to interfere with your
amusement. I hope’—turning to Crosby—‘later on I may be able to see more
of you, but to-day I am specially busy. I have many worries, Mr. Crosby,
that are not exactly on the surface.’

‘Like us all,’ says Crosby, nodding his head gravely. ‘Life is full of
thorns.’

‘Ah!’ says Miss Barry. She feels that she has now ‘impressed’ him
indeed, and is satisfied.

‘We travel a thorny road,’ says she.

Crosby sadly acquiesces.

‘True,’ says he.

‘Adieu,’ says she. She makes him an old-fashioned obeisance, and once
again rounds the corner and disappears.

‘I don’t think it was very nice of you to make fun of her,’ says Susan
reproachfully to Crosby.

‘Fun of her! What do you take me for?’ says he. ‘Make fun of your aunt
because I said life was full of thorns? Well’—with argument looming in
his eye—‘isn’t it?’

‘Thorns?’ She pauses, as if wondering. ‘Oh no,’ says she. It seems a
pity to disturb so sweet a faith; and Crosby, with a renunciatory wave
of his hand, gives up the impending argument.

‘Awful lucky she went away so soon!’ says Carew, as the last bit of Aunt
Jemima’s tail disappears round the corner. ‘She’d have led us a life had
she stayed. She’s been on the prance all day on account of those
Brians.’

‘Yes, isn’t it awful?’ says Betty.

‘Who are the Brians?’ asks Crosby.

‘Farmers up on the hill over there’—pointing far away to the south.
‘Very well-to-do people, you know, with their sons going into the
Church, and their daughters at a first-class school in Birmingham. Aunt
Jemima, thinking to help them on their road to civilization, sent them a
bath—one of the round flat ones, you know—as a present last month,
hearing that they were expecting the girls home for their holidays,
and—’

Here Betty breaks off, and goes into what she calls ‘kinks’ of laughter.

‘Well?’ says Crosby, naturally desirous of knowing where the laugh comes
in.

‘Ah, that’s it!’ says Dom. ‘Really, Betty, I think you might hold on
long enough to finish your own story. It appears Aunt Jemima went up to
the farm yesterday, and found that they had taken the bath as an
ornament, and had nailed it up against the sitting-room wall with four
long tenpenny nails, and—’ Here, in spite of his lecture to Betty, Mr.
Fitzgerald himself gives way, and, falling back upon the grass, shouts
with laughter.

‘They took it,’ gasps Carew, ‘as some curio from some barbarous
country—a sort of shield, you know; a savage weapon! They had never seen
a bath before. Oh my!’ He, too, has gone into an ecstasy of mirth. ‘I
expect they thought it was straight from South Africa.’

‘Poor Aunt Jemima!’ says Betty, when she can speak. ‘It must have been a
blow to her.’

‘Talking of blows,’ says Carew, turning to her sharply, and somewhat
indignantly, ‘I never knew anyone blow their nose like you, Betty;
you’ve been at it now since early dawn.’

‘Well, I can’t help it,’ says Betty, very rightly aggrieved, ‘if I have
got a cold in my head.’

‘I’ve a cold, too,’ says Jacky dismally—Jacky is always dismal—‘but it
isn’t as bad as Betty’s. My head is aching, but Betty’s nose is only
running.’

A frightful silence follows upon this terrific speech. Mr. Fitzgerald,
who can always be depended upon at a crisis, breaks it.

‘Not far, I trust,’ says he, with exaggerated anxiety. ‘We could hardly
spare it. Betty’s nose is the one presentable member of that sort in the
family.’

Betty, between the pauses of this speech, can be heard threatening
Jacky. ‘No, no; never! I won’t give it now. You’re a little wretch! Even
if I promised to give it I don’t care. I’ll take it back. You shan’t
have it now.’

But all this is so distinctly not meant to be heard that no one takes
any notice of it, and any serious consequences are prevented by the fact
that Dominick, rising, throws himself between the puzzled Jacky and the
irate Betty. In the meantime, Crosby draws himself along the rug until
he is even closer to Susan, who now again is looking serious.

‘What is troubling you, righteous soul?’ asks he lightly.

‘How do you know I am troubled? I am not, really.’

‘Yet you are thinking, and very gravely, too.’

‘Ah, that is another thing. I was thinking,’ says Susan gently, ‘of the
girl in there’—nodding towards the Cottage. ‘It must be a very sad thing
to have no one belonging to you.’

‘Sad indeed! But you must not let your sympathy for her run too far
afield. If not a father or mother, she must have—other ties.’

‘Brothers, you mean, or sisters?’

‘Yes, just so—brothers or sisters. They’ll turn up presently, no doubt.’

He looks at her as if waiting for an inspiration, and then it comes to
him.

‘What a sympathetic mind you have!’ says he. ‘And yet you don’t give me
a share of it. You have known me quite a long time now, and I have no
father or mother, yet you have not wept with me.’

‘I didn’t know,’ says Susan. ‘And, besides, there was no long time,
surely. Father told us you had no father or mother, but—have you’—with
hesitation—‘no people belonging to you, Mr. Crosby?’

‘One sister,’ says he.

‘One sister! And why doesn’t she live with you?’

‘Ah, you must ask her that. Perhaps she wouldn’t care about it.’

‘I should think she would love to live with you,’ says Susan. She utters
this bold sentiment calmly, kindly, without so much as a blink of her
long lashes.

Crosby looks at her. Is she real, this pretty child? His inclination to
laugh dies within him; and so dies, too, the inclination to utter the
usual society speech, that with most society girls would have been
considered the thing on an occasion like this. Both are done to death by
Susan’s eyes, so calm, so sweet, so earnest, and so entirely without a
second meaning of any sort.

‘Well, you see, she doesn’t,’ says he.

‘But why?’ asks Susan. She is feeling a little angry with the unknown
sister. To live with Carew, if he were well off enough to have her,
would, Susan thinks, be a most delightful arrangement.

‘It seems she prefers to live with another fellow,’ says he.

Susan stares at him. He nods back at her.

‘Fact,’ says he. ‘Horrid taste on her part, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, I see,’ says Susan slowly. ‘She’s married.’

‘Very much,’ says Crosby. ‘At all events, her husband is. She doesn’t
give him much rope. However, you’ll see her soon, as she is coming to
stay with me. She always makes a point of coming to me for my birthday,
whenever I chance to be in Ireland or England for it. I suppose I must
be going now. I say, you two fellows’—turning to Carew and Dom—‘why are
you so lazy? Why don’t you come up and help me to shoot the rabbits?
They are getting beyond the keepers’ control.’

Dom and Carew glance at each other.

‘Can we?’ says Carew. They seem a little tongue-tied.

‘As often as ever you like. Look here, be up at six to-morrow morning,
and we’ll catch them feeding. And if you will stay and breakfast with
me, it will be a kindness to a solitary man.’

‘Oh, thank you!’ says Dominick rapturously. Carew, however, looks a
little crestfallen, whereupon Dom begins to whisper in his ear. The
words ‘every second shot’ reach Mr. Crosby.

‘If either of you wants a gun, I can find you one,’ says he carelessly,
after which joy unruffled reigns. ‘I make only one stipulation,’ he
adds: ‘that you won’t shoot me.’

‘Oh, hang it, we are not such duffers as that!’ says Carew.

They all laugh at this, and all, as usual, accompany him to the gate to
give him a kind send-off.

As he disappears up the road past the little side-gate of the Cottage,
Dom makes a rush back to the house. ‘I must go and polish up the old
gun,’ says he. Betty follows him, with Tom and Jacky.

‘How kind he is!’ says Susan, turning to Carew. Her tone is warm and
grateful. There is no doubt that Carew’s answer would have been equally
warm, but it never comes.

A little sound—the creaking of a rusty hinge—at this moment attracts his
attention, and Susan’s also. They glance quickly towards the little
green gate of the Cottage.

It is slowly opening!

And now a face peeps out—very cautiously, very nervously.




                              CHAPTER XXV.

                ‘Dear, if you knew what tears they shed
                  Who live apart from home and friend,
                To pass my house, by pity led,
                  Your steps would tend.’


It is the face that had peeped out of the branches of the sycamore-tree
a little while ago. A charming face! The eyes glance down the little
lane, and then, suddenly seeing Susan, rest with a frightened expression
on her. As this is the first time in all Susan’s experience that anyone
has ever betrayed the smallest fear of her, she naturally gives herself
up to the contemplation of her new-born slave. Her eyes and those of the
mysterious stranger meet.

‘Oh, how pretty!’ thinks Susan to herself, but she says nothing, being
lost in wonder and admiration; and the girl, peeping out of the doorway,
as if disheartened, draws back again, and will in another minute
disappear altogether, but for Carew.

He makes a sharp gesture.

‘Wait!’ cries he, in a low tone, though hardly conscious that he is
speaking at all. And again the pretty frightened head comes into sight
between the leaves of the luxuriant ivy that frames the gate.

‘Susan!’ says Carew, in a voice of low and hurried entreaty; and Susan,
responding to it, speeds quickly up the road and into the little
gateway.

‘Oh, come in—come in!’ breathes the stranger in a whisper, putting out
her hands and catching Susan’s in a soft grasp. ‘I have seen you so
often; I’—flushing and smiling timidly—‘have watched you from the
sycamore many a day. And it’s very lonely here. You will come in for a
moment, won’t you?’

Susan smiles back at her, and passes through the small green gate. Ella,
pleased and palpitating, glances back, to see Carew looking after them
like a young culprit at the door of a forbidden paradise.

‘Won’t you come too?’ cries she, beneath her breath, in that soft,
curiously frightened sort of a way that seems to belong to her. ‘Hurry!
hurry!’ She looks anxious, and it is only, indeed, when Carew has come
inside the gate, and she has with her own fingers fastened and secured
it, that the brightness returns to her face.

‘It’s very good of you,’ says she, smiling rather shyly at Susan.

‘Oh no!’ cries Susan, with a charming courtesy that belongs to her; ‘it
is very good of you to let us come and see you. You know’—softly—‘we had
heard—understood—that you did not wish to be intruded on. That
is’—stammering faintly—‘that you didn’t wish to see people, and so—’

‘It is all quite true,’ says the girl distinctly. ‘I don’t want to see
people—not everyone, you know. But sometimes when I hear your voices
over there’—pointing towards the Rectory garden—‘laughing and talking, I
have felt a little lonely.’ She is looking at Susan, and Susan can see
that her eyes now are a little misty. ‘To-day’—wistfully—‘you were
laughing a great deal.’

‘Yes, yes; I wish we hadn’t been,’ says Susan, who is beginning to feel
distinctly contrite, until she remembers that, after all, some tears
were mingled with her mirth. ‘But now that we have met, you will come
and join us sometimes, won’t you?—and, indeed, to-day? I wish you had
come to-day. We should all have been glad to see you—shouldn’t we,
Carew?’

‘I am sure you know that,’ says Carew to Ella. A warm colour is dyeing
his handsome young face, and there is the tenderest, most reverential
expression in his voice. Carew is of that age when ‘the light that lies
in a lady’s eyes’ can mean heaven to him.

‘I shall never leave this place,’ says Ella quickly. ‘All I want is to
stay here, in this lovely garden, by myself.’

‘Yet you said you felt lonely,’ says Susan anxiously.

‘Yes—I know.’ She looks down, as if puzzled, uncertain how to go on.
‘Still, I would rather be lonely than go out into the world again.’

‘Poor thing!’ thinks Susan. ‘I was right; no doubt she has just lost
everyone that was dear to her.’ She glances at Ella, as if in search of
crape, but Ella’s navy-blue skirt and pretty pale-blue linen blouse seem
miles away from woe; and, yes, Betty had seen that blue bow near her
neck.

‘I know this garden so well,’ says Susan, with a view to changing the
sad subject. ‘We used to come here often before you came. Mr. Wyndham
sometimes stayed here for weeks at a time, but now, of course, that is
all changed. Oh, I see you have planted out some asters in the round
bed. They will be lovely later on. I suppose’—thoughtfully—‘you like
gardening?’

‘I love it!’ says Ella, with enthusiasm. ‘Only I don’t know anything
about it. Mrs. Denis gives me hints.’

‘I love it, too,’ says Susan, ‘but for all that’—as if a little ashamed
of herself—‘I like to see people sometimes. I couldn’t live on gardening
alone, and you’ll find you can’t, either. In fact’—gaily—‘you have found
it out already. That’s why you called us in. Oh, you’ll have to come
over to our place. Do you like tennis?’

‘I have never played it.’

‘Golf, then?’

‘No.’ Her tone is very sad, and Carew turns sharply upon poor Susan, who
had only meant to do her best.

‘There are other things in the world besides golf and tennis,’ says he.

‘Oh, of course—of course,’ says Susan hastily. ‘It is only people who
live in the country who ever really care about things like that, and no
doubt you—’

‘I don’t believe I know anything at all,’ says Ella, very gently.

‘Well, you know us now, at all events,’ says Carew very happily, with
the light and ready manner that belongs to all large families. His tone
is a little shy, perhaps—the tone of the boy to the lovely girl, when
first love’s young dream dawns upon him; but Susan and Ella take the
joke very kindly, and the laughter that follows on it clears the
atmosphere.

‘You are Mr. Wyndham’s tenant, aren’t you?’ says Susan.

‘Yes, now’—in a glad and eager voice—‘though at first I wasn’t.’ She
pauses here, drawing back, as it were. Has she said too much? Susan,
however, has evidently seen nothing in the small admission.

‘I like Mr. Wyndham,’ says she. ‘We all do, indeed. What we are afraid
of now is that, as you have the Cottage, we shan’t see so much of him.
But perhaps’—gaily—‘you will put him up sometimes, and then we can renew
our acquaintance with him.’

Here Carew turns an awful crimson, and casts a glance, meant to
annihilate, upon the innocent Susan.

‘I don’t know; I’m not sure,’ says Ella dejectedly. Evidently she has
seen as little in Susan’s suggestion as Susan herself. ‘He has only been
here once since I came, and Mrs. Denis seems to think he won’t come very
often. I wish he would come, and I’m glad you like him, because I like
him too.’

Carew here begins to wonder if he ever had liked Wyndham, and on the
whole thinks not.

Ella has taken a step towards Susan.

‘What is your name?’ asks she timidly, but very sweetly.

‘Susan Barry.’

‘That sounds like the beginning of the Catechism,’ says Carew, who is,
as we know, a clergyman’s son, and therefore up to little points like
this.

‘I knew it,’ says Ella, still very shyly, to Susan—‘I knew it in a way.
Mrs. Denis told me. But I wanted to be quite sure. You are Miss Barry?’

‘Oh no; only Susan,’ says the pretty proprietor of that name. ‘My aunt
is Miss Barry. But I hope you will call me Susan. It is’—mournfully—‘a
dreadfully ugly name, isn’t it?’

‘No, no; indeed, I like it.’

‘I hope you will like mine,’ says Carew, breaking into the conversation.
‘It is Carew. Susan and the others call it Crew, but that’s an
abbreviation of me to which I object. But your name,’ says he. ‘We
should like to know that.’

Has he thrown a bomb into the assembly? Something, at all events, has
stricken the stranger dumb. She shrinks backwards, playing with a branch
of the Wigelia rosea near her, as if to hide her embarrassment. What is
her name? She tells herself that she does not know, that she disbelieves
in the name forced upon her by those dreadful people she had lived with
after—After what? Even that is vague to her. Was it after her mother’s
death? Hints and innuendoes from the Moores had given her to believe
that Moore, at all events, was not her real name. But beyond that she
knows nothing.

‘My name is Ella,’ says she, in a miserable tone. ‘Call me that if—you
will.’

‘Such a pretty name!’ says Susan. ‘Why did you think we shouldn’t like
it? So much nicer than Susan. Isn’t mine horrid? But what is your other
name?’

Here they all start. A loud ring at the big gate over there has taken
them from their own immediate concerns—to another. Ella turns deadly
white, and shows a distinct desire to get behind Susan. Mrs. Denis is to
be seen in the distance, flying towards the entrance-gate.

Presently it is opened by her, and Wyndham walks in.




                             CHAPTER XXVI.

          ‘“Mark ye,” he sings, “in modest maiden guise
            The red rose peeping from her leafy nest;
          Half opening, now half closed, the jewel lies:
            More bright her beauty seems, the more represt.”’


Wyndham pauses in the gateway, and then comes forward. His astonishment
at seeing the two Barrys here is unbounded, so unbounded, indeed, that
Ella, who has been the first to see him, and who therefore naturally has
been the first to notice it, is quite frightened. She goes quickly to
him.

‘It was my fault. I asked them to come in. Do you mind?’

‘I mind? I quite understood that it was you who would mind,’ says he.
There is no time for any more. Susan has come forward.

‘How d’ye do, Mr. Wyndham?’ says she.

Wyndham gives her his hand mechanically, murmuring the usual
meaningless, but courteous, words of greeting that are expected of one,
no matter what worries lie on the heart, troubling and mystifying it.
And Wyndham, in spite of his reputation of being one of the smartest
barristers in Dublin, has, to tell the truth, been considerably
mystified of late.

The day after he left Ella, he had gone to that part of Dublin described
by her as the place where the man Moore lived. A squalid place, though
still with an air of broken respectability about it, and with quite an
extraordinary number of ill-dressed urchins playing about the hall
doorsteps. They were of that class, that though their garments were
almost in rags they had still shoes and stockings, of sorts, on their
feet, and an attempt at a frayed collar round their necks. It gave
Wyndham a sense of disgust to think that the girl who was now living in
his dainty cottage had once lived in such an atmosphere as this; and
when he had gone down the hideous road twenty yards or so, the certainty
that had begun at the first yard—that she could never have lived
there—had deepened. But this idea gave him little comfort. If she had
ever lived here, it was only, to say the least of it, deplorable. If she
had not lived here, she had lied to him, and was an impostor. And if the
latter supposition was true, he had rented his cottage to an impostor,
and a clever one, too. She had taken him in, beyond all doubt. And he
was looked upon as rather a bright and shining light amongst his
_confrères_ at the Bar and at the University Club, and in the various
other resorts for rising young men in Dublin.

When he knocked at the door of the house mentioned by her, he told
himself that of course he had come on a fool’s errand; yet, when the
woman who answered the door—a highly respectable person, and frightfully
dirty, in a respectable way—told him ‘that no Moores lived here,’ he
felt as though someone had struck him. He must have looked extremely
taken back, because the respectably-dirty lady roused herself
sufficiently from the dignity that seemed to cling to her as closely as
her grime, and condescended to say she had only been there a short time,
‘an’ p’raps Mrs. Morgan, nex’ door, could give him the information he
was lookin’ for.’

Wyndham had taken the hint—he scarcely knew why—and had gone ‘nex’
door,’ to receive, as he honestly believed, the same answer. But no!
Mrs. Morgan, in a tight-fitting gown, draggled at the tail, and with her
sparse front locks in curl-papers (she said ‘curling-tongs an’
methylated spirit played the very juice wid your hair’), gave him a very
handsome amount of news about the missing Moore.

She was a very genial person, in spite of the curl-papers—or perhaps
because of them—and she invited Wyndham into her ‘best front’ in the
most cordial way—even though she knew he was not going to take it.

Yes; of course she had known Mr. Moore. He used to live next door, but
some months ago his wife died, and he had seemed a little unsettled like
since.

‘There was a girl?’

‘Oh yes—Ella Moore.’

‘Their daughter?’

‘Law, no, sir! Her niece, poor Mrs. Moore would call her at times, but I
don’t think she was even that. I don’t know the truth of it rightly; but
that girl was “quite the lady,” sir, round here. An’ she found some
people who took her up an’ had her as governess for their children—big
people out in some o’ the squares. Mrs. Moore had her with her when she
took the house nex’ door. Ella was a little creature then, an’ used to
be cryin’ always for someone—her mother, I used to say. But Mrs. Moore
was very dark, entirely, an’ never let out. Is it about Ella you’re
comin’, sir? I’d be glad to hear good of her. But I suppose you know she
fled out of Moore’s house one night, an’ was never seen again? Some said
as how Moore wanted to murder her, or did murder her; but he wasn’t a
man for that, I say. Any way, up he sticks, and disappears after a bit.
The police looked into it for a while, but nothin’ came of it. They do
say’—mysteriously—‘that Moore wanted to marry her, and that she’d have
nothin’ to do with him. But, law, some people would say anythin’! An’,
of course, he was old enough to be her father. You wouldn’t be likely to
know anythin’ of her, sir?’—in the wheedling tone of the confirmed
gossip.

‘No,’ says Wyndham calmly. ‘What I want is the man Moore. You can tell
me nothing, then?’

‘No, sir.... Get out!’—to two or three little children who have appeared
on the threshold, anxious, no doubt, for their dinner, and wondering
what is keeping their mammy. ‘But if you did hear of Miss Ella—we all
used to call her “Miss Ella,” though she was, as it might be, one of
ourselves—I’d be glad to get a word from you. She was very good to my
little Katie, an’ she would come in of an evenin’ an’ give her a lesson,
just as if I could pay for it. There was very few like her, sir, an’
that I tell you,’ says Mrs. Morgan, whose eyes, in spite of her
wonderful dirtiness, are handsome now because of the honest, kindly
tears that shine in them. ‘An’ it’s me own opinion,’ goes on the grimy
woman, ‘that she never belonged to them Moores at all—that she was
stolen like by Mr. Moore.’

‘Or by his wife?’ suggests Wyndham.

‘Oh no, poor soul!’ says Mrs. Morgan. ‘She’—with delicate
phraseology—‘hadn’t a kick in her. But we often said—my husband and
I—that perhaps Mrs. Moore had been a servant in some great family, an’
had taken a—a child, that—beggin’ yer pardon, sir—mightn’t be altogether
wanted.’

This view of Mrs. Morgan’s takes root in Wyndham’s mind. An illegitimate
child! An unacknowledged scion of some good family! Poor, poor child!
poor Ella!

‘You may be right,’ he said. The interview was at an end. Seeing two of
Mrs. Morgan’s children peeping in again, hungry and disconsolate, he
beckons them to him, and after awhile they slowly, and with open
distrust, creep towards him. Was that the Katie—that little dark-eyed,
handsome child—that she used to teach? Wyndham caught her and drew her
towards him, and pressed half-a-sovereign into her hand, and then caught
the little boy hanging on her scanty skirts, and pressed another little
yellow piece into his soft but unwashed palm, after which he bid the
grateful Mrs. Morgan adieu, and walked out of their lives for ever.

But what she had told him went with him. Who is this girl Ella
Moore—this girl who is now his tenant? He had insisted on her being his
tenant, on her paying him rent. That was as much to satisfy her as to
satisfy some scruples of his own. She was really, of course, no more to
him than any other tenant might be—and yet—

For one thing, who is she? One does not, as a rule, rent one’s houses to
people, not only unknown and without a reference, but actually without a
name.

                  *       *       *       *       *

‘I quite understood it was you who would mind.’ There was rancour in the
voice that had spoken those few words, and the rancour had gone to
Ella’s heart. Was he angry with her?—displeased? Should she not have
asked the Barrys to come in? She loses her colour and shrinks back a
little, and Carew, glancing from her to Wyndham, whilst the latter is
murmuring his greetings to Susan, tells himself that Wyndham is a brute,
with a big, big B, and that in some way this mysterious girl—this lovely
girl—has her life made miserable by him. This is, as we know, manifestly
unfair, as it is really Wyndham whose life is being made distinctly
uncomfortable by this ‘lovely, mysterious girl.’ But Carew is too young
to see a second side to any question that has his sympathy.

‘I think we must go now,’ says Susan, holding out her hand to her new
acquaintance. ‘It is very late—too late’—smiling—‘for a formal visit.’
Wyndham winces. Is his informal? ‘But we shall pay that soon, now that
we know we may come. And, of course, you and your—’

She pauses, the thought coming to her that she really does not know if
Mr. Wyndham is actually this pretty girl’s landlord. And, besides, ‘your
landlord’—how badly it sounds! ‘You and your landlord!’ Oh, impossible!
She had been very near making a great mistake.

So she hesitates, and Wyndham misinterprets her pause. He feels furious.
What was the word she was going to use? ‘Lover,’ no doubt, in the
innocence of her young and abominably stupid heart. He feels brutal even
towards the unconscious Susan just now. Yes, that is what all the small
world round here will think. His colour rises, and he feels all at once
guilty, as though the very worst facts could be laid to his charge,
whilst all the time he is innocent. Innocent! Oh, confound it! the
situation is absolutely maddening ... and if it comes to the old man’s
ears! Lord Shangarry is not one to be easily entreated, or to be
convinced, either.... An obstinate old man, who, if he once caught an
idea into his old brain, would find it very hard to let it go again.

‘And, of course, you and Mr. Wyndham,’ says Susan now, hastily, not
understanding Wyndham’s frown, ‘have many matters to discuss.’

The speech is wound up very satisfactorily, after all.

‘Certainly not. I beg you won’t go on my account,’ says Wyndham stiffly.

‘Not for that,’ says Susan gaily, ‘but because father will be wondering
where we are.’ Wyndham, who has already heard a little of the gossip
that is beginning to circulate around the Cottage, almost groans aloud
here. Father would be wondering indeed if he only knew. ‘By-the-by, Mr.
Wyndham, now that’—she looks at Ella and holds out her hand to her—‘she
tells us she would like to see us here sometimes, we can come, can’t
we?’

She smiles delightfully at Wyndham, and the wretched man smiles back at
her in a way that should have moved her to tears had she seen him, but,
providentially, after a mere passing glance at him, she has given her
attention to Ella, who pleases her imagination immensely.

‘Certainly, if Miss Moore wishes it,’ says he. ‘You know this place is
no longer mine. Miss Moore is my tenant now. She is, therefore, at
liberty to do what she likes with it. You must not ask me what she can
or cannot do. I am that most disagreeable of all things, a
landlord—nothing more.’

His tone is even colder than he means it to be. The Rector—what will he
say when he hears of this visit of Susan’s? The Rector, who is so
ultra-particular, and this girl without a name—so almost certainly
illegitimate! Fancy the Rector’s face when he hears of this thoughtless
visit of Susan’s! Mr. Barry is a good man, and charitable in his own
line, but to give his countenance to a friendship between his daughter
and a girl nameless—unknown!

‘We are telling her,’ goes on Susan sweetly, ‘that she must come and see
us sometimes, too—just across the road, you know. But she says she will
not. Can’t you persuade her, Mr. Wyndham, though you are only her
landlord, as you say?’ Is there meaning in her tone? Does she think?
Wyndham glances at her suspiciously, and then knows he ought to be
ashamed of himself. ‘Still, landlords have weight, and you know father
would be so pleased if she would come to us sometimes.’

‘I dare say,’ says Wyndham, who can almost see Mr. Barry’s face when the
idea is suggested to him. The Rector, with his aristocratic tendencies,
that the very depths of poverty have not been able to subdue, would
think it monstrous, Susan’s being here at all with a girl so wrapped in
mystery—a girl so enveloped in the base gossip that already is arising
about her in the neighbourhood, because of her strange tenancy of the
Cottage—a gossip that must inevitably include him, Wyndham, too. How is
her coming here to be accounted for? Who will hold him guiltless of the
knowledge of her coming?

‘If you are going,’ says he, turning suddenly to Susan, ‘I shall go with
you; I wish to speak to your father.’ He has made up his mind on the
moment to lay the whole affair open to the Rector. It seems the only
thing to be done, if his tenant has decided on knowing the Barrys. ‘You
tell me Miss Moore is anxious—’

‘Your name is Moore, then?’ says Susan gently, going a step towards her.

‘It is not!’ says the girl almost passionately.

There is a silence; Wyndham, feeling the water closing over him more and
more still, with the girl’s troubled eyes upon him, comes to the rescue.

‘It is, at all events, the only name by which she is known at present,’
says he to Susan. ‘I am looking into her affairs, and hope in time to be
able to unravel them. That is the good of being a barrister, you see.
And now—if you are ready?’

Susan bids good-bye again to Ella, who is looking a little subdued and
uncertain now; Carew does the same, holding her hand lingeringly, as if
wishing to say something sympathetic to her, but finding words fail him.
Wyndham, following him and Susan, would have passed through the gate
into the road outside, but that Ella, with a quick, softly-spoken word,
full of emotion, stops him.

‘I have done something wrong,’ says she, in a breathless whisper.
‘Wait—do wait—one moment, and tell me, tell me—’ Tears are standing
thick within her eyes.

‘There is much to tell you,’ says he impatiently. ‘But no time in which
to tell it.’

‘About—’ Her face pales, and she looks eagerly at him, laying even a
restraining hand upon his arm in her growing fear.

‘Yes—about that fellow.’

‘Mr. Moore?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, you will stay—you will tell me!’ cries she, in low but panting
tones. ‘Oh, don’t leave me in suspense. Even if you can’t stay now, you
can come back again, if only for five minutes! Oh, do! You will? He—’
She looks as if she were going to faint.

‘There is no need for fear of that sort,’ says he quickly. ‘He knows
nothing of you, or where you are. Yes, if I can’—reluctantly—‘I will
come back.’

He follows the others now, and as he reaches Susan and Carew, they all
three distinctly hear the click of the lock of the garden-gate behind
them.

Susan looks at Wyndham in a startled way.

‘I—I think someone must have been very unkind to her,’ says she; ‘don’t
you? To lock herself up like that, and never to want to see anybody. Mr.
Wyndham, why don’t you try to find out her enemies?’

‘I am trying,’ says Wyndham, looking into the calm, earnest, intelligent
eyes raised to his.

‘Father would help you,’ says Susan. ‘Was it because of that you wanted
to see him to-day?’

‘Yes,’ says Wyndham.

There is no time for more.

Mr. Barry is coming up the road. He had evidently seen them all come out
of the green gate of the Cottage. His face is grave and stern.




                             CHAPTER XXVII.

             ‘Mystery magnifies danger, as a fog the sun.’


His greeting to Wyndham is of the coldest. He does not speak to him, but
turns at once to Susan.

‘Your aunt wants you,’ says he severely. And the girl, a little chilled,
a little apprehensive, disappears within the Rectory gate, carrying
Carew, a most unwilling captive, with her.

When she is gone, the Rector faces Wyndham.

‘How is this, Wyndham?’ asks he quietly, yet with unmistakable
indignation.

‘How is what?’ asks the young man a little haughtily.

‘Was it you who took Susan into that cottage?’

‘No; but even if it had been, I see no cause for the tone you have
assumed towards me.’

‘That is what I suppose you call “carrying it off,”’ says the Rector,
his pale face betraying a fine disgust.

‘Mr. Barry!’ says Wyndham, as if the other had struck him.

He has flushed a dark red, and now turns as if to walk straight away up
the road and out of the Rector’s ken for ever. But suddenly he halts and
looks back, and Mr. Barry, who has seen many phases of life and is quick
to discern the truth, however deep in the well it lies, beckons to him
to return. If this young man cannot clear himself, he may still plead
circumstances.

‘If you could explain, Wyndham.’

‘That’s what offends me,’ says Wyndham, with some passion. He has
refused to return an inch, so the Rector has had to go to him. It
wouldn’t do to shout his conversation, considering all the young people
who live on one side of the road behind the right-hand wall, and the one
‘young person’ (the Rector has the gravest suspicions) who lives on the
other side of it. What if they should all chance to hear?

Wyndham is still talking.

‘Why should I have to explain? You have known me many years, Mr. Barry.
Of what’—looking him fair in the face—‘do you accuse me?’

‘That hardly requires an answer,’ says Mr. Barry calmly. And all at once
Wyndham knows that the trouble he had dreamed of is already on him.
There is gossip rife in the neighbourhood about him and this mysterious
tenant of his cottage. People are talking—soon it will come to the old
man’s ears, and to his aunt’s, and to Josephine’s. The last idea is the
least troublesome. ‘You must surely have heard some rumours yourself. I
am willing, I am most anxious,’ says the Rector, with growing
earnestness, ‘to hear the truth of a story that seems, as it now stands,
to be disastrous to two people. You, Wyndham, are one of them. No, not a
word. Hear me first. I want to say just this: that if I was a little
harsh to you a moment ago, it was because of Susan. One’s daughter has
the first claim. And she—that child—to be—You tell me you did not take
her to see—’

‘I told you that,’ says Wyndham, ‘and I told you, too’—very
straightly—‘that if I had done so I should see no reason why I should be
ashamed of it. However, I had nothing to do with your daughter’s visit
to Miss Moore. It appears Miss Moore asked her to come into my—her—’

The Rector stops him with an impatient gesture.

‘Whose is it, yours or hers?’ asks he.

‘Mine, yet hers in a sense, too,’ begins and ends the fluent lawyer,
whose fluency has now, at his need, deserted him.

‘I do not understand your evasions.’

‘If you will let me—’

‘I want no explanations,’ says the Rector coldly. ‘I want only one
answer to one plain question: Who is this Miss Moore?’

He looks straight at Wyndham. The extenuating circumstances he had
believed in grow smaller and smaller.

Wyndham hesitates. Who is she, indeed? Who is this tenant of his?

‘You hesitate, I see,’ says Mr. Barry. ‘You have the grace to do even so
much. But at all events you cannot deny that you permitted the presence
of my young daughter in that place beyond.’

‘I—’

‘A truce to subterfuges, sir!’ cries the Rector. ‘A plain answer I will
and must get. Who is this girl who lives in your house and refuses to
see or know anyone in her neighbourhood?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Wyndham sullenly, angered beyond control.

‘I do,’ says the Rector, ‘and may God forgive you for your sin! She is—’

‘Be silent!’ cries Wyndham, interrupting him so imperiously that the
older man stops short. ‘She is my tenant—my tenant, I repeat,
and’—haughtily—‘no more.’

Silence follows upon this. The Rector, lost in thought, stands with
clasped hands behind his back and his eyes upon the ground. His silence
incenses Wyndham.

‘You can believe me or not, as you like,’ says he, turning on his heel.

He moves away.

‘Stay, stay,’ cries Mr. Barry suddenly. ‘We must get to the end of this.
If I have wronged you, Wyndham, I regret it with all my heart; but there
has been some talk here, and Susan—she is very young, a mere child. I
could not stand that. You tell me there is nothing to be condemned in
all this business—that she, this girl in there, is only your tenant. But
landlords do not visit their tenants except on compulsion, so far as I
know; and you—what has brought you here to-day?’

‘Just that,’ says Wyndham, who is still at white heat—‘compulsion. If
you would condescend’—angrily—‘to listen to my explanation, I might,
perhaps, make you understand.’

‘I shall be only too glad to listen,’ says Mr. Barry, with dignity.

‘But here—how can I explain here?’ says Wyndham, glancing round at the
open road and the walls. ‘Walls have ears.’

But Mr. Barry does not budge, and Wyndham gives way to rather sardonic
laughter.

‘I suppose,’ says he, ‘you would not let me under your roof until this
is perfectly clear?’

The Rector still remains immovable.

‘The roof of heaven is above us always,’ returns he. Whereupon Wyndham,
who has sympathy with determination, laughs again, but more naturally
this time, and forthwith tells him the whole story of his acquaintance
with Ella from that first strange night until to-day.

‘Bless me!’ says the Rector, when the recital is at an end. He strokes
his clean-shaven chin thoughtfully. ‘What an extraordinary tale!’

‘Not too extraordinary to be believed, I hope?’—stiffly.

‘No, no. I believe you, Wyndham—I believe you thoroughly,’ says the
Rector gently. ‘I am indeed sorry for my late distrust of you; but you
will admit that there was cause. That poor girl! You have utterly
failed, then, to discover those people with whom she had been living
before that—that dreadful night?’

‘So far, yes. But the fact that they once did live there goes far to
establish the truth of her—’ He stammers a little, but Mr. Barry takes
him up:

‘Her story? It entirely, in my opinion, establishes the truth of her
story.’ Wyndham’s stammer has added to the truth of his declaration so
far as the Rector is concerned.

‘You have a more liberal mind than mine,’ says Wyndham. ‘I have told you
so much that I may as well make you my father confessor _in toto_.’ The
smile that accompanies this is rather strained. ‘As a fact, there was a
time when I did not believe in her story myself; and now, when I have
to—well, it makes me feel rather poor, you know.’

‘You have no occasion to feel anything,’ says the Rector, ‘except that
you have been a kind friend to her. Do you think you will be able to
trace that fellow Moore?’

‘I hope so. I have engaged a detective—one of the smartest fellows in
Dublin—and I depend upon him to run down that scoundrel in a month or
so.’

‘In the meantime I shall make it my business to explain to everybody how
matters really are,’ says the Rector. ‘To tell the people we know round
here that—’

‘I beg you won’t,’ says Wyndham hurriedly. ‘Have I not told you how she
desires privacy above all things, how she dreads her discovery by that
man? I know it all sounds mysterious, Mr. Barry—that it is asking a
great deal of your credulity to expect you to believe it all—but I still
hope you will believe me, and at all events I know her secret is safe in
your hands. I myself have thought of suggesting to her to face matters
bravely, and if Moore should prove troublesome, why, to fight it out
with him. I cannot believe he has any actual claim on her; but she has
such an almost obstinate determination not to risk the chance of meeting
him that I fear she will not be moved by what I say. This shutting of
herself up in that cottage seems a mania with her—such a mania that I
cannot but think her story true, and that she suffered considerably at
that fellow’s hands.’

‘It looks like it,’ says the Rector.

‘Perhaps you will be able to combat her fears,’ says Wyndham rather
awkwardly. ‘I should be very glad if you could, as this mystery
surrounding her is—er—decidedly uncomfortable for me. You have seen
that.’

‘I wonder you ever consented to the arrangement.’

‘I never meant to, but she seemed so utterly friendless, and she seemed
to cling so to this place (a harbour of refuge it was to her,
evidently), that I found it would be almost brutal to refuse.’

‘It was a charitable deed,’ says the Rector.

‘Not done in a spirit of charity, however. I assure you I regret it more
and more every day of my life,’ says Wyndham, with a short laugh.
‘However, in for a penny, in for a pound, you know, and I had promised
the Professor to look after her. I have now engaged a companion for her.
I think you may remember Miss Manning. She was a governess of the
Blakes’ some years ago. You used to know them.’

‘Manning? Oh, of course, of course,’ says the Rector—‘a most worthy
creature. I never knew what became of her after Mary Blake went to
India.’

‘Got another situation, and a most miserable one. Left it, and was found
in direst poverty by the person I got to hunt her up. Her delight at my
proposal to her to live with Miss Moore was unbounded. It will, at all
events, be a blessing to get her out of that stuffy room I found her in.
She looked so out of place in it. You know what a nice-looking woman she
was, and so well got up always. But yesterday ... I advanced her a
little of her salary at once—to—to get anything she might want, you
know; and I expect that next week she will come to the Cottage.’

The Rector has heard this rather halting recital straight through
without comment. Now he lifts his eyes.

‘You are a good fellow, Wyndham,’ says he slowly.

‘For heaven’s sake, Mr. Barry, not that,’ says Wyndham impatiently. ‘I
expect I’m about the most grudging devil on earth. And if you think I
enjoy helping this girl, or Miss Manning, or anyone else, you make a
mistake. What I really want is to be left alone, to run my life on my
own rails without the worry of being crossed or stopped by passengers,
or goods, or extras.’

‘Ah, we can none of us hope for that,’ says the Rector. ‘The most
selfish of us have to live, not only for ourselves, but for others. You
spoke of having seen Miss Manning yesterday. Have you—told the young
lady in there of her coming?’

‘Not yet. I had no time, indeed. When I found your daughter there, I
felt I ought to take her away as soon as possible, simply because you
did not know how matters were, and I had a hint—as to gossip. I must go
back now, however, and tell her before my train leaves.’

‘You have little time,’ says the Rector, glancing at his watch. ‘Go.
Make haste.’

‘There is one thing more,’ says Wyndham quickly, ‘and I think you should
hear it. She—I don’t know anything for certain—but I feel almost sure
that the poor girl is illegitimate. And, of course, you—’

‘I?’

‘You would not like an acquaintance between her and your daughters?’

‘You mistake me there,’ says the Rector; ‘a misfortune is not a fault.
And the fact that this poor girl has been the victim of others’ vices
should not be allowed to militate against her.’

‘Hardly a fact,’ says Wyndham quickly. ‘I speak only from very uncertain
data, and yet—’

‘I know. It seems, unhappily, only too likely, however. There, go; you
have little time.’




                            CHAPTER XXVIII.

              ‘Weeping and wailing, care and other sorrow,
              I have enough on even, and on morrow.’


Ella is inside, waiting for him, when he returns. She has heard his
step, and has opened the little gate to let him in.

‘Oh, you have come! How long you have been! I thought you would never
come!’ cries she, in her agitation. Then, frightened at her own
impatience: ‘I—I thought perhaps you had gone away—and forgotten.’

‘There were certain things that had to be said to Mr. Barry,’ says
Wyndham. He slams the gate carelessly behind him, but Ella, passing
rapidly by him, turns the key in the lock.

‘It is very stupid of me, I know,’ says she, reddening at his glance of
surprise. ‘But the other day I thought’—paling—‘that I saw him.’

‘Moore?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where could you see him, as you never leave this?’ He is still feeling
a little sore about her determination to hold herself aloof from
everyone.

‘I’—reddening—‘was up in that tree over there’—pointing to the sycamore.

‘Up there! What on earth for?’

‘I wanted’—here poor Ella hangs her head—‘to see into the Rectory
garden. They—they were all laughing there, and I could hear them, and—’

She stops short in her somewhat dismal confession.

‘I see,’ says Wyndham quickly, all his coldness suddenly dying away.
Poor child! this little picture of her climbing with difficulty into
that great tree to catch even a glimpse of the gaiety of others goes to
his heart. ‘Was it there that—’

‘Yes; it was there I thought I saw him. I may—I must’—anxiously—‘have
been mistaken—don’t you think I must have been mistaken?—but I did see a
man just like him turning up the corner of the road that leads to the
village street.’

‘I am sure you were mistaken,’ says Wyndham. ‘As a fact, I know he has
disappeared altogether. If he wanted to spy upon you here, if he thought
you were in the country anywhere, what would be more likely than that he
should live in his old house, and make expeditions round about Dublin
with a view to coming upon you sooner or later? But I have heard from
the woman who lived next door to him that—’

‘Mrs. Morgan?’ says Ella eagerly.

‘Yes; Mrs. Morgan.’ He pauses, and is quite conscious of a glow of
satisfaction at her words. They are, indeed, ‘confirmation strong’ of
the truth of her story all through. She had known this Mrs. Morgan and
been known by her. ‘And,’ cries Ella eagerly, ‘she said—’

‘That he had left his house immediately after your disappearance. That
looks as if your going had frightened him, as if he thought he might be
made answerable to the law for your safety, as if he feared you had—that
is—’ He stammers here a little.

‘I know,’ says the girl, interrupting him gently. ‘As if he feared—I had
put an end to my life. And’—painfully—‘as you know—I was willing to risk
the chance of losing it, at all events.’

‘Oh, there was no risk,’ says Wyndham hastily. ‘But what I want to say
is that I believe Moore fancied himself liable to prosecution if he
could not say what had become of you. He had treated you abominably, and
no doubt the neighbours were talking, and—’ He himself is talking quite
at random now. He has not yet got over his late ‘slip.’ ‘Any way, his
not being seen since points to the fact that he has gone abroad.’

‘No, no,’ says the girl, shaking her head with conviction. She is very
pale now. ‘To me it seems that he has left home to look for me. I know—I
know’—affrightedly—‘that he is looking for me.’

‘Just because you saw a fancied resemblance to him in a man going down
the road?’

‘Not that altogether, though that did give me a shock, and I still
fancy—’

‘Come, that is being absolutely morbid,’ says Wyndham, with a touch of
impatience. ‘The man is gone, believe me. And even if not, what claim
has he on you?’

‘That I don’t know, but he said he had a “hold on me” until I was
twenty-one, and I am only eighteen’—with a sigh that is evidently full
of a desire to wish away three good years of her young life.

‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ says Wyndham promptly. ‘And in the
meantime, now that in my opinion he is well out of the way, why don’t
you try to enjoy your life—to see people, to—’

‘I am enjoying life. Oh’—with a sudden, quick, happy smile—‘if you only
knew how much!’

‘Yet you confess to loneliness—to a desire to see those around you.’

‘Yes.’ She colours and taps her foot on the ground, then laughs. ‘And
now I have seen them,’ says she, with a swift upward glance at him that
lasts only for a moment.

‘The Barrys, yes; but there are others, and now you know the Barrys you
can easily know everyone else down here; you can make friends for
yourself, and go out, and pay visits, and—’

‘Oh no!’ cries she quickly, with a sudden terror, indeed; ‘no,
no’—putting up her hands—‘I can’t—I won’t—I’ll never go out. Mr.
Wyndham, don’t—don’t ask me to do that.’

It is in Wyndham’s mind to say to her that it would be of considerable
benefit to his social look-out if she would only consent to know people,
and make herself known, and break through this deplorable attitude of
secrecy that she has taken up; but a glance at her young frightened face
deters him. He shrugs his shoulders over his own ill-luck, and bears it.

‘I—you are angry with me again,’ says Ella nervously; ‘but I can’t go
out of this place. I can’t, indeed, unless you could send me somewhere
across the sea where he could never find me. But to leave this!’ Her
lips quiver, and she turns aside.

‘Nonsense! Who wants you to leave this?’ says Wyndham roughly. ‘But I
think you ought to have some common-sense about you. You have no one to
give you advice of any sort, and you are about the most headstrong girl
I ever met.’

‘I have taken your advice,’ says she, ‘always—always.’ Her face is still
turned away, and her voice sounds stifled.

‘Always when it suited you; but not now, when it might be of some use.
Of course, I can see quite plainly that that old idiot Mrs. Moriarty is
backing you up in all your nonsensical fears, but there will soon be an
end to that. I have engaged a lady to come and live with you, and give
you lessons, and knock some sense into your head, I hope.’

‘A lady to live with me? You have found her, then? You meant it?’

‘Naturally I meant it, and I only hope she will be able to show you the
folly of your ways—a matter in which I have most signally failed.’

Wyndham has worked himself into quite a righteous fever of wrath against
her. Good heavens! what a row there is bound to be shortly with his aunt
about this obstinate recluse! He has gone a little too far. The girl
turns upon him, gently indeed, but with a certain dignity in her air.

‘As I have told you, I can always leave this,’ says she; ‘but it will be
for a place where I can live alone, and where I shall never have to
leave my home, even though it be a garret. I—I have thought of a
convent’—her voice faltering—‘but I am a Protestant, and—’ She sighs
heavily. ‘Mr. Wyndham,’ cries she suddenly, ‘why do you want me to go
out—to know people? Why?’

Wyndham, who could have given one very excellent reason for his wish,
remains determinedly silent.

‘You see,’ cries she triumphantly, ‘you have no reason at all, and I am
ever so much happier by myself! I don’t say but that, if I were somebody
else, I should not like to go into that garden there’—pointing towards
the Rectory—‘but as it is, it would frighten me to step outside the
gate.’

‘And how long is this state of things to go on?’ asks Wyndham—‘until you
are ninety?’

‘Ah, he can’t live till then,’ says she; ‘and, besides, long before that
I shall be old and ugly, and he won’t care. You know’—growing
crimson—‘what I told you.’

‘Yes.’ Wyndham frowns. ‘You told me enough to know he was a most
infernal scoundrel.’

‘I suppose he is that,’ says she thoughtfully. ‘Though I don’t think
really he would ever murder anybody. You see, he didn’t even murder me.
He only wanted to marry me! That was what made me so angry. If he had
made me marry him’—turning to Wyndham with a quick, sharp movement—‘you
think that would mean that I should have to live with him always?’

She pauses as if eager for an answer, and when he does not speak, she
says imperatively:

‘Well?’

Wyndham nods his head.

‘It wouldn’t, however,’ says she with angry emphasis. ‘I’d have run away
after I was married, just the same. Only I thought it better to do it
before.’

There is so much force, so much girlish venom, in her tone, that Wyndham
feels inclined to laugh; but the little air mutin she has taken sits so
curiously, and with such an unexpected charm, upon her, that somehow his
laughter dies within him. Something about her now, too, as she stands
there flushed and defiant, strikes him as familiar. Who is she like?

‘For a young lady so very valiant, I wonder you are so afraid to face
the world,’ says he gravely.

‘Ah, I am not afraid of the world, but of him!’ says she. ‘And’—she
draws closer to him, and now all her bravery has died away from her, and
she looks as greatly in want of courage as a mouse—‘I’m afraid of this
new lady, too! Is she—kind—nice? will she—be angry with me sometimes?’

‘Very likely,’ says Wyndham. He softens this disagreeable answer,
however, by a smile. ‘No—you must not be afraid of her. She is an old
friend of mine, and very charming. And she is quite prepared to love
you.’

‘Ah! Then you have said—’

‘The very prettiest things of you, of course’—sardonically—‘so keep up
your courage.’

‘She will come?’—nervously.

‘On Thursday.’

‘And you?’

‘When you and she have reached the point of open war, I dare say she
will drop me a line, to come to her rescue.’

‘It will be to mine,’ says she, smiling, but very faintly. Tears are in
her eyes. ‘You—you will come with her, won’t you? Don’t let me have to
see her alone at first. You know her, and I don’t. And you—’

‘Very well, I’ll bring her,’ says Wyndham, with an inward groan. What
the deuce is going to be the end of it all?

He does not leave by the little green gate this time, but going down at
a swinging pace (that has a good deal of temper in it) to the principal
entrance, meets there with Mrs. Moriarty, who has been on the look-out
for him for the past half-hour.

‘An’ did ye hear what happened to Denis, yer honour?’

‘To Denis?’—abstractedly. Then, recovering himself, and with a good deal
of his late temper still upon him: ‘Of course I’ve been wondering all
day where he was. Not a soul to attend to me. He was drunk, as usual, I
suppose.’

‘Fegs, you’ve guessed it,’ says Mrs. Moriarty, clapping her hands with
unbounded admiration. ‘Dhrunk he was—the ould reprobate!’

‘Well, I hope he’ll turn up this evening, at all events,’ says Wyndham.
‘It is extremely uncomfortable, going on like this. If he can’t attend
to me, I’ll have to get another man. I have borne a good deal already,
and I hope you will let him fully understand that if he isn’t at my
rooms at seven I shall dismiss him.’

‘An’ who’d blame ye?’ says Mrs. Moriarty. ‘Faith, I’ve often thought of
dismissing him meself. But’—slowly—‘he can’t be at yer rooms at seven,
yer honour.’

‘And why not?’—angrily.

‘He’s bruk his arm, sir.’

‘Broke his arm?’

‘Just that, sir, bad scran to him! An’ the docther says he never saw a
worse compound fraction in his life. ’Twas all through Timsey Mooney.
Timsey and him’s at war for a long time, an’ yestherday Timsey said he’d
break his head, an’ with that Denis said he’d have the life ov him; and
’twas the divil’s own row they had afther that, only’—with a regretful
air—‘it was Denis’s arm that got bruk, an’ not Timsey’s head.’

‘So Denis got his arm broken?’

‘Yes, sir. An’ that Timsey Mooney as sound as iver! Not a scratch on
him. I’ve alwas tould ye that there’s nayther luck nor grace wid Denis.
But what am I wastin’ words on him at all for? ’Tis about the young lady
I’m curious. She’s to stay, sir?’

‘Yes—yes. I told you that before. And I have arranged with a friend of
mine, a very accomplished lady, to come down here and live with her as a
companion.’

‘A companion is it?’ Mrs. Moriarty strokes her beard. ‘She’s been very
continted wid me,’ says she.

‘I dare say. But this lady, Miss Manning, is to be a governess to her,
to teach her—to see to her manners, and—’

‘To tache her her manners is it? She’s got the purtiest manners I ever
yet see,’ says Mrs. Moriarty, with a smothered indignation. ‘Tache her,
indeed!’

It is plain that Mrs. Moriarty is already consumed with the pangs of
jealousy.

‘She is coming, at all events,’ says Wyndham shortly. ‘And I request you
will treat her with every respect, as one of my oldest friends.’

‘She’s ould, thin?’—anxiously.

‘She is not young.’

Mrs. Moriarty shakes her head with the air of one who would say: ‘We all
know what that means.’

‘Is she kind-hearted, sir? Miss Ella is terrible timid-like.’

‘Certainly she is kind. But, of course, she will expect “Miss Ella,” as
you call her, to follow her lead in most ways. I’—with meaning—‘shall
take care she is not interfered with in any way. I hope you quite
understand all this.’

‘I understhand, yer honour. She’s ould an’ cross, an’ Miss Ella is to
follow her about everywhere. But’—with a last lingering remnant of
hope—‘she won’t be comin’ for a while, sir, will she?’

‘She is coming on Thursday.’

‘Oh, murther!’ says Mrs. Moriarty _sotto voce_, as he shuts the gate
behind him.




                             CHAPTER XXIX.

  ‘Ther is ful many a man that crieth, “Werre, werre,” that wat ful
  litel what werre amounteth. Werre at his begynnyng hath so greet an
  entre and so large, that everywight may entre when him liketh and
  lightly find werre; but certes what ende schal falle thereof, it is
  not lightly to knowe!’


‘Nothing will do for these beastly hens, it seems, but the garden,’ says
Betty indignantly. ‘Susan, stand there, you—no, there!’—gasping.

‘Oh, they’ve scratched up all the mignonette,’ cries Susan, rushing to
the point indicated—an escallonia bush in which three culprit hens are
lurking. ‘Were there ever such wretches? And plenty of food in the yard,
too! It isn’t as if they were starved. Cush! cush! Bother them! They
won’t come out. Have you got a stick, Betty?’

‘Here’s one. I declare I’m out of breath from hunting them. And the cock
is the worst of all. I hope I’ll live to see the broth he is made into;
not that I’d touch it—it would be too full of all malice and bitterness.
Hi! hi!’ with a frantic dab at the hens with her stick beneath the too
friendly escallonia—‘there is one of them, Susan; run—run to the gate!
She’s going that way. Ah! you’ve got that, any way.’

‘That,’ I regret to say, is a stone directed with unerring aim by Betty,
and received by the hen on her shoulder with a shock that makes her
bound, not only into the air, but ‘over the garden wall’ and into the
yard beyond, with a haste that perhaps she calls undue. And now Susan
has routed out the other two, and, with a cackling that would rouse the
dead, they rush after their companion towards that spot in the wall that
is easiest for the purposes of ingress and egress from the yard to the
garden. Susan races after them, ‘shoo-ing’ with all her might,
generously supported by Betty and her shower of small stones. So ardent,
so bloodthirsty, is the chase, it is matter for wonder that the hens,
having once gone through such an encounter, could ever brave it again.
But hens are amongst the bravest things living—Amazons in their own
line. It is indeed popularly supposed in our neighbourhood that the
souls of those defunct termagants have entered into them, and, at all
events, there does not rest a doubt now in the minds of Susan and Betty
that in half an hour’s time those hens will have returned to the charge,
as fresh as ever.

‘We must get a wire netting put up along there,’ says Betty angrily.
‘What’s the good of our planting seeds and roots and things for the
amusement of those abominable hens? And why should they think there are
more grubs under a picotee than under a common daisy?’

‘I wish there was a netting put up,’ says Susan, who is distinctly
flushed. ‘But who’s going to do it? Father won’t. Wiring costs
something, and there would be a good bit of it to be put up
there’—pointing to the long wall.

‘Maybe Dom would, when he gets his next half-year’s allowance.’

‘I don’t think you ought to ask him,’ says Susan. ‘He is not our
brother, you know.’

‘He’s nearly as good,’ says Betty.

‘Still, he isn’t, and I, for one, wouldn’t ask him.’

‘I would. The only thing is that perhaps father wouldn’t like it.’

‘I know he wouldn’t.’

‘What’s to be done, then? Are we to spend our time hunting these blessed
hens until the day we die? If so’—tragically—‘I hope that day will come
full soon. Oh, I declare, there’s the cock! Run, Susan, run! Oh, the
villain! the ringleader! Catch him, Susan! Oh, there, he’s gone under
the laurels! Oh, the artful thing!’

‘No he isn’t,’ cries Susan; ‘he’s over there, near you. I see his leg.
This side—this side, Betty. Ah, now you have him! Hold him—hold him
tight.’ Betty has caught hold of the king of the yard, and is dragging
him ruthlessly from his hiding-place. There are yells from the cock, and
muttered execrations from Betty. But finally the cock has the best of
it. With a whir and a whoop he makes a last grand sprint, and once again
knows the splendours of freedom.

Away he goes down the garden-path, and away go the girls after him.

‘Squawk, squawk, squawk!’ cries the cock; and ‘Oh, if I catch you!’
cries Betty, under her breath. Her breath is, indeed, running very
short. Susan’s has given way entirely.

‘Oh, he is going to the tennis-ground!’ shrieks Betty distractedly; and,
indeed, the cock, with a view of circumventing the enemy, is making for
that broad course.

At the rustic gateway, however, that leads to it from the garden, a
third enemy appears upon the scene—an enemy that takes off his hat, and
makes such a magnificent attack with it that the cock, disheartened,
gives way in turn, retreats, _chassés_ a little, and finally, with a
wild skirl, swoops over the garden wall after his wives, and is gone.

‘It was a famous victory!’ cries Mr. Crosby, when the defeat of the cock
is beyond doubt.

He is looking at Susan. Such a lovely, flushed, and laughter-filled
Susan! A Susan with soft locks flying into her beauteous eyes. A Susan
with soft parted lips, and breath coming in little merry gasps.

‘You were just in time,’ cries she, running up to him, with happy
_camaraderie_ in her smile. ‘But for you, we should have been hunting
him all over the place. What lucky fortune brought you at this
moment?’—smiling blandly into his eyes and giving him her hand. ‘Just
happening to be passing by?’

‘No, I was coming to see you all,’ says Crosby. He has nearly stopped at
the ‘you,’ but she looks so young, so without a thought behind her, that
he feels it would be useless. She would not understand, and even if she
did it would only annoy her. A girl of the world—that would be
different. She would laugh at this suggestion of a flirtation; but
Susan—

‘Well, come and see us all,’ says Betty gaily. ‘We’re all round the
corner, I fancy.’

And, indeed, most of them are, the children in the far distance chasing
butterflies with a net just constructed by Dom, whilst he and Carew are
listening with apparently engrossed interest to their aunt, who, with
curls shaking and an air of general excitement about her, is holding
forth.

‘Is that you at last, Susan?’ says she, shaking her curls more
vigorously than ever. ‘Where have you been?—How d’ye do, Mr. Crosby?—I
must say, Susan, you are never to be found when wanted.’

‘The hens got into the garden,’ begins Susan, colouring a little beneath
this rebuke uttered before Crosby.

‘Oh, hens! What are hens,’ cries Miss Barry tragically, ‘when human
beings are dying?’

‘Dying?’

‘Yes. I’ve just been to see poor dear Miss Blake, and I really believe
she is at death’s door.’

‘Oh, I am sorry!’ says Susan.

‘She’s been at that uncomfortable portal for the past year,’ says Betty,
with distinct scorn. ‘In my opinion, it would take a lot of pushing to
make her pass it.’

‘Elizabeth, this frivolity is absolutely disgraceful,’ says Miss Barry,
directing a withering glance at Betty, who, it must be said, bears up
beneath it with the utmost fortitude. ‘Dr. Mulcahy was with her. I’ve
always thought him a distinctly vulgar person, and really, after what he
said of poor Miss Blake to-day, I feel justified in my opinion.’

‘What did he say, auntie?’

‘I hardly like to repeat it. An insult to a poor dying creature seems
impossible, doesn’t it, Mr. Crosby? But I heard him myself. After all,
why should not I speak? One ought to expose monsters. My dear’—to
Susan—‘Lady Millbank had called to ask how Miss Blake was—at least, I
suppose it was for that purpose—but she mumbles so, on account of those
false teeth of hers, no doubt, that I scarcely heard what she was
saying. But I did hear what Dr. Mulcahy said to her a moment afterwards.
He was speaking of poor dear Kate Blake, and I distinctly heard him say
she was “low”!’ Miss Barry pauses dramatically, but, beyond a smothered
sound from Dom, nothing is heard.

‘Aren’t you shocked, Susan, or must I believe that the young people of
this generation are devoid of feeling. A Mulcahy to call a Blake “low”!
It struck me as so abominable a piece of impertinence that I went away
on the instant. I don’t know, of course, how Lady Millbank took it, but
I hope she put down that insolent man without hesitation. Fancy a Blake
being called “low”! Why, poor dear Kate! she is as well born as
ourselves.’

‘But, auntie—’

‘Nonsense, my dear! Don’t talk to me. You children would find an excuse
for anyone.’

‘It was only that I think he meant that she was not so very well—’

‘Born? Not so well born as the rest of us? You must be mad, Susan! A
creature like Dr. Mulcahy to talk of birth at all is absurd. Why, his
father was a draper in Dublin. But that he should cavil at Kate Blake’s
birth is outrageous. Why, the Blakes—’ She stops, as if overcome by
wrath, and Dom takes up the parable.

‘I thought you knew, Susan,’ says he reproachfully, but in a cautious
tone, heard only by the youngsters of the party, ‘that it was poor Miss
Blake’s forefather who planted that tree of good and evil over which
Adam came such a cropper.’

After this it is a relief to everybody when Miss Barry, with a
singularly brief farewell to Crosby, betakes herself to the house. It is
quite as well she has gone so soon, as Carew and Dominick were in the
last stages of convulsive laughter, and could not certainly have held
out much longer.

‘I say, isn’t Aunt Jemima a regular corker?’ says Dom presently,
addressing everybody in general.

‘She didn’t understand,’ says Susan, who feels a little sorry that her
aunt should appear in so poor a light before a man like Crosby, who is,
of course, accustomed to a fashionable world and its ways.

‘I think she has a very kind heart,’ says he promptly, seeing her
distress and smothering the laughter that is consuming him. ‘Of course,
she had no idea that the doctor was alluding to Miss Blake’s state of
health.’

‘You knew,’ says Susan, with a touch of indignation, turning to Carew.
‘Why didn’t you make it clear to her?’

‘Why, indeed?’ retorts he. ‘You tried to do it, and how did you come
off? Catch me explaining her mistakes to Aunt Jemima. More kicks than
ha’pence for my pains.’

Bonnie has come over to Susan, and, casting his crutches aside, has
slipped into her arms, his head upon her knee—a head that she strokes
softly, softly, until at last the little lad falls fast asleep.

‘He had such a bad night,’ says Susan, as Crosby now comes up and seats
himself beside her.

‘I expect that means that you had a bad night too.’

‘Oh no’—reddening—‘I—I’m all right. But he—’

‘It seems absurd,’ says Crosby suddenly, ‘that a child like that should
be a prey to rheumatism? Are you sure the doctors have told you all the
truth?’

‘I think so.’

‘But are they reliable authorities?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ says Susan, sighing. ‘But’—gently—‘don’t let me trouble
you with our sorrows; tell me of yourself. Your sister is coming, you
say.’

‘For my birthday. Yes, next month.’

‘Your birthday?’

‘I told you, didn’t I? It will be in a few days now.’

‘A few days!’ Susan’s voice is low, as usual, but primed with a
curiosity that she has much difficulty in suppressing.

‘The third of August. It always makes me feel like Ah Sin, Bret Harte’s
Chinee—soft, you know. Katherine is coming for the great occasion.
That’s my sister’s name, Katherine. You will like her, I think.’

‘Is she like you?’ asks Susan.




                              CHAPTER XXX.

                               ‘Ask not her name:
               The light winds whisper it on every hand.’


‘Not a bit,’ says he, shaking his head. ‘Just the reverse. She is young
and skittish, whilst I am old and dull.’

‘Not dull,’ says Susan.

‘Lazy, then. That comes of age, too, you know.’

‘You weren’t too lazy to hunt the hens just now,’ says Susan, as if
combating some disagreeable remembrances; ‘and you weren’t too lazy to
mount a ladder a month or so ago.’

‘Ah, Susan, that’s unkind! You shouldn’t hold up my past misdeeds to me.
If you do, I’ll hold up your indiscretions to you—your lengthened
conversation with a thief, for example. You know you did think me a
thief then.’

Susan makes a gesture.

‘Oh yes, you did; there is no getting out of that. You even made me
promise never to steal again. And I haven’t, not so much as the
proverbial pin. That’s good of me, isn’t it? Shows signs of grace, eh?
Really, Susan, I think you might say something. Give me one word of
encouragement. But perhaps you don’t believe in my reformation. I know
ever since that day when I was stealing the cherries you have had the
lowest opinion of me.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,’ says Susan, her charming brows
drawing together; ‘it is very stupid of you, and you know you don’t mean
a word of it. Stealing! How could you steal your own cherries? What
nonsense it all is! If you have nothing better to say than that,
you’—with a sudden and most unusual discourtesy—‘had better go away.’

‘Never; wild horses wouldn’t draw me from this,’ says Crosby. ‘I’ll say
something “better” at once. I’m sure you have the highest opinion of me.
Will that do, and may I stay now?’

Susan gives him a glance from under her long lashes that is still a
little resentful—a very little—but she says nothing.

‘Must I go, then?’ says Crosby. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it of you,
Susan, to send a poor lonely creature adrift like this.’

‘You are not so very lonely,’ says she. She gives him another lovely,
half-angry glance.

‘I am indeed. There is not a soul to speak to me when I go back to my
silent home, and hours must elapse before I can with any decency go to
bed. Susan, be merciful. Let me stay here and talk to you of—’ He stops.

‘Of what?’ says Susan, still eminently distrustful. ‘What are you going
to talk about? That last thing—’

‘I’ll never mention cherries again.’

‘You must keep to that. And now’—lifting her face and smiling at him in
a little fugitive way—‘go on about your sister. You haven’t told me
anything about her except her name. Katherine, is it not?’

‘Katherine Forster.’

‘Mrs. Forster?’

‘No, Lady Forster. She married one of the Forsters of Berkshire. The
eldest one, George Forster, is a very good chap; you’ll like him too.’

Susan had grown thoughtful. Dim recollections of the Forsters as being
extraordinarily wealthy people have come home to her.

‘I think I told you that Katherine is coming here to celebrate my
birthday?’ says Crosby.

‘Yes; but your birthday—when is it?’ asks Susan, anxious to know when
these alarming visitors are to arrive.

‘The third of August. Didn’t I tell you? Katherine likes to think she is
coming here to do me honour on that day; that’s how she puts it in
words. To turn my house upside down, however, is what she really means.
But I submit. The old house will stand it. She isn’t half bad, really,
and certainly not more than half mad. I think I told you you would like
her?’

‘Yes,’ says Susan, who has begun to quake at the brother’s description
of his sister. ‘And she will be here—’

‘In about ten days’ time. George—that’s her husband—is a first-class
shot, and this place has been pretty well preserved, in spite of its
absentee landlord. I hope he will enjoy himself. Katherine is bringing a
lot of her friends with her.’

‘Hers?’ Susan’s tone is a little faint. If only this big society dame’s
friends—what is going to happen? Mr. Crosby is so kind that he will be
sure to make his sister ask her up to the Hall. And how could she
(Susan) hold her own with these clever people of the world, people who—

Crosby breaks into her silent fears.

‘Hers principally; but some of them are mine, too, in a way. I really am
so little at home that I haven’t time to cultivate lifelong friendships;
but Lady Muriel Kennedy I have known all my life, and liked. I
hope’—suddenly—‘when Katherine comes, you will spare her a little of
your time.’

‘You are very kind. If you would care to have me,’ falters Susan
disjointedly. Her eyes are on the ground. To spare Lady Forster a little
of her time! As if Lady Forster would even care to know her! How could
she (Susan) make herself at home with people like that—people who had
lived in fashionable circles all their days—frivolous people like Lady
Forster, and lovely people like Lady Muriel Kennedy? Had he called Lady
Muriel lovely?

‘That is begging the question,’ says he, laughing. ‘Who wouldn’t care to
have you? How silent you are, Susan! Not a word out of you. I’ll begin
to think you are in love presently. People in love are always silent,
dwelling on the beloved absent, no doubt.’

‘I am not in love,’ says Susan, with singular distinctness.

‘Not even with “James”? I forget his other name. He would be a beloved
absent, wouldn’t he?’

‘Absent or present, he would not be beloved by me,’ says Susan calmly.
She pauses. Her head is slightly turned from Crosby, so that only the
perfect profile can be seen. The fingers of her right hand are lying
tenderly on Bonnie’s sleeping head. The fingers of the left are plucking
idly at the grass by her side.

All at once she turns her glance straight on Crosby.

‘Were you ever in love?’ asks she.

‘Susan,’ says Crosby seriously, ‘I don’t think you ought to spring
things upon one like that. My heart may be weak, for all you know; and,
really, I begin to think of late that it is.’ He pauses. Susan remaining
sternly unsympathetic, however, over this leading speech, he goes on.
‘What was your question?’ asks he.

This sounds like basest subterfuge, and Susan casts a glance of scorn at
him.

‘I asked you if you had ever been in love. Please don’t answer if you
don’t want to. After all, I am sure I should not have asked you.’

‘You can ask me anything you like,’ says Crosby with resignation. ‘Yours
is to command, mine to obey. Yes’—comfortably, if surreptitiously,
disposing himself on the tail of Susan’s gown—‘I acknowledge it. I have
had my little disappointment. It was a frightful affair. I don’t believe
anyone was ever so much in love as I was—then. I was just twenty-one,
and she was just—something or other. It’s bad to remember a lady’s age.
Any way, I know I loved her—I loved her,’ says Crosby, rising now to
tragedy, ‘like anything. I can’t even at this hour speak of it without
tears.’

‘Oh, nonsense! you’re laughing,’ says Susan, with fine disgust.

‘I am not, indeed. It is hysterics. If only you had gone through half
what I have, I might expect a little sympathy from you. However, to
continue. She was lovely, Susan, and she was tall—taller than you. She
had coal-black eyes, and a nose that I have always considered Roman. I
adored her. I used to walk about o’ nights looking at the moon (when
there was one), and telling myself it was the image of her.’

‘The image of her! I must say I think you were hardly complimentary,’
says Susan, who seems to be on the look-out for slips. ‘There is nothing
in the moon but a man, and a hideous one too—just like the clown at the
circus.’

‘True’—reflectively. ‘Then it couldn’t have been the moon I compared her
to. Perhaps’—thoughtfully—‘it was a star. Ah!’—joyfully—‘that’s it—my
own particular star. See?’

‘No,’ says Susan contemptuously; and then: ‘I don’t believe you ever
compared her to anything.’

‘I did—I did indeed, even quite lately,’ says Crosby. But this ambiguous
speech receiving no recognition, he goes on: ‘If, as your contemptuous
silence evidently means, Susan, you think me incapable of love, you are
greatly in the wrong. I assure you I did compare her to that star. There
was one special one; but somehow I can’t find it lately. It must have
been removed, I think. And besides the star, I remember quite well being
under a hallucination that led me to believe that the wettest day under
heaven was full of sunshine when she was present; and that when she
wasn’t present, no matter how brilliant the sky might be, that the sun
never shone. Come, now, Susan; be just. That was real love, wasn’t it?’

‘I really don’t know,’ says Susan. There is a slight pause; then: ‘Go
on.’

‘Go on?’

‘Did she die?’

‘Die? Not much,’ says Crosby cheerfully. ‘Though of course’—relapsing
into very suspicious gloom—‘she was dead to me. She’—with deep
melancholy—‘thought I couldn’t furnish a house up to her form, so she
threw me over.’

‘What an odious girl!’ says Susan. For the first time a spark of sorrow
for him lights her eyes. She flushes softly with most genuine
indignation. Crosby looks at her.

‘She was a very pretty girl,’ says he.

‘For all that’—quickly—‘you must hate her.’

‘On the contrary, I think I love her.’

‘Still?’

Susan’s face grows disdainful.

‘Even more than ever I did.’

‘You are very constant.’

‘That’s the first compliment you ever paid me. But to end my tale—I saw
her in town last March.’

‘Yes?’ Susan has lifted her flower-like face, and is gazing at him.

‘You met her? And she—she—’

‘Was a widow.’

‘A widow; and so you and she.... It is quite a romance!’ says Susan, in
her soft voice, speaking hurriedly, almost stammering, indeed, in what
is perhaps her joyful excitement over this beautiful ending to a sad
love-story. ‘And she was as beautiful as ever?’

‘Well, hardly,’ said Crosby slowly, as if recalling a late picture to
mind. ‘She is now, I am sorry to say, all angles. She was once plump.
Her nose struck me as anything but Roman now; and her eyes were blacker
than ever—I wonder who blacks them?’

‘Yet when you saw her, you must have thought of the past. You must
have—’

‘You are quite right: I thought strongly of the past. I thought of
nothing else. I said to myself: “At this moment this woman might have
been your wife, but for—” I forget the rest—I believe I fainted. When I
recovered I knew I loved her as I had never loved her before. She had
refused me!’

‘I suppose that’s what people call cynicism?’ says Susan, regarding him
with open distrust.

‘I don’t know what any other fellow would call it,’ says Crosby mildly.
‘I only know that I call it a blessed relief. I felt quite kindly
towards her, and went forthwith and bought her tickets for something or
other, and sent them to her with a line, saying I was going to Africa
for ten years. But there’s no more animosity. I look upon her now as a
woman who has done me a really good turn.’

‘I don’t think,’ says Susan, with sweet seriousness, ‘that you ought to
speak of her like that. I dare say she was really very fond of you, but
if you were both very poor how could you be married?’

‘Is that the view you take of it?’ says Crosby. ‘What a mercenary one!
And from a child like you! Susan, I’m ashamed of you!’

‘Oh no, you know what I mean,’ says Susan, blushing divinely whilst
making her defence. ‘There might be unkind people behind her, you know,
forbidding her to marry you.’

Crosby stops, and his thoughts run swiftly to the mysterious ‘James.’
Were there unkind people behind her when that gallant youth declared his
passion?

‘Might there? And if there were, should she listen, do you think?’

‘Ah, some would,’ says Susan, speaking out of the great wealth of
worldly lore that can be gathered from eighteen years of life. ‘But
others’—thoughtfully—‘wouldn’t.’

‘To which section do you belong?’

‘Oh, me! I don’t know,’ says Susan, growing suddenly very shy. ‘I
shouldn’t do anything—I—I should wait.’

‘Would you?’ says Crosby. There is something in the girl’s soft young
face, now lowered and turned from him, so full of gentle strength that
he wonders at it. Yes, she would wait for her lad—‘Though father, an’
mither, an’ a’ should go mad.’ Is she waiting for James?

‘I’m afraid, after all, I must destroy your illusion,’ says he
presently. ‘I don’t think she could have been in love with me. Not
overpoweringly, I mean. She had a little money of her own, and I had a
little of mine, so that we should not have been altogether paupers. But
she was dreadfully addicted to diamonds, and man milliners, and bibelots
of all kinds. I have other reasons, too, Susan, for thinking she did not
really love me. She never gave me a keepsake! Now you—you have had a
keepsake.’

‘Mr. Crosby!’ Susan’s face is crimson. ‘I wish—’

‘I know. I beg your pardon. Of course I should not have mentioned it.
But you and I are old friends now, Susan; and somehow it is permissible
for me to confide to you the hollow fact that no one ever gave me a
silver brooch with—’

Susan lifts Bonnie’s head gently, and shows a dignified, but most
determined, desire to rise.

‘Don’t,’ says Crosby quickly. ‘You’ll wake him.’ He points to Bonnie’s
lovely little head, and Susan pauses in her flight. ‘Besides, I shan’t
say another word—not one. I swear it. What I really wanted was your
compassion. I have never had a keepsake given me in all my life, save
one.’

‘Surely one is enough,’ says Susan slowly. Curiosity, after a moment,
overcomes her dignity, and she says unwillingly: ‘Is it a nice one?’

‘I desire no nicer,’ says he. He pulls his watch from his pocket, and on
the chain close to it—on a tiny silver ring of its own—hangs a silver
sixpence.

‘That! Only a sixpence!’ Susan’s voice is rather uncertain. What
sixpence is that? She—she didn’t— ‘Of course,’ says she, ‘I know a
broken sixpence is a very usual thing between lovers. But this— It is
not broken, and—and not old, either. I must say when she gave you a
keepsake she—’

‘She hardly gave it,’ says Crosby. ‘She only laid it on the last rung of
a ladder that led up to some—’

That sentence is never finished. Bonnie’s head is now lying on Susan’s
rug. But Susan herself is already far over there, her head very high
indeed, and her rage and her indignation even higher.




                             CHAPTER XXXI.

                     ‘My love is like the sky—
                     As distant and as high.
               Perchance she’s fair and kind and bright,
               Perchance she’s stormy, tearful quite—
                     Alas! I scarce know why.’


‘Is this Susan?’

Crosby, standing at the little gate leading into the Rectory garden,
feels a spasm of doubt. He has come down this morning to make it up with
her, as the children say, after that slight quarrel of yester eve—a
quarrel that was all on her side. Her remorseless refusal to bid him
good-bye had left him a little desolate.

Is that really the sedate Susan, that slender nymph flying over there in
the distance—racing, rather—with Tommy, as a willing prey, running
before her?

Crosby has, through time, grown accustomed to think of Susan as a demure
maiden, slightly Puritan in type, though no doubt with a latent
wilfulness lying beneath the calm exterior. But now that the latent
wilfulness has broken loose, he finds himself unprepared for it. Susan
running there in the sunshine, with her hair, apparently just out of the
tub and hardly yet dry, floating behind her, is another creature
altogether. And such hair, too! Such glorious waves on waves glinting
golden in the sun’s bright rays, with Susan’s face peeping out of it now
and then. How wild, how mad, how soft, the bright hair looks, and how
sweet are the ringing cries that come from Susan’s parted lips!

‘The bear has you, Tommy. He’s coming. He’—making a dab at the excited
Tommy—‘will have you soon. In another moment he’ll be on you, tearing
you—’ Quite a sprint here on the part of Tommy, and increased speed
accordingly on Susan’s part. ‘And his claws are sharp—sharp!’

Tommy, in his flight, turns terrified eyes on Susan over his shoulder.

‘Oh, Susan, don’t, don’t!’ shrieks he, filled with joy and terror. The
terror constitutes three-fourths of the joy. And now he flies again for
his life, the deadly bear, the ruthless pursuer, dashing after him with
relentless energy.

Crosby, watching, tells himself, with a somewhat grim smile, that it is
Tommy alone who would flee from such a delightful enemy. Perhaps his
thoughts are touched with a tinge of disappointment at finding Susan in
this mad mood. Yesterday she had seemed to him angered and disturbed
when she left him so abruptly; and he had gone home with a growing sense
of contrition strong upon him. It had been strong enough to bring him
down this morning with half a dozen apologies, to find that she has
forgotten all about this offence and—him.

Here lies the real sting. The Susan he had imagined as being a little
out of joint with her world—just a very little daintily offended with
him—is not the Susan who is here now, and who is running round the
garden in merry pursuit of her little brother, with her eyes gleaming
like diamonds, and evidently as gay as a lark.

She is close on Tommy now. She has put out a hand to grasp him, but
Tommy is full of enterprise, doubles like a hare, and is now rushing
frantically towards the gate on which Crosby is leaning.

This brings Susan, who is still in hot pursuit of him, with her face
towards Crosby. Now more distinctly he can see her. What a lovely,
perfect child she is, with her loose hair floating behind her, like that
of the immortal ‘Damosel,’ and the little soft gasping laughs coming
from her open lips! _Joie de vivre_ is written in every line of her face
and every curve of her lissom body.

All at once, even as he watches her, this joy dies out of her face. ‘She
has seen me,’ says Crosby to himself; and forthwith he opens the gate
and advances towards her. Tommy, in his race, has reached him, and now,
breathless, flings himself into his arms, turning to look, with affected
fright, at the coming of Susan.

It is a very slow coming, and has evidently something to do with her
hair—as can be seen through the branches of a big escallonia on Crosby’s
left. He determines to give her time to struggle with that beautiful
hair. ‘Tommy, you ought to fall on the gravel and embrace your
preserver’s knees,’ says he. ‘I have evidently saved you from an
untimely death, if all I heard was true. I think, however, that you
might have warned me that bears were about.’

He is quite conscious, whilst speaking, that Susan is still making
frantic, but ineffectual, efforts to do up her hair; so he goes on.

‘Where’s your particular bear?’ asks he.

‘Here,’ says Susan, as she steps in the most unexpected fashion from
behind the tree. He can see that she is greatly disconcerted, and that
she would never have come from behind it if remaining there was any
longer possible. But she had seen and heard him, as he had seen and
heard her.

She advances now, her expression cold and unkindly, and her hands still
struggling with her hair, in her desire to reduce it to some sort of
reason.

‘Why trouble yourself about it?’ says Crosby. ‘It is the prettiest thing
I ever saw as it is.’

‘It is not pretty to me,’ says Susan crushingly. Her arms are still
above her head, and, as she speaks to him, she weaves into a superb coil
the loose strands of her soft hair. In spite of this, however, the
little locks around her brows, loosened and softened by the late
washing, are straying wildly, flying here and there of their own sweet
will, and making an aureole round Susan’s head, out of which her eyes
gleam at Crosby with anything but friendship in them.

‘How d’ye do?’ says he blandly.

‘How d’ye do?’ says Susan in return. She lets her hand rest in his for
the barest moment, then withdraws it.

Crosby regards her reproachfully. ‘You are angry with me still,’ says
he. ‘And after a whole night of reflection.’

‘I am not angry at all,’ says Susan. ‘Why should you think so?’

‘Yes, you are,’ says Crosby. ‘I can see it in your eyes. Your very hair
is bristly. And all because—’ He stops, as if afraid to go on.

‘Because what?’ asks Susan, with a touch of severity.

‘Because I once got sixpence out of you!’ He is not able to resist it.

‘Tommy,’ says Susan, ‘your collar is dirty, and you must come back to
the house with me to get another.’ As she speaks she catches Tommy, who
has not yet got to the years of civilization, and who hates clean
collars, and prepares to march him off.

‘Tommy,’ says Mr. Crosby, ‘wait a minute; your sister won’t, but perhaps
you will. There is a photographer in town to-day; he has come down from
Dublin. And your aunt says she would like to have some of you
photographed.’ Here there is a distinct slowing in Susan’s march past,
though she disdains to turn her head, or show further mark of interest.
‘Don’t you want to be photographed, Tommy? I do, badly.’

‘What is it?’ asks Tommy, whose views of amusement as a rule mean
lollipops, and those only, and who has no knowledge of cameras or
kodaks.

‘It’s painful, as a rule,’ says Crosby. ‘But children seldom suffer.
It’s only people of my age who come out with their noses twisted. Did
you ever have your nose twisted, Tommy? It hurts awfully, I can tell
you. But’—with a glance at Susan—‘other things hurt worse. You ought to
speak to Susan, Tommy—to tell her that prolonged cruelty sometimes ends
in the death of the victim.’

At this Susan faces round. ‘What I think is,’ says she, ‘that you ought
to give me back that horrid sixpence.’

‘It isn’t horrid.’

‘You should give it back, at all events.’

‘Oh, Susan, anything but that—my life even.’

‘What’—with mounting indignation—‘can you want it for, except to annoy
me?’

‘Is thy servant a slave? I want it as a memento of the only occasion on
record on which I was called a “kind, kind man,” and a “good” and an
“honest” one besides. You did call me all that, Susan. And yet, now—’

Heaven alone knows what would have been the end of all this, but for the
providential appearance of Miss Barry and Betty upon the scene.

‘My dear Susan, have you heard? But, of course, Mr. Crosby has told you.
Good gracious! what is the matter with your head, child?’

And, indeed, Susan’s hair has again found freedom, and is flowing down
her back in happy, shining waves.

‘I have just washed it,’ says Susan shamefacedly.

‘An admirable deed,’ says Miss Barry, who is in too great a state of
delight to lecture with her usual fluency, and who, indeed, feels
inclined to be lenient. ‘But you should not come into publicity, my dear
child, until it is dry and carefully dressed again. However’—beaming
upon Crosby, who begins to quite like her—‘youth will be youth, you
know. And what do you think, Susan? There is a man down from the best
photographer’s in Dublin—from Chancellor’s, I believe. And I am thinking
of having our pictures taken, if only to send some copies to your uncle
in Australia—my brother, you know, my dear. He will be so pleased to get
them; and, really, it is a grand opportunity. Of course, you, Mr.
Crosby, have had yours taken in every quarter of the globe, but we
country mice seldom get the chance of seeing ourselves as others see
us.’

‘I haven’t been photographed for quite ten years,’ says Crosby, ‘and I
feel now as if it were my duty to sit again. Miss Barry, if you are
going to be photographed to-day, will you take me under your wing?’

‘I shall be pleased indeed,’ says Miss Barry, with much dignity.

‘Won’t it be fun!’ cries Betty, clapping her hands.

‘And the hour?’ asks Crosby.

‘About two. What do you think, Susan? Two would be a good hour, eh?’

‘Yes, a good hour,’ says Susan, without interest. Then, suddenly:
‘Is—are you going to have Bonnie taken?’

‘My dear Susan’—Miss Barry flushes the dull pink of the old when
shamed—‘why should we send all our pictures to your uncle at once? It—it
would probably confuse him. Another time we may think of that,’ says
Miss Barry, who has counted up all her available shillings this morning,
to see if it would be possible to send all the children, but had found
they fell decidedly short. She would have died, however, rather than
confess this to a stranger. ‘Just mine and yours, and—but I am afraid
your father will never consent to be taken—and Betty’s and Carew’s—just
the eldest ones. You can see, Mr. Crosby, that just the eldest ones will
be those most acceptable to their uncle.’

‘Yes, I see,’ says Crosby. He has seen it all, indeed. As if in a dream,
Miss Barry’s purse has been laid open to him and the contents made bare.
The two shillings for herself, and the two for Susan, and for Betty, and
for Carew—eight shillings in all—and after that nothing. He has seen,
too, the pride of the poor lady, who would not acknowledge the want of
means wherewith to provide photos of the younger children for their
uncle abroad, but put her objection to their being taken on the grounds
of their youth. He has seen, too, Susan’s face as she hears that Bonnie
is not to be taken. Oh, the quick, pained disappointment of it!

‘At two, then,’ says he, ‘we shall meet at the photographer’s.’

‘Yes; two sharp,’ says Miss Barry, who seems quite excited. ‘Susan, I
think I shall wear my new lace cap.’

‘I think you ought to wear your hair just as it is now,’ says Crosby to
Susan in a low tone, as he bids her good-bye. It is impossible for her
to refuse him her hand with her aunt looking on; and though Crosby is
aware of this, it is to his shame, I confess, that he takes it and holds
it in a warm clasp before he lets it go.




                             CHAPTER XXXII.

              ‘But I know best where wringeth me my shoe.’


‘Betty, was I looking frightful?’ asks Susan, drawing her sister away as
soon as Crosby is out of sight. ‘Tell me quite the truth. Don’t gloss
things over just to please me.’

‘I won’t,’ says Betty, giggling. ‘I’ll be as honest as the sun. You
looked’—pausing wickedly—‘something between Meg Merrilees and a wild
Indian, with a bias toward the latter. But that needn’t put you out.
He’s accustomed to wild Indians; and when one has lived with people
fifty years or so, one gets to admire them. I shouldn’t wonder if he
admired you. You must have taken him back to the good old days. Why
didn’t you sing “Way down upon the Swannee River” for him? That would
have finished the conquest.’

‘You don’t seem to know what wild Indians are,’ Susan remonstrates
calmly. ‘They live in North America, and couldn’t sing a nigger song to
save their lives. You don’t seem to know, either, that it was in Africa
that Mr. Crosby spent most of his time, and that the blacks there aren’t
niggers at all.’

‘Oh, it’s all the same,’ says Betty airily. ‘A black’s a black for a’
that; and if they don’t sing one thing, they sing another. And any way,
I could see by the gleam in Mr. Crosby’s eye, as he looked at you and
your flowing locks, that he loves wildness in every form.’

Susan is silent for a time; then:

‘Betty’—in a low tone—‘how old do you think he is?’

‘I don’t think he has beaten Methuselah yet, if you mean that.’

‘No; but really, I mean how old, eh?’

‘Well’—carefully—‘allowing him the fifty years he spent with his blacks,
and the fact that he told us that he started at twenty-three on an
adventurous career, he must be now well into the seventies.’

Susan’s laugh—so evidently expected here—sounds to herself a little
forced, though why she could not have explained.

‘Oh, not so old as that!’

‘Well, perhaps not, by a year or so,’ says Betty, as if determined on
being absolutely fair and accurate to a fraction.

‘Do you know,’ says Susan, a little reluctantly, but as though she must
say it, ‘I—of course, I know he is ever so much older than any of us,
but, for all that, somehow, he doesn’t seem to me to be—well, old, you
know.’

Betty nods, and Susan, encouraged by this treacherous sign, rashly takes
a further step.

‘It has even sometimes seemed to me,’ says she nervously, ‘that he is
quite young.’

‘That reminds me of something I read this morning,’ says Betty, who is
beginning to enjoy herself. ‘It ran like this: “On the whole, I consider
him one of the youngest men of my acquaintance.”’

‘Where did you read that?’ asks Susan, with open suspicion.

‘In a book’—smartly.

‘Well, I suppose so. And what book, and who said it?’

‘A frisky duchess.’

‘She was young, of course?’

‘Not very,’ Betty grins. ‘Eighty-two or thereabouts.’

‘Oh, well, then, no doubt she was alluding to a mere boy of her
acquaintance.’

‘Not at all. To another frisky person of the opposite sex—a young thing
of one hundred and five or so.’

‘What do you mean, Betty? You don’t suppose that Mr. Crosby is a hundred
and five or so?’

‘I don’t indeed. I put him in the seventies, if you remember. That would
make him quite a babe to the duchess I speak of. She said her
centenarian had the brightest, the most engaging manners, and, of
course, that reminded me of Mr. Cros— Where are you going now, Susan?’

‘I want to put fresh cuffs on Bonnie’s shirts,’ says Susan. Her tone is
a little reserved, and there is a deepening of dignity in the delicate
lightness of her steps, as she turns away, that tells Betty she is in
some way offended.

Betty, stricken, but with a conscience clear, runs after her and tucks
her arm into hers.

‘Have I vexed you?’ asks she.

‘Vexed me?’ Susan’s tone is rather exaggerated. ‘No. How could you have
vexed me?’

‘That’s true,’ says Betty comfortably, who never gets deeper than the
actual moment. ‘Then I’ll come with you.’

‘But why should I bring you in?’ asks Susan, who has a new queer fancy
to be alone.

‘To do your hair, for one thing,’ says the tease of the family with
delightful _bonhomie_. ‘Really, Susan, you can’t appear in public like
this twice; and you know we are going to be photographed in— What is the
hour now? Good gracious! it’s growing very late. We must run. Bonnie’s
shirts can’t be done to-day, but I’ll help you with them to-morrow. Oh,
there’s auntie—’

‘Susan, you must make haste,’ cries Miss Barry, hurrying round the
corner. ‘There is no time to be lost. And, my dear, your hair! How
fortunate you washed it to-day! When neatly done up it will look
beautiful. Betty, I have been thinking of having you taken with your hat
on. Your best hat—’

‘Oh, auntie!’ says poor Betty.

‘No; well, perhaps not. What do you think, Susan?’

‘I think she would look nicer without it,’ says Susan, in answer to an
agonized glance from Betty. ‘And you, auntie? I think we ought to put a
fresh bow in your cap; that side one is always falling down. You have a
little bit of ribbon, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, I think so; in the top drawer,’ says Miss Barry.
‘Susan’—suddenly—‘how could you ask such an uncomfortable question
before Mr. Crosby!’

‘What question?’ asks Susan, turning very red.

‘Why, as to whether I was going to have Bonnie photographed. I was quite
taken aback,’ says Miss Barry, shaking her curls; ‘and, indeed, it was
only the natural _savoir faire_ that belongs to me’—to give Miss Barry’s
Parisian accent would pass the wit of man—‘that enabled me to conquer
the situation. You might be quite sure, Susan, that if I had the money
Bonnie and Tommy too should have been sent to their dear uncle.’

‘I see, auntie. I am sorry,’ says Susan, with honest, deep regret.

‘I suppose,’ says Miss Barry, with the air of one addressing a forlorn
hope, ‘that you and Betty have nothing?’

It is plain that the poor lady had set her heart originally on having a
‘full set’ to send to the uncle abroad, but that reasons financial have
crushed her hopes.

‘I have only sixpence,’ says Susan sadly. ‘You, Betty?’

‘I spent the twopence I had yesterday,’ says Betty, ‘on hairpins.’

‘Hairpins!’ cries Miss Barry indignantly. ‘And your hair not up yet!’

‘They were for Susan,’ explains Betty angrily, who had, indeed, bought
them for Susan, but who, nevertheless, had spent an enjoyable hour with
them, doing up her own hair, and seeing how she would look next year
when ‘grown up.’

‘Well, that’s the end of it,’ says Miss Barry, with the courage of
despair. ‘I certainly won’t ask your father for a penny, as I know he
hasn’t one to spare this month; and, indeed’—sighing—‘I only hope that
those reports about that bank in Scotland are untrue. It is in that he
has invested the £500 he has laid aside for Carew—for his crammer, you
know, and his outfit, and all the rest of it. I dare say the scare will
come to nothing; but, at all events, he is a little pressed just now, so
that for a mere luxury like this I think we had better not ask him for
anything.’

‘Of course not,’ says Susan. ‘But, auntie’—slowly and a little
nervously—‘would you mind very much if—if Bonnie had his picture taken
instead of me? I have always so longed for one of his. He is so
delicate, and—’ She stops suddenly, a terrible feeling in her throat
forbidding another word.

‘My dear Susan! And you the eldest! Why, it would be quite an insult to
your dear uncle. No, no,’ says Miss Barry; ‘we must depend upon another
time to get Bonnie and Tom taken.’

Susan turns away. Will there ever be ‘another time’ for Bonnie? So frail
in the warm summer-time, how will it be with him when the snows and the
frosts set in?

‘At all events, I think I will take him down with me to see the rest of
us taken,’ she says presently in a depressed voice. ‘It will amuse and
interest him. You know how clever he is.’

‘Yes, by all means, and I’ll take Tommy,’ says Betty, ‘though goodness
knows if after that we shall any of us come out alive.’

                  *       *       *       *       *

Susan has started very early (it is only ten minutes after one), so as
to give Bonnie plenty of time to get down to the village without
fatigue. Miss Ricketty will give him a seat in her place; a penny out of
the last sixpence will buy him a cake or some sweets; and then, with a
little rest, he can easily go on to the room rented to the photographer
by Mr. Salter, the hardware Methodist.

She has now reached Miss Ricketty’s, and has been welcomed by that
excellent if slightly eccentric spinster with open arms. Bonnie is
literally in her arms—and now is ensconced in the cosiest corner of this
cosy little shop, behind the tiny gateway. Indeed, Miss Ricketty is
preparing in a surreptitious manner to bring down a jar of unspeakably
beautiful bull’s-eyes for Bonnie’s delectation, when Susan intervenes.

‘No—no indeed, dear Miss Ricketty. He has a penny of his own to-day. And
he loves buying. Don’t you, Bonnie? Another day, perhaps. And I think a
cake would be better for him, don’t you? You would rather have a Queen
cake, Bonnie darling, wouldn’t you?’—appealingly.

‘Yes,’ says Bonnie, out of the sweetness of his nature, seeing she
desires it, though his soft eyes are dwelling on the lollipops. But that
he can’t have both is a foregone conclusion, as Susan tells herself with
a sigh. The remaining fivepence will have to do many things until next
week, when father will give her her tiny weekly allowance again.
Besides, a cake is ever so much better for him than bull’s-eyes. Thus
Susan consoles herself.

‘Are you goin’ to be took, Miss Susan?’ asks Miss Ricketty, settling
herself, as she calls it, for a good chat.

Susan laughs.

‘Not by the sergeant, any way,’ says she.

‘Ah, ye will have yer joke now. An’, sure, I’m a silly old fool. But
ye’re goin’ to have yer picture done, aren’t ye? Fegs, ’twould be a
shame if ye didn’t. ’Tis a mighty purty picture would be lost to the
world if you held back. Why, all the world is crowdin’ to that man’s
door. I saw Lady Millbank go in just now. An’ at her time o’ life! Law,
the vanity o’ some folk! D’ye know what me brother said to me to-day?’

‘What?’ asks Susan, who is growing interested.

‘Whether I wouldn’t like to see me own face on a card. An’ I tould him
as I had seen it for sixty years in a lookin’-glass, an’ that was good
enough for me.’

‘But, Miss Ricketty,’ says Susan, seeing with her delicate sense of
sympathy beneath the veil that conceals Miss Ricketty’s real desire to
be ‘seen on a card,’ ‘why not be taken? It would not give you pleasure,
perhaps, but see what pleasure it would give to others. And as for me, I
should love a photograph of you.’

‘Oh now, Miss Susan! Sure, ye know, ye wouldn’t care for a picture of
the likes of me.’

‘I should like it more than I can say,’ says Susan. ‘Miss Ricketty’—with
pretty entreaty— ‘you really must make up your mind to it.’

‘Well, I’ll be thinkin’—I’ll be thinkin’,’ says Miss Ricketty, who is
all agog with excitement and flattery. ‘I suppose, Miss Susan dear, that
shawl they sent me from America would be too bright?’

‘The very thing,’ says Susan. ‘It would be lovely. And your people in
America will certainly recognise it, and it will give them great
pleasure to know that you treasure it so highly.’

‘There’s a lot in that,’ says Miss Ricketty, musing—she muses
considerably. ‘Well, perhaps—’ Here she pauses again. ‘It may be,’ says
she at last. She might, perhaps, have condescended to explain this last
oracular speech, but that her bright eye catches sight of three young
ladies going past her window. ‘There they go! there they go! Look at
them, Miss Susan, my dear! Did ye ever see such quare crathures? May the
Vargin give them sense! Look at their hats, an’ the strut o’ them!
They’ve a power o’ money, I’m tould. “Articles of virtue” Mr. Connor
called them the last day he was in here; but, faith, where the virtue
comes in—they do say— But that’s not talk for the likes o’ you or me,
dear. But tell me now, Miss Susan, what of Mr. Crosby? I’ve heard that
he— Oh, murdher! talk of the divil—’

Miss Ricketty retires behind a huge jar of sweets as Crosby comes into
the shop.




                            CHAPTER XXXIII.

            ‘Read in Senec, and read eke in Boece,
            There shall ye see express, that it no drede is,
            That he is gentle that doth gentle deedes.’


Crosby looks a little surprised at finding Susan here.

‘How d’ye do?’ again says he.

Susan, without enthusiasm, gives him her hand. She is busy wondering
what could have brought him in here, of all places. Fond of chocolates,
perhaps.

‘Why, there you are, Bonnie,’ says Mr. Crosby gaily. ‘No wonder I didn’t
see you in that nice big chair. How d’ye do, Miss Ricketty? I hope you
have been behaving yourself properly since last I saw you.’

‘Oh, Mr. Crosby!’ The old maid shakes her head at him with delight.

‘No fresh flirtations, I trust.’

‘Oh, hear to him!’ Miss Ricketty is laughing like a girl.

‘And how is the giant?’

‘Me brother is very well, thank you, sir. An’ he wants to see ye badly
about that cricket match in the park. They say that Tim Murphy is goin’
to be very troublesome over it.’

‘Not a bit of it. Tell your brother that I’ve squared the militant Tim,
and that he will turn up all right. What charming sweets, Bonnie! I love
sweets; don’t you?’

He has made a sign to Miss Ricketty, who is now making up a splendid
parcel.

‘Bonnie has had a cake,’ says Susan. She would have said a great deal
more if Tommy had been in question. Indeed, then she would have refused
distinctly; but Bonnie’s little lovely smiling face, and the joy she
knows it will give the gentle child to share Mr. Crosby’s gift with his
little brother, stops her. She says nothing more, though it is actual
pain to her to have to accept these sweets for her brother from Crosby.
It is a debt she owes to Bonnie to suffer thus. But, then, what does she
not owe Bonnie?

‘L’appétit vient en mangeant,’ says Crosby. ‘Miss Ricketty, don’t be in
such a hurry to tie up that parcel. Bonnie and I want something out of
it first.’ He puts a delightful box of chocolate creams on Bonnie’s knee
as he speaks, then turns to Susan.

‘I suppose I daren’t offer you anything,’ says he, in a low tone. Miss
Ricketty becomes at once absorbed in a bottle of bull’s-eyes.

‘No,’ says Susan gently, ‘thank you.’

‘Not even an apology?’

Susan glances quickly at him, and then hesitates. Perhaps she would have
said something, but at this moment Miss Barry, with Betty and Dom and
Carew, enter the shop.

‘We saw you through the window,’ cries Betty; and suddenly Susan’s
thoughts run riot. Had he seen her through the window? ‘And so we came
in. We must hurry, Susan; all the world is going to have its picture
taken—even Lady Millbank, though goodness alone knows why. And such a
guy as she looks in that velvet mantle—that heavy thing—’

‘A regular overmantle,’ says Dom.

‘Bless me!’ says Miss Barry suddenly, breaking off her conversation with
Miss Ricketty over the proper treatment of young fowls when they come to
be three months old. ‘Susan, you and Betty are wearing the same frocks.’

‘Yes, it was I who arranged that,’ says Betty calmly. ‘In some way,
Susan and I have never worn these frocks together before, and I have
heard that those old Murphy girls—’

‘Not the Murphys, Betty—the Stauntons,’ says Susan.

‘It doesn’t matter; they are all old maids alike,’ says Betty lightly.
‘Any way, I have heard that some of the weird women of Curraghcloyne
have said that we were short of clothes, because Susan and I had only
one dress between us. This’—smoothing down her pretty serge frock—‘is
the one in question. So I’m going to be photographed with Susan in it,
if only to upset their theories, and give them some bad half-hours with
their cronies; cronies never spare one.’

‘You and Susan are going to be photographed together!’ says Miss Barry,
who is getting a stormy look in her eyes. ‘You will not, then, be taken
separately?’

‘Oh yes,’ says Betty airily. ‘Separately, too. I hate double pictures as
a rule, but when duty calls—’

Miss Barry is now making wild pantomimic signs to Susan. ‘Stop her!’ her
lips are saying—‘stop her at all risks, or we shall be eternally
disgraced!’

And, indeed, the poor lady had not another penny to spend beyond what
she had already arranged for. If this double picture that the rash and
reckless Betty speaks of becomes an accomplished fact, who is to pay for
it? Not Miss Barry, certainly, because she has nothing with which to
pay. And, naturally, the photographer will demand his just fees, and
then all will come out, and—

She is on the point of appealing to Miss Ricketty, when Dom nudges her.

‘It’s all right,’ whispers he. ‘I have enough for that. I’ve settled it
with Betty.’

Miss Barry gives him a grateful look, greatly interspersed with rebuke.
Such a throwing away of good money! As if that conceited child could not
be satisfied with one representation of her face! She must really speak
to Dom about his folly later—a little later—on.

It doesn’t seem folly at all to Dominick, who is a most generous youth,
if extravagant, and who would give a great deal more to this
photographic business if it was in his power. But a great deal has been
spent of late on cartridges for the murdering of Mr. Crosby’s rabbits—so
much, indeed, that cigarettes have grown scarce and pipes a luxury,
spite of even the small sums that Carew has thrown into the common fund.
Carew has generally a shilling or two in his pockets, the Rector deeming
it advisable to give to his eldest son, out of his terribly inadequate
income, a certain amount of pocket-money, to prepare him for the time
when he will be thrown on his own resources; to teach him to economize
now, so that when he is gazetted, and has to rely on his own slender
allowance, he will be able to understand how to make money go as far as
it can.

All through the boy’s educational course, he had felt it a sort of
madness to put him into the army at all—a boy who must necessarily live
entirely on his pay—a forlorn arrangement in these fast days, and one
out of which only ten per cent. rise successfully. But the last wish of
his dying wife had been that Carew should enter the army. She had come
of a good fighting stock herself, poor soul! to which she remained
faithful, having fought her own fight with poverty most bravely until
she died; and the Rector, who had cared less and less for earthly things
since she had gone to heaven, had not the heart or the strength to
refuse that dying wish.

‘You’re sure you have it?’ whispers back Miss Barry to Dom.

‘Certain.’

‘Then’—sharply—‘it would have been much more to your credit if you had
kept it.’

‘To my credit, yes,’ says Dom.

‘A more disgraceful display of extravagance—’ Miss Barry, either from
the forced whispering or indignation, here grows hoarse, and coughs a
little, whereupon Miss Ricketty, who is now intensely interested, and is
listening with all her might, holds out to her a jar of jujubes; but
Miss Barry waves them off.

‘I suppose it is the last penny?’ asks she, still addressing Dom in a
whisper, but with a magisterial air.

‘Yes—nearly,’ says he.

The ‘nearly’ is a concession to the truth. He has, indeed, three
shillings left out of his monthly allowance, but these are already
accounted for. They are to buy three copies of Betty for his own special
apartment—one to be hung up over his gun, one over his bookcase, and one
over his study table.

‘That’s the one you’ll never see,’ Betty had said to him tauntingly, and
most ungratefully, when he told her of the decision he had come to about
his last three shillings.

Miss Barry, now turning away from him with a heart decidedly heavy,
directs her conversational powers on Crosby.

‘I congratulate you on being in good time,’ says she. ‘When Betty and I
started, we had great trouble in getting Carew and Dominick to come with
us. They were dreadfully late, and we said then—Betty and I—that you
would surely be late. But you’—smiling and wagging her curls—‘have
behaved splendidly. I do appreciate a young man who can be punctual.’

Susan glances quickly at her. ‘Young man!’ Is she in earnest, and after
all that Betty had said?

‘Young man!’ Is he a young man? Well, she has often thought so—she had
even told Betty so. Here she glances at Betty, but Betty is now enjoying
a word-to-word dispute with Dominick.

Any way, she had told her. But Betty—what does she know? She has
declared a man once over thirty, old. But Aunt Jemima thinks otherwise.
And really, when one comes to think of it, Aunt Jemima at times is very
clever—almost deep, indeed; and certainly very clever in her
conclusions.

‘Look! there are the Blakes coming out,’ cries Betty suddenly; she is
standing on tiptoe at the window, which commands a fine view of the
entrance to the photographer’s. ‘Auntie, Susan, let us go, before any
other people come.’

With this they all in a body cross the road, Carew having caught up
Bonnie, who is all eagerness to see this wonderful thing that will put
Susan’s face on paper.

Upstairs they march in a body, to find themselves presently in a most
evil-smelling corridor, out of which the studio opens. Here they wait
perforce, until at last the studio door opens, and some people of the
farming class, and very flurried and flushed, walk nervously down the
little lane between them.

‘Now is your time!’ says Betty, who is really quite irrepressible
to-day. She takes the lead, and they all swarm after her into the
studio, to find there an emaciated man in highly respectable clothes
regarding them with a melancholy eye. Collodion seems to have saturated
him.

‘Aunt Jemima, you first,’ says Susan.

‘Yes, certainly,’ says Dom. ‘First come, first served. And, you know, in
spite of Betty’s well-meant endeavours, you entered the room first.’

‘Besides which it is the part of the young to give way to their elders,’
says Miss Barry, striving to keep up her dignity, whilst dying with
terror. The photographer and the great big thing over there with dingy
velvet cloth over it have subdued her almost out of recognition.

‘Now, auntie, come on. He’s looking at you.’ ‘He’ is the photographer,
who has now, indeed, turned a lack-lustre eye on Miss Barry.

‘We are rather pressed for time,’ says he in a lugubrious tone. ‘Which
lady wishes to be taken first?’

‘Answer him, auntie,’ says Susan.

‘What impertinence, hurrying us like this!’ says Miss Barry. She has
recovered something of her old courage now, though still frightened, and
turns a freezing eye upon the photographer, who is so accustomed to all
sorts of eyes that it fails to affect him in any way.

‘Really, auntie, you ought to have yours taken first,’ says Dominick
seriously, ‘and as soon as possible. There’s murder in that man’s eye.
Don’t incense him further.’

The photographer is now standing in an adamantine attitude, but his eye,
entreating, cries: ‘Come on, come on!’

But no one stirs.

‘A most insolent creature,’ says Miss Barry, who has unfortunately taken
a dislike to him. ‘Look at him; one would think we had to have our
pictures taken by law rather than by choice. Susan, did you ever see so
villainous a countenance? No, my dear, I—I really feel—I couldn’t have
my picture sent to your uncle if taken by an assassin like that.’ She
holds back.

‘Nonsense, Miss Barry!’ says Crosby gaily. ‘You have too much spirit to
be daunted by a mere cast of countenance. And we—we have no spirit at
all—so we depend upon you to give us a lead.’

‘I assure you, Mr. Crosby, had it been any other man but this....
However, I submit.’

Whereupon, with much outward dignity and many inward quakings, she
approaches the chair before the camera and seats herself upon it.

‘A little more this way, please, ma’am,’ says the photographer.

‘Which way?’ asks Miss Barry, in a distinctly aggressive voice.

‘If you would pose yourself a little more like this,’ and the
photographer throws himself into a sentimental attitude.

‘Mercy! what ails the man?’ says Miss Barry, turning to Crosby. ‘Do you,
my dear Mr. Crosby—do you think the wretched being has been imbibing too
freely?’

‘No, no, not at all,’ says Crosby reassuringly. ‘You must sit like
this’—coming to the photographer’s help with a will—‘just a little bit
round here, d’ye see, so as to make a good picture. That will give a
better effect afterwards; and of course he is anxious to make as good a
photograph of you as he can.’

At this Miss Barry condescends to move a little in the way directed. She
clutches hold of Susan, however, during the placing of her, and whispers
thrillingly:

‘I don’t believe in him, Susan. Look at his eye. It squints! Could a
squinter give one a good photograph?’

‘Now, madam!’ says the camera man, in a dying tone. He has heard
nothing, but is annoyed in a dejected fashion by the delay. ‘If you are
quite ready.’

‘Are you?’ retorts Miss Barry.

‘Yes, ma’am.’ He comes forward to rearrange her draperies and herself,
her short colloquy with Susan having been sufficiently lively to disturb
the recent pose. He pulls out her gown, then steps back to further study
her, and finally takes her head between his hands, with a view to
putting that into the right position also.

If the poor man had only known the consequences of this rash act, he
would, perhaps, rather have given up his profession than have committed
it.

‘How dare you, sir!’ cries Miss Barry, pushing him back, and making
frightful passes in the air as a defence against another attack of his
upon her maiden cheek.

‘Carew, where are you? Dominick! Susan, Susan, do you see how I have
been outraged?’

‘Dear auntie,’ says Susan, in a low tone, Carew and Dominick being
incapacitated for service, ‘you mistake him. He only wants to arrange
you for your picture. It is always done. Don’t you see?’

‘I don’t,’ says Miss Barry stoutly. ‘I see only that you are all a silly
set of children, who do not understand the iniquity of man! This
creature—’ She points to the photographer, who has gone back in a
melancholy way to his slides, and is pulling them in and out, by way of
exercise, perhaps. ‘However, Susan, I’ll go through with it, insolent
and depraved as this creature evidently is; coming from a huge
metropolis like Dublin, he scarcely knows how to behave himself with
decent people. I must request you to tell him, however, that I
refuse—absolutely refuse—to let him caress my face again!’

Thus peace is restored with honour, for the time being. And the unlucky
man who has been selected by an unkind Providence to transmit Miss
Barry’s face to futurity, once again approaches her.

‘Now, ma’am, if you will kindly sit just so, and if you will look at
this—a little more pleasantly, please’—holding up a photograph of Lord
Rosebery that he has been carrying about to delight the Irish people.
‘Ah, that’s better; that earnest expression will—’

‘Who’s that?’ cries Miss Barry, springing to her feet. ‘Is that the
Radical miscreant who has taken old Gladstone’s place? God bless me,
man! do you think I’m going to be pleasant when I look at him?’

The wretched photographer, now utterly dumfounded, casts a despairing
glance at Crosby, who is certainly the oldest, and therefore probably
the most sensible, of the rest. The noise of the feet of impatient
customers in the passage outside is rendering the poor man miserable.
Yet it is impossible to turn this terrible old woman out, when there are
so many with her waiting to be taken, and to pay their money.

‘I assure you, sir, I thought that picture would please the lady. I’m
only lately from England, and they told me—’

‘A lot of lies. Ah yes, that’s of course,’ says Crosby, interrupting him
sympathetically. ‘But what they didn’t teach you was that there are two
opinions, you know. You can show Lord Rosebery to the people who have
not a shilling in the world, and not a grandfather amongst them; but I
think you had better show Miss Barry a photograph of Lord Salisbury, and
if you haven’t that, one of the Queen. She’s quite devoted to the
Queen.’

‘I wish I’d been told, sir,’ says the photographer, so wearily that
Crosby decides on giving him a substantial tip for himself when the
sittings are over.

‘Now, ma’am,’ says the photographer, returning to the charge with
splendid courage, seeing Miss Barry has reseated herself in the chair,
after prolonged persuasion from Carew and Susan. Betty and Dominick, it
must be confessed, have behaved disgracefully. Retiring behind a huge
screen, and there stifling their mirth in an extremely insufficient
manner, gurgles and, indeed, gasps, have come from between its joints to
the terrified Susan.

‘And now, ma’am, will you kindly turn a little more this way?’ The poor
man’s voice has grown quite apologetic. ‘Ah, that’s better! Thank you,
ma’am. And if I might pull out your dress? Yes, that’s all right. And
your elbow, ma’am, please.’

‘Good gracious! why can’t he stop,’ thinks poor Susan, who sees wrath
growing again within Miss Barry’s eye.

‘It is just a little, a very little, too pointed. Ah, yes. There! And
your foot, ma’am—under your dress, if you please.’

Here Miss Barry snorts audibly, and the photographer starts back; but
hearing is not seeing, and he rashly regains his courage and rushes to
his destruction.

‘That’s well, very well,’ says he, not being sufficiently acquainted
with Miss Barry to note the signs of coming war upon her face; ‘and if
you will now please shut your mouth—’

Miss Barry rises once more like a whirlwind.

‘Shut your own, sir!’ cries she, shaking her fist at him.

There is one awful moment, a moment charged with electricity; then it is
all over. The worst has come, there can be nothing more. Miss Barry is
again pressed into her chair. The photographer, having come to the
comforting conclusion that she is a confirmed lunatic, takes no more
pains over her, refuses to adjust her robe, to put her face into
position or revise her expression, and simply takes her as she is. The
result is that he turns out the very best photograph he has taken for
many a year.

After this things go smooth enough, until at last even Betty—who has
proved a troublesome customer, if a very charming one—declares herself
satisfied.

‘No more, sir?’ says the photographer to Crosby, whom he has elected to
address as being the principal member of the party. To speak to Miss
Barry would have been beyond the poor man.

‘Oh yes, one more,’ says Crosby.




                             CHAPTER XXXIV.

                                   ‘If Sorrow stole
               A charm awhile from Beauty, Beauty’s self
               Might envy well the charm that Sorrow lent
               To every perfect feature.’


He draws Bonnie forward—Bonnie, who has been sitting so quietly in his
corner for the past thirty minutes, enchanted with the strange scene. He
has cared nothing for his aunt’s eccentricities; he has thought only of
the wonderful things that were done behind that dingy black velvet
curtain. Oh, if he could only get behind it too, and find out! The
sickly child’s frame was weak, but his mind was fresh and strong, and
ran freely into regions far beyond his ken.

With the boy’s hand in his, Crosby turns courteously to Miss Barry.

‘I hope you will let me have this charming face taken, if only for my
own gratification,’ says he. ‘I have long wished it. And as he is
here—if you will allow me. It is quite an ideal type, you know—I may
have him photographed?’

‘Yes—yes,’ says Miss Barry, with slow acquiescence, uttered with a pause
between. And then all at once, as if she has come to the end of her
hesitation, ‘Yes, certainly.’ She looks at Susan as if for approval, but
Susan does not return her glance. She has cast down her eyes, and is
distinctly pale.

Poor Susan! So delighted at the thought of having a picture of her
Bonnie given her, yet so sorry for the occasion of it. She has lowered
her eyes so that no one may see what she is thinking about, or what she
is suffering; the quick beating of her heart is also a secret known only
to herself.

The throbs run like this: Oh, how good of him! Oh, no matter what he is
or whom he loves, he will surely give her one of Bonnie’s pictures—a
picture of her lovely, pretty Bonnie!

Meantime, Bonnie is being taken by the photographer, and so still, so
calm a little subject he is, that his picture is, perhaps, the best of
all, after Miss Barry’s, which is unique. Just Bonnie’s head—only that.
But so sweet, so perfect, and the earnest eyes—

The photographer tells them that they shall have them all in a week or
so. The photographer’s ‘week or so’ is so well understanded of the
people, that the Barrys tell themselves in whispers in the little studio
that if they get them in a fortnight they may thank their lucky stars.

‘A fortnight with that man!’ says Miss Barry, with ill-subdued wrath. ‘A
month, you mean. I tell you he’s got the evil eye.’

Having thus relieved herself, and the photographer having vanished into
a room beyond, she rises into happier ways.

‘Any way, in spite of him,’ says she, pointing towards the dark doorway
into which he has vanished, ‘this must be called a most happy
occasion—an auspicious one even, indeed.’ Miss Barry is always on
immense terms with her dictionary. ‘I really think’—with sudden
sprightliness—‘we should all exchange photos. I hope, Mr.
Crosby’—turning pleasantly to him—‘that you will give us one of yours.’

‘I shall give you one with pleasure, Miss Barry,’ says Crosby, ‘and feel
very proud about your wanting to have it. I shall, however, demand one
of yours in return. As to your suggestion about a general exchange, I
think it delightful.’ He turns suddenly to Susan. ‘I hope you will give
me one of yours,’ says he.

Susan hesitates. To give her picture to him, when he thinks Lady Muriel
Kennedy so lovely? Why, if he thinks a girl is so very lovely—she has
described Lady Muriel to herself as a mere girl—why should he want a
photograph of herself?

Miss Barry has noticed Susan’s hanging back, and, wondering that she
should refuse her photograph to so good a friend, comes quickly forward.

‘Susan, I really think you might give Mr. Crosby your picture. You know,
Mr. Crosby, I have always kept the girls a little strict, and perhaps
Susan thinks—’

‘I don’t,’ says Susan, with sudden vehemence. She has shrunk back a
little; her lovely eyes have suddenly grown shamed. ‘It—isn’t that,
auntie.’

‘Oh, my dear, if it isn’t that—’ says Miss Barry; and being now called
by Dominick, she turns away.

‘Auntie takes such queer views of things,’ says Susan, pale and unhappy.
‘It seems, however, that she would like me to give you my photograph.
Well’—grudgingly—‘you can have it.’

‘I didn’t want it on those terms,’ says Crosby. ‘And yet’—quickly—‘I do
on any terms.’

‘Oh no,’ says Susan; ‘auntie is right. Why should I refuse it to you?’

‘Susan,’ says he, ‘is the feud so strong as all that? Will you refuse me
your picture?’

‘No, I shall give it,’ says she, faintly smiling; ‘but I shall make a
bargain with you. If you will give me one of Bonnie’s, you shall have
one of mine.’

‘I gain, but you do not,’ says he; ‘for you should have had one of
Bonnie all the same. But what has come between us, Susan? I thought I
was quite a friend of yours. Why am I to be dismissed like this, without
even a character? You must remember one great occasion when you said
that anyone who was allowed to go through my grounds would be sure to
treat me with respect, or something like that. Now, you have often gone
through my grounds, Susan, and is this respect that you are offering
me?’

‘I thought,’ says Susan gravely, ‘that you promised never to speak of
that again.’

‘Of what—respect?’

‘No, of that’—reluctantly—‘that day in the garden.’ The dawn of a blush
appears upon her face, and her eyes rest on him reproachfully. ‘You are
not to be depended on,’ says she.

‘Oh, Susan!’

His air is so abject that, in spite of herself, Susan laughs, and
presently she holds out her hand to him with the sweetest air. ‘Any way,
I have to thank you a thousand times for having had my Bonnie’s picture
taken,’ says she. ‘And I know you knew that I wished for it.’ She gives
him her hand. Tears rise to her eyes. ‘You could never know how I wished
for it,’ says she.




                             CHAPTER XXXV.

            ‘Words would but wrong the gratitude I owe you;
            Should I begin to speak, my soul’s so full
            That I should talk of nothing else all day.’


‘Now, Miss Manning,’ says Wyndham, in his quick, alert, business-like
way. He steps back, and motions her to go through the gateway that Mrs.
Denis had opened about three inches a minute ago.

Miss Manning, a tall, thin, rather nervous-looking lady of very decided
age, steps inside the gate, and glances from Wyndham to Mrs. Denis and
back again interrogatively.

‘This is Miss Moore’s housekeeper, cook, and general factotum,’ says
Wyndham, making a hasty introduction, and with a warning glance towards
Mrs. Denis, who has dropped a rather stiff curtsy. ‘Yours too. She will
remove all troubles from your shoulders, and will take excellent care of
you, I don’t doubt.’ He pauses to give Mrs. Denis—who is looking glum,
to say the least of it—room for one of her always only too ready
speeches, but nothing comes. ‘Eh?’ says he, in a sharp metallic voice
that brings Mrs. Denis to her senses with a jump.

‘Yes, sir,’ says she, and no more—no promises of obedience.

Wyndham hurries Miss Manning past her.

‘The other maid you can manage,’ says he, in a low tone, ‘and no doubt
Mrs. Denis after awhile. She is a highly respectable woman, if a little
unreasonable, and a little too devoted to your pupil. About the
latter’—hastily—‘you know everything—her whole history—that is, so far
as I know it—even to her peculiarities. You quite understand that she
refuses to leave these grounds, and you know, too, her reasons for
refusing—reasons not to be combated. They seem absurd to me, as I don’t
believe that fellow has the slightest claim upon her; but she thinks
otherwise. And—well, they are her reasons’—he pauses—‘and therefore to
be respected.’

‘Certainly,’ says Miss Manning, in a low, very gentle voice, ‘and I
shall respect them.’ Her voice is charming. Wyndham tells himself that
he could hardly have made a better choice of a companion for this
strange girl who has been so inconveniently flung into his life. Miss
Manning’s face, too, is one to inspire instant confidence. Her eyes are
earnest and thoughtful; her mouth kind, if sad. That she has endured
much sorrow is written on every feature; but troubles have failed to
embitter a spirit made up of Nature’s sweetest graces. And now, indeed,
joy is lighting up her gentle eyes, and happy expectancy is making warm
her heart. A month ago she had been in almost abject poverty—scarce
knowing where to find the next day’s bread—when a most merciful God had
sent her Paul Wyndham to lift her from her Slough of Despond to such a
state of prosperity as she had never dared to dream of since as a child
she ran gaily in her father’s meadows.

‘I am sure of that,’ says Wyndham heartily. ‘I am certain I can give her
into your hands in all safety. I know very little of her, but she seems
a good girl, not altogether tractable, perhaps, but I hope you will be
able to get on with her. If, however, the dulness, the enforced
solitude, becomes too much for you, you must let me know.’

‘I shall never have to let you know that,’ says Miss Manning, in a low,
tremulous tone. ‘A home in the country, a young companion, a garden to
tend—for long and very sad years I have dreamt of such things, but never
with a hope of seeing them. And now, if I have seemed poor in my thanks,
Paul—’

She breaks off, turning her head aside.

‘Yes, yes; I understand,’ says Wyndham hurriedly, dreading, yet feeling
very tenderly towards her emotion. Once again he congratulates himself
on having thought of this sweet woman in his difficulty.

‘And for myself,’ says she, calmly now again, ‘I should never like to
stir from this lovely garden.’ They are walking by one of the paths
bordered with flowers. ‘I have been so long accustomed to solitude that,
like my pupil, I shrink from breaking it. To see no one but her
and’—delicately—‘you occasionally, I hope, is all I ask.’

‘You may perhaps have to see the Barrys now and then—the Rector’s
people. They live over the way,’ says Wyndham, pointing towards where
the Rectory trees can be seen. ‘I found the last time I was here that
Susan, the eldest girl, had come in, or been brought in here by Miss
Moore, so that there is already a slight acquaintance; and with girls,’
says the barrister, somewhat contemptuously, ‘that means an immediate,
if not altogether undying, friendship.’

‘Yes,’ says Miss Manning. She feels a faint surprise. ‘It is not so
much, then, that she does not desire to know people, as that she refuses
to stir out of this place?’

‘That is how I take it. I wanted her very much to move about, to let
herself be known. Honestly’—colouring slightly—‘it is rather awkward for
me to have a tenant so very mysterious as she seems bent on being. I
urged her to declare herself at once as my tenant and wait events; but
she seemed so terrified at the idea of leaving these four walls that I
gave up the argument. Perhaps you may bring her to reason, or perhaps
the Rector and his youngsters may have the desired effect of putting an
end to this morbidity. By-the-by, I am going over to the Rectory after I
have introduced you to—’

‘Ella’ was on the tip of his tongue, but he substitutes ‘Miss Moore’ in
time.

The very near slip renders him thoughtful for a moment or two. Why
should he have called her Ella? Had he ever thought of her as Ella? Most
positively never.

He is so absorbed in his introspection that he fails to see a slight,
timid figure coming down the steps of the Cottage. Miss Manning touches
his arm.

‘Is this Miss Moore?’ cries she, in an excited whisper. ‘Oh, what a
charming face!’

And, indeed, Ella is charming as she now advances—very pale, as if
frightened, and with her dark eyes glancing anxiously from Wyndham to
the stranger and back again. She has no hat on her head, and a sunbeam
has caught her chestnut hair and turned it to glistening gold.

‘I hope you received my letter last night,’ says Wyndham, calling out to
her and hastening his footsteps. ‘You see’—awkwardly—‘I have
brought—brought you—’ He stops, waiting for Miss Manning to come up, and
growing hopelessly embarrassed.

‘Your friend, my dear, I trust,’ says Miss Manning gently, taking the
girl’s hand in both her own and regarding her with anxious eyes.

Ella flushes crimson. She has so dreaded, so feared, this moment, and
now this gentle, sad-eyed woman, with her soft voice and pretty
impulsive speech! Tears rise to the girl’s eyes. Nervously, yet eagerly,
she leans forward and presses her lips to Miss Manning’s fair, if
withered, cheek.

Wyndham, congratulating himself on the success of his latest enterprise,
takes himself off presently to inspect a farm five miles farther out in
the country, that had been left to him by his mother, with the Cottage.
He has determined on taking the Rectory on his way back to meet the
evening train—to enlist further Mr. Barry’s sympathy for his tenant. He
tells himself, with a glow of self-satisfaction, that he is uncommonly
good to his tenant; but so, of course, he ought to be, that dying
promise to the Professor being sacred; and if it were not for the
affection he had always felt for that great dead man, he would beyond
doubt never have thought of her again.... There is much moral support in
this conclusion.

Yes, he will spend half an hour at the Rectory. He can get back from the
farm in plenty of time for that, and Miss Manning being an old friend of
the Rector’s, the latter will be even more inclined to take up her
pupil, which will be a good thing for the poor girl. He repeats the
words ‘poor girl,’ and finds satisfaction in them. They seem to show how
entirely indifferent he is to her and her fortunes. That mental slip of
his awhile ago had alarmed him slightly. But ‘poor girl,’ to call her
that precludes the idea of anything like—pshaw!

He dismisses the ‘poor girl’ from his mind forthwith, and succeeds
admirably in getting rid of her, whilst blowing up his other tenants on
the farm. But on his way back again to Curraghcloyne her memory once
more becomes troublesome.

To-day, so far, things have gone well. She has seemed satisfied with
Miss Manning, and Miss Manning with her. And as for the fear of an
immediate scandal, that seems quite at rest. But in time the old worry
is sure to mount to the surface again. For example, when Mrs. Prior
hears of her—he wishes now, trudging grimly over the uneven road, that
he had not led that astute woman to believe his tenant was a man—as she
inevitably must, there will be a row on somewhere that will make the
welkin ring; and after that, good-bye to his chances with Lord
Shangarry, who has very special views about the right and the wrong.

If only this silly girl could be persuaded to come out of her shell and
mingle with her kind, all might be got over after a faint wrestle or
two. But no! Angrily he tells himself that there is no chance of that.
Soft as she looks, and gentle, and lov—h’m—he kicks a stone out of his
way—and pleasant-looking, and all that, he feels absolutely sure that
nobody will be able to drag her out of her self-imposed imprisonment.

                  *       *       *       *       *

After this diatribe, it is only natural that he should, on entering the
Rectory garden, feel himself a prey to astonishment on seeing, amongst a
turbulent group upon the edges of the tennis-court, the ‘poor girl’
laughing with all her heart.

He stands still, within the shelter of the laurels, to ask himself if
his eyesight has failed him thus early in life. But his eyesight still
continues excellent, and when he sees the ‘poor girl’ pick up Tommy and
plant him on her knee, he knows that all is well with his visual organs.

The fact is that, almost as he left the Cottage by the front-gate, Susan
had run across the road and hammered loudly at the little green one.
This primitive knocking had become a signal now with the Barrys and
Ella, and soon the latter had rushed to open the door. There had been
entreaties from Susan that she would come over now—now, at once—and have
a game of tennis with them. She did not know tennis. All the more reason
why she should begin to learn; and Aunt Jemima was quite pining to know
her.

‘Yes, do come!’

‘No—no, I can’t. I have said I would never leave this place.’

‘Oh, that, of course; but—oh!—’

Here Susan breaks off abruptly. Who is that pretty, tall lady coming
down the path? It is Miss Manning, and Ella very shyly introduces Susan
to her.

‘Miss Manning, tell her to come and play tennis with us this afternoon,’
says Susan. ‘Not a soul but ourselves, and she’s very lonely here.
Father says she ought to see people.’

‘I think as your father does,’ says Miss Manning gently.

‘And will you come too?’ asks Susan. ‘Aunt Jemima’—with born
courtesy—‘will come and see you to-morrow, but in the meantime—’

‘I am afraid I have some unpacking to do,’ says Miss Manning, smiling,
having fallen in love with Susan’s soft, flushed face and childish air.
‘But if you can persuade Ella—I know, my dear’—to Ella, who has turned a
sad face to hers, a face that has yet the longing for larger life upon
it—‘that you wish never to leave this place. But to go just across the
road.... And there is no one there, Miss Barry tells you; and it is only
a step or two, and’—smiling again—‘if you wish it, I’ll go over in an
hour and bring you back again.’

‘No, don’t do that,’ says Ella. ‘You are tired.’ She hesitates, then
looks out of the gateway, and up and down the lane. It is quite empty.
‘Well, I’ll come,’ says she, giving her hand to Susan.

It is evidently a desperate resolve. Even as she says it, she makes a
last drawback, but Susan clings to her hand, and pulls her forward, and
together the girls run down the lane to the Rectory gate and into it,
Ella all the time holding Susan tightly, as if for protection.

This was how it happened that Ella first left the shelter of the
Cottage. She was most kindly received by the Rector, who spared a moment
from his precious books to welcome her—and even agreeably by Aunt
Jemima. Ella had gone through the ordeal of these two introductions
shyly but quietly. She had, however, been a little startled at finding
that, added to the Barrys congregated on the lawn (a goodly number in
themselves), there was a strange gentleman. Crosby struck her at first
sight as being formidable—an idea that, if the young Barrys had known
it, would have sent them into hysterics of mirth.

Crosby had strolled down early in the afternoon, and now Wyndham,
standing gazing amongst the shrubberies, can see him turn from Susan to
say something or other to Ella.

Wyndham, in his voluntary confinement, feels a sharp pang clutch at his
breast. He stands still, as if unable to go on, watching the little
pantomime.

Tommy is speaking now. The child’s voice rings clear and low.

‘I’ll tell you a story.’ He has put up a little fat hand, and is
pinching Ella’s cheek. Ella has caught the little hand, and is kissing
it. How pretty!

‘Silence!’ cries Crosby gaily. ‘Tommy is going to tell Miss Moore a
story.’

There seems something significant to Wyndham in his tone. Why should he
demand silence in that imperative manner, just because Miss Moore wishes
a story to be told to her? He hesitates no longer. He comes quickly
forward and up to the group.




                             CHAPTER XXXVI.

                 ‘To feel every prompting of pleasure,
                   To know every pulsing of pain;
                 To dream of Life’s happiest measure,
                   And find all her promises vain.’


Susan sees him first, and, pushing Bonnie gently from her, rises to meet
him.

‘How do you do?’ says she.

‘That you, Wyndham?’ cries Crosby. ‘You are just in time to hear Tommy’s
story. Miss Moore has promised to lend him her support during the
recital.’

For all Crosby’s lightness of tone, there is a strange, scrutinizing
expression in his clever eyes as he looks at Wyndham. He knows that Ella
Moore’s presence here must prove a surprise to him; and how will he take
it? The girl seems well enough, but—And if Wyndham has been capable of
placing so close to this family of young, young people someone who—

He is studying Wyndham very acutely. But all that he can make out of
Wyndham’s face is surprise, and something that might be termed
relief—nothing more. As for the girl, she is the one that looks
confused. She rises, holding Tommy by her side, and looks appealingly at
Wyndham. She would have spoken, perhaps, but that the Rector, who has
not yet gone back to his study, takes up the parable.

‘We are very glad to have persuaded Miss Moore to come here to-day,’
says he, in a tone to be heard by everyone. ‘She has told me that you
came down this morning, bringing Miss Manning with you. That will be a
source of pleasure to us all, I am quite sure.’

He bows his courteous old head as amiably as though Miss Manning over
the road could hear him. It is a tribute to her perfections. After this
he buttonholes Wyndham, and draws him apart a bit.

‘She’s a nice girl, Wyndham—a nice girl, I really think. A most
guileless countenance! But not educated, you know. Betty and Susan—mere
children as they are—could almost teach her.’

The Rector sighs. He always regards his girls as having stood still
since his wife’s death. Children they were then, children they are now.
He has not seemed to live himself since her death. Since that, indeed,
all things have stood still for him.

‘Yes. But she seems intelligent—clever,’ says Wyndham, a little coldly.

‘I dare say. And now you have secured Miss Manning for her! That is a
wise step,’ says the Rector thoughtfully. ‘She owes you much, Wyndham. I
was glad when Susan persuaded her to come over here to-day. But I doubt
if she will consent to go further. She seems terrified at the thought of
being far from your—her home. Have you not yet discovered any trace of
that scoundrel Moore? The bond between them might surely be broken.’

‘There is no bond between them. Of that I am convinced,’ says Wyndham.

‘I trust not—I trust not,’ says the Rector. He makes a little gesture of
farewell, and goes back to his beloved study, his head bent, his hands
clasped behind his back, as usual.

‘We’re waiting for you, Mr. Wyndham,’ calls out Betty, arching her
slender neck to look over Dominick’s shoulder. The wind has caught her
fair, fluffy hair, and is ruffling it.

‘Yes; come along, Wyndham,’ says Crosby. ‘Tommy’s story is yet to tell.’

‘Better have one from you instead, Mr. Crosby,’ says Susan hastily. She
knows Tommy. ‘You can tell us all about lions and niggers and things.
You’d like to hear of lions and niggers, Tommy’—in a wheedling
tone—‘wouldn’t you?’

Wyndham by this time has joined the group, and, scarcely knowing how,
finds himself sitting on half of a rug, the other half of which belongs
to his tenant.

‘I want to tell my own story,’ says Tommy with determination. He is
evidently a boy possessed of much firmness, and one not to be ‘done’ by
anyone if he can help it.

‘But, Tommy,’ persists Susan, who has dismal reasons for dreading his
literary efforts, ‘I think you had better not tell one just now. We—that
is—’

‘Oh, do let him tell it!’ says Ella softly.

‘My dear Susan,’ says Crosby, ‘would you deprive us of an entertainment
so unique—one we may never enjoy again?’

‘Well, go on, Tommy,’ says Susan, resigning herself to the worst.

‘There once was a man,’ begins Tommy; and pauses. Silence reigns around.
‘An’ he fell into a big bit of water.’ The silence grows profounder.
‘’Twas as big as this’—making a movement of his short arms a foot or so
from the ground. At this there are distinct groans of fear. ‘An’ he was
drownded—a little fish ate him.’

‘Oh, Tommy!’ says Susan, in woeful tones. She can now pretend to be
frightened with a free heart. Evidently Tommy’s story this time is going
to be of the mildest order. ‘He didn’t really eat him?’

‘He did—he did!’ says Tommy, delighted at Susan’s fright. ‘He ate him
all up—every bit of him!’

Here Susan lets her face fall into her hands, and Tommy relents.

‘But he wasn’t killed,’ says he. He looks anxiously at Susan’s bowed
head. ‘No, he wasn’t.’ Susan lifts her head, and shakes it at him
reproachfully. ‘Well, he wasn’t, really,’ says Tommy again. This
repetition is not only meant as a help to Susan to mitigate her extreme
grief, but to give him pause whilst he makes up another chapter.

‘Oh, are you sure?’ asks Susan tragically.

‘I am. The fish swallowed him, but he came up again.’

‘Who gave the emetic?’ asks Dominick; but very properly no one attends
to him.

‘Yes; well, what’s after that?’ asks Betty.

‘Well—’ Tommy stares at the earth, and then, with happy inspiration,
adds: ‘The nasty witch got him.’

‘Poor old soul!’ says Carew.

‘The witch, Tommy? But—’

‘Yes, the witch’—angrily. ‘An’ then the goat said—’

‘Goat! What goat?’ asks Ella very naturally, considering all things.

‘That goat,’ says Tommy, who really is wonderful. He points his lovely
fat thumb down to where, in the distant field, a goat is browsing. His
wandering eye had caught it as he vaguely talked, and he had at once
embezzled it and twisted it into his imagination.

‘Yes?’ says Susan, seeing the child pause, and trying to help him. ‘The
goat?’

‘The goat an’ the witch—’ Long pause here, and plain incapacity to
proceed. Tommy has evidently come face to face with a _cul de sac_.

‘Hole in the ballad,’ says Dominick to Betty in a low tone.

‘Go on, Tommy,’ says Susan encouragingly. Really, Tommy’s story is so
presentable this time that she quite likes to give him a lift, as it
were.

‘Well, the witch fell down,’ says Tommy, goaded to endeavour, ‘an’ the
goat sat on her.’

‘Not on her,’ says Susan, with dainty protest. ‘You know you frightened
me once, Tommy, but now—’

‘Yes, they did, Susan—they did.’ In his excitement he has duplicated the
enemy. ‘They all sat down on her—every one of them, twenty of them.’

‘But, Tommy, you said there was only one goat.’

This is rash of Susan.

‘I don’t care,’ cries Tommy, who is of a liberal disposition. ‘There was
twenty of them. An’ they all sat down on her, first on her stomach,
an’’—solemnly turning himself and clasping both his fat hands over the
seat of his small breeches—‘an’ then on her here.’ He lifts his hands
and smacks them down again. He indeed most graphically illustrates his
‘here.’

There is an awful silence. Susan, stricken dumb, sits silent. She knew
how it would be if she let that wretched child speak.

Shamed and horrified, she draws back, almost praying that the earth may
open and swallow her up quick. She casts a despairing glance at Crosby,
to see how he has taken this horrible fiasco, before following Dathan
and Abiram; but what she sees in his face stops her prayers, and, in
fact, reverses them.

Crosby is shaking with laughter, and now, as she looks, catches Tommy in
his arms and hugs him.

Another moment and Betty breaks into a wild burst of laughter, after
which everyone else follows suit.

‘I’m going to publish your story, Tommy, at any price,’ says Mr. Crosby,
putting Tommy back from him upon his knee, and gazing with interest at
that tiny astonished child. ‘There will be trouble with the publishers.
But I’ll get it done at all risks to life and limb. I don’t suppose I
shall be spoken to afterwards by any respectable person, but that is of
little moment when a literary gem is in question.’

Tommy, not understanding, but scenting fun, laughs gaily.

‘I don’t think you ought to encourage him like that,’ says Susan, whose
pretty mouth, however, is sweet with smiles.

‘One should always encourage a genius,’ says Crosby, undismayed.

There is a little stir here. Tommy has wriggled out of Crosby’s lap and
has gone back to Ella, who receives him with—literally—open arms.

Wyndham is watching her curiously. Her manner all through Tommy’s
absorbingly interesting tale has been a revelation to him. He has found
out for one thing that he has never heard her laugh before—at all
events, not like that. No, he has never heard her really laugh before,
and, indeed, perhaps poor Ella, in all her sad young life, has never
laughed like that until now. It has been to the shrewd young barrister
as though he has looked upon her for the first time to-day after quite
two months of acquaintance—he who prides himself, and has often been
complimented, on his knowledge of character, his grasp of a client’s
real mind from his first half-hour with him or her.

Her mirth has astonished him. She, the pale, frightened girl, to laugh
like that! There has been no loudness in her mirth, either; it has been
soft and refined, if very gay and happy. She has laughed as a girl might
who has been born to happiness in every way—to silken robes and delicate
surroundings, and all the paraphernalia that go to make up the life of
those born into families that can count their many grandfathers.

Once or twice he has told himself half impatiently—angry with the charge
laid upon his unwitting shoulders—that the girl is good-looking. Now he
tells himself something more: that she is lovely, with that smile upon
her face, as she sits—all unconscious of his criticism—with Tommy in her
arms, and

                                      ‘Eyes
              Upglancing brightly mischievous, a spring
              Of brimming laughter welling on the brink
              Of lips like flowers, small caressing hands
              Tight locked,’

around the lucky Tommy’s waist.

But now she puts Tommy (who has evidently fallen a slave to her charms,
and repudiates loudly her right to give him away like this) down on his
sturdy feet, and comes a little forward to where Susan is standing.

‘I’m afraid I must go now,’ says she.

‘Oh, not yet,’ says Susan; ‘there is plenty of time. It isn’t as if you
had to drive five miles to get to your home.’

‘Still—I think—’ She looks so anxious that Susan, who is always
charming, understands her.

‘If you must go,’ whispers she sweetly—‘if you would rather—well, then,
do go. But to-morrow, and every other day, you must come back to us.
Carew—’

‘I’m here,’ says Carew, coming up, and blushing as well as the best of
girls as he takes Ella’s hand. ‘I’ll see you home,’ says he.

‘I don’t think it will be necessary,’ says Wyndham shortly. Then he
stops, confounded at his own imprudence, considering all the
circumstances. Yet the words have fallen from him without volition of
his own. ‘The fact is,’ says he quickly, ‘I too am going now, and will
be able to see Miss Moore safely within her gate.’

Carew frowns, and Susan comes to the rescue.

‘We’ll all go,’ cries she gaily.

‘The very thing,’ says Crosby. ‘That will give me a little more of your
society, as I also must drag myself away.’

The ‘your’ is so very general that nobody takes any notice of it, and
they all go up the small avenue together.

‘You were surprised to see me here?’ says Ella in a nervous whisper to
Wyndham, who has doggedly taken possession of her, in spite of the
knowledge that such a proceeding will in the end tell against him.

‘I confess I was’—stiffly.

‘You are displeased?’

‘On the contrary, you know I always advised you to show yourself—to defy
your enemies. You can defy them, you know.’

‘Yes; but—I mean that, after all I said to you about my dislike, my
fear, of leaving the Cottage, you must think it queer of me to be here
to-day.’

‘I do not, indeed. I think it only natural that you should break through
such a melancholy determination. Besides, no doubt’—with increasing
coldness—‘you had an inducement.’

‘Yes, yes; I had,’ says she quickly.

‘Ah!’ A pause. ‘Someone you have seen lately?’

‘Quite lately.’

Second pause, and prolonged.

‘I suppose you will soon see a way out of all your difficulties?’

No doubt she had fallen in love with Crosby, and he with her, and—

‘No; I don’t think there is any chance of that,’ says she mournfully.
‘But when Su—Miss Barry asked me to come here, I couldn’t resist it. You
can see for yourself what an inducement she is.’

Susan! is it only Susan? He pulls himself up sharply. Well, and if so,
where is the matter for rejoicing? Of course, being left in a sense her
guardian by the Professor, he is bound to feel an interest in her; but a
vague interest such as that should not be accompanied by this quick
relief, this sudden sensation of—of what?

Dominick, just behind him, is singing at the top of his lungs—sound
ones:

                      ‘As I walked out wid Dinah,
                        De other afternoon,
                      De day could not be finer,
                        Ho! de ring-tailed coon!’

He is evidently pointing this nigger melody at Betty, who has been rash
enough to go walking out with him. She has gone even farther. She has
condescended to sing a second to his exceedingly loud first, a stroke of
genius on her part, as it has taken the wind out of his sails so far as
his belief in his powers of teasing her (on this occasion, at all
events) are concerned.

Mr. Wyndham takes the opportunity of the second verse coming to a
thrilling conclusion to break off his conversation with Ella. And now,
indeed, they are all at the little green gate, and are saying their
adieus to her. And presently they have all gone away again, and Ella,
standing inside, feels as if life and joy and all things have been shut
off from her with the locking of that small green gate.

                  *       *       *       *       *

‘Isn’t she pretty?’ cries Susan enthusiastically, when they have bidden
good-bye to Crosby and Wyndham too, and are back again on their own
small lawn.

‘She’s a regular bud,’ says Dom, striking a tragic attitude. He doesn’t
mean anything really, but Carew, with darkling brow, goes up to him.

‘I think you ought to speak more respectfully of her,’ says he. ‘It
isn’t because she is alone in the world that one should throw stones at
her.’

‘Betty, I appeal to you,’ says Dominick. ‘Did I throw a stone? Come,
speak up. I take this as a distinct insult. The man who would throw a
stone at a woman—He’s gone!’ says Mr. Fitzgerald, staring at Carew’s
disappearing form. ‘Well, I do call that mean. And I had arranged a
peroration that would have astonished the natives. Anyway,
Susan’—turning—‘what did I say to offend him? Called her a bud. Isn’t a
bud a nice thing? I declare he’s as touchy about her as though she were
his best girl.’

‘What’s a best girl?’ asks Betty.

‘The one you like best.’

‘Well, perhaps she’s his’—growing interested. ‘Susan, I do believe he is
in love with her.’

‘Do you?’ says Susan thoughtfully. And then: ‘Oh no! Boys never fall in
love.’

‘Dom thinks they do,’ says Betty, turning a saucy glance on Fitzgerald.
She flings a rose at him. ‘Who’s your best girl?’ asks she.

‘Need you ask?’ returns that youth with his most sentimental air.

‘I don’t think I quite approve of her,’ says Miss Barry, joining in the
conversation at this moment, and shaking her curls severely; ‘I thought
her a little free this afternoon.’

‘Oh, auntie!’

‘Certainly, Susan! Most distinctly free.’

‘I thought her one of the gentlest and quietest girls I ever met,’ says
Carew, who has strolled back to them after his short ebullition of
temper—unable, indeed, to keep away.

‘What do you know of girls?’ says Miss Barry scornfully.

‘I’m sure she’s gentle,’ says Dominick, who is so devoted to Carew that
he would risk a great deal—even his friendship—to keep him out of
trouble, ‘and very, very good; because she is beyond all doubt most
femininely dull.’

‘Pig!’ says Betty, in a whisper. She makes a little movement towards
him, and a second later gets a pinch and a wild yell out of him.

‘What I say I maintain,’ says Miss Barry magisterially. ‘She may be a
nice girl, a gentle girl, the grandest girl that was ever known—I’m the
last in the world to depreciate anyone—but who is she? That’s what I
want to know. And no one knows who she is. Perhaps of the lower classes,
for all we know. And, indeed, I noticed a few queer turns of speech. And
when I said she was free, Susan, I meant it. I heard her distinctly call
that child’—pointing to him—‘“Tommy.” Now, if she is, as I firmly
believe—your father is a person of no discrimination, you know—a person
of a lower grade than ourselves, didn’t it show great freedom to do
that? Yes, she distinctly said “Tommy.”’

‘Well, she didn’t say “Hell and Tommy,” any way,’ says Dominick, who
sometimes runs over to London to see the theatres.

‘If she had,’ says Miss Barry with dignity—she has never seen the
outside of a theatre—‘I should have had no hesitation whatsoever in
sending for the sergeant and giving her in charge.’




                            CHAPTER XXXVII.

                                  ‘She is outwardly
              All that bewitches sense, all that entices,
              Nor is it in our virtue to uncharm it.’


It is a week later, and the village is now stirred to its depth. Such
gaieties! Such gaddings to and fro! Such wonderful tales of what Lady
Forster wore and Sir William said, and how Miss Prior looked. Gossip is
flowing freely, delightfully, and Miss Ricketty, whose shop is a general
meeting-place, is doing a roaring business in buns and biscuits.

The Park, in fact, is full of guests.

‘Every corner,’ says Miss Blake to Mrs. Hennessy, in a mysterious
whisper, ‘is full to overflowing. I hear that some of the servants have
to be accommodated outside the house, and that Mr. Crosby has painted
and papered and done up the loft over the stables in the latest Parisian
style for the maids and valets.’

‘My dear!’ says Mrs. Hennessy, in an awful tone—very justly shocked;
then, ‘You forget yourself, Maria!’

‘Faith I did,’ says Miss Blake, bursting into an irrepressible giggle.
‘Law, how funny y’are! But they’re safely divided, I’m told, one at one
side o’ the yard, the other at this, as it were. Like the High churches
we hear of in England. The goats and the sheep—ha, ha!’

‘But where are the maids?’

‘Over the stables at the western side, some of them.’

‘You don’t say so!’ says Mrs. Hennessy. ‘Bless me, but they wouldn’t
like—you know, the—er—the atmosphere!’

‘Oh, there’s ways of doing away with that too,’ says Miss Blake, with a
knowing air. ‘But you’ll come in for a cup of tea, won’t you? Jane’s
dyin’ to have a chat with you.’

Miss Blake is hardly to be trusted in matters such as these, her
imagination being extraordinarily strong. And, indeed, the idea of those
stables rose alone from her great mind. But although there are still
corners in the splendid old Hall to let, it must be confessed that it is
pretty full at present.

Guests at the Park! Such a thing had not been heard of for many years.
Not for the last eight years, at all events.

Then Crosby, who was about twenty-five, came home from Thibet, and his
sister Katherine, who was quite a girl—being six years his junior—had
been brought over from England by her aunt to freshen up her old love
for him, and to stay with him for his birthday. Not longer. The birthday
came off within the week of their arriving. Lady Melland was a woman of
Society, who hated earwigs, and early birds, and baa-lambs, and insisted
on bringing quite a big company ‘on tour’ with her on this
re-introduction of the brother to the sister, and had organized a
distinct rout at the Hall during her memorable stay. It had created a
fearful, if pleasurable, impression at the time, and people are
beginning now to wonder in this little village if Lady Forster will be a
worthy representative of her aunt. Or if perchance the aunt will again
take up the deal; for Lady Melland has, they say, come here with her.

However, for once ‘they say’ is wrong. Katherine Crosby had married Sir
William Forster two years after the termination of that remarkable
visit, and nothing had been seen of her since that, until now. She had,
however, in between shaken off Lady Melland.

She has brought an innumerable company in her train, thus justifying the
idea of Curraghcloyne that she would probably follow in her aunt’s
footsteps, and, as I have said, the village has waked to find itself no
longer deserted, but the centre of a very brilliant crowd.

Yesterday was the first of August, Saturday, and a most unendurable one
on the small platform of the railway-station. Possibly during its brief
existence so many basket-trunks have never been laid upon its modest
flags before. To-day is Sunday, and possibly also the parish church has
never had so large a congregation within its whitewashed walls. Even the
Methodists, quite a large portion of the Curraghcloyne people, have
deserted their chapel for the orthodox church. Even Miss Ricketty has
been heard to say with distinct regret that she ‘wished she was a
Protestant for once.’

The Hall pews, which number four, and for which Mr. Crosby, during all
his wanderings, has paid carefully, are all filled, and the three seats
behind them again, that have vacant sittings in them, are all filled
also with the servants of the people in the four front seats. Never was
there such a display in the small church of Curraghcloyne! And it was
acknowledged afterwards by everyone in the town that though the Rector
did not ‘stir a hair,’ the curate was decidedly ‘onaisy.’ The curate was
unnerved beyond a doubt. He grew fatter and stouter as the service went
on, and he does not know to this day how he got through his sermon. He
says now, that people oughtn’t to spring people on one without a word of
preparation.

Susan tried to keep her eyes off the Hall pews, but in spite of herself
her eyes wandered. Betty did not try to keep her eyes off at all, so
they wandered freely. She was able, half an hour later, to tell Susan
not only the number of guests Mr. Crosby had, but the exact colour of
each gown the women wore, and she told Susan privately that she thought,
if ever she were a rich woman, she would never let her servants wear red
ribbons in their bonnets in church.

Mr. Haldane rushes through his sermon at the rate of an American liner,
and presently the service is over, and all move, with the cultivated
leisurely steps that are meant to hide the desire to run, towards the
open door.

Some of the other Rectory people have gone through the side-door, and,
with Bonnie’s hand fast clasped in hers, Susan is following after them,
when a well-known voice calls to her:

‘Susan, my sister wants very much to know you. Will you let me introduce
you to her?’

Susan turns her face, now delicately pink, and she sees a small, dainty,
pretty creature holding out her hand to her with the prettiest smile in
the world.

Is this Mr. Crosby’s sister?

‘How d’ye do?’ says Lady Forster, in a very clear if low voice. ‘George
was chanting your praises all last night, so naturally I have been
longing to see you. George’s friends, as a rule, are frauds; but—’

She pauses, evidently amused at the girl’s open surprise, not so much at
her words as at her appearance.

‘I’m not a bit like George, am I?’ says she.

No, she is not. Crosby is a big man, if anything, and she is the tiniest
creature. Her features are tiny too, but exquisitely moulded. The
coquettish mouth, the nose ‘tip-tilted like a flower,’ the well-poised
dainty head, the hands, the feet—all are small, and her figure slender
as a fairy’s. She is wonderfully pretty in a brilliant fashion, and her
bright eyes are alight with intelligence. She is altogether the last
person in the world Susan would have imagined as Crosby’s sister. And
yet there is certainly a likeness between them—a strange likeness—but,
of course, his sister should have been large and massive, not a little
thing like this. Susan has always told herself that she should be
dreadfully afraid of his sister—but to be afraid of this sister!

Lady Forster, indeed, is one of those women who look as if they ought to
be called ‘Baby’ or ‘Birdie,’ but in reality she was named Katherine at
her birth, with a big and a stern K, not a C—which we all know is much
milder—and never did Susan hear her called anything less majestic by
anyone. Not even by her brother or her husband. And this was probably
because, beneath her charming butterfly air, there lay a good deal of
character and a strength of will hardly to be suspected in so slight a
creature.

‘No,’ says Susan shyly. She smiles, and involuntarily tightens her
fingers on those she is holding—Lady Forster’s fingers. ‘But—’ A still
greater shyness overcomes her here, and she grows quite silent. The
‘but,’ however, is eloquent.

‘You see, George! She thinks I am infinitely superior to you. How lovely
of her!’ She laughs at Susan and pats her hand. ‘You will come up and
lunch with us to-morrow, won’t you? It is George’s birthday. And
considering the slap you have given him just now, you can hardly refuse.
It will be a little sop to his pride, and that’s frightful! He thinks
himself a perfect joy! I’m told that in Darkest Africa the belles—’

Here Crosby gives her a surreptitious but vigorous nudge, and she breaks
off her highly-spiced and distinctly interesting, if slightly
unveracious, account of his doings in Uganda.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ asks she, whispering, of her brother, who
whispers back to her many admonitory things. She turns again to Susan:
‘We shall expect you to-morrow, then. It will be a charity to enliven
us, as we hardly know what to do with ourselves, being strangers in a
strange land.’

‘Thank you,’ says Susan faintly. How on earth can she ever summon up
courage enough to go and lunch up there with all these fashionable
people? It is she who will be the stranger in a strange land.

‘That is settled then,’ says Crosby quickly. Had he feared she would go
on to say something more—to say that she had an engagement? ‘I will call
for you at twelve.’

‘Oh no,’ says Susan. ‘I’—confusedly—‘I can walk up. It—it is too much
trouble.’

‘George doesn’t think so,’ says Lady Forster, with a faint grimace. ‘Is
this your brother?’

She bends in her quick way, and turns up Bonnie’s beautiful little face
and looks at it earnestly.

‘What a face!’ cries she. ‘Is everyone beautiful down here? I shall come
and live here, George—no use in your putting me off! I’m determined. It
is a promise, then’—to Susan, smiling vivaciously—‘that you will come
to-morrow, and another day. We must arrange another day—you will bring
me up this small Adonis,’ patting Bonnie’s cheek as he smiles at her
(children love all things pretty) ‘to see me?’

‘I shall be very glad,’ says Susan tremulously. Then Lady Forster trips
away to rejoin her friends, who are standing beside the different
carriages, and quarrelling gaily as to who shall go home with whom, and
for a second Crosby is alone with Susan.

‘You said it was a promise.’

‘Yes,’ says Susan, ‘but—I have not known any very—very—’

‘Smart folk,’ says Crosby, laughing. ‘Well, you’ll know them to-morrow,
and I expect you’ll be surprised how very little smart they are.’

‘But—’

‘There shan’t be a “but” in the world.’

‘It is only this’—miserably—‘that I shall be shy, and—’

‘Not a bit of it. And even if you are’—he looks at her—‘you may depend
on me. I’ll pull you through. But don’t be too shy, Susan. Extremes are
attractive things—fatally attractive sometimes.’ He pauses. ‘Well, so
much for the shyness, but what did your “and” mean?’

‘It meant,’ says Susan, with deep depression, ‘that they will all hate
me.’

‘I almost wish I could believe that.’ He laughs again as he says this,
and gives Bonnie’s ear a pinch, and follows his sister. Two minutes
later, as Susan rejoins her own people at the little gate that leads by
a short-cut to the Rectory, she sees him again, talking gaily, and
handing into one of the carriages a tall and very handsome girl, dressed
as Susan had never seen anyone dressed in all her life. It seems the
very perfection of dressing. She lingers a moment—a bare moment—but it
is long enough to see that he has seated himself beside the handsome
girl, and that he is still laughing—but this time with her—over some
reminiscence, as the carriage drives away.




                            CHAPTER XXXVIII.

                 ‘Anxiety is the poison of human life.’


‘I suppose I’ll have to go,’ says Susan, who is evidently terrified at
the idea, crumpling up a small note between her fingers—a most courteous
little note sent by Lady Forster this morning, Monday, the third of
August, to ask Miss Barry’s permission for Susan to lunch at the Park.
She—Lady Forster—had met her charming niece yesterday, and had induced
her to promise to come to them on this, her brother’s birthday. And she
hoped Miss Barry had not quite forgotten her, but would remember that
she was quite an old friend, and let her come and see her soon.

It is a pretty little note, and delights Miss Barry; yet Susan finds no
pleasure in it, and now sits glum and miserable.

‘Go!’ cries Betty. ‘I should think so. Oh, you lucky girl!’

‘Would you like to go, Betty, if it were your case?’—this wistfully. Oh
that it were Betty’s case!

‘Is there anything on earth that would keep me away?’ cries Betty
enthusiastically. ‘What fun you will have there! I know by Lady
Forster’s eyes that you are safe to have a good time. I
think’—gloomily—‘she might have asked me too.’

‘I wish she had,’ says Susan fervently. ‘If—I had one of you with me, I
should not feel half so nervous.’

‘What makes you nervous?’ asks Carew.

‘Well, they are all strangers, for one thing—and besides’—rather
shamefacedly—‘they will be very big people, of course, and at luncheon
there will be entrées, and dishes, and things I have never even heard
of, and’—almost tearfully now—‘I shan’t know what to do.’

‘There are only two things to be remembered really,’ says Mr. Fitzgerald
slowly but forcibly. ‘One is not to pick your teeth with your fork, and
the other is even more important: for goodness’ sake, Susan, whatever
you do, don’t eat your peas with your knife. All that sort of thing has
gone out—has been unfashionable for quite a year or more.’

‘Oh, it’s all very well for you to make fun of it,’ says Susan
resentfully. ‘You haven’t to go there.’

‘And is that what you call “well for me”? I wish I was going there, if
only to look after your manners, which evidently, by your own account of
them, leave a great deal to be desired. By-the-by, there is one thing
more I should like to impress upon you before you start: never, Susan—no
matter how sorely tempted—put your feet on the table-cloth. It is quite
a solecism nowadays, and—’

‘If you won’t go away, I shall,’ says Susan, rising with extreme
dignity. But he leans forward, and catching the tail of her gown just as
she is gaining her feet, brings her with a jerk to her sitting position
again. After which they all laugh irrepressibly, and the _émeute_ is at
an end.

‘What a lot of servants they had in church!’ says Betty, alluding to the
all-absorbing guests at the Park. ‘I suppose that tall woman was Lady
Forster’s maid?’ ‘Yes, and the little woman was Mrs. Prior’s. By the
way, that squares matters. Mrs. Prior has grown several yards since last
year.’

‘It seemed to me that each maid sat behind her own mistress.’

‘So as to keep her eye on her. And very necessary too, no doubt.’

‘Did you see that pale young man, ever so thin and wretched-looking, but
so conceited? His hair was nearly down to his waist, and he hadn’t any
chin to speak of.’

‘Oh, that!’ cries Betty eagerly. ‘That’s the poet. Yes, he is, Susan.
He’s a real poet. Miss Ricketty told me about him yesterday. He has
written sonnets and whole volumes of things, and is quite a poet. Miss
Ricketty says that’s why his hair grows like that.’

‘Samson must have been the laureate of his time,’ says Dominick
thoughtfully.

‘So that was the poet,’ says Susan, who had heard of his coming from
Crosby. ‘Well, he certainly looked queer enough for anything. I
wonder’—nervously—‘who was the tall girl sitting next to Mr. Crosby?’

This was the tall girl with whom Crosby had driven away.

‘I don’t know,’ says Betty. ‘Wasn’t she pretty? And wasn’t she
beautifully dressed? Oh, Susan, didn’t you want to see yourself in a
gown like that?’

‘No,’ says Susan shortly.

‘Well, I did. I wanted to know how I’d look.’

‘As if you didn’t know,’ says Dominick encouragingly. ‘Like Venus
herself!’

‘I never heard she had her frocks from Paris,’ says Betty, hunching up
an unkind little shoulder against him.

‘You’ve heard so little, you see,’ says Dom, with gentle protest. ‘Now,
as a fact, Venus had her frocks made by—’

‘Well?’ with a threatening air.

‘Miss Fogerty,’ naming Betty’s own dressmaker.

‘Pshaw!’ says that slim damsel contemptuously. ‘However, Susan, that
girl was pretty, any way. I wonder who she was? Had she a maid, I
wonder? There was a dark-looking woman amongst the servants farther on,
just behind the poet. Perhaps it was hers.’

‘Oh no,’ says Dom gravely, ‘that was his.’

‘His?’

‘The poet’s. Yes.’

‘Nonsense!’ says Betty. ‘What would he want a maid for?’

‘To comb his locks and copy his sonnets,’ says Dom, without blinking.

‘Nonsense! Men don’t have maids,’ says Betty, who seems to know all
about it.

‘Oh, here is someone from the Park,’ cries Jacky suddenly.

‘Is it Mr. Crosby or Lady Forster?’ asks Susan anxiously.

‘Both of ’em,’ says Jacky, in his own sweet laconic style.

The smart little cart, with its wonderful pair of ponies, rattled up to
the door, and Miss Barry, who had known that someone would come to fetch
Susan, and had therefore put on her best bib and tucker, emerged from
the flower-crowned porch of the Rectory to receive Lady Forster, her old
face wreathed in smiles. It was sweet to her to see Susan accepted and
admired by the Park people. ‘Our own sort of people’ proudly thought the
poor old maid, who had struggled with much poverty all her life.

And Lady Forster was quite charming to her, insisting on going to see
the old garden again, ‘which she quite remembered.’ Lady Forster had
never stuck at a tarradiddle or two, and was, after seeing it, genuinely
enthusiastic over its old-fashioned charms. Might she bring her friends
to see it? They had never, never seen anything so lovely! It would be a
charity to show them something human, these benighted town-people. To
hear her, one would imagine she despised the town herself, whereas, as a
fact, she could never live for six months out of it.

Miss Barry was elated—so elated, indeed, that she took a dreadful step.
She invited Lady Forster and all her friends to tea the next Friday,
without a thought as to the consequences—until afterwards! Lady Forster
accepted the invitation with effusion. There was no getting out of it,
Miss Barry felt during that dreadful ‘afterwards.’

Meantime Susan had found herself, comparatively speaking, alone with
Crosby, when she came downstairs after putting on her best gown and hat.
She had brought something with her besides the best gown and hat; a
little silken bag, made out of a bit of lovely old brocade she had
begged from Miss Barry a month ago. She had cut it out, and stitched it,
and filled it with lavender-seeds, and worked on it at odd moments when
no one but Betty could see her (she was afraid of the boys’ jokes) the
words: ‘Mr. Crosby, from Susan.’

At first she had thought of buying something for him—something at Miss
Ricketty’s, who really had, at times, quite wonderful things down from
Dublin, but her soul revolted from that. What could she buy him that he
would care for? And besides, to buy a thing for a person one liked, and
one who had been so good to Bonnie! No; she could not. It seemed cold,
unkind. So she decided on the little bag that was to lie in his drawer
and perfume his handkerchiefs, and tell him sometimes of her—yes, her
love for him! Because she did love him, if only for his goodness to the
children, and to her Bonnie first of all.

She had been afraid to run the gauntlet of the boys’ criticisms, but
Betty she clung to. A confidante one must have sometimes, or die.

‘You know he told me, Betty, when his birthday would be.’

‘Yes. So clever of him!’ said Betty, who, if she were at the point of
death, could not have refrained from a joke.

‘Well, he has been good to the chicks, hasn’t he? To darling Bonnie
especially.’

‘Oh, he has—he has indeed,’ Betty declared remorsefully, melting at the
thought of the little crippled brother who is so inexpressibly dear to
them all.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Betty had hurried up with Susan to get her into her best things, and
then had given her sound advice.

‘Give it to him now, Susan. Lady Forster’—glancing out of the window—‘is
talking to Aunt Jemima. Hurry down and give it to him at once. It is the
sweetest bag. No one’—giggling—‘can say less than that for it. It’s
quite crammed with lavender.’

‘Yes, I will,’ says Susan valiantly.

She doesn’t, however. She hesitates, and is, as usual, lost. She tries
and tries to take that little bag out of her pocket and give it to him,
but her courage fails her. And presently Lady Forster carries her off,
and now the Park is reached, and she finds herself in the lovely, sunny
drawing-room, and after a while in the dining-room, and still that
little fragrant bag lies perdu.

Susan glances shyly round her. Sir William Forster, a tall young man
with a kindly eye, takes her fancy at once, and there is a big girl over
there and a big woman here (they must be mother and daughter), who make
her wonder a great deal about their strange garments. Mrs. Prior is
here, too, and Miss Prior—Mr. Wyndham’s people. And at the opposite side
of the table Mr. Wyndham himself. Beside him sits the poet, a lachrymose
young man with long hair and a crooked eye, and the name of Jones. No
wonder he looks depressed!

He has got his best eye fixed immovably on Susan, who seems to appeal
even to his high ideal of beauty—and, indeed, throughout the day she
suffers a good deal, off and on, from his unspoken, but quite open,
adoration of her. Poets never admire: they adore. And for a simple
country maiden this style is somewhat embarrassing. On Mr. Crosby’s
right hand is sitting the tall and beautiful girl, with the pale roses
near her throat, with whom he had driven home from church on Sunday. It
seems all quite clear to Susan. Yes, this is the girl he is going to
marry. But a girl so beautiful as that could make anyone happy. She had
heard someone call her Lady Muriel. Rank and beauty and sweetness—all
are for him. And surely he deserves them all; and that is why she is at
his right hand.




                             CHAPTER XXXIX.

                     ‘Thou didst delight mine ear,
                       Ah! little praise; thy voice
                       Makes other hearts rejoice,
                     Makes all ears glad that hear,
                       And shout my joy. But yet,
                       O song, do not forget.’


Susan is seated beside a very fashionably-dressed girl with an extremely
good-humoured face, and Captain Lennox—a man of about thirty or
thereabouts—who seems to find pleasure in an every two minutes’
contemplation of her young and charming face. In this, the good-humoured
looking girl—Miss Forbes—is not a whit behind Captain Lennox, she too
seeming to be delighted with Susan. And, indeed, everyone seems to have
fallen in love with pretty Susan, for presently the stately young beauty
sitting next to Crosby, who has come in a little late for luncheon,
whispers something to him, and then looks smilingly at Susan. Crosby, in
answer to her words, says quietly:

‘Susan—Lady Muriel Kennedy is very anxious to know you. Miss Barry, Lady
Muriel.’

‘I went past your charming old home yesterday,’ says Lady Muriel, in
tones barely above a whisper, but which seem to carry a long distance.
‘I quite wanted to go in, but I was afraid.’

‘Well, you’ll be able to satiate your curiosity on Friday,’ says Lady
Forster, ‘as we have been asked to tea on that day at the Rectory.’

‘How delightful!’ says Lady Muriel.

‘Your house is quite close to the Cottage, is it not, Miss Barry?’ asks
Mrs. Prior. ‘My nephew’s place, you know’—nodding at Wyndham, who
changes colour perceptibly. Good heavens! what is going to happen next?

‘Yes,’ says Susan; ‘only the road divides us.’

‘Then you can tell us about Mr. Wyndham’s new tenant. You’—smiling
archly—‘are quite an old friend of my nephew’s, eh?’ It is quite safe to
make a jest of the friendship with this insignificant little country
girl, as, of course, Paul, or any other man of consequence, would not
waste a thought over her.

‘Almost, indeed,’ says Susan. ‘But as to the tenant—’

Crosby drops a spoon, and Susan, a little startled, turns her head. It
is not on him, however, her eyes rest, but on Wyndham, who is looking at
her with a strange expression. Is it imploring, despairing, or what? It
checks her, at all events.

‘I know very little,’ she murmurs faintly.

‘Been flirting with him,’ thinks Mrs. Prior promptly. ‘All country girls
are so vulgar. Any new man.... And I dare say this tenant of Paul’s is
by no means a nice man either.’

There might have been a slight awkwardness here, but providentially Lady
Forster, who is never silent for two minutes together, breaks into the
gap.

‘What’s this, George?’ asks she, peering into a dish before her. ‘Are
you prepared to guarantee it? It’s your cook, you know, not mine. Looks
dangerous, and therefore tempting; and any way, one can only die once.
Oh! is that you?’—to a late man who has strolled in. ‘Been losing
yourself as usual? Come over here and sit beside me, you innocent
lamb’—patting the empty chair near her—‘and I’ll look after you. I’ll
give you one of these’—pointing to the dish—‘I hate to die alone. What
on earth are they?’—glancing at the little brown curled-up things that
seem filled with burnt crumbs. ‘Will they go off, George? Bombs, eh?’

Here the butler murmurs something to her in a discreet tone.

‘Oh, mushrooms! Good gracious, then why don’t they try to look like
them!’

‘Have you any brothers?’ asks Miss Forbes, turning to Susan.

‘Don’t answer,’ says Captain Lennox. ‘She’s always asking after one’s
brothers. Tell me, instead, how many sisters you have. Much more
interesting. I love people’s sisters.’

‘I’m George’s sister,’ says Lady Forster, glancing at him thoughtfully.

‘And my wife!’ says Sir William, with such an over-assumption of marital
authority that they all laugh, and his wife throws a pellet of bread at
him.

Susan grows thoughtful, filled with a slight amazement. She had been
nervous, almost distressed, at the idea of having to lunch at the Park.
Its habitués, she told herself, would be very grand folk, and clever,
and learned, and would talk very far above her little countrified head.
And now how is it? Why, after all, they are more like Dom in his
queerest moods than anything else.

‘What shall we do after luncheon?’ says Lady Forster. ‘I am willing to
chaperon anybody.’ She glances at Lady Muriel, and Susan intercepts the
glance.

Is it Lady Muriel and Mr. Crosby she is thinking of chaperoning?

‘Oh, I like your idea of supervision,’ says the Guardsman who has come
in late, and who is called Lord Jack by everybody, only because, as
Susan discovers afterwards, his name is Jack Lord. This, naturally, is
inevitable. ‘You once undertook to chaperon me, and let me in for about
the most _risqué_ situation of my life. I came out of it barely alive,
and very nearly maimed.’

‘Yes—I don’t think Katherine would make a very excellent chaperon,’ says
Mrs. Prior, who likes Crosby, but cordially detests his sister.

‘What a slander!’ cries Lady Forster; ‘easy to see you don’t understand
me! I’m a splendid chaperon—a born one. Always half a mile ahead—or else
in the rear. One should always be ahead if possible, as it gives the
poor creatures a chance of getting up to you in an honourable way, if
the enemy should come in sight. Whereas the turning and running back
business always looks so bad. No, better be in front of them. I’m going
to write a little treatise on the art of chaperoning for all
right-minded married women—and I hope you will accept a copy, dear Mrs.
Prior.’

‘I don’t expect I shall get one,’ says Mrs. Prior, with a distinct
sneer.

‘Oh, you shall indeed, “honest Injun,”’ says Lady Forster. ‘You’ll be
delighted with it.’

‘I feel sure of that,’ says Captain Lennox in an aside to Miss Forbes.

‘But really what shall we do this afternoon, George?’ asks his sister;
‘ride—drive?’ She has left her seat, and has perched herself on the arm
of the handsome old chair in which her husband is sitting at the foot of
the table.

‘What about the Abbey, Bill?’ asks Crosby, addressing his
brother-in-law.

‘No use in asking “Billee Barlow” anything,’ says that young man’s wife.
‘He hasn’t an idea on earth. Have you, Billee? And the Abbey is miles
off, and— Do you ride, Susan? I am going to call you Susan, if I may.’

She pauses just long enough to give Susan time to smile a pleased, if
shy, assent.

‘Susan is so pretty,’ says Captain Lennox absently.

‘Eh?’ says Crosby quickly, and with a suspicion of a frown.

‘Very, very pretty,’ repeats Lennox fervently.

Crosby glances at Susan. This absurd joke, this jest on her name—with
anyone else here it would be a jest only, but Susan—would she.... Her
colour is faintly, very faintly accentuated, and she is looking straight
at Lennox.

‘My name?’ says she, taking up the meaning he had not meant. ‘Do you
really think it pretty? The boys and Betty despise it.’

Her gentle dignity goes home to all. Crosby is indignant with Lennox,
and, indeed, so is Sir William. Sir William’s wife, however, I regret to
say, is convulsed with laughter.

‘It is certainly not a name to be despised,’ says Lennox courteously,
who is now a little ashamed of himself.

‘I like to be called by my Christian name,’ says a singularly
young-looking married woman. ‘Puts people out so. They never know
whether you are married or not for the first half-hour, at all events.’

They are now in a body strolling into the drawing-rooms, and Miss Forbes
has gone back to her cross-examination of Susan.

‘Four brothers? So many? And all grown up?’

‘Oh no! Carew is the eldest, and he is only seventeen. But we have a
cousin living with us, and he is twenty.’

‘What lovely ages!’ cries Lady Forster. ‘George, why didn’t you tell me
about Susan’s boys? You know I adore boys. Susan, you must bring them up
to-morrow. Do you hear?’

‘They will be so glad,’ says Susan; ‘do you know’—blushing shyly and
divinely—‘they were quite envious of me because I was coming here
to-day.’

‘Oh! why didn’t you bring them with you? Seventeen and twenty—the nicest
ages in the world!’

‘Certainly not the nicest,’ says Lennox, who is a born tease. ‘You, Miss
Barry’—looking at Susan—‘are thirteen, aren’t you?’

‘Oh no; much, much more than that!’ says Susan, laughing. Strangely
enough, she has begun to feel quite a liking for her tormentor, divining
with the wisdom of youth that his saucy sallies are filled with mischief
only, and no venom. ‘I was eighteen last May.’

‘How very candid!’ says Miss Prior, whose own age is growing uncertain,
and who is feeling a little bitter over the attention paid to Susan. If
Paul should prove inconstant, there is always the master of the Park to
fall back upon, or so she has fondly hoped till now. But there is no
denying the fact that Crosby has been very anxious all this afternoon
about Susan’s happiness.

‘Nonsense!’ says Lennox. ‘Tell that to—well, to somebody else.’

‘But that’s what I am really,’ says Susan, who is secretly disgusted at
being thought thirteen. ‘I was born in—’

‘Don’t tell that,’ says Lady Forster, putting up her finger. ‘It will be
fatal twenty years hence.’

‘Still, I’m not thirteen,’ says Susan, with gentle protest. ‘And I think
anyone could see that I’m not.’

‘I could, certainly,’ says Crosby, coming to the rescue. ‘In my opinion,
anyone that looked at you would know at once that you were forty.’

At this they laugh, and Susan casts her so very unusual ire behind her.

‘You will bring up the boys to-morrow, then?’ says Lady Forster, who is
always chattering. ‘And we’ll go for a long drive, and have a gipsy tea.
That will be better than nothing. And as we go Susan shall show us the
bits. No use in depending on George for that. He knows nothing of the
scenery round here, or any other scenery for the matter of that, except
African interiors, kraals, and nasty naked nigger women, and that. So
immodest of him! He’ll come to grief some day. We can go somewhere for a
gipsy tea to-morrow, can’t we, George? I’m dying to light a fire.’

‘What, another!’ says Lord Jack, regarding her with a would-be
woe-begone air. He lays his hand lightly on his heart.

‘It’s going to rain, I think,’ says Sir William presently; he is
standing in one of the windows.

‘“Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!”’ exclaims Miss Forbes. ‘What a thing
to say!’

‘It always rains in Ireland, doesn’t it?’ asks Lady Muriel, in her soft,
low voice.

‘Oh no—no indeed!’ cries Susan eagerly. ‘Does it, Mr. Crosby?’

‘Certainly not. Lady Muriel must prolong her stay here’—smiling at the
beautiful girl leaning in a picturesque attitude against the
window-shutter—‘and take back with her a more kindly view of our
climate.’

Yes; it is quite settled, thinks Susan. He loves her, and she—of course
she loves him. And he wants her to prolong her stay, most naturally. And
most naturally, too, he would like her to take back to England a kindly
impression of her future home, of her future climate. Oh, how pretty,
how lovely she is!

Heavily, heavily beat the raindrops on the window-pane.

‘Never mind,’ says Lady Forster, whom nothing daunts; ‘we’ll have a
dance. You love dancing, Susan, don’t you? Come along, then. Take your
partners all, and let’s waltz into the music-room.’

In a second Susan finds Captain Lennox’s arm round her waist, and
through the halls and the library they dance right into the music-room
beyond. After her comes Crosby with Lady Muriel, and after them Lady
Forster with—no, not Lord Jack, after all, but Sir William.

And now the big woman whom Susan had noticed at luncheon has seated
herself at the piano, and the poet has caught up a fiddle, and if the
big woman can do nothing else on earth, she can at least play dance
music to perfection, and the poet, ‘poor little fellow,’ as Susan calls
him to herself—if he could only have heard her!—does not make too many
false notes on the fiddle, so that she dances very gaily, feeling as if
her feet are treading on air, and answering Captain Lennox’s whispered
honeyed words with soft smiles and hurried breathing. Oh, how lovely it
all is! And, oh, how happy Lady Muriel is going to be!

The waltz has come to an end, and now Crosby is standing before her. And
now his arm is round her waist, and he—oh yes, there is no doubt of
it—he dances even better than Captain Lennox, and it is good of him,
too, to spare so much time from the lovely Lady Muriel.

‘Susan,’ says Crosby, as they pause at the end of the room, ‘I consider
your conduct distinctly immoral! The way you have been going on—’

‘Who—I?’

‘Yes, you! Don’t attempt to deny it. Your open flirtation with Lennox—’

‘What?’ Susan lifts her dewy eyes to his. Suddenly she breaks into the
merriest laughter. ‘You’re too funny for anything,’ says she.

‘Not for another dance, I hope.’ He laughs too, and so gaily. And again
his arm is round her, and away they go once more, dancing to the big
lady’s happiest strains. There is a conservatory off the music-room, and
into this he leads her presently.

‘You have no flowers,’ says he. ‘I must give you some. These roses will
suit you.’

‘They suit Lady Muriel too,’ says Susan, remembering.

‘Yes? Oh yes! I gave them to her this morning. Well, it shan’t be roses,
then. These pink begonias?’

‘I should like those better,’ says Susan; she takes them tranquilly. It
is, of course, quite right that he should wish to give her flowers
different from those he has just given his _fiancée_. She had reminded
him just in time.

Crosby is thankful for her suggestion, but for very different reasons.
He had forgotten about Lady Muriel’s roses, and to give her the same—

‘The rain is clearing away,’ says he, looking out of the window.
‘Still’—as if to himself—‘I think we had better take an umbrella.’

‘An umbrella?’

‘On our way home.’

‘Mr. Crosby’—eagerly—‘you need not take me home. You must not. There is
really no necessity. Oh!’—anxiously, thinking of Lady Muriel and his
desire to be with her—‘I hope you won’t come.’

‘That is not very civil, Susan, is it?’ says he, smiling. He pauses and
looks suddenly at her, a new expression growing in his eyes. ‘Of course,
if you have arranged to go home with anyone else—’

‘No—no indeed. But to take you away from your guests—’

‘My guests will live without me for half an hour, I have no doubt.’ His
tone is quite its old joyous self again. ‘And I promised your aunt to
see that you got safely back to her, and, as the children say, “a
promise is a promise.” Here are your begonias. Shall I fasten them in
for you?’

He arranges them under her pretty chin, she holding up her head to let
him do it, and then they go back to the music-room, where Sir William
catches him and carries him off for something or other. Susan, sinking
into a chair, finds Josephine Prior almost immediately beside her.

‘Those pretty begonias!’ says she. ‘How they suit you, though hardly
your frock! Of course’—with elephantine archness—‘I need not ask who
gave them to you. Mr. Crosby is always showering little favours on his
women friends. Those roses to Lady Muriel’—Susan holds her breath a
moment—‘and these begonias to you, and opera-tickets to others, and last
night such a delicious box of _marron glaces_ to me.’ She forgets to add
that he gave a similar box to each of his lady guests, having run up to
Dublin in the morning and brought them back with him from Mitchell’s.

‘I declare the sun is coming out at last,’ says Lady Forster. ‘It is
going to be a glorious evening. What a swindle! We have been quite done
out of our day. I do call that maddening. Never mind, we must make up
for it to-night. We will have—what shall we have, Dolly?’—to Miss
Forbes. ‘A pillow scuffle? Yes; that will be the very thing. And, Susan,
you shall stay and sleep and help us. And we’ll get the boys up. They
would be splendid at it, and give even us points, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘I have promised Miss Barry,’ says Crosby, in a distinct tone, ‘to take
Susan home this evening at six, and I’m afraid it is rather after that
now. Will you go and put on your hat, Susan?’


                            END OF VOL. II.


                 BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


 1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
      spelling.
 2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.