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Title: The professor's experiment: A novel, Vol. 1 (of 3)

Author: Duchess

Release date: December 7, 2022 [eBook #69494]
                Most recently updated: October 19, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Chatto & Windus

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


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PROFESSOR'S EXPERIMENT: A NOVEL, VOL. 1 (OF 3) ***

                       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. I.


                                =London=
                      CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
                                  1895




                                  THE

                         PROFESSOR’S EXPERIMENT




                               CHAPTER I.

         ‘Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried.’


The lamp was beginning to burn low; so was the fire. But neither of the
two people in the room seemed to notice anything. The Professor had got
upon his discovery again, and once there, no man living could check him.
He had flung his arms across the table towards his companion, and the
hands, with the palms turned upwards, marked every word as he uttered
it, thumping the knuckles on the table here, shaking some imaginary
disbeliever there—and never for a moment quiet—such old, lean,
shrivelled, capable hands!

He was talking eagerly, as though the words flowed to him faster than he
could utter them. This invention of his—this supreme discovery—would
make a revolution in the world of science.

The young man looking back at him from the other side of the table
listened intently. He was a tall man of about eight-and-twenty, and if
not exactly handsome, very close to it. His eyes were dark, and somewhat
sombre, and his mouth was thin-lipped, but kind, and suggestive of a
nature that was just, beyond everything, if hardly sympathetic. It was a
beautiful mouth, at all events, and as he was clean-shaven, one could
see it as it was, without veiling of any kind. Perhaps the one
profession of all others that most fully declares itself in the face of
its sons is that of the law. A man who has been five years a barrister
is seldom mistaken for anything else. Paul Wyndham was a barrister, and
a rising one—a man who loved his profession for its own sake, and strove
and fought to make a name in it, though no such struggle was needful for
his existence, as from his cradle his lines had fallen to him in
pleasant places. He was master of a good fortune, and heir to a title
and ten thousand a year whenever it should please Providence to take his
uncle, old Lord Shangarry, to an even more comfortable home than that
which he enjoyed at present.

The Professor had been his tutor years ago, and the affection that
existed between them in those far-off years had survived the changes of
time and circumstance. The Professor loved him—and him only on all this
wide earth. Wyndham had never known a father; the Professor came as near
as any parent could, and in this new wild theory of the old man’s he
placed implicit faith. It sounded wild, no doubt—it was wild—but there
was not in all Ireland a cleverer man than the Professor, and who was to
say but it might have some grand new meaning in it?

‘You are sure of it?’ he said, looking at the Professor with anxious but
admiring eyes.

‘Sure! I have gone into it, I have studied it for twenty years, I tell
you. What, man, d’ye think I’d speak of it even to you, if I weren’t
sure? I tell ye—I tell ye’—he grew agitated and intensely Irish here—‘it
will shake the world!’

The phrase seemed to please him; he drew his arms off the table and lay
back in his chair as if revelling in it—as if chewing the sweet cud of
it in fancy. He saw in his mind a day when in that old college of his
over there, only a few streets away—in Trinity College—he should rise,
and be greeted by his old chums and his new pupils, and the whole world
of Dublin, with cheers and acclamations. Nay! it would be more than
that—there would be London, and Vienna, and Berlin. He put Berlin last
because, perhaps, he longed most of all for its applause; but in these
dreamings he came back always to old Trinity, and found the greatest
sweetness in the laurels to be gained there.

‘There can’t be a mistake,’ he went on, more now as if reasoning with
himself than with his visitor, who was watching him, and was growing a
little uneasy at the pallor that was showing itself round his nose and
mouth—a pallor he had noticed very often of late when the old man was
unduly excited or interested. ‘I have gone through it again and again.
There is nothing new, of course, under the sun, and there can be little
doubt but that it is an anæsthetic known to the Indians of Southern
America years ago, and the Peruvians. There are records, but nothing
sufficient to betray the secret. It was by the merest accident, as I
have told you, that I stumbled on it. I have made many experiments. I
have gone cautiously step by step, until now all is sure. So much for
one hour. So much for six, so much for twenty-four, so much’—his voice
rose almost to a scream, and he thumped his hand violently on the
table—‘for seven days—for seven months!’

His voice broke off, and he sank back in his chair. The young man went
quickly to a cupboard and poured out a glass of some white cordial.

‘Thank you—thank you,’ said the Professor, swallowing the nauseous
mixture hurriedly, as though regretting the waste of time it took to
drink it.

‘Why talk any more to-night?’ said the young man anxiously; ‘I am going
abroad in a few days, but I can come again to see you to-morrow. It is
late.’ He glanced at the clock, which pointed to ten minutes past
eleven. The movement he made in pointing pushed aside his overcoat and
showed that he was in evening dress. He had evidently been dining out,
and had dropped in to see the Professor—an old trick of his—on his way
home.

‘I must talk while I can,’ said the Professor, smiling. The cordial,
whatever it was, had revived him, and he sat up and looked again at his
companion with eyes that were brilliant. ‘As for this pain here,’
touching his side, ‘it is nothing—nothing. What I want to say, Paul, is
this’—he bent towards Wyndham, and his lips quivered again with
excitement: ‘If I could send a human creature to sleep for seven months,
then why not for seven years—for ever?’

Wyndham looked at him incredulously.

‘But the last time——’

‘The last time you were here, I had not quite perfected my discovery.
But since then some of my experiments have led me to think—to be
absolutely certain—that life can be sustained, with all the appearance
of death upon the subject, for a full week at all events.’

‘And when consciousness returns?’

‘The subject treated wakes to life again in exactly the same condition
as when he or she fell asleep—without loss of brain or body power.’

‘Seven days! A long time!’ The young man smiled. ‘You bring back old
thoughts and dreams. Are you a second Friar Laurence? Even he, though he
could make the fair Juliet sleep till all believed her dead, could not
prolong that unfortunate deception beyond a certain limit.

            ‘“And in this borrowed likeness of shrunk death
              Thou shalt continue two-and-forty hours.”

‘Less than two days—and yet, thou conjurer’—he slapped the Professor’s
arm gaily—‘you would talk of keeping one in death’s bonds for years!’

‘Ay, years!’ The Professor looked back at him, and his eyes shone. Old
age seemed to slip from him, and for the moment a transient youth was
his again. ‘This is but a beginning—a mere start; but if it succeeds—if
life can be sustained by means of this drug alone for seven days, why
not for months and years?’

‘You forget one thing,’ said the young man. ‘Who would care for it? Why
should one care to lie asleep for years?’

‘Many!’ said the Professor slowly.

He ceased, and a strange gloom shadowed his face. His thoughts had
evidently gone backward into a long-dead past—a past that still lived.
‘Have you no imagination?’ he said at last reproachfully. ‘Think,
boy—think! When affliction falls on one, when a grievous sorrow tears
the heart, who would not wish for an oblivion that would be longer than
a sleeping-draught could give, and less pernicious than suicide?’

‘The same refusal in both cases to meet and face one’s doom,’ said the
young man. ‘You would create a new generation of cowards.’

‘Pshaw! there will be cowards without me,’ said the Professor. ‘But
here, again, take another case. A man, we will say, has had his leg cut
off—well, let him sleep until the leg is well, and he will escape all
the twinges, the agonizing pains of the recovery. This is but one
instance; all surgical cases could be treated so, and so much pain saved
in this most painful world.’

‘Ah, I confess a charm lies there!’ said Wyndham.

‘It does. And yet it is to the other thought I lean—to the dread of
memory where grief and shame lie.’ The Professor’s gaunt face lost again
its short return of youth, and grew grim, and aged, and white. ‘See,’ he
leant towards Wyndham, and pressed him into a chair beside the dying
fire, ‘to you—to you alone I have revealed this matter: not so much
because you have been my pupil, as that you have a hold on me. You think
me dry, and hard, and old. All that is true. But’—his voice grew if
possible harsher than ever—‘I have an affection for you.’

It seemed almost ludicrous to think of the Professor as having an
affection for anything beyond his science and his discovery, with his
bald head, and his bleared eyes, and his cold, forbidding face. The
young man gazed at him with pardonable astonishment. That the Professor
liked him, trusted him, was quite easy to understand—but the word
‘affection’!

‘It surprises you,’ said the old man slowly, perhaps a little sadly.
‘Yet there was a time——’ He moved and poked the fire into a sullen
blaze. ‘I married,’ he said presently. ‘And she—well, I loved her, I
think. It seems hard to remember now, it is so long ago, but I believe I
had a heart then, and it was hers. She died.’ He poked the fire again,
and most of it fell into the grate—it was all cinders by this time, and
the younger man shivered. ‘It was well. Looking back upon it now,’ said
the Professor coldly, ‘I am glad she died. She would have interfered
with my studies. Her death left me free; but for that freedom, I should
never have found out this.’ He tapped some papers lying loosely on the
table—three or four pages, no more, with only a line or two upon
them—vague suggestions of the great discovery that was to shake the
world, so vague as to be useless to anyone but himself.

‘You had no children, then?’ asked Wyndham, who had never even heard
that he was married until now.

‘One.’ The Professor paused, and the silence grew almost insupportable.
‘He, too, is dead. And that, too, is well. He was of no use. He only
burdened the world.’

‘But——’

‘Not a question——’ The old man silenced him. ‘I cast him off.’ There was
something terrible in the indifference with which he said this. ‘He was
a fool—a criminal one. I heard later that he had married—no doubt as
great a fool as himself. I hope so. Set a thief to catch a thief, you
know.’

He laughed bitterly—the cruel, mirthless laugh of the embittered old.
‘For the rest, I know nothing,’ he said.

‘You made no inquiries?’

‘None. Why should I?’

‘He was your son.’

‘Well, does that make a black thing white? No—no! My son—my child is
here!’ He touched the loose papers with a loving hand.

Wyndham did not pursue the subject further, and as if to show that it
was ended, he stooped and threw some coals upon the fire that now seemed
to be at its last gasp. A tiny smoke flew up between the fresh lumps,
and after that came a little uncertain blaze. The fire had caught the
coals.

The Professor had gone back to his heart’s desire.

‘To see the blossom of my labour bear fruit—that is my sole, my last
demand from life. I have so short a time to live that I would hasten the
fulfilment of my hopes.’

‘You mean——’

‘That I want to see the drug used on a human being. I have approached
the matter with some of the authorities at Kilmainham, with a view to
getting a condemned criminal to experiment upon; but up to this I have
been refused, and in such a presumptuous manner as leads me to fear I
shall never receive a better answer. Surely a man respited for seven
days, as has been the case occasionally, might as well risk those seven
days in the cause of science.’

Wyndham shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have never met that man,’ said he.
But the Professor did not hear him.

‘The most humane people in the world,’ said he, ‘refuse help to the man
who has devoted twenty years of his life to the cause of humanity. Such
an anæsthetic as mine would work a revolution in the world of medicine.
As I have told you, a man might not only be unconscious whilst a limb
was being lopped off, but might remain so until the wound was healed,
and then, made free of pain and perfectly well, be able to take his part
in the world again.’

‘It sounds like a fairy-tale,’ said Wyndham, smiling. ‘You have, I
suppose, made many experiments?’

‘On animals, yes—and of late without a single failure; but on a human
body, no. As yet no opportunity has been afforded me. Either jealousy or
fear has stopped my march, which I feel would be a triumphal one were
the road made clear. I tell you I have addressed many leading men of
science on the subject. I have asked them to be present. I would have
everything above board, as you who know me can testify. I would have all
men look on and bear witness to the splendour of my discovery.’ Here
again the Professor’s strange deep eyes grew brilliant, once again that
queer flash of a youth long ago departed was his. ‘I would have it shown
to all the world in a blaze of light. But no man will take heed or
listen. They laugh. They scoff. They will not countenance the chance of
my killing someone; as if’—violently—‘the loss of one poor human life
was to be counted, when the relief of millions is in the balance.’

He sank back as if exhausted, and then went on, his tone hard, yet
excited:

‘Now it has come to this. If the chance were given me of trying my
discovery on man, woman, or child, I should take it, without the
sanction of the authorities, and with it that other chance of being
hanged afterwards if the experiment failed.’

‘You feel so sure as that?’ questioned Wyndham. The old man’s enthusiasm
had caught him. He too was looking eager and excited.

‘Sure!’ The Professor rose, gaunt, haggard, and with eyes that flashed
fire beneath the pent brows that overhung them. ‘I would stake my
soul—nay, more, my reputation—on the success of my discovery. Oh for a
chance to prove it!’

At this moment there was a low knock at the door.




                              CHAPTER II.

             ‘Of all things tired thy lips look weariest.’
                    *       *       *       *       *
             ‘What shall I do to be for ever known?’


The handle was turned, and the door opened with a considerable amount of
caution (the Professor did not permit interruptions). It was evidently,
however, the caution of one who was suppressing badly a wild desire to
make a rush into the room, and presently a man’s head appeared round the
corner of the door, and after it his body. He came a yard or two beyond
the threshold, and then stood still. His reddish hair was standing out a
little, and his small twinkling Irish eyes were blinking nervously. He
looked eagerly first at the younger man, who was his master, and then at
the Professor, and then back again at Wyndham.

‘Well, Denis?’ said the latter, a little impatiently.

‘If ye plaze, sir, there’s an unfortunate young faymale on the steps
below.’

The Professor frowned. As if such an ordinary occurrence as that should
be allowed to interfere with a discussion on the great discovery!
Wyndham spoke.

‘If she is noisy or troublesome, you had better call a policeman,’ he
said indifferently.

‘Noisy! Divil a sound out of her,’ said Denis. ‘She looks for all the
world, yer honour, as if there wasn’t a spark o’ life left in her.
Sthretched in the hall she is, an’ the colour o’ death.’

‘In the hall?’ said Wyndham quickly. ‘I thought you said she was on the
steps.’

‘She was. She’—cautiously—‘was. But——’ He paused and scanned anxiously
the two faces before him. ‘It’s bitther cowld outside to-night, so I tuk
her in.’

And, indeed, though the month was May, a searching wind was shaking the
city, and biting into the hearts of young and old. As often happens in
that ‘merrie month,’ a light fall of snow was whitening the tops of the
houses.

‘I had better see to this,’ said the young man, rising. He left the
room, followed by Denis (who had stopped to throw a few more coals on
the now cheerful fire), and went down to the cold, bare, hideous hall
below. The light from the solitary gas-lamp scarcely lit it, and it took
him a few seconds to discern something that lay on the worn tarpaulin at
the lower end of it. At last he made it out, and, stepping nearer, saw
that it was the figure of a young and very slight girl. She was lying on
the ground, her back supported against a chair, and Wyndham could see
that Denis had folded an old coat of the Professor’s that usually hung
on the hat-stand, and placed it behind her head.

The light was so dim that he could not see what she was like; but
stooping over her, he felt her hands, and found that they were cold as
ice. Instinct, however, told him that life still ran within her veins,
and lifting her quickly in his arms, he carried her upstairs to the room
he had just left, and where the Professor still sat, so lost in fresh
dreams of the experiment yet to be made that he started as Wyndham
re-entered the room with his strange burden; it was, indeed, with
difficulty that he brought his mind back to the present moment. He had
forgotten why the young man had left the room.

‘She seems very ill,’ said Wyndham. His man had followed him, and now,
through a sign from his master, he pulled forward a huge armchair, in
which Wyndham placed the unconscious girl.

The Professor came nearer and stared down at her. She was very
young—hardly eighteen—but already Misery or Want, or both, had seized
and laid their cruel hands upon her, dabbing in dark bistre shades
beneath her eyes, and making sad hollows in her pallid cheeks. The lips,
white now, were firmly closed as if in death, but something about the
formation of them suggested the idea that even in life they could be
firm too.

It was a face that might be beautiful if health had warmed it, and if
joy had found a seat within the heart that now seemed at its last ebb.
The lashes lying on the white, cold cheek were singularly long and dark,
and Wyndham roused himself suddenly to find himself wondering what could
be the colour of the eyes that lay hidden behind that wonderful fringe.

Her gown was of blue serge, neatly, even elegantly made, and the collar
and cuffs she wore were quite primitive in their whiteness and
simplicity. She had no hat or cloak with her, but a little gray woollen
shawl had been evidently twisted round her head. Now it had fallen back,
leaving all the glory of her rich chestnut hair revealed.

Involuntarily the young man glanced at her left hand.

There was no ring there. An intense wave of pity swept over him.
Another! Dear God! what cruel sorrows lie within this world of Yours!

The face was so young, so free of hardness, vice, or taint of any kind,
that his very heart bled for her. Misery alone seemed to mark it. That
was deeply stamped. Looking at her, he almost hoped that she would never
wake again—that she was really dead; but even as this thought crossed
his mind, she stirred, sighed softly, and opened her eyes.

For awhile she gazed at them—on the Professor, impassive, silent; on the
younger man, anxious, pained—and then with a sharp, quick movement she
released herself from the arm Wyndham had placed round her, and raised
herself to a sitting posture. There was such terror in her eyes as she
did this that the younger man hastened to reassure her.

‘You are quite safe here,’ he said kindly. The girl looked at him, then
cast a frightened glance past him, and over his shoulder, as though
looking fearfully for some dreaded object. ‘My man found you on the
steps outside. You were ill—fainting, he said—so he brought you in here
to’—with a gesture towards the Professor—‘this gentleman’s house.’

The girl looked anxiously at the Professor, who nodded as in duty bound,
but who seemed unmistakably bored, for all that, and angry enough to
frighten her afresh.

‘If you will tell us where you live,’ said Wyndham gently, ‘we shall see
that you are taken back there.’

The girl shrank visibly. She caught the little shawl that had slipped
from her, and drew it round her head once more, almost hiding her face.

‘I can find my own way,’ she said. The voice was low, musical; it
trembled, and as she moved forward to pass Wyndham, so did she. She even
tottered, so much, indeed, that she was obliged to catch hold of a table
near to keep herself from falling.

‘It is impossible for you to walk to-night,’ said the young man
earnestly. ‘And there is no necessity for it. My servant is at your
disposal; he can call a cab for you, and he is quite to be trusted; he
will see you to your home.’

The girl hesitated for a moment, then lifted her heavy eyes to his.

‘I have no home,’ she said.

It was a very forlorn answer, and it went to Wyndham’s heart. God help
her, poor girl! whoever she was. He glanced again at her clothes, which
were decidedly above the average of the extremely wretched, and he was
conscious of a certain curiosity with regard to her—a distinctly kindly
one.

The girl caught the glance and turned away her head.

‘You can at least say where you want to be driven,’ said he gravely, but
with sympathy; he hesitated for a moment, and then went on. ‘No
questions will be asked,’ he said.

She made no answer to this, and while he waited for one the Professor
broke in impatiently:

‘Come, girl, speak! Where do you want to go? Where do you live?’

On this followed another shorter silence, and then at last she spoke.

‘I shall not go back,’ she said. Her tone was low, but defiant, and very
firm.

‘That means you will not tell,’ said the Professor. ‘Then go—do you
hear—go! You are interrupting us here.’ He motioned towards the door,
where Denis stood mute as a sentinel; he was, indeed, an old soldier,
for the matter of that.

The girl stepped quickly, eagerly forward, but Wyndham stopped her
imperatively, and standing between her and the door, he spoke to the
Professor.

‘It is impossible to turn her out at this hour—in this weather.’ He
stopped, and now looked at the girl and spoke to her.

‘Why can’t you trust us?’ he said, with angry reproach. ‘Why can’t you
let us do something for you? You must have a home somewhere, however
bad.’

The girl thus addressed turned upon him suddenly with miserable passion
shining in her large, dark eyes.

‘I have not,’ she said. ‘Under the sky of God, there is no creature so
homeless as I am.’

Her passion was so great that it struck the listeners into silence. She
made a little gesture with her arms suggestive of awful weariness, then
spoke again:

‘There was a place where I lived yesterday. It was not a home. I shall
not live there again. I have left it. I shall not go back.’

‘But where, then, are you going?’ asked Wyndham impulsively.

‘I don’t know.’ She drew her breath slowly, heavily. It was hardly a
sigh. There was enough misery in it for ten sighs. But her passion was
all gone, and a terrible indifference had taken its place; and there was
such consummate despair in her tone as might have touched even the
Professor. But it did not. He had begun to study her. He was always
studying people, and now a curious expression had crept into his face.
He leaned forward and peered at her. There was no compassion in the
glance, no interest whatever in her as a suffering human thing; but
there was a sudden sharp interest in her as a means to a desired end.
Thought was in his glance, and a wild longing that was fast growing to a
hope.

‘Have you no plans, then?’ asked the young man. His tone was sad. He had
looked into the depths of her dark eyes, and found there no guile at
all.

‘None!’ She was silent awhile, and then very slowly she raised her head;
her brows contracted, and she looked past them both into vacancy. If she
was communing with her own heart, the results were very sad. Despair
itself gathered in her eyes. She turned presently and looked at Wyndham.
‘I wish,’ said she, with a forlorn look, ‘that I had the courage to
die.’

It was unutterably sad, this young creature, with all her life before
her, praying for courage to end it; craving for death in the midst of
life, wishing she had the courage to escape from a world that had
evidently given her but a sorry welcome.

Wyndham looked round at the Professor as if expecting him to join in his
commiseration for this poor, unhappy child, but what he saw in the
Professor’s face checked him. It startled him, and stopped the tide of
sympathy for a time—as great floods will for the moment always catch and
carry with them the milder rushes of the rivers near.

The Professor’s face was indeed a study. It was radiant—alight with a
strange and sudden hope. His piercing eyes were fixed immovably upon the
girl. They seemed to burn into her as though demanding and compelling an
answering glance from hers.

She obeyed the call; slowly, languidly she lifted her head.

‘So you would die?’ said he.

‘Yes.’ The word fell listlessly from her lips; but she stared straight
at him as she said it, and her young unhappy face looked nearly as gray
as the old merciless one bending over it.

‘Then why live?’ pursued he. ‘Death is easy.’

‘No, it is hard,’ she said. ‘And I am afraid of pain.’

‘If there were no pain, you would risk it, then?’

She hesitated. His glance was now, indeed, so wild, so full of frantic
eagerness, that it might readily have frightened one older in the
world’s ways. To Wyndham, waiting, watching, it occurred that the
Professor was like a spider creeping towards its prey. He shuddered.

‘Speak, girl, speak!’ said the Professor. His agitation was intense, and
almost beyond control. Here—here to his hand was his chance. Was he to
have it at last, or lose it for ever? Wyndham could stand it no longer;
he went quickly forward, and, standing between the Professor and the
girl, took the former by the shoulders and pushed him gently backwards
and out of hearing.

‘If this drug of yours possesses the lifegiving properties you speak
of,’ said he sternly, ‘why speak to her of death? Do you honestly
believe in this experiment? Or do you fear it—when you suggest this sort
of suicide to her?’

‘I fear nothing,’ said the old man. ‘But we are all mortal. We can all
err, even in our surest judgments. The very cleverest of us can be
deceived. The experiment—though I do not believe it—might fail.’

At the word ‘fail’ he roused.

‘It will not! It cannot!’ he cried, with vehemence. ‘But in the meantime
I would give her her chance, too. She shall know the worst that may
befall her.’

‘Why not tell her all?’ said the young man anxiously. ‘It’—he hesitated
and coloured faintly—‘it would give her her chance perhaps in another
world if your experiment failed. It would take from her—in part—the sin
of deliberately destroying herself.’

The Professor shrugged his shoulders. He thought it waste of time, this
preparing for another world—another Judge.

‘You think, then, that I should tell her?’

‘I do. I think, too,’ said Wyndham strongly, ‘that if your experiment
succeeds you should consider yourself indebted to her for ever.’

‘I shall see to her future, of course.’

‘If,’ said the young man gloomily, ‘anyone could see to the future of
such a one as she is!’

The Professor looked at him.

‘You are out of sorts to-night,’ he said. ‘Your natural instinct is
deadened in you. That girl does not belong to the class of which you are
thinking. Whatever has driven her to her present desperate state of
mind, it is not impurity.’

‘You think that?’ Wyndham looked doubtful, but was still conscious of a
faint wave of relief; and the Professor, watching him, smiled, the
tolerant smile of one who understands the cranks and follies of poor
human nature.

‘If so,’ said Wyndham quickly, ‘she should surely not be subjected to
this experiment at all. She——’

‘For all that, I shall not lose this chance,’ said the Professor
shortly. He turned and went back to the girl.

She was sitting in the same attitude as when he left her—her hands
clenched upon her knees, her eyes staring into the fire. God alone knew
what she saw there. She did not change her position, but sat like that,
immovable as a statue, as the Professor expounded his experiment to her,
and then asked her the cold, unsympathetic question as to whether, now
she knew what the risk was, she would accept it. It might mean death,
but if not, it would mean safety and protection in the future.

When he had finished, she turned her sombre eyes on his.

‘I will take the risk,’ she said.

Wyndham made a movement as if to speak, but the Professor checked him.

‘Of course, if the experiment is successful,’ he said, ‘I shall provide
for you for life.’

‘I hope you will not have to provide for me,’ she said.

At this, a little silence fell upon the room, that seemed to chill it.
The Professor broke it.

‘You agree, then?’

‘I agree.’ She rose, and held out her hand. ‘Give me the draught.’

Wyndham started, his voice vibrating with horror.

‘No, no!’ he cried. ‘She does not understand; and’—to the
Professor—‘neither do you. If this thing fails, it will mean murder.
Think, I entreat you, before it is too late to think. That
girl’—pointing to the young stranger, who was standing regarding him
with a dull curiosity—‘she is but a child. She cannot know her own mind.
She ought not to be allowed to settle so stupendous a question. Look at
her!’ His voice shook. ‘Many a happier girl at her age would still be in
her schoolroom. She is so young that, whatever her wrongs, her sorrows
may be, she has still time before her to conquer or live them down.
Professor, I implore you, do not go on with this.’

The Professor rested a contemptuous glance on him for a moment, then
swept it from him, and addressed the girl.

‘You are willing?’ he said.

‘Yes.’ She spoke quite firmly, but she was looking at Wyndham. It was a
strange look, made up of surprise and some other feeling hardly defined.

‘She is not all,’ broke in Wyndham again, vehemently. ‘There is you to
be considered, too. If this sleep of your making terminates fatally,
have you considered the consequences to yourself?’

The Professor smiled. He pointed to the girl, who stood marble-white
beneath the dull gaslight.

‘Like her, I take the risk,’ he said. ‘I think I told you a little while
ago that I would chance the hanging.’ His smile—a very unpleasant
one—faded suddenly, and his manner grew brusque and arrogant.
‘There—enough,’ he said. ‘Stand aside, man. Do you think that now—now
when at last my hour has come—I am likely to let it slip, though death
itself lay before me?’

‘For God’s sake, Professor, think yet a moment!’ said the younger man,
holding him in his grasp. ‘She is young—so young!... To take a life like
that!’

‘I am going to take no life’—coldly. ‘I see now that you never had any
faith in me at all.’

‘I believe in you as no other man does,’ rejoined Wyndham hotly. ‘But
surely at this supreme moment a doubt may be allowed me. If this thing
were done openly in the eye of day, in sight of all men, it were well;
but to try so deadly an experiment here, at midnight—with no witnesses,
as it were—great heavens! you must see the pitfall you are laying for
yourself. If this experiment fails——’

‘It will not fail,’ said the Professor coldly. ‘In the meantime’—he cast
a scornful glance at him—‘if you are afraid of being called as a
witness, it is’—pointing to the door—‘still open to you to avoid such a
disagreeability.’

Their eyes met.

‘I don’t think I have deserved that,’ said the other proudly, and all at
once in this queer hour both men felt that the tie that had bound them
for years was stronger than they knew.

‘Stay, then,’ said the Professor.

He went into an inner room and returned with a phial and glass, and
advanced towards the girl with an almost buoyant step. There was,
indeed, an exhilaration in his whole air, that amounted almost to
madness. He looked wild—spectral, indeed—in the dim light of the
solitary lamp, with his white hair thrown back and his eyes shining
fiercely beneath the rugged brows.

‘Are you ready?’ he asked.

She made a slight gesture of assent, and went a step or two to meet him.
She was deadly pale, but she stood without support of any kind. The
Professor poured some of the pale fluid from the phial into the glass
with a hand that never faltered, and the girl took it with a hand that
faltered quite as little; but before she could raise it to her lips,
Wyndham caught her arm.

‘Stop!’ cried he, as if choking. ‘Have you thought—have you considered
that there is no certainty in this drug?’ Her eyes rested for a moment
on his.

‘I thought there was a certainty,’ she said slowly.

‘A certainty of death, perhaps,’ said he, poignant fear in his tone. ‘At
this last moment I appeal to you, for your own sake. Don’t take it. If
you do, it is doubtful whether you will ever come back to life again.’

She looked at him steadily.

‘I hope there is no doubt,’ she said. She raised the glass and drank its
contents to the dregs.

As she did so, some clock in the silent city outside struck the midnight
hour.




                              CHAPTER III.

  ‘A land of darkness, as darkness itself, and of the shadow of death;
  without any order, and where the light is as darkness.’


Morning had broken through the sullen gloom of night, and still the two
men watched beside the couch on which the girl lay, seemingly, in all
the tranquillity of death. The Professor’s drug had been calculated to
keep her asleep for exactly six hours. So long a time would be a test.
If she lived, and woke at the right time, then he would try again. He
would make it worth her while. For the younger man, during this anxious
vigil, there had been passing lapses of memory, that he, however, would
have disdained to acknowledge as sleep; but with the old man there had
been no question of oblivion, and now, as the vital moment drew near
that should test the truth of the great discovery, even Wyndham grew
abnormally wide-awake, and with nervous heart-sinkings watched the pale,
death-like face of the girl.

Could it be unreal? Wyndham rose once and bent over her. No faintest
breath came from her lips or nostrils; the whole face had taken the
pinched, ashen appearance of one who had lain for a full day dead. The
hands were waxen, and the forehead too. He shuddered and drew back. At
that moment he told himself that she was dead, and that he had
undoubtedly assisted at a form of murder.

He turned to the Professor, who was sitting watch in hand, counting the
moments. He would have spoken, but the old man’s grim face forbade him.
He was waiting. At twelve o’clock the girl had sunk into a slumber so
profound, so representative of death, that Wyndham had uttered an
exclamation of despair, and had told himself she was indeed struck down
by the Destroyer, and now when six o’clock strikes she ought to rise
from her strange slumbers if the Professor’s drug possessed the powerful
properties attributed to it by its discoverer.

As Wyndham stood watching the Professor, a sound smote upon his ear.
One! Again the city clock was tolling the hour. The Professor rose; his
face was ghastly. One, two, three, four, five, six!

Six! The Professor bent down over the girl, and Wyndham went near to
him, to be ready to help him when the moment came—when the truth was
made clear to him that his discovery had failed. Wyndham himself had
long ago given up hope, but he feared for the old man, to whom his
discovery had been more than life or love for over twenty years.

The Professor still stood peering into the calm face. Six, and no sign,
no change!

Already the sun’s rays were beginning to peep sharply through the
window; there was a slight stir in the street below. Six-thirty, and
still the Professor stood gazing on the quiet figure, as motionless as
it. Seven o’clock, and still no movement. The face, now lovely in its
calm, was as marble, and the limbs lay rigid, the fingers lightly
locked. Death, death alone could look like that!

Half-past seven! As the remorseless clock recorded the time, the
Professor suddenly threw up his arms.

‘She is dead!’ he said. ‘Oh, my God!’

He reeled forward, and the young man caught him in his arms. He was
almost insensible, and was gasping for breath. Wyndham carried him into
an adjoining room and laid him on a bed, and, finding him cold, covered
him with blankets. This, so far as it went, was well enough for the
moment, but what was the next step to be? The old man lay gasping, and
evidently there was but a short step between his state and that of his
victim outside. Yet how to send for a doctor with that victim outside?
To the Professor, whose hours were numbered, it would mean little or
nothing; but to him, Wyndham, it would mean, if not death, eternal
disgrace. He drew a long breath and bent over the Professor, who was now
again sensible.

‘Shall I send for Marks or Drewd?’ he asked, naming two of the leading
physicians in Dublin.

The Professor grasped his arm; his face grew frightful.

‘No one—no one!’ he gasped. ‘Are you mad? Do you think I would betray my
failure to the world? To have them laugh—deride——’ He fell back, gasping
still, but menacing the young man with his eye. By degrees the fury of
his glance relaxed, and he fell into a sort of slumber, always holding
Wyndham’s arm, however, as if fearing he should go. He seemed stronger,
and Wyndham knelt by the bed, wondering vaguely what was going to be the
end of it all, and whether it would be possible to remove the corpse
outside without detection. There was Denis—Denis was faithful, and could
be trusted.

Presently the Professor roused from his fit of unconsciousness. He
looked up at the young man, and his expression was terrible. Despair in
its worse form disfigured his features. The dream of a life had been
extinguished. He tried to speak, but at first words failed him, then,
‘All the years—all the years!’ he mumbled. Wyndham understood, and his
heart bled. The old man had given the best years of his life to his
discovery, and now——

‘I have killed her!’ went on the Professor, after a minute or two.

‘Science has killed her,’ said Wyndham.

‘No; I, with my cursed pride of belief in myself—I have killed her,’
persisted the old man. ‘I would to God it were not so!’ He did not
believe in anything but science, yet he appealed to the Creator
occasionally, as some moderns still do to Jove. His lean fingers beat
feebly on the blankets. ‘A failure—a failure,’ he kept muttering, his
eyes fixed on vacancy. ‘I go to my grave a failure! I set my soul on it.
I believed in it, and it was naught.’ He was rambling, but presently he
sprang into a sitting posture, his eyes afire once more. ‘I believe in
it still!’ he shouted. ‘Oh, for time, for life, to prove.... O God, if
there is a God, grant me a few more days!’ He fell into a violent fit of
shivering, and Wyndham gently laid him back in his bed, and covered him
again with the blankets, where he lay sullen, powerless.

‘Try not to think,’ implored the young man.

‘Think—think—what else is left to me? Oh, Paul!’ He stretched out his
arm and caught Wyndham. ‘That it should be a failure after all. I
wish——’ He paused, and then went on: ‘I wish I had not tried it upon
her; she was young. She was a pretty creature, too. She was like ...
someone——’ He broke off.

‘She was a mere waif and stray,’ said Wyndham, trying to harden his
voice.

‘She was no waif or stray of the sort you mean,’ said the Professor.
‘Her face—was not like that. There’—pointing to the room outside—‘go;
look on her for yourself, and read the truth of what I say.’

‘It is not necessary,’ said the young man, with a slight shudder. And
again a silence fell between them. It was again broken by the Professor.

‘She was full of life,’ he said; ‘and I took it.’

‘She wished you to take it,’ said Wyndham, who felt choking. Her blood
seemed to lie heavily on him. Had he not seen, countenanced her murder?
The Professor did not seem to hear him; his head had fallen forward, and
he was muttering again.

‘She is dead!’ he whispered to himself. He made a vague but tragic
gesture; and then, after a little while, ‘Dead!’ he said again. His head
had sunk upon his breast. It was a strange scene. Here the Professor
dying—out there the girl dead—and between them he, Paul Wyndham. What
lay before him?

He roused himself with an effort from his horrible thoughts, and made a
faint effort to withdraw his hand from the Professor’s; but though the
latter had fallen into a doze, he still felt the attempt at withdrawal,
and tightened his clutch on Wyndham; and all at once it seemed to the
young man as though the years had rolled backward, and he was still the
pupil, and this old man his tutor, and the days were once more present
when he had been ordered here and there, and had taken his directions
from him, and loved and reverenced him, stern and repellent as he was,
as perhaps no tutor had ever been reverenced before.

After a little while the Professor’s grasp relaxed, and Wyndham rose to
his feet. A shrinking from entering the room beyond was combated by a
wild desire to go there and look once again upon the slender form of the
girl lying in death’s sweet repose upon her couch. He went to the door,
hesitated involuntarily for a second or two, and then entered.

How still is death! And how apart! Nothing can approach it or move it.
He looked at her long and earnestly, and all at once it came to him that
she was beautiful. He had not thought her beautiful last night, but now
the dignity of death had touched her, and her fear and her indifference
and her despair had dropped from her, and the face shone lovely—the
features chiselled, and a vague smile upon the small, closed lips. He
noticed one thing, and it struck him as strange—that pinched look about
the features that he had noticed an hour ago was gone now. The mouth was
soft, the rounded chin curved as if in life. Almost there seemed a
little bloom upon the pale, cold cheeks.

With a heavy sigh he turned away, and, leaning his arm upon the
mantelshelf, gave himself up a prey to miserable thought. The fire had
died out long ago, and the morning was cold and raw, and from under the
ill-fitting door a little harsh wind was rushing. The Professor, though
actually a rich man, had never cared to change the undesirable house
that had sheltered him when first he tried a fall with fortune, and,
conquering it, came out at once to the front as a man not to be despised
in the world of science.

What was to be done? The Professor would have to see a doctor, even if
the medical man were brought in without his knowledge. Would it be
possible to remove the—that girl—and trust to to-night for her removal
to——To where? Again he lost himself in a sea of agonized doubt and
uncertainty.

Denis would still be here, of course; but what could Denis do? He fell
back upon all the old methods of concealing dead bodies he had ever
heard of, but everything seemed impossible. What fools all those others
must have been! Well, he could give himself up and explain matters; but
then the Professor—to have his great discovery derided and held up to
ridicule! The old man’s look, as he saw it a little while ago, seemed to
forbid his betrayal of his defeat. Great heavens! what was to be done?

He drew himself up with a heavy sigh, and passed his hand across his
eyes, then turned to go back to the inner room to see if the Professor
was still sleeping. As he went he tried to avoid glancing at the couch
where the dead form lay, but when he got close, some force stronger than
his will compelled him to look at it. And as he looked he felt turned
into stone. He seemed frozen to the spot on which he stood; his eyes
refused to remove themselves from what they saw. Staring like one
benumbed, he told himself at last that he was going mad. How otherwise
could he see this thing? Sweat broke out on his forehead, and a cry
escaped him. The corpse was looking at him!




                              CHAPTER IV.

               ‘Look, then, into thine heart and write!’


Very intently, too, and as if surprised or trying to remember. Her large
eyes seemed singularly brilliant, and for a while the only thing living
about her. But all at once, as though memory had returned, she sprang to
her feet and stood, strong, and utterly without support, and questioned
him with those eyes silently but eloquently. The queerest thing about it
all to Wyndham was that, instead of being enfeebled by the strange
draught she had drunk, she looked younger, more vigorous, and altogether
another person from the forlorn, poor child of eight hours ago. Her eyes
were now like stars, her lips red and warm; the drug had, beyond doubt,
a property that even the Professor had never dreamt of; it gave not only
rest, but renewed health and life to those who drank it.

Seeing Wyndham did not or could not speak, she did.

‘I am alive—alive!’ she cried, with young and happy exultation. Where
was the desire for death that lay so heavily on her only a few hours
ago? It was all gone. Now it was plain that she desired life—life only.
Her voice rang through the room fresh and clear, filling it with music
of a hope renewed, and so penetrating that it even pierced into the room
beyond. And as it reached it, another cry broke forth—a cry this time
old and feeble.

Wyndham rushed to answer it, taking with him his last memory of the
girl, as she then stood, with her arms thrown out as if in quick
delight, and her whole strange, beautiful face one ray of gladness.

The Professor was sitting up in bed a mere wreck, but with expectation
on every feature. He was trembling visibly.

‘That voice!’ he whispered wildly—‘that voice! I know it. Long years ago
I knew it. Boy, speak—tell me, whose voice was that?’

Wyndham knelt down beside him, and took his hand in his. He, too, was
trembling excessively, and his eyes were full of tears.

‘Sir,’ he said softly, ‘she is alive.’

‘She—she—who?’ asked the Professor. He bent forward; his features were
working.

‘That girl ... last night.... She lives, sir. Your experiment has not
failed, after all.’

He feared to look at the Professor when he had said this, and bent his
head, leaning his forehead on the wrinkled hand he held. It quivered
slightly beneath him, but not much, and presently the old man spoke.

‘She lives?’ His voice was stronger now. Wyndham looked up, and found
the Professor looking almost his normal self, and with that expression
in his eyes that the young man knew as meaning a sharp calculation.

‘Yes; I have spoken to her. Will you see her?’

‘No.’ The Professor silenced him by a gesture. He was evidently in the
midst of a quick calculation now.

‘The hour she woke?’ he asked presently, with such a vigorous ring in
his tone that Wyndham rose to his feet astonished.

‘Two minutes ago.’

‘Hah!’ The Professor went back to his calculations. Presently a shout
broke from him. ‘I see it now!’ he cried victoriously; ‘I see where the
mistake lay! Fool that I was not to have seen it before! It was a
miscalculation, but one easy to be rectified. An hour or two will do it.
Here, help me up, Paul.’

‘But, Professor, it is impossible; you must rest; you——’

‘Not another moment, not one, I tell you!’ cried the Professor
furiously. He lunged out of bed. ‘This thing must be seen to at once.
What time can any man be sure of, that he should waste it? The discovery
must be assured. And what time have I?’

He fell forward; he had fainted. Wyndham laid him back, and rushed
frantically into the next room.

The girl was standing just where he had left her. But her arms were
outstretched no longer; they were better employed—they were doing up her
hair.

There was a glass on a wall opposite to him, and by this she was trying
to bring herself back to as perfect a state of respectability as
circumstances permitted her.

‘You must go,’ said Wyndham, ‘and at once. Do you hear—at once?’

And, indeed, it was imperative that she should be out of the house
before the arrival of the doctor, for whom he was now about to go.

She rose. And suddenly gladness died from her face, her arms dropped to
her sides; something of the old misery, but not all, settled down on her
once more.

‘I can go,’ she said. ‘I—I am not so afraid now, when it is day; but—he
said——’

Poor child! she had remembered the bargain of the night before. She had
not thought it worthy of thought then, believing Death indeed lay before
her when she drank that draught; but when she woke, when memory returned
to her (and it always came quickly after such a draught as that), she
had gladly told herself that now all her troubles were at an end, that
the old man would provide for her, protect her. And now this young man,
so forbidding, so unkind, with his harsh voice and ways; and yet last
night he had seemed so kind!

‘He is dying!’ said Wyndham shortly. ‘A doctor must be summoned without
delay. I shall arrange for your going—for your safety; but you must be
quick.’ He rang the bell for Denis, who was waiting for him below. The
Professor’s only servant was a charwoman, who left nightly at ten, and
did not return till the same time next morning.

‘You need provide for nothing,’ said the girl. She caught up the little
shawl that had been wrapped round her last night, and moved towards the
door.

‘Stay a moment; you can’t go like this,’ said the young man
distractedly. ‘I have a servant who will take you to some place
of safety. It is impossible that you should go like this.
Why’—awkwardly—‘you haven’t even got a bonnet.’

She stopped and looked at him.

‘It is not you who are responsible,’ she said. ‘And’—she drew her breath
quickly—‘after all, no one is. I took that drug of my own accord, of my
own will, but he did promise to—to—— But if he is dying?’ She looked at
him anxiously, making the last speech a question.

‘I am afraid so.’

‘Then that is at an end.’ She went towards the door.

‘Wait for my servant,’ entreated he, following her and laying a hand
upon her arm. ‘I cannot allow you to go like this.’

‘I don’t see what it is to you,’ said she.

‘It is much—a great deal. For one thing, the Professor, if he recovers,
would never forgive me for letting you go out of his life without
reparation—without the fulfilment of his promise to you. He is indebted
to you, remember. It’—eagerly—‘was a bargain. And, after all, if you
throw off his responsibility now, where will you go? You say you have no
home—no——’

‘Nothing! nothing!’ she said. He could see her face pale again, and
again that dreadful look of despair, of hopelessness, that had crowned
her last night, aged and made miserable her face.

He turned gladly from the sad contemplation of it to address Denis, who
had entered the room, his small twinkling eyes as bright as ever; but,
then, he had slept tranquilly the whole night through by a kitchen fire
that would have been hard to rival in heat and brilliancy. Amongst all
Denis’s many virtues, one stood out: he could always be depended on to
look after himself. And really that is a great thing in a faithful
servant; so many of them like to pose as martyrs in the cause.

Wyndham led his servant a little aside.

‘You see this——’ He hesitated for a word, and then said, ‘young lady;
you will take her away at once. There is not a moment to be lost. Get
her out of the house directly. I am going for a doctor. The Professor is
seriously ill. Do you understand? You are to lose no time. You must take
her away at once.’

Denis stared at him in the appallingly nonunderstanding way that
belongs, I believe, to Irish servants alone. It doesn’t mean that they
don’t understand; it only means that they are taking it all in, with a
cleverness that few other servants can show at a moment’s notice.

‘An’ where, yer honour?’

‘Anywhere out of this!’

This struck him as abominably unfeeling, and he added hastily: ‘To the
safest place you know—the very safest. I depend upon you, Denis. Treat
her as you would your own daughter.’




                               CHAPTER V.

                ‘For the shades are about us that hover
                  When darkness is half withdrawn,
                And the skirts of the dead Night cover
                  The face of the live new Dawn.’


The doctors when they came could do nothing for him. The Professor,
though hardly an old man as the ordinary acceptation of the word goes,
being still within the seventies, had so burnt out his candle at both
ends that all the science in Europe could not have kept him alive for
another twenty-four hours. A spice of gruesome mirth seemed to fall into
the situation when their declaration was laid bare and one thought of
the great discovery.

Wyndham was the one who thought of it, and a wild longing to rouse the
old man, who was now sunk into an oblivion that presaged death, and
compel him even in his death-throes to reveal the secret that might
bring even him back to life, seized upon him. But he felt it was
impossible, and presently the two great men went downstairs to consult
each other, and he was left alone with his dying friend.

They had hardly gone when, watching as he incessantly did the face of
the Professor, he noticed a change. He bent over him.

‘Why doesn’t she speak now,’ said the Professor. He was thinking of the
girl’s voice—a voice that had taken him back to his early days in some
strange way.

‘Master,’ said Wyndham—he, too, had gone back to the old days—‘you are
thinking——’

‘Of her. They said she was dead.’

‘Who was dead?’ asked Wyndham.

At this the old man roused. He had not known Wyndham’s voice the first
time, but now he did, and he turned and looked at him; and presently
consciousness once more grew within his eyes.

‘It is you, boy. And where is she?’

‘She? The girl, you mean?’

‘Yes.... I promised her. You remember.... It is late now, very late ...
and I must sleep. But ... a word, boy.... I have left you all, and
she ... out of it ... you must give her ... give her....’ He sank back.

‘All—all,’ said Wyndham eagerly.

‘No ... no’—he rallied wonderfully—‘three hundred a year—that for a
girl.... The rest is yours.... But see to her.... I can trust you. You
are a good boy. But your Greek, boy—your Greek is bad—your aorists are
weak. You must mend—you must mend....’

His dying eyes tried to take the old stern look as they rested on
Wyndham, the look he used to give the boy when his Greek or his Latin
verses were hardly up to the mark, but presently it changed and softened
into a wider light. ‘The boy,’ in the last of all moments, was forgotten
for the love that was strongest of all.

‘She was very like my wife,’ he gasped faintly, and fell back and died.

                  *       *       *       *       *

It was all over. The doctors had taken their departure, and the old
dismal house was very still. The Professor had died in the morning, and
it was quite night again before Wyndham had time to think of ordinary
matters. It was the presence of Denis, who had come up to see, probably,
how his master had continued to live so long without him, that brought
back the thought of the girl to Wyndham’s mind.

‘Where did you take her?’ he asked listlessly. Even as the words passed
his lips he knew it was most important that she should be found again.
She was now the inheritress of three hundred a year—no mean thing for a
girl who only last night was ready and willing to die of want, amongst
other things, no doubt.

‘To the Cottage, sir.’

‘To——’ Wyndham gazed at him as if too astonished to give way to the
words that evidently lay very near to his tongue.

‘The Cottage, sir. Yer own place, sir.’

‘The Cottage,’ repeated Wyndham, now breaking forth in earnest. ‘What
the devil did you take her there for?’

His extreme anger would have cowed perhaps any other servant in Europe
save Denis. That good man stood to his guns without a flinch.

‘Fegs, sir, ’tis you can answer that,’ said he, with quite an
encouraging air.

‘What d’ye mean, Denis?’ demanded Wyndham almost violently.

‘I’m manin’—what I’m manin’,’ said Denis, who certainly was not violent
at all. ‘Ye know yourself, sir, that the first thing ye said to me about
the crathur was to take her to the safest place ye knew.’

‘Well?’ said Wyndham, with anger he tried hard to stifle.

‘Faix, yer honour, it seemed to me that the safest place I knew for the
young lady was the house that belonged to yer honour.’

This no doubt was distinctly flattering, but at the moment the flattery
did not appeal to Wyndham. The girl down there—and what the deuce was he
to do with her? And what would all the people round be thinking?—for the
most part country folk. The Cottage lay twenty miles outside Dublin. The
Rector, Mr. Barry, would for one be positively enraged. He would require
all sorts of explanations.

Denis had waited for a reply, but finding none, now went on:

‘Anything wrong, sir?’

‘Anything!’ said Wyndham. ‘Were you mad that you should take a—a person
like that down to my house? A girl found lying on the Professor’s
doorstep! Good heavens, man! what could you mean by it?’

He exaggerated a little when he said ‘my house.’ As a fact, he lived
very little in the Cottage, only using it when he felt tired and
overdone by work. His real home was to be found in rooms in
Dublin—pleasant rooms in Upper Merrion Street. There he entertained his
bachelor friends, and was highly regarded by his landlady. He was one of
those men—more usual than the coming young lady believes—who thought a
great deal more of their work, and their reading, and their golf, than
of the opposite sex.

‘Well, sir, there’s this,’ said Denis, who had remained beautifully
calm. ‘Besides tellin’ me I was to take her to a safe place, ye
specially said as she was to be thrated as me own daughter. I remimber
the words well. Now, ye know well, sir, havin’ bin intimate with me an’
Bridget since ye wur in yer first throusers, that we haven’t a child
between us; an’ yet for all that I tuck it for manin’ that the young
lady was to be given to Bridget.’

‘You took a great deal upon yourself then,’ said Wyndham.

‘Maybe so,’ said Denis, pursing up his lips. ‘But ye said as how she was
to be thrated like that; an’ if a girl was my daughter—why, I’d take her
to Bridget.’

It was impossible to go into this involved affair. Wyndham dismissed him
with a gesture; but Denis dallied at the door.

‘I suppose there’s something wrong, sir?’ persisted he.

‘Nothing,’ said Wyndham, putting a match to his cigar, ‘except that you
are the most infernal ass I ever met.’

With a heavy heart Wyndham, assisted by a physician of great note, had
gone through the Professor’s papers. There were few of them, and with
regard to the experiment only a few useless notes here and there,
principally written on the backs of envelopes. There was nothing
connected—nothing that could be used. The Professor, it seemed, had been
in the habit of writing on his brain, and on that only. Alas! there was
nothing left wherewith to carry on the great discovery.

Wyndham abandoned his search with a sigh. There was no doubt now that
the wonderful experiment was lost to all time. With this sad ending of
it he told himself he had closed one chapter in his life, but he made a
mistake there; the chapter was only beginning.




                              CHAPTER VI.

               ‘In her is highe beauty without pride,
               And youth withoute greenhood or folly.
               To all her workes virtue is her guide.
               Humbless hath slain in her all tyranny:
               She is the mirror of all courtesy,
               Her heart a very chamber of holiness,
               Her hand minister of freedom for almess.’
                                                 CHAUCER.


‘No!’ says Susan. The word is not a denial; it is merely an ejaculative
expression of the most extreme astonishment, largely mingled with
disbelief.

The sun is glinting through the trees in the old orchard right down on
her head, striking a light from the glancing knitting-needles she has
now let fall into her lap. This old orchard is the happy hunting-ground
of the Barry children old and young—the place which they rush to in
their joyous moments, the place which they crawl to with their griefs
and woes. To-day neither joys nor griefs are near them, and it is out of
sheer love alone for its mossy old apple-trees and its sunlit corners
that Susan had tripped in here a while ago with a dilapidated old novel
tucked into her apron pocket, and the eternal sock with the heel half
turned between her pretty fingers. After her had straggled Betty, a
slender creature of sixteen, and Tom, the baby. Tom was five, but he was
always the baby, there having been no more babies after him, principally
because his mother died when he was born. And last of all came Bonnie,
the little cripple, hopping sadly on his crutches, until Susan saw him,
and ran back to him and caught him in her arms, and placed him beside
her on the warm soft grass, putting out her much-washed cotton skirt
that he might sit upon it, and so be protected from even an imaginary
damp, and had cuddled him up to her, to the many droppings of the
stitches of the long-suffering heel.

Carew, who came between Betty and Susan, was away, fishing somewhere in
the Crosby river, and Jacky had not put in an appearance since
breakfast. How on earth his lessons are going to be prepared between
this—two o’clock—and five, makes Susan wonder anxiously. Why doesn’t he
come home? What can he be doing?

She has hardly got further than this in her thoughts of the truant, when
suddenly he appears upon the scene, a very rosy, bright-eyed rascal, big
with news. Indeed, it was the coming of Jacky, and the astounding
revelation in his opening sentence—that he had sprung upon them in a
most unprincipled way, without a word of warning—that had drawn from
Susan that heavily emphasized ‘No!’

She speaks again now.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she says.

‘Oh, Susan, why not?’ asks Betty, who is sitting with her hands folded
behind her head, perhaps because if she brought them forward she might
find some knitting to do, too. Idle hands they are, only made for
mischief; so is the face to which they belong.

‘Because it’s nonsense,’ says Susan, shrugging her shoulders, and
drawing Bonnie closer to her. ‘And, besides, I don’t want to believe
it.’

‘Oh, I do!’ says Betty, with a little grin from under her big sun-hat.
‘Go on, Jacky.’

‘I saw her, I saw her plain,’ says Jacky, his rosy round face fired with
joy at the thought of being for once the bearer of important news. ‘She
was walking about in the garden.’

‘In,’ from Susan, in a severe tone, ‘Mr. Wyndham’s garden?’

‘Yes, in there.’ Jacky now looks as though he is going to burst. ‘Why
don’t you believe me? I saw her, I tell you. I saw her quite plain. An’
her hair is dark, a lot darker than yours, an she’s got a blue frock
like your Sunday one, only better.’

Susan interrupts him with dignity.

‘I don’t see how Mrs. Denis’s——’ Denis’s wife was always called Mrs.
Denis; if she had any other name, it was sunk beneath insuperable
barriers. Mr. and Mrs. Denis she and her husband had been since the
priest poured his blessing down upon them and made them one in the old
chapel built on the rock at the end of the village. This rock gave the
parish priest a distinct crow over the Protestant clergyman.

‘Ye would quote me the Scriptures, would ye?’ Father McFane would call
to Mr. Barry as the latter drove by the chapel in his Norwegian on his
way to the church beyond. ‘An’ what did St. Paul say? “Like a house
founded upon a rock.” Why, here’s the rock, man. Come in! come in! where
are ye going?’

It occurred every Sunday, and Mr. Barry would smile back at Father
McFane, and nod his head, for the two, indeed, were great friends, as
the Protestants and Roman Catholics often are in small places, until
someone comes in to them with wild news and absurd tidings from
incendiaries outside to upset the loving work of years.

‘I don’t see how Mrs. Denis’s niece or cousin, or whatever she is,
should have a better gown than mine,’ says she.

‘But she isn’t Mrs. Denis’s cousin, she’s too young,’ says Jacky. ‘She’s
a girl, and she was pulling the flowers like anything, and if she
belonged to Mrs. Denis she wouldn’t be let do that.’

Jacky’s English is always horrible.

‘Oh, you’ve dreamt the whole thing!’ says Susan contemptuously. ‘Run
away and play.’ She has forgotten about the lessons.

‘Oh, you are a marplot! I am going to believe in Jacky for once in my
life. Don’t go, Jacky! Jacky, come back! If you don’t, Aunt Jemima will
make you do your lessons.’

This has a magical effect. Jacky swerves round.

‘She is there,’ says he indignantly. ‘I did see her.’ He seems to dwell
on this fact with gusto. ‘An’ she’s not Mrs. Denis’s niece. An’ old
Meany down by the mill says she’s been there for four weeks.’

‘The plot is thickening,’ says Betty lazily. ‘’Tis a clever villain,
whoever she is; fancy her being here for four weeks without the very
size of her shoes being known throughout the length and breadth of
Curraghcloyne! Four days ought to have done it. Go on, Jacky! Had she a
cloven foot by any chance?’

‘No; but’—and Jacky’s eyes widen, and he seems to swell—‘Meany says
she’s a prisoner.’

‘A what?’

‘Yes, a real prisoner. She’s not let go out of the place. Mrs. Denis
never opens the front-gate now, but comes out by the little green one we
can see from the hall-door, an’ even that’s locked when she comes out
an’ goes back again, Meany says.’

‘Mrs. Denis very seldom comes out by any other,’ says Susan.

‘But she doesn’t always lock it behind her,’ puts in Betty, who is
evidently beginning to enjoy herself.

‘Now she locks the front-gate too,’ says Jacky triumphantly.

‘It’s perfectly thrilling,’ declares Betty, sitting up and growing
openly interested. Betty is frivolous. ‘A prisoner, and a young girl.
Can she be the long-lost princess of our infancy? And imprisoned by Mr.
Wyndham! Oh, the terrible man!’

‘She is of course a friend of Mrs. Denis’s,’ says Susan, with the grand
air of one who will have the truth at any price, and who is bent on
dismissing all theories save the practical one. ‘It’s the most natural
thing in the world. We all know Mr. Wyndham told her he wouldn’t come
down for a month or two, and so she is entertaining a niece or a cousin,
or something.’

‘She isn’t a niece of Mrs. Denis’s, any way,’ persists Jacky
obstinately; ‘she’—with a hopeful, yet doubtful glance at Betty, whose
latest idea has struck him—‘she is much more like a—a princess.’ Again
he looks at Betty, as if expecting her to bring him through this
difficulty of her own making; but Betty fails him, as she fails most
people.

‘After all, I dismiss the romantic element,’ says she, nursing her knees
and swaying herself indolently to and fro in the warm sunshine. ‘I
incline now towards the supernatural. Susan,’ addressing her elder
sister with due solemnity, ‘perhaps she is a ghost.’ Her face thus
uplifted is sufficiently like Susan’s to let all the world know they are
of kin; but Betty’s face, piquante, provocative, as it is, lacks the
charm of Susan’s. Betty is pretty, nay, perhaps something more, for the
Barrys are a handsome race; but Susan—Susan is lovely. It is useless
saying her nose is not pure Greek, that her mouth wants this or that,
that her forehead is a trifle too low. Susan, when all is said, when
long argument has been used, remains what she was before—lovely. The
smiling, earnest lips, the liquid eyes, the rippling, sunny hair—all
these might be another girl’s, but yet that other girl would not be
Susan. Oh, beauteous Susan! with your youthful, starry eyes and tender,
mirthful, timid air, I would that a brush, and not a pen, might paint
you!

‘A ghost! Nonsense,’ says she, now contemptuously.
‘But’—thoughtfully—‘what a queer story!’ And again, with a wrathful
glance at Jacky: ‘After all, I don’t believe a word of it.’

‘Oh, I do! I want to,’ says Betty, who revels in sensations. ‘And the
ghost development is beautiful. I’d rather see a ghost than anything. As
you looked, Jacky, did she vanish into thin air?’

‘No; only round the corner,’ says Jacky reluctantly. He would evidently
have liked the vanishing trick.

‘Very disappointing! But perhaps that’s her way of doing it. Corners are
always so convenient.’

‘If the gates are all locked,’ says Susan, turning suddenly a
magisterial eye upon her brother, ‘may I ask how you saw her?’

‘Ah, that’s part of it! That,’ says Betty, ‘is where the fire and
brimstone come in. That’s what makes her a ghost. It isn’t everybody can
see through stone walls,’ says she, lowering her voice mysteriously, and
glancing at the staring Jacky. ‘She had evidently the power to turn Mrs.
Denis’s walls into glass! It’s very unlucky, Jacky, for ghosts to fall
in love with people, and I’m sorry to say I think this one has developed
a mad fancy for you.’

‘She hasn’t!’ says Jacky, who is now extremely pale.

‘Circumstances point to it,’ says Betty, who is nothing if not a tease.
‘And when ghosts fall in love, they do dreadful things to people. Things
like this!’ She has risen, and is now advancing on the stricken Jacky
with her slender arms uplifted, and long fingers pointed downwards and
arranged like claws. She has taken to a sort of prance, a high-stepping
walk that brings her knees upwards and her toes outward, and she has
worked her face out of all recognition in an abominable grin. All this
taken together proves too much for Jacky, who, his face now visibly
paler, descends precipitately upon Susan.

Susan has been seeing to the comfort of her little Bonnie, and has
therefore been ignorant of Betty’s flight of fancy until the moment when
Jacky stumbles somewhat heavily against her, and looking up, she sees
Betty’s diabolical pose.

‘Betty, don’t!’ says she, glancing back to Jacky’s face, which is,
indeed, a mixture of pluck and abject terror.

‘Would you not warn him, then?’ says Betty reproachfully, returning,
however, to her ordinary appearance, and making an aside at Bonnie, a
pretence at shooting him with her first finger and thumb, that sends the
delicate little creature into fits of laughter. ‘Poor old Jacky!’
returning to the charge. ‘It isn’t for nothing that ghosts reveal
themselves. It is easy to see that this one has her eye on you!’

‘She hasn’t,’ says Jacky again, who is on the point of tears. He is
evidently not partial to ghosts. ‘And it wasn’t through a glass wall I
saw her—it was——’ He stops dead short.

‘Yes?’ says Susan, still severely. ‘Do be quiet, Betty, and let him
speak. It was——’

‘Through the hole in the wall near the garden,’ confesses Jacky
doggedly, but somewhat shamefacedly.

‘You see, it was through the wall, after all!’ says Betty, breaking into
a delighted laugh. ‘She’ll get you, Jacky—she’ll get you yet.’

‘I don’t think it is a very nice thing to peep through other people’s
walls into their grounds,’ says Susan, more from the point of view that
she is the eldest sister, and bound to say a word in season now and
then, than from any feeling of horror at the act. All boys peep through
holes in walls, when lucky enough to find them. ‘How would you like it,’
says she, ‘if you were found doing it?’

‘But I wasn’t found,’ retorts Jacky sulkily.

‘Susan,’ Betty breaks into the argument with a vivacity all her own,
‘you have no more morality than a cat. You are teaching him all wrong.
It isn’t the not being found out, Jacky, that is of importance, as Susan
is most erroneously bent on impressing upon you; it is the fact of
peeping in itself that makes you the’—shaking her finger at
him—‘miserable sinner that you are!’

‘Sinner yourself!’ says Jacky, now driven to desperation and the most
unreserved impertinence. ‘I often saw you look through the hole in the
wall yourself.’

At this, instead of being annoyed, both Susan and Betty give way to
inextinguishable mirth; whereupon Jacky, who had, perhaps, hoped that
his shot would take effect, prepares once more to march away. But Betty,
making a sudden grab at him, catches him by his trousers.

‘Wait awhile,’ cries she, still shaking with laughter. ‘Susan, seize his
arm. Tell us the rest of it. Was she——’

‘I won’t tell you anything; and I’m sorry I told you a word at all. Let
me go, Betty. D’ye hear? You are tearing my breeches.’

‘And you are tearing our hearts,’ says Betty, ‘Jacky darling. Go on;
don’t be a cross cat, now. Was she——’

‘Twice as pretty as you, any way,’ says Jacky, with virulence.

‘Is that all? Poor girl! says Betty, who is very hard to beat. ‘Prettier
than Susan?’

‘Yes, lots.’

‘She must be a real princess, then, and no ghost. I’d like to leave a
card upon her. Perhaps you would kindly push it through the hole in the
wall, Jacky.’

This is adding to the insult, and Jacky, with the loss of a button or
two, and serious injury to his suspenders, breaks away.

‘There now!’ says he, beginning to cry. ‘Look what you’ve done; and no
one to mend it; and Aunt Maria will be angry, and father will give me
twenty lines——’ Sobs check his utterance.

Susan rises hurriedly, and, with a whispered word to Bonnie, she passes
him on to Betty, who, in spite of her carelessness, receives the little
fragile creature with loving arms, hugging him to her, and beginning to
ransack her memory for a story to tell him, such as his soul loveth;
then Susan, slipping her arm round Jacky’s shoulder, whispers soft
comforts to him. He shall come in now and do his lessons with her, so
that father shall not be vexed this evening, and after dinner (the
Rector’s family dined at two, and had high tea at seven) she would take
him with her up to Crosby Park.

Jacky’s recovery is swift; his sobs cease, and he graciously allows
himself to be kissed. To go to Crosby Park is always a joy—the big,
huge, handsome place, with its long gardens and glass houses, and, best
of all, its absentee landlord.

It is, indeed, quite ten years since George Crosby has been at the Park,
and in all probability ten more years are likely to elapse before he
comes again. The last accounts of him were from Africa, where he had had
a most unpleasantly near interview with a lion, but had got off with a
whole skin and another not quite so whole: the lion had come to grief.




                              CHAPTER VII.

  ‘Where there is mystery, it is generally supposed that there must also
  be evil.’


It is three o’clock as Susan, with Jacky in tow, leaves the Rectory gate
and goes up the village towards the broad road beyond that mounts
steepwards to Crosby Park. Curraghcloyne possesses but one street, and a
very small one, too; but as a set-off to that it teems with interest.

This morning a pig-fair was held in the ‘fair-field,’ a square mass of
beaten earth, anything but ‘fair,’ and as unlike a field as possible;
and now that the ‘payers of the rint’ have been mercifully removed,
bought, or sold, the unsightly patch is covered by young colts, that are
being ridden up and down by their owners, with a view to showing them
off; whilst in the far part of the field, over there, cows, sheep, and
donkeys are changing owners.

Here, in the main street, much lively conversation is going on. On the
right, Salter, the hardware man—a virulent Methodist, who calls himself
a Protestant—is retailing to a hushed and delighted group the very
latest ritualistic news of the curate just lately imported, and who, if
a most estimable man, is undoubtedly abominably ugly. Short and stout
and ill-made, poor Mr. Haldane has not proved a success amongst the
Protestants of the parish. His views are extreme, and so are his looks,
and, as Betty most unkindly put it, he should, on his ordination, have
been at once despatched by the Bishop of the diocese as a missionary to
the Cannibal Islands, with a view to getting rid of him as quickly as
possible. He is a sore trial to Mr. Barry, the Rector of the parish, and
Susan’s father. But he had to replace the last curate in a hurry, that
young man having resigned his charge at a moment’s notice, because the
Rector would not give his sanction to having matins at six a.m., he
said; but in reality because Susan had, the evening before, rejected him
with a haste that deprived him of all hope.

Just now the excitement amongst the groups at Salter’s is growing
intense. The curate had been knocked down. No! But he had fallen—and so
on, and so on. A few shops lower down comes Mr. Murphy, the
undertaker’s. He, too, as indeed do all the shopkeepers in
Curraghcloyne, stands in the front of his shop-door, chatting to all who
come and go. A little, fat, jolly man, rather useless you would think in
a solemn business like his, and yet the best undertaker, for all that,
in the seven parishes round. Perhaps it is well to have a cheerful
person of that sort to dispel the dreadful gloom of death. However it
is, he is a universal favourite, and no wonder, when I tell you he is
the man in all Curraghcloyne who can tell you most about the babies!—the
ones come, the ones to come immediately, and those in the middle
distance! The gayest, happiest little man in the town, with a wife as
rosy as himself, and quite a crowd of embryo little undertakers swarming
round his knees. But these, and many more of the Curraghcloyne
celebrities, sink into insignificance before Ricketty, the proprietor of
the Crosby Arms Hotel. This name is painted on a swinging signboard,
with a huge boar beneath, the crest of the Crosbys from all time.

Ricketty—his name was once Richards, but time and many devoted
friendships has brought it down to Ricketty—is a huge benign Irishman,
with the biggest jaw in Europe and the smallest eyes. To his bones flesh
has grown, until now he might have exhibited himself in the most
fastidious show in New York as the ‘Last of the race of Anak,’ or some
such attractive title.

And as most big men are, so is he—the mildest-mannered man on earth; who
would have run away if he had been asked to scuttle a ship, and who
would have fainted if the idea of cutting the throat even of a mouse had
been suggested to him. One side of his hotel has the usual bar blind up
in it, behind which is a parlour, where on special occasions the
politicians congregate to air their eloquence. The other side is given
up to a fancy shop, kept by his sister, Miss Ricketty.

Miss Ricketty is the wit, and therefore the scourge, of the village
(very little wit suffices for a village such as Curraghcloyne), and
though nearly stone-deaf, knows more of the ‘goings on’ of her
neighbours than anyone else in the small town.

Of course there is a bank and a post-office in Curraghcloyne. And a
town-hall, where the future tenors and sopranos of the world sometimes
‘kindly consent’ to sing to the poor people round them. And there is the
draper’s shop called ‘The Emporium,’ very justly, of course; and there
is a market-place too, where everyone says the beef and mutton are both
bad and dear. But even the interest of all these fails before the
caustic tongue of Miss Ricketty.

Just as Susan reaches the window of the hotel that holds Miss Ricketty’s
show of notepaper, ballads, bull’s-eyes, woollen mufflers, the latest
thing in veils ten years old, and the flotsam and jetsam of various
seasons past, she finds herself face to face with Wyndham.

‘You have come back!’ says she involuntarily. She is glad to see him. He
is—well, scarcely an old friend, because the distances between his
comings and goings to the Cottage make such broad margins on the leaf of
time that he has hardly come into quite close contact with the family at
the Rectory. But they have known him for a long time, and they have
liked him, and there is a good deal of soft, pleasurable welcome in the
glance that Susan gives him. He has been away now, she tells herself,
quite two months.

‘Yes,’ says Wyndham, smiling. His smile is a little preoccupied,
however. ‘And how are you, Jacky? My goodness, how we are grown! You’ll
be as big as Ricketty presently if you don’t put a weight on your head.’

Jacky sniggles, but, like Wyndham’s smile, his sniggles are a little
preoccupied. Having shaken hands with the latter, he retires behind
Susan, and wonders if Wyndham is going up to the Cottage, and if he is,
will the ghost catch him? He rather hopes it. It would leave
him—Jacky—free, any way, and Mr. Wyndham is a big man and would be a
better match for her.

Susan, too, is thinking of the ghost. As Wyndham is facing now, the
Cottage lies before him. Is he going to see the mysterious ‘prisoner’?
Perhaps he is married to her! This seems delightful—like an old romance,
so much nicer than the commonplace marriages of to-day. She scans
Wyndham’s face swiftly with a view to saying something nice and kind to
him, if she sees anything there to help her to believe in this
sentimental marriage. But evidently she sees nothing, because she says
nothing. After all, she tells herself, it is of course a secret.

‘I hope you will come in and see father,’ she says presently, when she
and Wyndham have discussed the town and its inhabitants, and she has
told him all the news. He is in the habit of sleeping at the Cottage
whenever he does come down, and in the habit, too, of spending his
evenings at the Rectory, which is only just over the way from the
Cottage.

‘Not to-night, I’m afraid,’ says Wyndham. ‘I must go back to town by the
evening train.’

A slight frown gathers on his brow, but he dismisses it as he bids her
good-bye.

‘Remember me to him,’ he says quickly, absently. He pinches Jacky’s ear,
and is gone.

Susan, who has been inveigled into a promise concerning bull’s-eyes, is
now led triumphantly into Miss Ricketty’s shop, where that spinster is
discovered in an Old English attitude, her body being screwed out of all
shape in her endeavour to catch sight of someone going down the street.
Her window is quite blocked up by her shoulders, and her deafness
prevents her from knowing of Susan’s coming until Jacky, falling over
her left leg, which is sticking out behind in mid air, brings her back
to the perpendicular and a view of Susan.

She is a small woman, thin to a fault, and shrewd-visaged, with a
quizzical eye and a bonnet. The latter is of the historic coal-scuttle
shape, and must have been a most admirable purchase when
bought—‘warranted to wear,’ in the truest sense of the word, as it has
lasted without a break for at least fifty years. As no one in
Curraghcloyne ever saw her ‘outside of it,’ and as she is popularly
supposed to sleep in it, it may safely be regarded as a sound article;
even her worst enemy had once been heard to say that, ‘no matther how
great an ould fool she was wid her tongue,’ she had made no mistake
about ‘the bonnet.’

‘An’ is that you, Miss Susan, me dear?’ says she, when Jacky has picked
himself up, and she has ceased to rub her ankle. ‘Ye’re as welcome as
the flowers in May, though divil a flower we had this year, wid the rain
an’ all. Ye’re not in a hurry, miss, are ye, now? Ye can spare a minute
to the ould maid? Come in, then.’

She opens the little gate that hinges on to her little counter, and
draws Susan inside, to her ‘parlour,’ as she calls the tiny space
within—a cosy spot in truth, where in the winter a fire burns briskly,
and with a wall lined with bottles that make glad the souls of children.
To Susan Barry the old maid has given all the heart that remains from
her worship of her giant brother. Perhaps it is the almost childish
sweetness of her manner that has won the old maid’s heart, or else the
young unconscious beauty of her—beauty being dear to the Irish heart.
However it is, she has a warm corner in Miss Ricketty’s.

‘An’ how’s your good aunt?’ says the spinster, adjusting the bonnet with
one hand, whilst with the other she pulls out from under the counter a
huge ear-trumpet, half a yard long, and big enough at the speaking end
to engulf Susan’s small and shapely head. ‘She’s been expectin’ that
clutch o’ eggs I promised her, no doubt; but them hens o’ mine might as
well be cocks for all the eggs we get out of them.’

‘Aunt Jemima knows that eggs are scarce now,’ cries Susan, softly, into
the gulf.

‘Scarce! ’Tis nothin’ them ungrateful hens is doin’ for us now, an’ we
who coddled ’em up all the winther. The saints forgive thim! Miss
Susan’—leaning towards the girl, and speaking with the suppressed
emotion of the born gossip—‘was that Misther Wyndham as wint up the
street just now?’

‘Yes,’ says Susan. ‘I was talking to him just before I came in here.’

‘No! Blessed Vargin!’ says Miss Ricketty, recoiling; she had, of course,
been the first to hear of the mysterious stranger at the Cottage, and
had, indeed, told the news to her brother, under promise of secrecy,
that she knew he would not keep. Nor did she want him to keep it. How
can you gossip unless you have someone to gossip with? That is why
people spread scandals.

‘And what was he saying?’ asks she presently, when she has produced a
little box of figs and given them to Jacky, with a view to keeping him
quiet until she has got the last word of news out of Susan.

‘Nothing, I think,’ says Susan, running over mentally her late
conversation with Wyndham. ‘He won’t have time to see father to-night,
because he is going back to town by the evening train.’

‘Is that what he says?’ Miss Ricketty gives her bonnet a push. ‘Faith,
he’s full of smartness. An’ did he tell ye nothin’ at all?’

‘Oh, it was I who told him everything,’ says Susan. ‘He wanted to know
how the new curate was going on, for one thing, and——’

‘If ’twas Misther Haldane he was askin’ afther so kindly, I could a’
tould him somethin’,’ says Miss Ricketty. ‘But never mind him! What else
was Misther Wyndham sayin’?’

‘There was not time to say anything,’ says Susan, laughing. ‘He was in a
hurry, and so was I—at least, Jacky was; he wants you to give him two
pennyworth of bull’s-eyes. Though, really, after those figs——’

‘Miss Susan’—the old maid puts Susan’s last remark aside with an
eloquent gesture—‘have ye heard anything sthrange about the Cottage
lately?’

Susan starts, and Jacky comes to a dead set, the last fig between his
finger and thumb. Jacky must be far gone indeed when, having anything
edible between his fingers, he delays about putting it between his lips.

‘Ye have, I see,’ says Miss Ricketty. ‘I’m tould, me dear,’ looking
behind her, and beside her, and to the door, and now, for even better
security, putting up her opened palm to one side of her mouth, ‘that
there’s a young—a’—she hesitates as if to choose a word, then comes to a
safe conclusion—‘a faymale there,’ she says.

‘There’s a girl there, I think,’ says Susan nervously. ‘At least’—here
Jacky looks at her appealingly, and she changes her sentence—‘someone
says there is. A niece, or a friend of Mrs. Denis’s, I suppose.’

‘Arrah! Suppose!’ says Miss Ricketty with considerable eloquence, but
without committing herself.

‘Well, if not that,’ says Susan, who is full of her late romantic idea
about a secret marriage between the unknown and Wyndham,
‘perhaps—perhaps Mr. Wyndham knows something about her.’

Miss Ricketty turns sharply, and looks at her. But the girl’s lovely,
open, tranquil face betrays nothing but a soft enthusiasm. A sense of
amusement fills Miss Ricketty’s breast.

‘Fegs, I’m thinkin’ ye’re on the right thrack,’ says she evenly.

‘You won’t say it again, Miss Ricketty, will you?’ says Susan; ‘but I
have thought—at least, it has occurred to me—that perhaps she’s Mr.
Wyndham’s wife.’

This is a little too much for Miss Ricketty. She gives way suddenly to a
fit of coughing, and, turning her back to Susan, dives under the
counter, whether to recover from a very proper confusion, or to indulge
in very improper laughter, can now, alas! never be known. When she
emerges, however, her face is a fine crimson.

‘That would be very romantic, wouldn’t it?’ says Susan, looking at her
and speaking softly, yet with a pretty delight. ‘A marriage like that,
with nobody knowing anything except they two, you know; and I feel sure
she is lovely, and Mr. Wyndham is very nice-looking too, and after
awhile perhaps we shall know her. He will introduce us to her, and we
shall be friends, and——’

‘’Tis a beautiful story,’ says Miss Ricketty, breaking in with unction.
‘An’ beautiful stories, we all know, come thrue. I wish ye joy o’ the
bride at the Cottage, Miss Susan; but I wouldn’t be for intherferin’ wid
the young married people too soon if I were you, me dear.’

‘Of course, I shouldn’t do that,’ says Susan hastily, her fair face
growing earnest. ‘But I thought that if——’

‘Well, ye’d betther wait, I think,’ says Miss Ricketty. ‘’Tis bad bein’
in a hurry, as Misther Haldane found out last night.’

‘Mr. Haldane! What has happened to him?’

‘Fegs, miss, it seems that last night, as he was descendin’ the steps
from the vesthry, he thripped, God help us! an’ fell on his ugly mug an’
broke his front teeth.’

‘Oh, how dreadful!’ says Susan, real compassion in her tone, though the
new curate is rather farther beyond the range of her sympathy than even
the old. ‘I wonder father hasn’t heard of it.’

‘It seems the poor gintleman is keeping it dark,’ says Miss Ricketty,
‘wid the thought of gettin’ thim put in agin widout anyone knowin’.
But’—wrathfully—‘’twill be no use for him. I see that villain of a
Salter down there’—with a glance out of the window—‘tellin’ every wan of
it. Why, ye must have seen him yerself, miss, as ye come by.’ And
suddenly Susan does remember the crowd round Salter’s shop-door, with
Salter himself in its midst. ‘He’s got hould of it, for sure, and if he
has ’twill be short shrift for Misther Haldane.’

‘But why?’ asks Susan.

‘Why, this, miss! He hates your clergy because he’s not in wid ye, like.
A Methody he is; an’ Mr. Haldane goes agin his grain, wid the candles
an’ the flowers an’ that, an’ he says how that Mr. Haldane had a dhrop
too much last night when he thripped on the vesthry stairs.’

‘What a shame!’ says Susan indignantly. ‘I know for a fact that Mr.
Haldane is——’

‘Yes, of course, miss. But that’s how thim Methodys does. An’ as for
that Salter himself, I don’t believe in him. ’Tis a power o’ whisky he
can get undher his own belt widout bein’ found out, until his timper is
up. I know for a fact that ’twas only a week ago that he bate his poor
wife until she let a screech out of her that would have waked Father
D’Arcy himself, only that the seven sleepers aren’t a patch on him.’

It appears she cannot even spare her parish priest! Susan, who has
risen, and who is now dragging Jacky from under the counter, where he
has been in hot pursuit of a kitten, bids her old friend good-bye for
the present.

‘You’ll tell Miss Barry about the clutch,’ says the spinster; and ‘Yes!’
shouts Susan into the terminus, a little louder than usual, perhaps,
because Miss Ricketty lifts up her hand and shakes it at her
reproachfully.

‘Wan would think I was deaf,’ says she tragically, whereupon both she
and Susan laugh together. The girl’s happy mirth—seen if not
heard—delights the old maid behind the counter.

‘Good-bye, me dear, an’ God bless you!’ says she, and, disdaining to
even see Susan’s pennies, she thrusts a big parcel of sweets into
Jacky’s small hands.

‘Keep a few for Masther Bonnie,’ whispers she, as she kisses him and
sends him after his sister.

At the door, however, Susan turns back, and once more calls down the
trumpet:

‘You will contradict that thing about Mr. Haldane, won’t you?’ says she;
‘surely it is bad enough that he should have lost his front teeth,
without having scandalous stories spread about him. Besides, they will
make father very unhappy.’

‘I’ll look afther him,’ says Miss Ricketty, ‘if only to oblige ye, me
dear; though, I think, I’m not wantin’. Providence seems to have his eye
on that young man.’

‘Oh, poor man! I’m afraid not,’ says Susan; ‘he was ugly enough before,
and now his front teeth are gone!’

‘That’s it,’ says Miss Ricketty; ‘whin next ye look at him, ye’ll see
what a fine openin’ the Lord has made for him.’

The last vision Susan has of Miss Ricketty shows her leaning back in her
chair, with her apron over her bonnet, convulsed with joy at her own
wit.




                             CHAPTER VIII.

  ‘Nature often enshrines gallant and noble hearts in weak
  bosoms—oftenest, God bless her! in female breasts.’


Quite close to the gardens Susan meets one of the under-gardeners at
Crosby Park.

‘I suppose Master Jacky and I can go in and see the gardens, Brown?’

‘Oh yes, miss, o’ course. But I’m afraid there’s no one there. As it
happens, no one’s working there to-day. ’Tis a holiday, you know, miss.
An’ the gates are locked.’

It happens, indeed, to be a saint’s day, or holiday—one of the
innumerable saints’ days that are held sacred in Ireland, and on which
no man will work, if he is a Roman Catholic labourer, though the loss of
the day’s hire is a severe strain upon his slender resources. And the
funny part of this arrangement is that, though they are too religious to
support their families by working on these days, they never know what
saint’s day it is, or anything in the world about him—or her.

‘Oh!’ says Susan; she had forgotten about its being a holiday, though
both the maids had gone to chapel in the morning, leaving her and Betty
to make up the many beds. Her tone is so disappointed that Brown drags
out a key from his trousers pocket.

‘If ye’ll take this, miss, ye can let yoself in, an’ ye can lave it at
the lodge wid Mrs. Donovan whin ye’re goin’ back.’

‘Oh, thank you, Brown!’ says Susan joyfully; and diving into her pocket,
she produces twopence (it is quite a sum for Susan, whose pennies are
very scarce), and gives it to him, an instinct born with her—a sort of
pride—compelling her to reward the underling. And yet she had refused to
give Tommy—the baby, the youngest of all, and the dearest to her of the
children after Bonnie—a halfpenny out of that twopence only this
morning.

‘Thank you, miss,’ says Brown, with considerably more gratitude than he
would have shown another if she had given him half a crown, and Susan,
who had paid for the key quite as much for her own sake as for Jacky’s,
goes on her way rejoicing.

Yes, the gate is locked. Susan, having unlocked it, carefully removes
the key, locks it on the other side, and goes down the broad, beautiful,
scented path with Jacky beside her. Some of the houses are near, but not
so worthy of notice as those that come after, and through these they
hurry to the great glass ones beyond—where the roses are all a-growing,
all a-blowing, in magnificent profusion—that are always kept up in a
very perfect state, though the master of them be in the Soudan or North
America, or among the highest peaks of the Andes.

Between these two sets of houses runs a wall, now laden with
cherry-trees in full fruit, and as Susan and her brother emerge from the
seedling-house into the freer air, she catches sight of something that
brings her to a standstill.

Against the wall where the cherries are growing stands a ladder, and on
the top of it—a man.

Now, Susan knows all the gardeners at Crosby Park, and even those
beneath them, and certainly this man is not one of them.

She turns and retreats on Jacky, who is just behind her, and for a
moment fear covers her. She has never been brought face to face with a
thief before—few girls have been—and a desire to fly is the thought
uppermost in her breast. She glances upward fearfully to the figure on
the top of the wall, who is hastily pulling off the cherries and
dropping them into the basket he has slung on to the top of the ladder.
She draws her breath quickly. Could anything be more premeditated—could
anything show more plainly what a determined rogue he is? And to-day of
all days! A holiday, when, of course, he knew that all the gardeners
would be away, and the place safe to him! No doubt he had climbed the
outside wall—thieves can do anything—and had found the ladder inside
with which to rob poor Mr. Crosby, who is now goodness knows how many
miles away.

Susan stands rooted to the ground, not knowing whether to stay or fly.
Old stories of heroines return to her, and it seems to her that it would
be base to steal away now and say nothing; even if she happened to gain
the walk outside, it is doubtful whether she should meet any servant,
this being a saint’s day; and if she did, would he be willing to tackle
a real live thief single-handed? As she hesitates, she again looks at
the man, and notices that he is glancing from right to left, hesitating,
as if either uneasy or else with a view to choosing the best fruit. Both
ideas anger her, but the second more than the first. Uneasy? of course
he is! And no wonder, too! A thief must necessarily be uneasy. And to
attempt to steal here, in this lovely secluded place!

The owner of Crosby Park has been so long away that Susan has almost
adopted his place as her own. Many years ago Mr. Crosby, who had been a
pupil of Mr. Barry’s, had given directions that every member of the
Barry family should have free right to his grounds, and Susan, once come
to years of discretion—not so long ago—has taken great advantage of this
kindly permission. It is so near to the Vicarage, and so lovely! All its
walks and pretty windings are so well known to her. They have been much
to her, indeed, during all these years, though so little to the actual
possessor of them, who has evidently found more pleasure in shooting
grizzlies than in cultivating cherries.

That now someone has come to steal these cherries seems dreadful to
Susan. With that poor man away, too—at the end of the world probably,
shooting, or being shot by, some of those awful Indians! Again she casts
her frightened glance at the thief, still high on his ladder and secure
from detection now that all the servants are away; and something in his
air—an insolent security, perhaps—drives her to action.

No, she will not fly! She will tell him, at all events, what she thinks
of him before flying. She makes her way straight to the foot of the
ladder, wrath in her bosom, and addresses him.

‘I wonder you aren’t ashamed of yourself!’ cries she, righteous
indignation in her tones and in her lovely uplifted eyes.

The sweet voice rings up the ladder. The start that the thief on the top
of it gives, when he hears her, condemns him to all eternity in Susan’s
eyes. ‘No one,’ argues Susan to herself, ‘ever starts unless he is
guilty.’ Susan is very young.

The man casts a sidelong glance at her. It is so one-sided that Susan
hardly sees him, but evidently he is trembling, conscience-stricken,
because he makes no reply.

‘Come down!’ says Susan again, her courage mounting with the occasion.
Her tone is now severely calm, and without a vestige of fear. After all,
he is a poor creature whom even a girl can frighten, so small is the
courage of the unrighteous! ‘Do you know what you are doing? You’—with
accumulated scorn—‘are stealing!’

This terrible charge brings the culprit round. He sinks upon the topmost
rung of the ladder, as if overcome, and pulls his cap over his eyes,
evidently to avoid recognition. Says Susan to herself: ‘He is ashamed,
poor creature!’ and seeing the abject attitude of the wretch, she grows
bolder, and presses the wondering Jacky to her side, and tells him to
take courage. This poor man will not kill them. No—no, indeed.

‘Yes, stealing,’ repeats she, her fair, beautiful face uplifted to the
sinner’s above her. There is a second pause, during which, perhaps, the
sinner takes note of it.

‘I——’ begins he, then pauses. Susan’s eyes are looking into his, and
Susan’s face, implacable and austere, no doubt has daunted him. But
Susan tells herself that conscious guilt has rendered him silent. After
awhile, however, he makes another attempt.

‘I——’ says he again, and again stops. It is contemptible! Susan turns a
scornful glance upon him.

‘It is not to be defended,’ says she. ‘To steal from a garden like this!
From a garden that the owner has so kindly left open to many people—who
has besides been so kind, and who has helped all the poor in the
district. He has given forty blankets where another has given ten, and
coals without restriction everywhere. And these beautiful gardens,
too—he has given these as a recreation to some who have no lovely
gardens of their own; and now you take advantage of a day like this,
when all the servants are away, to defraud this kind, kind man and steal
his cherries. Oh, how can you bear to be so bad?’

‘If you would hear me!’ begins the man on the top of the ladder, in a
low tone. He is evidently immensely touched by the scorn of the young
evangelist below, because his voice is very low and uncertain.

‘There is nothing to be said,’ says Susan, her eyes gleaming with honest
disgust. ‘There is no excuse for you. You are here stealing Mr. Crosby’s
cherries, and, as I said before, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

‘Still, miss, if you would listen a moment!’ He has pulled his cap even
closer over his brows.

‘You needn’t do that,’ says Susan. ‘Poor creature! you need not be
afraid of me; I will not give you up to justice!’

‘Thank you kindly, miss,’ comes from the wretched creature behind the
cap. He is evidently struggling with emotion.

‘I don’t want you to thank me,’ says Susan, who is feeling inclined to
cry. She has often read of thieves, but never met one until now, and it
seems to her, all at once, that they are decidedly interesting, so ready
to hear—to receive admonition, too. ‘I want you to promise me that for
the future you will abstain from—from thieving of any sort.’

‘I’ll promise you, miss—I will indeed. I’d promise you anything.’ Poor
thing! he seems quite overcome. ‘But, miss, I wasn’t really stealing
just now.’

‘Oh, nonsense!’ says Susan; a revulsion of feeling makes her once again
hard to him. Confession is good for the soul, but denial—and such a
useless denial, too, caught in the act as he is—savours of folly, that
worst of all things, for which there is no forgiveness.

‘Do you think I did not see you? Why, look at that basket; it is nearly
full. How can you say you were not stealing those cherries? Better to
show some regret than to carry off your crime in such a barefaced way.’

It is hardly barefaced, the unhappy culprit’s face being now quite
hidden by his cap.

‘Just think,’ says Susan, her clear, sweet voice trembling with grief
because of this sinner; ‘if you had a garden, would you like people to
come into it and steal your fruit?’

The poor thief is evidently beginning to feel the situation acutely. He
has taken out his handkerchief in a surreptitious fashion, and is
rubbing his eyes with it.

‘I shouldn’t mind if it was you, miss,’ says he, in a stifled tone.

Poor thing! he is evidently very sorry.

‘You won’t give me up, miss?’

‘No, no!’ cries Susan hastily. ‘But I do hope you see and are grieved
for what you are doing. When people are so good and so generous as to
let other people go through their grounds and get a great deal of
enjoyment out of them, I think the least those others may do is to
respect them, and their shrubs, and fruit, and flowers.’

‘You’re right, miss. I seem as if I never saw it like that till now.’

‘Ah! that’s what they all say,’ says Susan sadly, and with a sigh. She
has a good deal to do with her father’s impenitent penitents. ‘But you
are no doubt from some distant parish. A tramp, I suppose,’ says Susan,
with another sigh. ‘At all events, I am sure you do not belong to this
part of the world, as your voice is strange to me.’

‘I’ve come a long way, miss, indeed.’

‘Poor man! Perhaps you are hungry,’ says Susan. Again she searches her
pocket, and produces the last coin in it—the last coin she has in the
world, for the matter of that—and lays a sixpenny bit on the lowest rung
of the ladder.

‘Perhaps this may help you,’ says she. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t any more,
but I haven’t. And now remember I expect you to keep your promise. I
shall not report you, or get you into trouble of any sort; in fact,
this’—gently—‘shall be a secret between you and me; but I do expect you
to go away without those cherries, and with the promise never to steal
again.’

‘I promise you that, miss, most gratefully. I’ll never steal again. But,
miss, might I give the cherries to you or the young gentleman?’

‘No, no!’ says Susan in horror. She catches Jacky’s hand and draws him
away from temptation. After going a yard or two, however, she looks
back; and the thief, who has been looking after her, again pulls his cap
hurriedly over his guilty face.

‘The gate is locked,’ says she; ‘how will you get out?’

‘The way I came, miss,’ says the bad man, with open signs of contrition.

‘I see—yes,’ says Susan sadly. ‘But go at once. I trust you—remember.’

‘I’ll never forget it, miss,’ says the unhappy man, sinking down upon
the ladder and covering his face with his hands.

‘Jacky,’ says Susan, when they have left the garden and locked the door
carefully behind them, ‘if you ever say a word about that poor creature,
I’ll never think the same of you again. Do you hear? He is a wretched
thief; but I have given my word not to betray him, and you must give
your word too. Poor man! I think he was sincerely sorry. You won’t say a
word at home or anywhere, Jacky?’

‘No,’ says Jacky. He looks at her. ‘Why couldn’t you have taken the
cherries?’ says he.

It takes the entire remainder of the walk home to make the ‘why’ clear
to him.




                              CHAPTER IX.

                       ‘He knew not what to say,
                         And so he swore!’


Wyndham, when he met Susan, had been in rather a disgusted mood. Shortly
after the Professor’s death he had gone to Norway for a month with the
friend whom he had arranged to go with on the morning following the
luckless night that had seen the last of the Professor’s experiment. He
had induced his friend to wait for him—the latter consenting with rather
a bad grace—until the Professor’s funeral was over and his affairs
looked into. He had had a last conversation with Denis about the
uninvited guest whom the latter had taken to the Cottage, and had told
him to find a suitable home for her at once, comfortable—luxurious even,
if necessary, as she was now undoubtedly the possessor of three hundred
a year—but, at all events, to get her out of the Cottage without further
delay. He spoke peremptorily, and Denis promised all things; yet only
yesterday, on his return, he had heard from Denis’s own lips that still
that girl was located in the Cottage.

‘Didn’t I tell you to get her a home somewhere else?’

‘Ye did, sir—ye did. Faix, I don’t wondher ye’re mad, but ‘twasn’t aisy
to do it.’

‘To do what?’—firmly.

‘To get her to go.’

‘What nonsense! A girl like that—as if she could resist! Why, one would
think there wasn’t a policeman anywhere. Do you mean to tell me she
refused to go?’

‘No, sir; that’s not me manin’. ’Tis that ould fool of a wife o’ mine.
It seems she got set upon her wan way or another, an’ do all I could I
couldn’t git her to turn the young lady out. “There’s room for us all
here,” says Bridget. “But that’s not his ordhers,” says I—manin’ you,
sir. “But whin is she to go?” says she. “That’s nothing to me,” says I.
“’Tis so,” says she. “A comfortable home he tould ye to git for her, and
where’ll she find wan but here?” An’ divil a fut I could move her from
that. Don’t you iver get married, Misther Paul; it will be the undoin’
o’ ye. Ye won’t have a mind o’ yer own in six months.’

‘I’ve a mind now, any way,’ says Wyndham, still swearing, ‘and that is
to get rid of you without another second’s notice.’

‘An’ I’m not surprised, sir,’ says Denis, drawing himself up and
saluting. He is an old soldier. ‘It was most flagrant disobadience. But
what can ye do wid a woman, sir? Fegs, nothing—nothing at all. They
carries all before thim—even a man’s conscience. When Bridget refused to
let her go, what could I do?’ He pauses satisfied, having put the blame
upon his particular Eve. ‘Is it yer wish that I tackle Bridget agin,
sir?’

‘No; I shall go down to Curraghcloyne myself to-morrow,’ says Wyndham,
getting rid of him with a gesture.

He had gone down, had met Susan, had read something in her face that
seemed to him (whose senses were very much alive to impressions on the
subject) to be studying him—wondering at him. It was with a still more
enraged feeling he left her, and went on to the Cottage, where, to his
supreme indignation, he found, for the first time on record, the
entrance-gate locked.

Good heavens! What could be the meaning of this? Were they determined to
compromise him in the eyes of the world? When he has rung the bell until
it is hopelessly smashed, someone comes to the gate, and without opening
it says, in a voice evidently meant to alarm any unwelcome intruder:

‘Who’s there?’

‘Only the master of this place,’ says Wyndham grimly, who has recognised
Mrs. Denis’s handsome brogue even under these new conditions. Indeed, it
would be hard to mistake it anywhere; as Fitzgerald, who knows her,
says, ‘you could sit on it at any moment without the slightest chance of
a breakdown.’

‘Glory be!’ comes in a muffled tone from Mrs. Denis, and, with
tremendous fuss and flurry, she draws the bolt, unlocks the gate, and
opens it wide to Wyndham.

‘Oh, yer honour, who’d a’ thought to see yerself this day! Faix, I
thought ’twas still in thim haythin countries ye were. Sure, if I’d
known I’d have had the gates open to yer honour; and I hope ye’ll
forgive me cap, sir—I’ve another wan just ironed, an’——’

‘Are you preparing for a siege?’ demands Wyndham grimly; ‘or what may be
the reason of this “barring out” on your part? Anything threatening on
the part of the Land Leaguers or the Home Rulers round here?’

‘Oh, law, sir! How could ye think o’ sich a thing? It was only that the
young lady, sir, was a trifle nervous.’

‘She will have to take her nerves somewhere else,’ says the barrister.
‘Now, Mrs. Denis, I hear from your husband that it is your fault that
this—this distinctly undesirable person is still a resident in my
house.’

Mrs. Denis, who has been bowing and scraping up to this, now grows
suddenly alert.

‘Arrah, what are ye sayin’ at all?’ says she. ‘D’ye mane to tell me that
Denis knew ye were come back, and niver give me tale or todin’s of it?’

‘That is altogether beside the question. The thing is——’

‘Faix, the raal thing is this,’ says Mrs. Denis, ‘that I’ll break ivery
bone in that thraitor’s skin the next time I see him! Why,’ says she,
squaring her arms and growing so wrathful that the questionable cap on
the top of her head begins to quiver, ‘sixpence would have brought any
boy down from Dublin wid the news of yer return, and’—with a truly noble
declaration of an innate dishonesty—‘I could thin have’—she stops
herself, happily, at the last moment—‘made mesilf clane to meet ye,’
says she.

Wyndham, who is sufficiently Irish himself to put in the broken
paragraph, smiles coldly.

‘I am not going to discuss Denis with you,’ says he. ‘What I want to
know is why these gates are locked.’

‘Well, sir, there was this: when the young lady came she was that upset
wid bad thratement of wan sort or another that she seemed to be
tremblin’ all over. But whin I questioned her as to what ailed her, not
a word could I git out of her. I put her to bed, an’ she just clung to
the wall like, turnin’ an’ twistin’ her purty head, an’ always keepin’
away from me, an’ refusin’ the tay even, till the night came down upon
us. Ye will remimber, sir, that it was in the airly mornin’ that
Denis——’ At this word she breaks off, and grows again intensely angry.

‘That varmint,’ says she, ‘what did he mane by not tellin’ me? Wait till
I get me hands on him!’

‘Yes, the early morning,’ says Wyndham, bringing her back somewhat
impatiently to the place where she had broken off.

‘Well, yes, sir. I beg yer pardon. She come in the airly mornin, an’ I
could see at once that she was very sad at her heart, an’ so I just tuk
her in as I tell ye, for Denis, though a divil all out in most
ways’—here again a most ominous frown settles on her forehead—‘is still
a man to be depended on where a woman is concerned. And so I tuk her in
to oblige ye, sir.’

‘To oblige me!’ says Wyndham.

‘Well, sir, I thought so thin. An’’—she pauses, and looks straight at
him—‘an’ ye’ll nivver regret it, sir. If ye saw her a bit afther she
came, an’ her delight at yer purty place! “Why, there’s flowers
growin’,” she’d say, as if she never see them before, except whin
sellin’! “And, Mrs. Denis,” says she, “I like these walls,” says she.
“They is so high,” says she. “An’ it would be very hard for anyone,”
says she, “to git through thim, or even to look over thim.” Faith, ’tis
little the crayture knows of the boys round here, I said to meself whin
she said that. But I declare to ye, sir, it went to me heart whin she
said it, for it made it plain to me like that there was someone in her
life that she was thinkin’ of, that she didn’t want to get through these
walls or over thim aither. If he did, I could gather from what she said
that it would be wid no good intintions towards herself.’

‘Has she said anything as to where she came from or who she is?’ asks
Wyndham, with most disgraceful want of sympathy for this moving story.

‘No, sir, sorra a word, barrin’ that she was very unhappy until yer
honour sint her here.’

‘Till I sent her here! What on earth do you mean?’ says Wyndham
indignantly. ‘You must know very well that it was that blundering idiot
of a husband of yours that brought her here.’

‘Fegs, ’tis plain that ye know Denis, any way,’ says Denis’s wife
complacently. ‘Idjit is the word for him, sure enough! But however it
is, sir, the poor young lady is very continted here entirely,
an’’—waxing enthusiastic—‘’twould do your heart good to hear her singin’
about the garden, for all the world like wan o’ thim nate little
thrushes.’

This expectation on Mrs. Denis’s part, that he will find delight in the
thought of the unwelcome stranger making herself at home in his garden
and singing there like a ‘nate little thrush,’ naturally adds fuel to
the fire that already is burning vigorously in Wyndham’s breast.

‘Look here,’ says he, so fiercely that Mrs. Denis starts backwards,
‘you’ve taken a wrong impression of me altogether, if you think I shall
for one moment sanction the presence of that girl here. Your husband has
got me into this mess with his confounded stupidity, but I can trust
myself to get out of it—and I expect you to understand at once that your
“thrush”’—scornfully—‘will be out of this within twenty-four hours.’

With this he brushes by her, his temper—never very sweet—now
considerably the worse for wear.

Nice situation, by Jove! If it comes to the old man’s ears there will be
the devil to pay; and it’s sure to. He had felt there was something
queer in his aunt’s and Josephine’s manner yesterday when he called at
their house in Fitzwilliam Square. Why, if it gets about, there isn’t
one in forty amongst his acquaintances who will believe in the real
facts of the case.... It is a most confounded affair altogether. If he
hadn’t gone abroad, trusting—like the fool that he was—in Denis’s
ability to get her out of the Cottage at once, he could have done it
himself, and so speedily that no one would ever have been the wiser
about it. But now it has gone a little too far; people, no doubt, are
beginning to talk. Well, it shall go no farther. He will put an end to
it at once—this moment.




                               CHAPTER X.

                    ‘My heart is sad and heavy,
                      In this merry month of May,
                    As I stand beneath the lime-tree
                      On the bastion old and gray.’


‘This moment’ has come. As Mrs. Denis, routed, but by no means
vanquished, disappears hastily round one corner of the pretty cottage,
someone else comes round the other. A young girl, singing sweetly,
merrily, though in a subdued voice. Just as she reaches her corner she
looks behind her; her singing ceases, and an amused look brightens her
face—a face that has known much sadness. Again she looks behind her, as
if expecting something, this time turning her back on Wyndham; and now,
a moment later, a huge dog tears across the grass and literally flings
himself upon the girl, whose tall but slender frame seems to give way
beneath his canine embraces. For a second only; then she recovers
herself, her pliant body sways forward, and, catching the dog’s handsome
head in her arms, a merry tussle ensues between them. It is almost a
dance, so agile is the girl, so bent is the dog on entering into the
spirit of the fun with all his heart.

Wyndham, watching, feels no sense of amusement. Indignation is still
full upon him, and now it grows more intense as he sees the dog—his
dog—a brute hitherto devoted to himself, lavishing its affection upon an
utter stranger.

He makes an impatient movement, which the dog’s quick eye sees, and,
bolting from his late companion, he comes bounding towards Wyndham, from
whom, it must be confessed, he gets but a poor welcome.

The girl, turning, surprised at the dog’s desertion of her, becomes
suddenly aware that there is someone beyond, and as Wyndham emerges into
sight she makes a movement to fly, then stands stricken, as if turned to
stone.

It is impossible, under the circumstances, but that she should be known
to Wyndham; but as he looks at her he tells himself that, if he had not
known that Denis had brought her down here on the morning of the
Professor’s death, he would never have recognised her. Her dress, for
one thing, is so different. Of course he had found time to send a cheque
to Mrs. Moriarty before going abroad for the use of the ‘waif,’ as he
had somehow called the girl to himself, not knowing her name—a sum
handsome enough to dress her as the young heiress of a most unexpected
three hundred a year should be dressed—and it comes to him now that the
‘waif’ had not been slow in the spending of it. No doubt Mrs. Moriarty
had been the ‘middle man,’ but the ‘waif’ had known what she was about,
or else some well-born instinct had directed her.

‘Well born!’ Pah! A poor, miserable girl like that, with a shawl thrown
over her head when first he saw her—and yet, her face, her feet——

He can see them from beneath her petticoats. They are not like mice, by
any means, but they are of the proportions usually assigned to those who
have many grandfathers, and they are very delicately clad.

If he had not recognised her at all at first, she had barely recognised
him. That was because of the surprise—the shock, perhaps. She had almost
come to believe in the possibility of living here always and alone,
never seeing anyone except kind Mrs. Moriarty and Nero, the dog.

She has turned as white as death; and Wyndham, looking at her, tells
himself it is the memory of that last dreadful night, when she had
accepted death as her portion, rather than the life that lies behind
her, that has blanched her cheeks and brought that terror into her eyes.

But in a minute all these theories of the clever barrister are distilled
and float into air.

Having seen him, and dwelt upon his face, the colour in her own face has
crept back, and with a sharp sigh of relief she draws nearer to him
slowly, the dog, who has gone back to her, following, his muzzle in her
hand.

‘I—I thought you were a stranger,’ says she faintly.

It is an odd sentence. A stranger! What else is he to her? Her manner,
however, makes it clear to him that she has lived, since her entrance
into the Cottage, in constant dread of being discovered by someone, and
of being dragged back to a former existence—to which death, as she had
proved to him that night, seems far preferable.

This accounts for the locked gates, and the girl’s admiration for the
walls—an admiration that no doubt has but little to do with the ivy and
the Virginian creeper, now throwing out its palest leaves of green, and
the other trailing glories that have lifted them into a dream of beauty.

‘Your thought was very nearly right,’ says Wyndham, with a cold smile;
he is quite unmoved by the nervous pallor and the frightened expression
on the young face before him. Barristers after a while get accustomed to
young, frightened faces, and lose their interest in them. ‘But, no
doubt, you remember me?’

He pauses, and the girl looks at him for a moment.

‘Yes,’ says she slowly, her eye sinking to the ground. That last
dreadful scene, in which he had played so conspicuous a part, and when
in the sullenness of her despair she had welcomed death, lies once again
clear as a picture to her eyes. She shudders, and a faint moisture
breaks out upon her forehead.

‘I am glad to see you quite recovered,’ says he in a tone which belies
his words. ‘If you will be so good as to come indoors, I should like to
speak to you for a few minutes about your future.’

His tone is so curt, so positively unpleasant, that the girl, colouring
deeply and without another word, moves towards the hall-door of the
charming cottage, and leads the way through the porch—so exquisitely
festooned with delicate greeneries—into the long many-windowed room
beyond. This room runs the entire length of the house, and overlooks the
garden. As she goes a deep melancholy falls upon her. What has he come
to say? Why is his manner so unkind? That night—that awful night—he had
seemed to befriend her—to take her part—and now——

‘You are of course aware,’ says Wyndham formally, when they have reached
the drawing-room—the drawing-room that used to be his, but that now
seems to slip out of his possession, as he sees the slender figure of
the girl turn after his entrance, as if to receive him. ‘You are of
course aware that the late Professor, Mr. Hennessy, left you three
hundred a year?’

The girl, standing midway between one of the windows and Wyndham, makes
a slight affirmative movement of her head. She would have spoken, but
words failed her.

‘That was in accordance with his promise to you. If the experiment
failed, well’—with a careless shrug—‘there was nothing. If it was
successful—you were to be the gainer by it.’

His voice is clear, unemotional; there is a sort of ‘laying down the
law’ about it that takes every spark of sympathy that there might have
been quite out of it.

‘Yes.’ This time she manages to speak, but she colours as she speaks,
and blushes very painfully; and now her eyes seek the ground. If one
were to exactly describe her, one would say—but very reluctantly, I
think—that she looks ashamed.

‘With three hundred a year you should be able to——’

She interrupts him.

‘It is too much—far too much,’ says she, with an effort. ‘I don’t want
so much as that. Fifty pounds a year would be enough; I am sure I
could——’

She stops.

‘All that is beyond question,’ says the barrister coldly. ‘It was the
Professor’s wish that you should have three hundred a year, and now that
he is gone, there can be no further argument about it. He has no near
relations so far as I can make out, so that there is no reason why you
should not accept the money left to you by him. What I came to-day for
was, not about the Professor’s gift to you, but to know what you intend
to do with it.’

‘With it?’

‘Yes; what, in fact, are you going to do?’

‘What am I going to do?’ She looks up at him for the first time; a
startled expression grows in her large dark eyes.

‘We all have a future before us,’ says Wyndham, ‘and you——’ He hesitates
here, hardly knowing how to go on with those earnest eyes on his. ‘Of
course I feel that, for the time being, I am in a sense bound to look
after you, the Professor being an old friend of mine, and you——’ Again
he stops. It seems impossible, indeed, to refer to that strange scene
where he had had so prominent a part. ‘You will understand,’ says he,
‘that the Professor wished you to be placed in an assured position, and
he left me to see to that.’

Here the girl makes a sharp movement of her hands descriptive of fear.

‘Naturally,’ says Wyndham, in answer to that swift movement of the
pretty hands, ‘you object to my interference. But I must ask your
forbearance in a matter that’—with a steady look at her—‘does not
concern me in the slightest degree. You must really forgive me if I seem
impatient; but, as you are aware, I know nothing about you, and to look
after you as the Professor asked me to do requires thought. I am in
complete ignorance about you. I can see that you are educated, but
beyond that I know nothing.’

‘Ah! you know nothing indeed,’ says she quickly. ‘I am not educated. I
know hardly anything. I am one of the most ignorant people alive.’

‘And yet——’

‘I have read anything I could find to read,’ interrupts she; ‘and at one
time I went to a day-school, but that is all.’

‘I see,’ says Wyndham. His tone is indifferent, but, inwardly, curiosity
is stirring him. So little education, and yet so calm, so refined a
manner! Who is this girl, with her well-bred air, but with, too, the
little touches here and there that betray the fact of her having lived
not only out of the fashionable world, but very far from even the
outskirts of it? What whim of fate has given her that shapely head,
those shell-like ears and pointed fingers, yet given her into the
clutches of the middle classes?

‘You would wish to enlarge your studies?’ asks he presently.

For the first time since she came towards him, in the garden outside,
she now lets her eyes rest frankly upon his.

‘Oh, if I could!’ says she.

‘That is very easily to be managed, I should think. You have three
hundred a year of your own, and can command advantages that hitherto, I
imagine, from what you say, have been withheld from you.’ He waits a
moment, as if expecting her to speak, to make some comment on his words,
but she remains mute.

‘If you could tell me something of yourself—your history—what brought
you to this,’ says Wyndham, ‘it might make matters simpler for both you
and me.’

The girl shrinks backwards as though he had struck her.

‘No, no!’ cries she quickly.




                              CHAPTER XI.

                  ‘I wept in my dream, for I fancied
                    That you had forsaken me;
                  I woke, and all night I lay weeping
                    Till morning, bitterly.’


Wyndham lifts his brows.

‘Pray do not distress yourself,’ says he. ‘It is a free country; you can
speak or be silent, just as you wish. It had merely occurred to me that
there might be friends of yours naturally very anxious about you, and
that I might convey to them a message from you.’

The unsympathetic nature of his tone has restored the girl to her usual
manner more than anything else could have done. She glances at him.

‘Friends!’ says she bitterly.

‘At all events,’ says Wyndham, who has now begun to acknowledge his
curiosity with regard to her even to himself, and is determined on
pushing the matter as far as possible, ‘there must be someone on the
look-out for you.’

At this she turns as white as death.

‘Is there? Have you seen—have you’—she looks as though she is about to
faint—‘heard anything?’

‘Nothing—nothing at all!’ exclaims he quickly, a little shocked at her
agitation, that seems excessive. ‘Do not be frightened; I assure you I
know as little of anyone connected with you as I know of yourself.’

Here again he gives her an opening, if she wishes to make a declaration
of any sort, and again she remains mute. There is something even
obstinately silent in her whole air.

Her hands in her lap are tightly clasped, as though to help her to keep
her secret to all eternity.

‘You will not confide in me, I see,’ says he, with a little contemptuous
shrug; ‘and, after all, there is no earthly reason why you should. I am
as great a stranger to you as you are to me, and if I spoke at all it
was, believe me, because I fancied I might be of some assistance to you.
But women nowadays have taken the reins into their own hands, and I have
no doubt that you will be able to manage your own affairs to perfection.
In the meantime, however, if I can be of the slightest use to you in
looking out for a suitable home, for instance, I hope you understand I
shall be delighted to do all I can.’

The girl has drawn nearer during this speech, and is now standing before
him, the frightened eyes uplifted and her breath coming short and fast.
‘You mean—but here—can I not—might I not—a home, you said——’

‘Well, yes,’ says Wyndham. ‘A home where you might have a companion and
be very comfortable; but not here, you know.’

‘But——’

‘You can’t stay here, I’m afraid,’ says Wyndham, who, between his anger
and his suspicions of her, is beginning to wish he had never been born.

The girl turns away from him, in so far that only her profile now can be
seen, whilst her right hand has caught hold of the back of a chair near
her, as if for support.

‘But why?’ asks she, in a low tone. ‘Mrs. Moriarty likes me to be here.’

‘But, you see,’ says Wyndham gravely, ‘it is my house, and not Mrs.
Moriarty’s.’

‘Yes.’ She looks at him as if hardly understanding, but presently an
expression grows upon her face that gives him to know that she thinks
him churlish.

‘It is quite a big house,’ says she.

There is a pause—a pause in which he tells himself that evidently up to
this she had been accustomed to houses of very cramped limits. The
Circular Road in Dublin would supply such houses, built for respectable
artisans and clerks in commercial places, and the best of the decent
strata that cover the earth and are of the earth earthy. The Circular
Road, or some other road, has no doubt supplied the kind of house to
which the girl has been accustomed—this girl, with her pale patrician
face and her singular strength of mind. It is she who at last breaks the
silence. ‘There is plenty of room for me,’ says she.

‘I know—of course I know that,’ says Wyndham hurriedly. ‘But then, you
see, it—it wouldn’t do, you see.’

He looks deliberately at her, as if to explain his meaning, but, nothing
coming of the look, he falls back once more upon facts.

‘I come here sometimes,’ says he.

‘Yes; Mrs. Denis told me that,’ says the girl. ‘But’—eagerly—‘I
shouldn’t be in the way at all. I could stay in that little room
belonging to Mrs. Denis—that little room off the kitchen.’

‘Oh, that isn’t it,’ says Wyndham, frowning in his embarrassment. How
the deuce is one to say it plainly to a girl who can’t, or won’t, or
doesn’t understand! ‘The fact is——’ He has begun with the greatest
bravery, determined to explain the situation at all hazards; but,
happening to meet her eyes, this clever barrister, who has faced many a
barefaced criminal victoriously, breaks down. The eyes he has looked
into are full of tears.

‘Look here,’ says he almost savagely, ‘it’s out of the question! Do you
hear?’ His tone is so terribly abrupt that it strikes cold to the heart
of the poor girl looking at him. If he is going to turn her out of this
house, this haven of refuge, where—where can she go?

She struggles with herself, some touch of dignity that belongs to
her—wherever she came from or whoever she is—giving her a certain
strength.

‘Of course—I see——’ She is beginning to stammer dreadfully. ‘I am sorry
about it; but I thought—I fancied I could stay here. But now I can go—I
can go somewhere. There must be other places, and, indeed, just now you
told me there were other places, and that I could go to——’

She struggles with the word ‘them,’ the last of her sad sentence, but
can’t speak it; and now all her hard-found dignity gives way, to her
everlasting shame, and to Wyndham’s terrible discomfiture she bursts
into a passion of tears.

‘Don’t do that,’ says Wyndham gruffly. It is impossible to conceal from
himself the fact that he is frightened out of his life. Fear because of
her tears is nothing, but it is with ever-increasing self-contempt that
he knows that he is going even so far as to give in and let her stay at
the Cottage. After all, there are many other places for him in this big
world, but for her, perhaps, not so many; and she seems to have set her
heart on this little spot, and, hang it all! why can’t she stop crying?

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ says she at last, trying passionately to stifle her
sobs. She has turned away from him to the window, and there is something
in her whole attitude so descriptive of despair, and fear, and shame,
that, in spite of his anger, pity for her rises in his heart. ‘I don’t
know why I’m crying; I don’t often cry. But if I leave this, where shall
I go? where shall I hide myself?’

What on earth has she done? Her words denote fear—a guilty fear. What if
he should be about to take as a tenant for the Cottage a well known and
hardened criminal, for whom, perhaps, the police are even now on the
look-out? Her face, however, belies her tone; and, for the rest, he has
not the courage to face again a flow of those pitiful tears. Stay she
must.

One last protest, however, he makes as a salve to his conscience.

‘What do you see in this place that so attracts you?’ asks he, with
ever-increasing grumpiness. The girl turns to him a flushed and tearful
face.

‘I never knew what a home could be like till I came here,’ says she.
‘Never, never! You have had one—all the world has had one except me. It
means new life to me. Oh’—bitterly—‘it is the only life I have ever
known—the only happiness. If, sir’—she comes towards him and with a
little impulsive action holds out her hands—‘if I might stay——’

‘Well, you can,’ says he ungraciously.

He gives in so suddenly, and she is naturally so unprepared for so quick
a surrender, that for a moment she says nothing. Her eyes are fixed on
him, however, as if trying to read him through; they are beautiful eyes,
and Wyndham, his professional instincts on the alert, finds himself
wondering what lies behind them in that brain of hers.

‘Do you mean it?’ says she at last breathlessly; if you do, I cannot
thank you enough. Oh, to stay here within these lovely walls!’
Instinctively she glances out of the window to the ivy-clad walls, as if
in their protection she finds great comfort. A moment later a cloud
gathers on her forehead. ‘But you don’t like me to stay,’ she says.

‘It doesn’t matter what I like,’ says Wyndham, who certainly does not
shine on this occasion. ‘The arrangement we have come to now is that you
are to rent this cottage from me, at what sum we can agree about later
on.’

‘To rent it? I shall, then, be—— It’— she tries to hide the joy in her
eyes, feeling it to be indecent—‘it will belong to me?’

‘Yes,’ says Wyndham. At this moment he feels very little more will make
him positively hate her.

‘It will no longer be yours?’ Her voice is trembling.

‘In a sense, no.’ He turns and takes up his hat; this interview is
getting too much for him. There will be an explosion shortly if she goes
on like this.

‘It seems very selfish,’ says the girl. She is looking at him, though
for the last three minutes he has refused to look at her. ‘I am taking
your house away from you.’

‘There are other houses.’ He is now putting on his gloves.

‘Ah! that is as true for me as for you.’

‘We have come to an agreement, I think’—grimly. ‘Let us keep to it.’ He
turns to the door.

‘You are going?’ says she nervously. She follows him. ‘You——’ She stops,
and courtesy compels him to look back. Two troubled eyes meet his.

‘When——’ stammers she.

‘I shall come down some day next week to make final arrangements,’ says
he impatiently, and again takes a step or two away, getting so far this
time as to turn the handle of the door. Here, however, again he glances
back. She is standing where he last saw her, her young face looking
troubled, frightened, and uncertain.

‘Next week,’ repeats he jerkily. It is disagreeable to him to think that
it is through his fault that the nervous anxiety has crept into her
eyes. ‘And—er—good-bye.’ He certainly had not meant to do it, but he now
holds out his hand to her, and with a little swift, eager movement she
comes to him and slips her own into it.

A slim little hand, and beautifully shaped, but brown, and looking a
little as though it had done some hard work in its time, yet the grace
with which she gives it to him is exquisite.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Just at the gate he meets Mrs. Denis again.

‘This young lady,’ says he abruptly, ‘seems to have set her heart upon
living here. It is extremely unpleasant for me, but she appears to have
no other place to go to. She will therefore become my tenant. She will,
you understand, take the Cottage from me.’

‘Bless us an’ save us!’ says Mrs. Denis. ‘An’ yer honour—what will you
do?’

‘Keep out of it,’ says Wyndham coldly. ‘I suppose she will arrange to
keep you on. She——What’s her name?’—sharply.

‘I don’t know, sir; she don’t seem to like to spake about it. Miss Ella
I calls her.’

‘Ella? Did you say her Christian name was Ella?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Ah!’—thoughtfully. ‘Well, good-bye.’

‘But, sir, you’ll be coming again?’

‘Yes, next week, to arrange about the rent; not after that.’

He strides through the gate and up the road.

‘Faix, and I’m thinkin’ ye will,’ says Mrs. Denis, watching him with her
arms akimbo till he disappears round the corner. ‘’Tis mighty purty eyes
she’s got in that mighty purty head of hers. An’ so he’s not goin’ to
turn her out, after all! Didn’t I tell you, Bridget Moriarty,’ rubbing
her chin, on which a very handsome beard is growing, ‘that he’d soften
whin he put his glance upon her?’




                              CHAPTER XII.

                  ‘Jest and youthful jollity,
                  Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles,
                  Nods and becks, and wreathed smiles.


‘Where’s our beloved auntie?’ asks Mr. Fitzgerald, looking generally
round him from his seat on the tail of Betty’s gown.

It is the evening of the same day, and still divinely warm. Not yet has
night made its first approach, and from bush to bush the birds are
calling, as if in haste to get as much merriment out of the departing
day as time will give them. From here—in the bushes round the
tennis-ground, the one solitary court that Carew Barry and his cousin,
Dom Fitzgerald, have made with their own hands, after a hard tussle with
the Rector for the bit of ground, that seemed to him quite a big slice
off his glebe—to the big syringa-tree beyond, the sweet, glad music of
the birds swells and grows, filling the evening air with delicate
throbbings. Ever the little creatures seem to call one to another;
passionately sometimes, as if bursting their little throats in their
wild joy, and anon softly, pleadingly, but always calling, calling,
calling.

From the old-fashioned garden beyond comes the scent of the roses—all
old-world roses, as befits the garden, but none the less beautiful for
that. The rose céleste and the white rose unique, the cabbage rose and
the perfect rose of a hundred leaves, all lend their sweetness to the
air; indeed, on this June evening the place is ‘on fire with roses.’

The little group sitting on the edge of the tennis-ground seems very
happy and contented—lazy, perhaps, is a better word. Susan, as usual,
has Bonnie in her lap, and Tom, the baby, has fallen asleep with his
head on Betty’s knee. Jacky, still full of memories of the awful burglar
he had interviewed in the morning, is wondering whether he will raid the
village to-night, and if so, whether he will carry off Aunt Jemima;
whilst Carew, the eldest son, who is seventeen, and therefore a year
younger than Susan, is lazily dwelling on the best choice of a stream
for to-morrow’s fishing.

His cousin, Dom Fitzgerald, is the first to break the lovely spell of
silence that has fallen on them. He is a cousin of the Barrys, and a
nephew of their father and of Miss Jemima Barry also, the Rector’s
sister, who, since the death of her sister-in-law, has always lived with
them, and who, if a most exemplary person, is certainly what is commonly
described as ‘trying.’

The parish of Curraghcloyne is small, the income even smaller. But if
Providence, in giving Mr. Barry this parish as his special charge, had
been niggardly to him in money matters, it had certainly made up to him
lavishly in another respect—it had given him, for example, a large, and
what promised to be an ever-increasing, family, so increasing, indeed,
that it would ultimately have beaten the record but for the untimely
death of Mrs. Barry, who had faded out of life at Tom’s birth. She was
then just thirty-two, but she looked forty.

To her husband, however, gazing at her dead face, surrounded by its
lilies and white roses, she looked seventeen again—the age at which he
had married her—and though he was a man entirely wrapped up in his books
and theories, it is an almost certain thing that he never forgot her,
and that he mourned and lamented for her as few men whose lives are set
in smoother places do for their beloved.

Miss Barry, his sister, came on the death of his wife and took
possession of the house, Susan being then just thirteen. She had but a
bare sum wherewith to clothe and keep herself, and was therefore of
little use in helping the household where money was concerned; and it
was therefore with a sense of thankfulness that the Rector four years
ago accepted the charge of Dominick Fitzgerald, an orphan, and the son
of a stepbrother of his wife.

The poor, pretty wife was then a year dead, but he knew all about
Dominick’s people. The Rector himself came of a good old Irish family,
and his wife had been even more highly connected. Indeed, the lad who
came to Mr. Barry four years ago, though he had inherited little from
his father, would in all probability succeed to his uncle’s title and
five or six thousand a year—a small thing for a baronet, but, still,
worth having. Of course, there was always a chance that the uncle, a
middle-aged man, might marry, though he was consumptive and generally an
invalid; but all that lay in the future, and at present it was decided
that the boy should be given a profession; but having proved remarkably
idle and wild at school—though nothing disgraceful was ever laid to his
charge—his uncle in one of his intervals of good health had desired that
he should be sent down to Mr. Barry, for whom Sir Spencer Fitzgerald had
an immense respect and a little fear, for a few reasons that need not be
specified, though, if Sir Spencer only knew it, the Rector was the last
man in the world to betray the secrets of anyone.

The Rector accepted the charge gladly. He had passed several young men
(who had been private pupils of his before his marriage) very
successfully for the Civil Service, and he was doing his best for
Dominick now, whom from the very first he liked, in spite of the
reputation for idleness that came with him.

Indeed, Dom Fitzgerald had fallen into the family circle as though it
had been made for him, and had grown to be quite a brother to his
new-found cousins. He at once grew fond of Susan, and became on the spot
a chum of Carew’s, who was reading with his father for the army and
expected to pass next year. And he quarrelled all day long with Betty,
who accepted him as a ‘pal’ from the moment of his appearing. Betty
inclined towards slang.

As for the children, they all loved him; and, indeed, it must be said
that he loved them, and spent a considerable amount of the fifty pounds
allowed him for yearly pocket-money upon them.

‘Well, where is she?’ persists he, turning a lazy eye from one to
another, at last resting it on Susan.

‘She has gone down to Father Murphy’s about Jane,’ says Susan
reluctantly. ‘You know Jane is always breaking everything, and to-day
she broke that old cup of our great-grandmother’s, and Aunt Jemima was
very angry. She has gone to tell Father Murphy about it, and to say she
will never take a Roman Catholic servant again unless he punishes Jane
severely.’

‘And Father Murphy will laugh,’ says Carew, with a shrug. ‘He knows she
must take Catholic servants or do without them. All the Protestant girls
of that class here are farmers’ daughters, and either won’t go into
service at all, or else only to Lady O’Donovan’s or the O’Connors’.’

‘Oh, you should have heard Jane!’ cries Betty, going off into one of her
peals of laughter. ‘When Aunt Jemima had reduced her to a rage, she came
in weeping to me. All the forlorn hopes fall back upon me.’

‘True, even this poor old forlorn one,’ says Dom promptly, seizing his
opportunity to lift his head from her gown to drop it upon her lap.

After which there is a scuffle.

‘Oh, never mind Dom!’ says Susan impatiently. ‘What did Jane say to you
about the cup?’

‘She said——Go away, Dom.’

‘I’m sure she didn’t,’ says Dom, with an aggrieved air. ‘It’s an
aspersion on my character, Susan. You don’t believe this, do you?’

‘She said,’ goes on Betty, very properly taking no notice of the
interruption: ‘“Law, Miss Betty, miss, did ye iver hear the like o’
that? Did ye iver hear such a row about nothin’?”’

‘“It wasn’t about nothing,” I said; “because you know how even father
valued that cup, though an uglier thing I never saw in my life.”’

‘“Fegs, I don’t know what ye call anythin’,” said Jane (she was crying
all the time; you know how she can roar); “but yer aunt herself tould me
that that cup is a hundhred years ould if a day, an’ wid that to make
sich a screech over it! Faix, it must have bin rotten wid age, miss; an’
no wondher it come to bits in me hands.”’

They are all delighted with the story.

‘I don’t think Aunt Jemima would have been so cross with poor Jane,’
says Susan, in a low tone and with a glance round her to make sure of no
one’s being within hearing, ‘but for those eggs this morning.’

‘The eggs under the speckled hen?’ asks Jacky; ‘I heard her speaking
about them. Won’t they come out?’

Susan shakes her head, and Carew and Dominick edge a little out of
sight. The latter, under a pretence of feeling too warm, hides his face
under the big straw hat that Betty has thrown upon the grass beside her.

‘They should have come out ten days ago,’ says Susan; ‘but they’—she
casts an uncertain glance at Carew, who has turned over and is now lying
with his face upon his arms, and is evidently developing ague-fever—‘but
they didn’t.’

‘Were they all addled?’ asks Jacky, with amazement.

‘No; they were all boiled,’ says Susan.

‘Boiled!’ says little Bonnie, sitting up with an effort. ‘Who boiled
them—the hen?’

At this there is a stifled roar from under Betty’s hat, whereupon the
owner of it lifts it and discovers Mr. Fitzgerald plainly on the point
of apoplexy.

‘Just the sort of thing one would expect from you,’ says she scornfully.
‘No wonder you want to hide your face; but you shan’t do it under my
hat, anyhow.’

‘Oh, Carew, think of that poor hen waiting and waiting for three weeks,
and then for ten days more; I call it horrid,’ says Susan. ‘I really
think you ought to be ashamed of yourselves, you two.’

‘Ought we? Then we will be,’ says Dom; ‘never shall it be said that I
shirked my duty, at all events. Carew, get out of that, and be ashamed
of yourself instantly.’

‘Oh, that’s all very fine,’ says Betty, ‘trying to get out of it like
that; but let me tell you that I think——’

However, what Betty may think of people who put boiled eggs under
sitting hens is for ever lost to posterity, because at this moment Jane,
with red eyes and a depressed demeanour, comes hurrying up to them
across the small lawn, a covered basket in her hand.




                             CHAPTER XIII.

           ‘O, coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!’


‘For you, miss,’ says she, handing the basket to Susan.

Susan turns crimson. That basket! She knows it well.

‘For me?’ stammers she.

‘Yes, miss.’

‘Who’—nervously—‘who brought it?’

‘A boy, miss.’ For an instant Susan’s heart feels relief, but for an
instant only.

‘Whose boy?’ falters she.

‘I don’t know, miss. He came an’ wint in a flash like. I hope, miss, as
there isn’t anythin’ desthructive in it,’ says Jane, whose misfortunes
of the morning have raised in her a pessimistic spirit. ‘They do say
thim moonlighters are goin’ about agin.’

‘Do you mean to say the—the messenger said nothing?’

‘No, miss, except that it was for you. That was all, miss; and I’m not
deaf, though I wish I was before I heard all that was said to me this
mornin’ about an ould cup that——’ Here she lifts her apron and sniffs
vigorously behind it.

‘Oh, it can’t be for me,’ says Susan, with decision; ‘take it away,
Jane. There has been some mistake, of course. Take it away at once. Do
you hear? The—the boy will probably call for it again in a little time.’

‘I don’t think he will, miss; he looked like a runaway,’ says Jane.

‘Good heavens! how interesting,’ says Mr. Fitzgerald, breaking at last
into the charmed silence that has held them all since the advent of Jane
and the mysterious basket. ‘Who can this unknown admirer be? No doubt it
contains roses’—staring at the basket—‘or heliotropes—heliotrope in the
language of flowers means devotion! Susan, are you above a peep?’

‘Yes, I am,’ says Susan hastily.

‘I am not,’ says Betty, springing forward and pulling open the cover.
‘Oh, I say, cherries! and such beauties, too! Susan, you are in luck!’

‘And so are we,’ says Fitzgerald, putting a hand lightly over her
shoulder and drawing up a bunch of the pretty fruit between his fingers.

‘Oh, I think we ought not to eat them—I do indeed,’ says Susan, in a
small agony. There can be no doubt now about the fact that the thief,
repentant and struck to the very soul by her eloquent pleadings, had
sought to redeem himself in her eyes by sending the stolen cherries to
her. Whether with a view of giving her the pleasure of eating them, or
with the higher desire of proving to her that he hadn’t devoured them,
must, she feels and hopes (because to meet him again would be very
unpleasant to her), for ever remain unknown.

‘Poor fellow!’ thinks she, regarding the cherries with mixed emotions
that are not altogether devoid of admiration for her own hitherto
unimagined powers of persuasion; ‘he was certainly and sincerely
penitent. One could see that.’ She feels quite an uplifting of her soul.
Perhaps, who knows? she has been born as a worthy successor to Mrs. Fry,
or some of those good people! But then, after all, it is, undoubtedly,
to Mr. Crosby he should have made restitution, not to her. It is,
however, difficult to restore Irish cherries—a rather perishable
commodity—to an owner who happens to be at the moment in the middle of
Africa, or America, or China, for all she knows.

‘Not eat them!’ says Betty indignantly. ‘Why, what else are you going to
do with them—make them into jam?’

‘They are not mine—I’m sure they are not mine,’ says Susan. ‘Who, for
instance, could have sent them?’

Here Jacky makes a movement.

‘Jacky, you know nothing!’ cries Susan, turning indignant, warning eyes
upon him; whereupon Jacky, remembering his promise, subsides once again
into dismal silence.

‘Jacky, I smell a conspiracy,’ says Dominick, who has caught the look
between them; ‘and you are the head-centre. Speak, boy, whilst yet there
is time!’

‘I’ve nothing to say,’ says Jacky sulkily; he is naturally of a somewhat
morose disposition, and now feels positively ill at not being able to
divulge the delightful story of which these glowing cherries are the
result.

‘Susan, I do believe you have at last got an admirer,’ says Carew, in
the complimentary tone of the orthodox brother, who never can understand
why on earth any fellow can admire his sister. ‘Come! out with it; he
seems a sensible fellow, any way. Flowers are awful rot, but there’s
something in cherries.’

‘Betty, when I fall in love with you I’ll present you with a course of
goodies,’ says Dominick, regarding that damsel with an encouraging eye.

‘I have no admirers, as you all know,’ says Susan, her pale and lovely
face a little heightened in colour. She is thinking with horror of what
would have happened if that poor awful thief had brought them in person.
But, of course, he was afraid.

‘Perhaps Lady Millbank sent them,’ suggests Betty, after a violent
discussion with Fitzgerald on the head of his last remark. ‘I saw her in
town yesterday.’

‘So did I,’ says Carew. ‘Like a sack—not tied in the middle.’

Susan feels almost inclined in the emergencies of the moment to say
‘Perhaps so,’ and let it stand at that, but conscience forbids her.

‘She would have sent a footman and her card,’ says she dejectedly.
‘No’—decidedly, and preparing to close up the basket—‘they are not meant
for me, and even if they were, I could not accept them, unless I knew
where they came from.’

‘Do you mean that you are not going to give us some?’ says Betty,
rising, not only figuratively, but actually, to the occasion, and
standing over Susan. ‘I never heard anything so mean in all my life.’

‘Susan,’ says Fitzgerald mildly but firmly, ‘if you think to escape
alive from this spot with these cherries, let me at once warn you of a
sense of impending danger.’

‘Oh, I say, Susan, don’t be a fool!’ says Carew, turning his lazy length
upon the grass, a manœuvre that brings him much closer to Susan and the
cherries.

‘It’s a beastly shame!’ says Jacky, in a growl. And at this little Tom,
as if moved to the very soul, or stomach, sets up a piteous howl.

Susan, with all the ‘young martyr’ air about her, looks sternly round.
No; she will not give in, and it’s perfectly disgusting of them to think
so much of eating things. Her glance finishes at Jacky, who is scowling
and threatening her with the fellest of all fell eyes, and then descends
at last on Bonnie—Bonnie, who is lying in her arms, his pretty, thin,
patient little face against her shoulder. Poor little Bonnie! darling
little Bonnie! who has said nothing—not a word—but whose gentle eyes are
now resting on the fruit; Bonnie, whose appetite is always miserable—so
difficult to please. Susan, seeing that silent, wistful glance, feels
her heart sink within her.

Must she—must she deny him, her poor little delicate boy, her best
beloved of all the many that she loves? Oh, she must! she will be firm.
These cherries really are not hers. Even for Bonnie she——

The child stirs in her arms and sighs, the faintest, gentlest little
sigh—only one who loved him could have heard it; but with that little
sigh went out all Susan’s stern resolutions. Almost unconsciously her
hand goes towards the basket that holds the cherries. Slowly, slowly at
first, as if held back; but as it nears the glowing fruit it makes a
rush, as it were, dives into it, and in a second more Bonnie’s thin
little paws are filled with a huge and crimson bunch of the sweet
cherries.

Alas for Susan’s principles! They have all vanished away like snow in
the sun, beneath two little pain-filled eyes.

Alas for Susan’s principles again! As Bonnie’s white little face lights
up as he catches the pretty fruit, and bites one of them in two with his
sharp childish teeth, and as after that he lifts the other half of it to
Susan’s mouth, and presses it against her closed but smiling lips, she
does not refuse him. She opens her lips, and, against all her beliefs,
lets the stolen thing glide between them. The happy laughter of the
child as she takes the fruit is nectar to her, and in a little joyous
way she hugs him to her, catching him against her breast; and though she
does not know it, her one thought is this: ‘Let all things go so long as
this one is happy.’

And certainly Bonnie for the moment is happy with his cherries. But the
cherry he gave her is the first and only one out of her basket that
passes between her lips. And that is self-denial, I can tell you from
experience, for a girl of eighteen.

After this there is a general raid upon the basket, Betty and Fitzgerald
being quite conspicuous in their efforts to secure the largest cherries,
whilst Jacky runs them very hard. And Susan, afraid lest the supply
should fail before Bonnie gets a handsome share, pulls him to her and
fills his little hands. But her own hands? Never! Stern is her youthful
virtue. Those stolen cherries! No, no, she could not touch them, and,
besides, to watch Bonnie’s delight in them is enough for her.

Bonnie! It seems such a sad critique upon the little fragile child
racked with rheumatism and so sadly disabled by it.

In happier days, when he was, in truth, the bonniest little being of
them all, his poor mother—now mercifully in heaven—had given him the
dear pet name. And of course it had clung to him through all the ills
that followed.

The beginning was so simple, so easy to be described. A wet day when the
child had escaped from home and had been forgotten until the early
dinner reminded them of him. There were so many to remember, and they
all ran so loosely here and there, that up to that hour no one had
missed him. His mother was dead. The keynote of course lay there. She
was dead and lying in her grave for a year or more, and the young things
who tried to take her place, when they had asked a question or two,
never thought of Bonnie again. Carew, the eldest boy, then only twelve,
did not appear at dinner either, and it was naturally and carelessly
supposed that Bonnie was with him.

Alas for little Bonnie! Late that night he was discovered and brought
home, saturated to the skin, and almost lifeless. Asleep he had been
found beneath the shade of a big beech-tree; and sleep eternal he would
have known indeed had he not been discovered before morning by the
frightened people from the Vicarage, who, when night set in, had gone
hunting for him far and near. The Rector himself, roused from his notes
and papers by Susan’s terrors, had joined in the search; but it was
Susan who found him, tired, exhausted (after a ramble in which he had
lost himself, poor little soul!), and wet through from the rain that had
fallen incessantly since three o’clock in the afternoon.

It was Susan who carried him home, staggering sometimes beneath the
weight, but strong in the very misery of her fear. When at last home was
reached, it was Susan who undressed him, and lay awake the long night
through with him, holding him in her warm arms to heat his shivering
little body. And, indeed, when the morning came he seemed nothing the
worse for his exposure.

But towards the evening he began to shiver again, and next day he was
lying prone, racked with all the pangs of rheumatic fever. They twisted
and tore his little frame, and though at the last the doctor pulled him
through, and he rose again from his bed, it was but as a shadow of his
former merry self—a stricken child, a cripple for life.

Poor Susan—then thirteen—took it sorely to heart. Her mother in
heaven—had she looked down that night when Bonnie lay under the dripping
tree, and seen her pretty lamb alone, deserted?—the mother who had left
him to Susan to look after and care for. She had seemed to think more of
Bonnie in her dying moments than of the baby who had brought death to
her with his own life. Susan had been left in charge, as it were—sweet
Susan, who was barely twelve, and who, with her soft, shy ways and
lovely face, should have been left in charge herself to someone capable
of guiding her tender footsteps across earth’s thorny paths.

Her remorse dwelt with her always, and became a burden to her, and made
havoc of her colour for many a day. Of course she grew out of all
that—youth, thank God, is always growing—and at last, after many days,
joy came to her again, and all the glorious colour of life, and all the
sweetness of it. But she never lost a little pulsing grief that came to
her every now and then, telling her how she ought to have seen that
Bonnie had not wandered so far afield.

Oh, if only he could be made strong and well again. This was the heart
of the sad song that she often sang for herself alone, when time was
given her in her busy life.

She had dreamed dreams of how it would be with the little lad if he
could have been sent abroad. She had heard of certain baths, and of
wonderful cures worked by them. If he could go abroad to one of them he
might recover. But such baths were as far out of her reach as heaven
itself. It seemed hard to Susan, to whom life was still a riddle. And
she reproached herself always, and always mourned that there would never
come a time when Bonnie would be strong again, as he was when his mother
left him, and when she might meet that dear mother in heaven without
fear of reproaches.

All this lay in the background of Susan’s life, and now, as years grew,
seldom came to the front. But the child was ever her first thought and
her dearest delight, and the fact that he was not as his brothers were
was the one little blot on the happiness of her young life.




                              CHAPTER XIV.

          ‘O that this calculating soul would cease
            To forecast accidents, Time’s limping errors,
          And take the present, with the present’s peace,
            Instead of filling life’s poor day with terrors.’


About seven o’clock, Wyndham (who had come up to Dublin by the afternoon
train), going down Nassau Street, finds himself face to face with a
tall, big, good-humoured-looking man of about thirty-two.

‘Hallo! that you?’ cries the latter, stopping Wyndham, who, in somewhat
preoccupied mood, would have gone by without seeing him. The
preoccupation disappears at once, however, and it is with genuine
pleasure that he grasps the hand held out to him.

‘You, Crosby, of all men!’

‘Even so.’

‘Why, last week, when we met in Paris, you told me you were going to
Vienna to see a friend there.’

‘The friend came to me at Paris instead the very day after you left.’

‘But I thought you had arranged with him to go on an expedition to some
unpronounceable place in Africa?’

‘So I had, but he proved disappointing. Hummed and hawed, said he
couldn’t go just now, but perhaps a little later on. One saw through him
at once. I told him I never travelled about with fellows’ wives, and
that settled it.’

‘He was going to be married?’

‘Of course. Love was writ large all over him—in huge capitals. And he
was in such a hurry over everything. People in love are always in a
hurry—to get back. So I dismissed him with my blessing, and a bauble for
the venturesome young woman he has chosen to explore life’s boundless
ways with him. R.I.P. He’s done for; and a right good fellow he was,
too! Well, what’s up with you?’

‘With me?’

‘Think I can’t see? You’re out of your luck in some way.’

‘Nothing much, any way,’ says Wyndham, with an involuntary smile.

‘Too vague—too vague by half,’ says Crosby, laughing. It is the
happiest, heartiest laugh. ‘Come, what’s the matter? Out with it.
Money?’

‘No, no,’ says the barrister, laughing in turn.

‘Still, there is something.’

‘Is there? I don’t know,’ says Wyndham, in a tone half comical, half
forlorn.

At this Crosby thrusts his arm into his, and wheels him down the street.

‘It must be hunger,’ says he gaily, seeing the other is not ready for
confession yet. That the confession will come he knows perfectly well.
Ever since they were boys together, Wyndham, whose brain was then, as
now, very superior to Crosby’s, had still always given in to the
personal attractions of the stronger and older boy, whose big fists
often fought Wyndham’s battles for him on the public playground.

Crosby had been a big boy then; he is a big man now, and, in spite of
his adventurous wanderings by land and sea, looks younger than Wyndham,
though he is actually four years older. A splendid man, bronzed,
bearded, and broad-shouldered, with the grand look of one who has been
through many a peril and many a fight, who has led a cleanly life, and
can look the world in the face fearlessly. His eyes are large and blue,
and full of life and gaiety. He has a heart as true as gold, and a
strong right arm, good for the felling of a foe or the saving of a
friend.

‘For my own part, I’m starving,’ says he. ‘Come along; we’re near our
club, and you’ll dine with me. Considering what a stranger I am in my
own land, you’ll be able to help me out a bit. I feel as if I did not
know anyone—that is, if you are not going anywhere else. There’s a
wandering look about you. No? No other engagements? That’s good.’

They have reached the steps of the Kildare Street Club by this time, and
presently are in the pleasant dining-room.

‘By the way, talking of engagements,’ says Crosby, between the soup and
fish, ‘I have one for to-night, at your aunt’s—Mrs. Prior’s. In some odd
fashion she heard I was in Dublin, and sent a card to the Gresham for
me. You’—glancing at Wyndham’s evening dress—‘are going somewhere, too,
perhaps?’

‘There, too,’ says Wyndham. ‘I’ve got out of it a good deal lately; but
it doesn’t do to offend her overmuch. She’s touchy. And the old man, my
uncle, Lord Shangarry—you remember him, how he used to tip us at school
long ago?—makes quite a point of my being civil to her.’

‘To her, or——’

‘My cousin?’ Wyndham lifts his brows. ‘I feel sure my cousin is as
indifferent to me as I am to her.’ He pauses. ‘Still, I will not conceal
from you that my uncle desires a marriage between us.’

‘Is this the cause of your late depression?’ asks Crosby, with a
quizzical expression.

‘Not it,’ says Wyndham. ‘By-the-by’—a little hurriedly—‘what of that
late adventure of yours in Siam? You were just telling me about it
when——’

Crosby at once plunges into the interrupted anecdote, bringing it,
however, to a somewhat sharp close.

‘You know what life is!’ says Wyndham a little moodily when it is over.
‘I envy you; I often think I too should like to break off the threads of
society that bind one in, and start on a career that would leave
civilization and—its worries behind.’

‘Its worries?’

‘Well, gossip for one thing, and that delicate espionage that so often
leads to the damning of a man.’

‘Poor old boy! Got into deep water,’ thinks Crosby whilst toying with
his champagne.

‘Once in it, one never gets out of civilization,’ says he. ‘It sticks to
one like a burr. Don’t hope for that when you start on the wild career
you speak of. For myself, I like civilization. It’s clean, for one
thing—savages don’t do much in the way of washing. But I confess I like
wandering for wandering’s sake. It’s a mania with me. Here to-day and
gone to-morrow—that’s the motto that suits me. Yet, I dare say, in time
I shall get tired of it.’

‘Not you. Where are you going next?’

‘Not made up my mind yet. But I’ll tell you where I’ve been last—right
into Arcadia! A difficult place to find nowadays, the savants tell you;
but the savants, like the Cretans, are all liars. And in my Arcadia I
fell in with an adventure, and met——’

He pauses, and, leaning back in his chair, clasps his hands behind his
head and gives way to silent laughter. Evidently some memory is amusing
him.

‘Someone who apparently was kind to you,’ says Wyndham indifferently,
breaking off from the stem, but not eating, the purple grapes before
him.

‘Kind!’ says Crosby. ‘Hardly that.’

‘Unkind?’

‘More than that.’

‘She told you——’

‘That I was a thief.’ Wyndham’s indifference ceases for a moment.

‘Strong language,’ says he.

‘True, I assure you. Do I look like one? Ever since that terrible
denunciation I have often asked myself whether so much knocking about as
I have known has not ruffianized me in appearance, at all events.’

‘Where on earth is the Arcadia you speak of?’ asks Wyndham.

‘Well, to tell you everything, I went down to Curraghcloyne this morning
to have a look at the old place.’

‘What! There! Why, I was there to-day, too,’ says Wyndham, and then
pauses, as if suddenly sorry he had spoken.

‘We must have missed each other, then, and come up by different trains.’

‘I suppose so,’ says Wyndham slowly. ‘And so your Arcadia is
Curraghcloyne? Fancy an adventure there!’ He shrugs his shoulders, and
leans back in his chair. ‘You have had so many real adventures that I
expect you like to revel in imagining one now and then.’

‘Perhaps so,’ says Crosby. ‘Still, even in Arcadia one doesn’t like to
be called a thief. I say, it is getting late, isn’t it? Your aunt spoke
of ten. It is now well after eleven. Buck up, my child, and let us on.’




                              CHAPTER XV.

                ‘The web of our life is of mingled yarn,
                Good and ill together.’


The rooms are crowded to excess, and it is with difficulty that Crosby
and Wyndham make their way to the place where someone has told them
their hostess is to be found. They have arrived very late, in spite of
Crosby’s attempt at haste, so late, indeed, that already some of the
guests are leaving—a fact that has somewhat embarrassed their journey up
the staircase. The heat is intense, and the perfume of the many roses
makes the air heavy.

Quite at the end of the music-room Wyndham sees his aunt, and presently
she, seeing him and Crosby in the doorway, makes them a faint
salutation. The Hon. Mrs. Prior is a tall woman, with a high,
aristocratic nose, fair hair, and blue eyes, now a little pale. She was
the handsomest of the three daughters of Sir John Burke, and, what is
not always the case, had made the best marriage. Her youngest sister,
Kate, had, however, done very well, too, when she married James Wyndham,
but the eldest sister had made a distinct fiasco of her life. She had
run away with a ne’er-do-well, a certain Robert Haines, who came from no
one knew where, and went no one knew where, either, taking Sir John’s
favourite daughter with him. It was hushed up at the time, but the old
man had caused ceaseless secret inquiries to be made for the missing
daughter, always, however, without result. It was for a time a blot upon
the family history, but it was forgotten after awhile, and Mrs. Prior
and her daughter have for some time taken leading parts in Dublin
society.

A tall, thin woman is singing very beautifully as the two young men
enter, and Mrs. Prior’s slight movement of recognition to her nephew
conveys with it a desire that he should not seek her until the song has
come to an end. And presently the last quivering note dies away upon the
air, and the crowd is once more in motion. Lady H—— is being
congratulated on the beauties of her voice by many people, and Mrs.
Prior, having done her part, is now able to receive her nephew and
Crosby without having to pause and wonder who she is to speak to next.

Indeed, Lady H——’s singing has virtually wound up the evening. Few would
care to sing after her, and now the rooms are beginning to look
deserted.

‘Always a laggard, Paul,’ says his aunt, who, having bidden good-bye to
her principal guests, has left the rest to her daughter. ‘But I suppose
something of it must be put down to to-night.’ She smiles at Crosby,
whom she has known since he was a little boy. ‘You should have been here
earlier, you two; she sang even better in the beginning of the evening.
It was “Allan Water,” and you know how that would suit her voice. But
now that you have come so late, you must stay a little later and have
supper with Josephine and me.’

She talks on to them in her cultivated yet somewhat hard voice, rising
now and then to say good-bye to someone, until the rooms are quite
cleared and her daughter is able to join them.

Josephine Prior comes across the polished floor of the music-room to
where they are sitting in a curtained recess; she is as tall as her
mother, and as fair, and a little harder. Miss Prior is undoubtedly the
handsomest girl in Dublin this season (now all but over), and has been
for the past two or three. Tall, _distinguée_ and with irreproachable
manners, there are very few who can outdo her. She sweeps up to them
now, her pretty silken skirts falling gracefully around her, and her
mother, rising, motions her into her own seat, that next to Wyndham’s,
while she sinks into a chair on Crosby’s left.

It had been a settled thing with Mrs. Prior for years that Josephine,
her only child, should marry Paul Wyndham, who, though only a barrister,
is still a very rising one, and heir to his grand-uncle, Lord Shangarry.
To know Josephine a countess! There lay all the hope, all the ambition,
of Mrs. Prior’s life, and the fact that old Lord Shangarry shared her
hopes about this matter naturally led to the idea that in time it must
be accomplished. If Paul were to offend his uncle, then—well, then, the
title would be his indeed; but the enormous income now attached to it,
not being entailed, could be left as Lord Shangarry wished. Few people
fly in the face of Providence where thousands a year are concerned, and
Mrs. Prior depended upon Wyndham’s common-sense to secure him as a
husband for her daughter. As for Wyndham, though up to this not a
syllable has passed between him and Josephine to bind him to her in any
way, he has of late brought himself to believe that a marriage with her,
considering the stakes, is not out of the question. She is a handsome
girl, too, and as a countess would look the part.

Now, as she seats herself beside him, he again acknowledges the beauty
of her chiselled nose and chin. But——yes; there is a but. All at once it
occurs to him that beauty is very seldom to be found in perfect
features. The really artistic face has always one feature quite beyond
the bounds of art. Strange that it had not occurred to him before!
Still, Josephine is undoubtedly handsome.

Josephine’s voice is like her mother’s—clear and very hard. She is
talking now.

‘Do you know we were down in your part of the world the other day?’ says
she. ‘We were lunching with dear Lady Millbank, and then went on to your
cottage. We wanted to get some flowers. You know how mean Lady Millbank
is about her roses, so we decided on saying nothing to her, and trusting
to your place. But when we got there’—with an elephantine attempt at
playfulness—‘the cupboard was bare, at all events to us, because we
could not get in.’

‘Yes, so odd!’ says Mrs. Prior. ‘We rang, and rang, and rang, but no one
came for quite a long time. At last your housekeeper appeared, a most
disagreeable person, my dear Paul. She was, indeed, almost rude, and
said she had your orders to admit nobody.’

She looks back at Wyndham, who looks back at her with an immovable
countenance.

‘Not my orders, certainly,’ says he calmly. ‘I was abroad until the
other day, you know, so I can hardly be responsible for Mrs. Moriarty’s
manœuvres.’

His voice is perfectly even, though a perfect storm of rage against Mrs.
Denis is rendering him furious. Confound the woman! what does she mean
by seeking to create a scandal out of a mere nothing—a mountain out of a
mole-hill?

Crosby, glancing at him steadily for a moment, turns his eyes away
again, and breaks into the discussion.

‘I am sorry you did not go up to my place,’ says he, addressing Miss
Prior. ‘It is quite a terrible thing to contemplate, your having been in
want of flowers.’

‘Ah, but you weren’t there!’ says Josephine, with a mild attempt at
coquetry. ‘If you had been, we might have made a raid on you.’

‘Well, I’m at home now,’ says Crosby cheerfully. ‘You must come down
some day soon, and help me to gather my roses.’

‘You mean to stay, then?’ says Josephine, leaning a little towards him
across her mother. She is quite bent on marrying her cousin, though she
is as indifferent to him as he is to her; but in the meantime she is not
above a slight flirtation with Crosby. To tell the truth, this big,
good-humoured, handsome man appeals to her far more than Paul has ever
done.

‘Until the autumn, at all events,’ says he.

As for Wyndham, he is still sitting mute, apparently listening to his
aunt’s diatribes about society, and Dublin society in particular, but in
reality raging over Mrs. Denis’s shortcomings, and the deplorable Irish
sympathetic nature that has led her to sacrifice everything—even the
excellent situation she has at the Cottage—to a mere passing fancy for a
girl whom she has known at the longest for four or five weeks.

Crosby, noting his abstraction, is still rattling along.

‘Now, it’s a promise, Mrs. Prior, isn’t it? You’—here he glances
deliberately at Josephine—‘you will come and look round my place soon,
won’t you? I’m thinking of making up a little house-party in September
or August, and I hope you and Miss Prior will leave a week open for me.’
He throws a look over his shoulder. ‘You too, Wyndham?’

‘Thank you,’ says Paul absently.

‘What a charming idea!’ cries Josephine ecstatically. Here she decides
upon clapping her hands, and she does it in her perfectly well-bred way.
The result is deadly. ‘To stay with a bachelor! Mamma, you will
consent?’

Mamma consents. Josephine, again leaning towards Crosby, says something
delightful to him. It has seemed to her since Crosby’s coming that to
have two strings to your bow is a very desirable thing. Paul is well
enough, and in the end, of course, she will marry him, though at times
she has thought that he——But, of course, that is nonsense. He would be
afraid to marry anyone else—afraid of his uncle. What a pity he is not
Mr. Crosby, or Mr. Crosby Paul! Well, one can’t have everything one’s
own way, after all, and there is the title. Lady Shangarry—Mrs. Crosby.
Yes; the title counts. But really Paul is so very dull, and Mr. Crosby,
though he has no title, so infinitely better off than Paul will ever be,
and the Crosbys are an old family, dating back to—goodness knows when!
Still, a title!

Finally she gets back to the title, and stays there.

‘But yes, really, dear Paul,’ Mrs. Prior is saying, ‘I think that
housekeeper of yours, or caretaker, or whatever she is, takes too much
upon her. I tried to explain to her I was your aunt, and, indeed, she
has seen me several times, but I could not shake her determination to
let no one in. Anyone might be excused for imagining that she was
concealing something.’

‘Garden-party for her own friends, no doubt,’ says Crosby. He has cast a
half-amused, half-inquiring glance at Wyndham; but the latter’s face is
impassive.

‘I think it a little serious,’ says Mrs. Prior. ‘Young men, as a rule,
are always imposed upon by women of her class—caretakers, of course, I
mean,’ with a careful glance at the innocent Josephine. ‘Landladies and
that. Do you think, dear Paul, that she is quite honest?’

‘Quite, I think.’

‘Then why this extraordinary step on her part—this locking out your very
nearest and’—with an open glance at Josephine—‘dearest? No, no, George,’
to Crosby, ‘you really must not jest on this subject. I feel it is quite
important where Paul is concerned. You really know of no reason, Paul,
why she should have forbidden us an entrance?’

Is there meaning in the question? Wyndham looks at her steadily before
replying.

‘I was in France at the time,’ says he carelessly. ‘If she had a motive,
how could I know it?’

Crosby leans back and crosses his arms negligently. ‘What an idiotic
equivocation!’ thinks he.

‘You certainly ought to speak to her about it.’

‘Of course I shall speak to her.’

Crosby smiles.

‘I really think you ought,’ says Mrs. Prior. ‘You can’—severely—‘mention
me if you wish. I consider she behaved extremely badly. And I quite
tremble for the dear little old place. You know it was an uncle of
ours—a grand-uncle of yours—who left the place to your mother, and as
girls we—that is, your aunts and I—used to be very fond of running up
from your grandfather’s place in Kerry to spend a few weeks in it. We
were all girls then—your mother, and I, and your——’ She stops, and
sneezes most opportunely behind her lace handkerchief. The innocent
Josephine had touched her foot under cover of her gown. Of course the
aunt who had disappeared so unpleasantly had better not be mentioned.

‘I hope, Paul, you will see that this woman keeps the dear old place in
order,’ says Mrs. Prior rather hastily.

‘To confess a dreadful truth,’ says Wyndham, smiling somewhat briefly,
‘I have almost made up my mind to let the Cottage. It has been rather a
burden to me of late. And——’

‘To let it. But why?’

‘Well, as you see yourself,’ says Wyndham desperately, ‘Mrs. Moriarty
does not seem capable of looking after it. It is an awful bore, you
know, and’—with a rush of affection hitherto unborn—‘the idea of her
having kept you out of the place seems to put an end to my trust in her
for ever.’

Crosby flicks a little point of dust off his coat-sleeve. ‘Oh, the
handsome liar!’ thinks he.

‘But, my dear boy, you must not be too precipitate. A word to her would
perhaps——’

‘I’ve quite made up my mind,’ says Wyndham steadfastly. ‘I shall look
out for a tenant.’

‘Dear Paul!’ says Mrs. Prior, touched by this nephew-like act, ‘I of
course appreciate your sweetness in this matter. It is very dear of you
to be so angry about the woman’s incivility to me, and if you have made
up your mind about getting a tenant for the dear old Cottage, I think I
can help you.’

Here Crosby leans forward. It is proving very interesting.

‘You mustn’t take any trouble,’ says Wyndham; ‘I couldn’t allow you.’

‘It will be no trouble—for you,’ says Josephine, breaking into the
conversation very affectionately.

‘Thanks awfully, but I think I’ve got a desirable tenant in my eye,’
says Wyndham—‘one suitable in every respect.’

‘The real thing is to know if he is solvent,’ says Mrs. Prior.

‘Oh, I think so—I think so,’ says Wyndham thoughtfully.

‘Is he young or old?’ asks Josephine, who feels she ought to show some
interest in his affairs.

Wyndham remains wrapt up in thought for a moment, then apparently wakes
up.

‘Oh, the tenant,’ says he dreamily. ‘Not old; no, not old!’

‘At that rate you must introduce us to him,’ says Mrs. Prior, with quite
surprising archness. ‘Solvent and not old! Quite a desirable
acquaintance! What is his name, Paul?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Wyndham.

‘Not know? But, my dear Paul!’

‘I positively don’t,’ says Wyndham, in quite a loud voice. It occurs to
Crosby that now at last he is telling the truth, and that he is wildly
glad at being able to do so. But the truth! Where does it come in?
Crosby grows curious. ‘Strange as it may sound, the name is unknown to
me. And for the matter of that nothing is settled. There have been only
preliminaries. There must always be preliminaries, you know,’ talking
briskly to his aunt.

‘Well, be careful,’ says Mrs. Prior. ‘And whatever you do, Paul, don’t
take a lady tenant. They are so difficult. Now promise me, Paul, you
won’t take a lady as a tenant.’

Providentially, at this moment the very late supper is announced, and
Paul, rising, gives his arm to Josephine, after which the conversation
drifts into other channels.




                              CHAPTER XVI.

                  ‘This is the short and long of it.’


The moon is streaming brilliantly over the silent streets as the two men
leaving Fitzwilliam Square turn presently into Stephen’s Green and then
down Dawson Street. Crosby’s footsteps are bound for the Gresham Hotel,
and Wyndham, who should have gone the other way, considering his rooms
are in Elgin Road, walks with him silently, and so mechanically that it
becomes at once plain to Crosby that he has lost himself a little in a
world of troublous thought.

Determining to let him find his way out of his mind’s labyrinth by
himself, Crosby maintains a discreet silence, refraining even from good
words and the whistle that has come to be part of him during his strange
wanderings by sea and land, and is difficult to discard when in the
midst of civilization.

It is not until they have reached the railings that run round Trinity
College, where the glorious light of the moon is lighting up the old and
splendid pile, that Wyndham speaks.

‘I’ve had the deuce of a time,’ says he.

‘Well, I could see that,’ says Crosby, turning his cigar in his fingers.
‘I’m rather disappointed in you, do you know, Paul. How you are to make
a fortune out of your profession is to me a mystery. Throw it up. You
are certainly not a liar born.’

‘I’m in a tight place,’ says Wyndham disgustedly, ‘but I dare say I’ll
get out of it. Well’—reluctantly—‘good-night.’

‘Not a bit of it,’ says Crosby, tucking his arm into his; ‘come and have
a pipe with me, and—if you can bring yourself to it—give voice to this
worry of yours, and get it off your mind.’

A pipe is a great help; soothed by it, and the influence of the society
of his old chum, Wyndham, seated comfortably in a huge armchair in
Crosby’s room, tells the latter the whole of his remarkable acquaintance
with his unknown guest at the Cottage.

It is, to confess the truth, a rather lame story, very lamely told; and
at the close of it Wyndham looks at his friend, at least at as much of
him as he can see, Crosby being now enclouded in smoke. He had been
smoking very vigorously, indeed, all through the recital, and there had
been moments when he had seemed to be choking, but whether altogether
from the smoke Wyndham felt uncertain.

‘Well, that’s the story,’ says he at last, flinging himself back in his
chair.

There is a short silence.

‘Then I suppose you could not think of a better one?’ says Crosby,
beginning to choke again.

‘Oh, I knew how you’d take it—how any fellow would take it,’ says
Wyndham wrathfully. ‘I can see that there isn’t a soul in the world who
would believe such an idiotic story as mine. But there it is, and you
can take it or leave it as you like. But for all that, Crosby, you ought
to know me well enough to understand that I should not trouble myself to
lie to you unless there was occasion for it.’

At this Crosby gives way to a roar.

‘Well, I honestly believe there’s no occasion now,’ says he; ‘and for
the rest, dear old chap! of course I believe every word you have said.
You must be thoroughly hipped, or you’d have seen how I was enjoying the
joke. Come, it seems we have both had adventures in Arcadia, and that we
have both come in rather sorry fashion out of them.’

‘Oh, you—you can afford to speak of adventures,’ says Wyndham ruefully.
‘You’re accustomed to them, but I—I confess this last and first has been
enough for me. You who have faced lions——’

‘Not so many, after all,’ interrupts Crosby, laughing. ‘Don’t magnify
them like that. I’ve shot a few, I confess, but I only seem to remember
seven. One does remember them when one’s face to face with them. But
there is not such a lot to remember, after all.’

‘It would serve, so far as I am concerned,’ says Wyndham frankly.
‘Indeed, I think I could do with one—always supposing he was dead. As
for how I feel now, it is as though I were in a den of them, and I doubt
if I’ll come as well out of it as Daniel did.’

Crosby regards him with an amused eye.

‘Apropos your tenant,’ says he, ‘when are you going to introduce your
aunt to your young man?’

‘Oh, get out!’ says Wyndham.

‘That’s a lion if you like,’ says Crosby.

‘Which—my aunt or my tenant?’

‘I haven’t seen the tenant. Still, it strikes me that she will be a
lion, too. I’d get out of that den if I were you.’

‘Well, I want to. But what’s one to do? I can’t get rid of either of my
lions.’

‘Not even of the tenant?’

‘I don’t see how I can, now I have given my promise.’

‘Well, introduce them to each other; that’s a capital suggestion if you
will only look into it. Whilst they claw each other, you may be able to
make your escape.’

‘Introduce them?’ Wyndham pauses, as if sounding the proposition, then
gives way to wrath. ‘Hang it!’ says he; ‘you are worse than Job’s three
comforters all rolled into one.’




                             CHAPTER XVII.

                          ‘No hinge nor loop
                          To hang a doubt on.’


To-day is Sunday—the first Sunday since that eventful day when Susan had
tackled and disarmed the thief, and certainly the warmest day that has
come this season. In here in the church the heat is almost intolerable;
and Susan, when the Litany begins, feels her devotion growing faint.

She has, indeed, up to this had a good deal of troublous excitement. To
keep one eye on Jacky, who had left home in a distinctly resentful mood,
and the other on Tommy, who doesn’t believe in churches as a
satisfactory playground, is a task to which few would be equal; and even
now, when Tommy has been reduced to silence by Betty and lemon-drops,
the excessive warmth of the day leaves Susan too tired to follow the
beautiful service.

Mechanically she says, ‘We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord’; but her
mind is wandering, and presently her eyes begin to wander too.

The curate, how hideous he is, poor little man! and what a pity he is so
painfully conscious of the loss of his front tooth! and what a lovely
light that is from the window falling on his gown! It must be nice
outside now. How the flies are buzzing on the panes, just like the
organ! Maria Tanner should not be laughing like that; if father saw her
he would be so angry, and Maria is such a nice girl, and so clever—took
all the prizes at the diocesan examination last year—and her sister is
considered quite an excellent housemaid by Lady Millbank. What a pretty
bonnet Lady Millbank has on! Those violets suit her. Who is the man in
the pew behind her? Why, that is the Crosby pew, and——

For one awful minute Susan feels the walls of the church closing in upon
her; a sensation of faintness, a trembling of the knees, oppress her.
She is conscious of all this, and then the mist fades away.

No, no; of course it is not true. It is impossible. A remarkable
likeness, no more. She could laugh almost at her own folly, and very
nearly does so in her nervous state; but providentially the sight of a
gloomy black and white tablet, erected to the memory of a dead and gone
Crosby, that stands out from the wall right before her, prevents this
act of desecration.

She—she will look again, if only to assure herself of her own folly.
Slowly, slowly she lifts her eyes—the eyes that now are standing in a
very white face—and looks with a desperate courage at the Crosby pew.
Her eyes meet full the eyes of its one occupant, and then Susan tells
herself that it is all over, and death alone is to be looked for.

For the eyes of the Crosby pew man are the eyes of Susan’s thief. There
can be no mistake about it any longer. The man who sits in Mr. Crosby’s
pew and Susan’s repentant thief are one and the same.

Her eyes seem to cling to his. In the fever of horror that has overtaken
her, she feels as if she could never remove them. For a full minute the
man in the Crosby pew and Susan kneel, staring at each other; and then
suddenly something happens. Lady Millbank, who is sitting in the pew
before that of the Crosbys, turns round and hands Susan’s thief a
Prayer-book. That in itself would be very well—everyone should give a
thief a Prayer-book—but Lady Millbank has accompanied her gift with a
friendly nod of recognition, a charming smile—the smile that Susan so
well knows, the smile that is only given to those whom Lady Millbank
desires to honour or to be in with.

It is all quite plain now. The thief is Mr. Crosby, and Susan with a
groan lets her face fall upon her clasped hands, and hopes vainly for
the earth to open and swallow her up quick.

But the earth is a stupid thing, and never does anything nowadays. Not a
single earthquake appears for Susan’s accommodation, and the good old
church is not conscious of even a quiver. The service goes on. The
Litany is done. They all rise from their knees, and the curate gives out
a hymn:

                      ‘“O Paradise! O Paradise!”’

Poor Susan feels as if ‘O Purgatory!’ would be much nearer it, so far as
she is concerned. She would have stopped the hymn there and then if she
could, feeling utterly upset and nervous. But it would take a great many
feelings to stop a church service when it is once in full swing; and the
hymn goes on gaily in spite of Susan’s despair. It reaches, indeed, a
most satisfactory ending, in spite of a slight contretemps occasioned by
the one unlucky Protestant maid belonging to the Rectory, called Sarah.

Poor Sarah has this day for the first time put on a hat of which a
brilliant magenta feather is the principal feature. Hitherto it has not
caught Miss Barry’s eye—a wonder in itself even greater than the magenta
feather, as this estimable spinster, with a view to keeping the
servants’ moral conduct perfect, has elected that they shall sit on a
bench in the big square Rectory pew right before her and her nephew and
nieces.

It is at the beginning of the first verse that Miss Barry’s eye lights
on the monstrosity in Sarah’s hat. Feathers and flowers are abominations
in Miss Barry’s eyes when worn by the ‘common people,’ as she calls
those beneath her in the social scale. How dare that impertinent girl
come to church with such an immodest ornament on her head! What on earth
is the world coming to? She must, she will, speak to her; impossible to
let her enjoy that feather another second.

If she can’t speak, she can at all events sing at her.

She darts across the pew, and, leaning over Sarah’s shoulder, sings
piercingly into her ear:

“‘O Paradise! O Paradise.” Sarah, what do you mean?’ (Rising note.) ‘How
dare’ (prolonged shriek on top note) ‘you wear that feather, girl! Where
did you get that hat?’

She is simply screaming this to the hymn-tune. You all know the hymn, of
course, and can understand how Miss Barry’s voice rose to a shrill yell
in the ‘dare.’ Sarah, with a convulsive start, turns round. It seems to
her that this loud voice shouting in her ear must be heard by every
other soul in the church; and frightened, ashamed, she sinks down into
her seat, and prepares to hide herself and the magenta feather behind
her Prayer-book. But at this breach of church etiquette Miss Barry grows
even more incensed, and proceeds to rouse the wretched girl to a sense
of her further iniquity by well-directed and vigorous punches and prods
of her Prayer-book on her back. Whereon Sarah, dissolved in tears, rises
to her feet once more. She is evidently on the verge of hysterics, and
would have undoubtedly given way to them, but that at this moment Betty,
who is afraid of nothing under heaven, lays her hand on Miss Barry’s
arm, and forcibly pulls her back to her accustomed place.

The hymn has now come to an end, and only Sarah’s stifled groanings are
heard upon the air. Most people take these to be the buzzing of the
innumerable bluebottles collected in the window-panes, so that the whole
affair goes off better than might have been expected.

Slowly, slowly, go the minutes; slower and slower still is the voice of
the curate, as he intones the Commandments. The bluebottles, as if
invigorated by it, buzz louder than ever, until poor Sarah’s sobs are
completely drowned.

The heat grows more and more intense. Jacky, beneath its pressure, has
fallen sound asleep, and is now giving forth loud and handsome snorings.
Miss Barry, horrified, makes frantic signs to Dominick, who is next to
the culprit, to stop this unsolicited addition to the church music that
Jacky has so ‘kindly consented’ to give, and Dom waves back at her
wildly. No, no, of course. He quite understands; he will see that no one
interferes with the dear boy’s slumbers on any account whatever. The
wavings backwards and forwards grow fast and furious—furious on the part
of Miss Barry, and really as fast as lightning on the part of Mr.
Fitzgerald, who is having a thoroughly _bon quart d’heure_; but Carew
ends it.

He has been trying mentally to get through one of his papers for his
next examination, and finding Jacky’s snores a deadly interruption to
his thoughts, he fetches that resounding hero a telling kick on a part
that shall be nameless, which brings him not only to his senses, but the
floor.

There is a momentary confusion in the Rectory pew; but as every member
of the congregation is more or less drowsing, Jacky is picked up and
restored to his seat before the real meaning of the confusion is known.
And, indeed, when anyone does look, all the Barrys are sitting so demure
and innocent that no one could connect them with anything out of the
way. Susan, alone flushed and unnerved, in spite of her determination
not to do it, looks quickly at the Crosby pew, to find the thief looking
at her with a singular intensity of regard. It is at this moment that
Susan, for the first time in her young, happy life, wakes to sympathy
with those unfortunate people who sometimes wish that they were dead.

The curate, a short, squat little man—a man so short, indeed, that a
footstool has had to be placed in the pulpit for him to let the
congregation see him as he preaches—is now droning away like the flies,
‘shooting out shafts of eloquence to the bucolic mind’ is how he puts it
when writing to his people; but even his people, if here, could hardly
catch the shafts to-day. The fact is, he has not yet had time to get in
the teeth he lost by his fall last week; and, however admirable his
discourse may be, the beauties of it are known to him alone.

The farmers who are awake are leaning forward, their hands to their ears
to catch the Gospel words that never reach them. Lady Millbank has
fallen gracefully asleep. Sarah is still weeping copiously, but now,
thank Heaven, quietly. The curate, vainly striving to pronounce his
‘this’ and his ‘that,’ grows more and more nervous. He leans over the
pulpit, and thunders at the sleeping farmers and at the leading families
around, in whose pews, too, Somnus is holding a full court. Farther and
farther he leans, striving with his parishioners as much as with his
teeth; a very passion of anxiety grows upon him. He lifts his arms from
the desk before him—the desk that is supporting him—and waves them
frantically.

‘Hear—hear, my brethren,’ cries he. ‘Hear and see——’

His cry, like the ‘Excelsior’ young man’s clarion, rings loud and clear.
It wakes some of the sleepy members, who look up to see what it is all
about. But when they do look up there is nothing to see.

Most unexpectedly and disgracefully—considering its relation to the
Church—the footstool has given way with a crash, and Mr. Haldane, the
curate, has given way with it, and disappeared, holus bolus, into the
big old pulpit.

For quite a minute, though no doubt ‘to memory dear,’ the curate is
certainly ‘lost to sight;’ and when at last he ventures once more to
mount the offending stool, and look down at his parishioners, it is to
find that the far larger half of them are gladly streaming down the
aisle to the fresh air outside, under the fond delusion that ‘church is
over.’

These are the specially drowsy ones. The crash caused by the curate’s
unpremeditated descent had roused them from their happy dreams, and, on
opening their eyes, seeing no preacher in the pulpit, they had naturally
come to the conclusion that the performance was at an end.

Vain to call them back. Mr. Haldane spreads out his arms to heaven in a
mournful appeal, but, hearing some unmistakable tittering to his left,
turns, and incontinently flies.




                             CHAPTER XVIII.

                  ‘Life is thorny, and youth is vain!’


Not so quickly as Susan, however. He could hardly have flown with the
fleetness of that heart-troubled nymph. She—at the first chance, when
her father, rising hurriedly at the flight of his curate, had breathed
the blessing—had flown down the side-aisle and through the small oak
door into the golden air outside; and from there into a small lane
filled with flowering weeds, that led straight homewards.

Running—racing, indeed—goes Susan, with her heart on fire, as her
cheeks, and her lovely, child-like eyes darkened and bright with the
sense of coming disaster.

She does not draw breath until she finds herself safe in her own little
room, with just five precious minutes (precious, unusual five minutes,
gained only by that swift run that has left them all behind) in which to
think out as calmly as she can what has befallen her.

A thief! She had called him a thief! He—Mr. Crosby—the distinguished
traveller! Oh! what is to become of her? Not even now, at this last
gasp, does she try to persuade herself that the man in the Crosby pew
was a fraud—that he wasn’t Mr. Crosby. She knows as positively as though
she had been introduced to him that he is Mr. Crosby.

Introduced to him! As if——She covers her face with her hands. No, no;
there need be no fear of that. He will go away soon—at once. People say
he cannot bear civilized life; that he always hankers after savages, and
lions, and things. He will go away, of course. Oh, if only he will go
away soon enough, and never come back! Susan, with her hands before her
gentle eyes, has sudden dreams of people who have been devoured by
lions, and for the first time fails to see the extreme horror of it.

Yes, he will go away soon; and in the meantime—well, in the meantime it
is very unlikely that she will come face to face with him.

‘Susan, Susan! are you there?’

‘Yes,’ says Susan. She goes to the door, and finds Jacky on the
threshold of it.

‘Dinner is ready,’ says that solemn youth; ‘and they sent me up for
you.’

‘I can’t come down,’ says Susan. ‘I have a headache. Jacky—dear, dear
Jacky, say I have a headache. And I have, too—I have indeed. There won’t
be any lie. The heat—you must have felt the heat in church—you fell
asleep——’

‘Yes, I know,’ says Jacky, in his queer way, that always expresses anger
with difficulty suppressed. ‘You won’t come down, then?’

‘No; I can’t—I——’ She lifts her hand to her head.

Jacky hesitates, turns slowly, and then throws a glance at her.

‘Susan, did you see that man in the Crosby pew?’

Susan’s nerves being a little overwrought, she almost jumps at this.

‘Yes, yes,’ says she in a hurried way.

‘He was very like the thief, wasn’t he?’ says Jacky anxiously. Susan
colours hotly.

‘Nonsense, Jacky’—with a very poor attempt at scorn. ‘That gentleman in
Mr. Crosby’s pew was, I think, Mr. Crosby himself, or, at all events,
some friend of his.’

‘Well, the thief was the image of him,’ says Jacky slowly. That’s the
worst of Jacky, he is always so abominably slow. ‘I looked at him, and I
said to myself, “That’s Susan’s thief,” and,’ with awful obstinacy, ‘I
think it was, too.’

‘No, no, no!’ says Susan. ‘It was Mr. Crosby, I tell you. I saw Lady
Millbank nod and smile at him.’

Jacky considers.

‘Very well,’ says he, in a thoroughly unconvinced tone. He moves away a
bit and then looks back. ‘If that is true,’ says he, ‘Mr. Crosby looks
like a thief.’

                  *       *       *       *       *

At half-past three Susan, having come to the conclusion that sitting up
here won’t help her out of her difficulty, wanders downstairs and into
the schoolroom, where Betty makes much of her, and makes her sandwiches
out of the still warm mutton, which, in spite of their nastiness and her
headache, Susan devours with avidity. Hunger is a great sauce; no one
has ever yet invented one to beat it. And perhaps, if all were known,
Susan’s ache belongs more to the heart than the head. When the
sandwiches are finished, she declares herself much better, and Jane
coming to say that Lady Millbank is in the drawing-room, she rises, and
expresses a desire to see her.

Lady Millbank, or ‘the Sack,’ as the irreverent young Barrys always call
her, thinks it the correct thing to be in with, and civil to, her
Rector—without giving herself any unnecessary trouble. The drive from
Millbank to the parish church is five good miles, so she always makes a
point of lunching with some of her friends and taking afternoon tea at
the Rectory. Even so far she would not have condescended, but that the
Rector, poor as he is, has sprung from a good old stock, and that his
wife was a connection of the late Sir Geoffrey Millbank.

‘So sorry to hear you have been ill,’ says she, as Susan enters. Susan
is a favourite of hers. ‘The heat, eh?’ She speaks exactly as she looks.
She is one of those people who can be very gracious when they like, and
perfectly abominable on other occasions. She is ugly and shapeless, and
careless about her dress, but no one can mistake for a minute that she
is well born.

‘It was very warm,’ says Susan.

‘You look pale, my dear. I think, Miss Barry, she ought not to go to
church this evening.’

‘No, no, of course not, Susan,’ says Miss Barry severely; she is sitting
behind a wonderfully battered old teapot that has certainly seen
service, and must have been pure at heart to have come out of the trial
thus victoriously, though maimed and wounded. It is the pride of Miss
Barry’s life, and has come down to the Rector after many days.

‘I suppose you saw that George Crosby has come home?’ says Lady
Millbank. ‘I had heard a rumour of his coming a week or so ago, but
thought nothing of it. Such a man as he is can never be relied upon, and
when he turned up actually alive last week, I was more surprised than I
can tell you.’

Last week! She had seen him, had talked with him. Had he told her?
Susan’s heart sinks within her. Positive despair makes her raise her
eyes and look at Lady Millbank. Oh, if——

But Lady Millbank is still chatting on, and in her eyes, as they meet
Susan’s, there is no _arrière-pensée_. No; he had not betrayed her.

‘I don’t suppose we shall see much of him; he is always on the
stampede,’ Lady Millbank is saying. ‘One would think from his habits
that he was a criminal running before the law. I told him so. Ah’—rising
suddenly and looking out of the window—‘there he is! And coming here! Of
course, to call upon Mr. Barry. Your brother was a great friend of
George Crosby’s father, I think. Eh?’

‘There was a friendship,’ says Miss Barry. ‘Susan, how pale you are!
Come out of that dark corner, child, and sit near the window. The air
will do you good.’

‘I like being here,’ says Susan quickly.

There is no time to say any more. Susan’s ‘thief’ is in the room.




                              CHAPTER XIX.

  ‘A secret is in my custody if I keep it; but if I blab it, it is I
  that am prisoner.’


The Rector has come in, and has stayed to have a cup of tea with Mr.
Crosby. Lady Millbank declares herself charmed and very jealous. He
never leaves his beloved books to see her! Mr. Barry smiles, and then
falls back upon the memories of Crosby’s father that are always so dear
to him. He is a tall, gaunt man, severe, with a far-away look, and the
indifferent air of those who live with dead authors, and who are,
besides, a little worried by the money transactions of life.

To have to think of the daily needs is hateful to Mr. Barry, who ought
to have been a bachelor, with nothing but his notes to worry him, living
in a world in which he could sit loosely. Even now he sometimes forgets
how time flies, and to tell him that Susan is almost a woman grown would
have roused him to quite an extraordinary wonder. The world goes on
whilst he stands still, and to-day the dragging of him out of his shell,
even to the ordinary business of a drawing-room conversation, has
bewildered him. After a little while he retires.

His sermons, his visits to the sick, the poor (he never visits the rich
unless they specially send for him)—all these things concern him. But
when he knows himself happiest is when his study-door is shut for the
night to all intruders, and he can read, read, read, until the little
hours begin to chime.

As Crosby entered the drawing-room, Susan felt her heart stand still.
She rose mechanically, and held out her hand to him as he came up to
her, but she did not lift her eyes. She felt vaguely conscious that she
had flushed over cheek and brow. Such a blush! So quick! so deep! Oh, he
must have seen it, and known the meaning of it!

If he did, he made no sign whatever; and until the departure of Lady
Millbank he devoted himself to the Rector.

When Lady Millbank rose to say good-bye, Susan told herself that now at
last the ordeal was at an end, and that he would go too. But,
apparently, he had no intention whatever of stirring. And the climax
came when Dom and Carew asked him to come out into the garden and have a
cigarette. The cigarettes were Dom’s. Mr. Crosby seemed only too willing
to accept this lively invitation, and Dom, thrusting his arm through
Betty’s, asked her to come along with him.

‘And you, Miss Barry,’ says Crosby, now walking up deliberately to
Susan, who is still sitting in her shady corner. The elder Miss Barry
had gone out into the hall to bid Lady Millbank a last adieu, and tell
her of the latest misdoings of the young women of the Christian
Association in Curraghcloyne. ‘I hope you will come too.’

‘Oh yes, Susan, come on,’ says Betty. ‘It’s lovely outside to-day, and
father won’t be able to see the smoke through the beech hedge.’ The
Rector objects to smoking, so that Dom and Carew have quite a time of it
keeping their pipes and cigarettes out of his way.

‘I hope you will come,’ says Crosby. He is bending over Susan now, and
he has distinctly lowered his tone. ‘Do you know, I have come over
to-day to see and thank you. I felt it quite my duty to do it.’

‘To thank me?’ For the first time during the afternoon Susan looks
straight at him. Her large and lovely eyes are full of wonderment. ‘To
thank me?’

‘Yes, indeed; I have great cause to be grateful to you,’ says Mr.
Crosby, with such extreme earnestness and gravity that she rises. What
if, after all, she was wrong, and the thief was not really Mr. Crosby?

A cousin perhaps—a disagreeable one: cousins are very often
disagreeable, and often, too, more like one than one’s own brothers are.
Of course, if he was a kinsman, Mr. Crosby would be very grateful to her
for hushing up the whole affair, and telling nobody. And yet——

Again she lifts her eyes and studies his face. No, not even twins were
ever so alike as this man and the man that stole the cherries.

‘Are you coming?’ calls Betty impatiently, and Susan moves forward. In a
moment she is stepping from the low sill of the Rectory drawing-room on
to the little plot of grass beneath, disregarding Mr. Crosby’s hand as
he holds it out to help her.

She and he are well behind the others now, and Crosby speaks again.

‘You don’t ask me why I am grateful,’ says he reproachfully. ‘Don’t you
care to know? I care to tell you. I have had it on my mind since that
day in the garden. You remember?’

‘Yes,’ says Susan. She stops short, and confronts him with flushed
cheeks and nervous eyes, but a little touch of courage that sits most
charmingly upon her. ‘I do remember. You—you were the man who——’ She
hesitates.

‘Stole the cherries?’ suggests he.

‘No’—coldly—‘who sat on the top of the ladder and made fun of me.’

There is a little silence.

‘That is a most unkind speech,’ says Crosby at last. ‘After all, I don’t
feel as grateful now as I did a minute ago. I came here to-day to thank
you for looking so kindly after my property, and you meet me with an
accusation that absolutely strikes me dumb.’

At this Susan cannot refrain from bitter jest.

‘True,’ says she scornfully; ‘one can see how silent you are.’

Mr. Crosby regards her with apparent awe, tempered with grief.

‘If you persist in your present course,’ says he, ‘I shall commit
suicide. There will be nothing else left for me to do.’

‘In the meantime,’ says Susan, with astonishing spirit, ‘you had better
come into the garden. They are expecting you.’

Not so very much, after all. Betty, Carew, and Dom Fitzgerald are
engaged in a lively discussion on Miss Barry’s wild attack on the
unoffending Sarah in church this morning, and, in the delights of it,
have almost forgotten Mr. Crosby. The children are playing about on the
tennis-ground below, and Crosby’s eyes fall on Bonnie, as with great
difficulty, and with the help of a stick, he tries to follow little Tom.
Jacky, in the distance, is stretched on his stomach reading.

‘Those are your brothers?’ asks Crosby, looking more deliberately at
Bonnie, whose charming little face, though pale and emaciated, attracts
him.

‘Yes, I have four brothers and one sister.’

‘Five brothers, I thought.’

‘Oh no; Dominick Fitzgerald is our cousin. He lives with us nearly
altogether, and father is coaching him for the Indian Civil.’

‘Oh, I see. That little brother’—gently indicating Bonnie—‘does not look
very strong.’

‘No, he had rheumatic fever, and he has not been’—correcting herself
hastily, as though it is impossible to her to say the more terrible
word—‘very strong since.’

‘What a beautiful face!’ says Crosby involuntarily. And, indeed, the
loveliest flower of all this handsome Barry family is the little
suffering cripple child.

Susan is conscious for a moment of a choking in her throat. Oh, her
little lovely darling brother! To hear him praised is a great joy to
her, but with the joy follows pain unutterable. If only she had looked
more closely after him! And poor, poor mamma, who had told her to be a
mother to him! Then, all at once, she remembers the cherries, and how he
had enjoyed them, and a queer passion of feeling, arising first of all
from the fact that Crosby had admired the child, makes her turn to him.

‘Mr. Crosby, I want to tell you something,’ says she timidly; ‘those
cherries that you sent me’—he is about to tease her again, to pretend he
knows nothing of the gift, but her face, pale now and filled with a
strange but carefully-held-back emotion, keeps him silent—‘they gave
Bonnie a happy half-hour. No matter how I am feeling towards you, about
your pretending to be—you know—still, if only for the pleasure your
cherries gave Bonnie, I feel intensely thankful to you. He is not
strong, as you see. They say he will never be strong again, and it was
my fault; for I forgot him one day—one day—and mamma was dead too. I was
cross to you about your pretending to be a thief—I hope you won’t mind
me?’

It is such a childish speech, and there is such tragedy in the dark
eyes! She has not broken down at all. There is not a suspicion of tears
in her low, clear young voice, but that the child’s ill-health is a
constant grief to her is not to be doubted for a moment.

‘If it comes to that,’ says he slowly, ‘it is I who ought to apologize.
And the worst of it is, I haven’t an apology ready. The plain truth is
that I couldn’t resist the situation. If I could hope that you would try
to forgive me——’

He breaks off. Susan has looked at him, and through the deep gloom of a
minute ago a smile has broken on her face. Such a smile! It makes her
look about twelve years old, and is indescribably pretty. ‘What a lovely
child!’ says Crosby to himself. She holds out her hand to him frankly.

‘But don’t tell anybody,’ says she, in an eager little whisper.

‘Tell! “Is thy servant——” But the brother over there catching cold on
the grass with a book before him—he was with you, I think.’

‘Ah, Jacky and I are chums!’ says she. This seems to settle the
question. It occurs to Mr. Crosby that it would be rather nice to be
chums with Susan, and he vaguely wonders if she would accept a chum who
was not one of the family. Is Dominick a chum? But, then, he is one of
the family. When Susan has chums, does she trust them—have little
secrets with them? If so, he may clearly rise to the desired position in
time. He is conscious of a sense of exhilaration as he tells himself
that Susan once regarded him as a thief, and that he is bound by her to
keep that regard a secret.

‘Oh, there you are, Mr. Crosby!’ says Carew, stopping in his discussion
with Betty; ‘come here and sit down.’

‘Don’t sit on Betty, whatever you do,’ says Dominick from his place
beside her on the grass; ‘she’d be sure to resent it. She takes after
our own particular auntie in the way of temper. Susan, my
darling’—making a grab at Susan’s ankle, which she has learned from long
practice to avoid—‘come and sit down by me. No? Your brainpower must be
weak. Have a cigarette, Mr. Crosby. You need not mind the girls. It is
all we can do to keep our “baccy” from them.’

‘If I wanted your nasty “baccy,”’ says Betty, ‘it isn’t likely you would
be able to keep it from me. Give Mr. Crosby a match.’

‘Thanks, I have one,’ says Crosby. He had accepted Dom’s offer of a
cigarette without hesitation, and, indeed, would have smoked it to the
bitter end rather than offend any member of the little group around him.
They all please him; they all seem in unison with him—frank, happy,
rollicking youngsters, without a scrap of real harm amongst them.
Perhaps the secret of their success with Crosby lies in the fact that,
in spite of his being well in the thirties, he is still a boy himself at
heart, with a spice of mischief in him not to be controlled. The
cigarette, however, proves very tolerable, and Susan having seated
herself where he can distinctly see her, he feels that he is going to
spend an uncommonly pleasant afternoon.

‘It’s a shame to say Betty’s got a temper,’ says Susan. ‘I’m sure she
hasn’t—not a bad one, any way.’

‘You needn’t defend me, Susan,’ says Betty, clasping her long, lean arms
behind her head. ‘I prefer to do it for myself, and’—with a fell glance
at the doomed Dominick—‘I think I know where revenge lies.’

‘I give in!’ cries Mr. Fitzgerald frantically. ‘Betty, pax!’

‘Never,’ says Betty.

‘If you burn my fly-book a second time, I warn you that there will be
murder,’ says Dom; and then Betty has mercy.

‘A public retractation, then!’ demands she viciously.

‘A hundred of them. I swear to you, Mr. Crosby, that I wronged her, and
that her temper is like that of an angel, and not a bit like our Aunt
Jeremiah’s’—softly, ‘May I be forgiven!’

‘Did you hear her in church?’ asks Carew, turning to Crosby. ‘Aunt
Jemima, I mean, not Betty. She was mad with Sarah this morning——’

Crosby looks rather helplessly round him.

‘Another sister?’ asks he.

‘No, no,’ says Susan, whilst the others explode; and Crosby, unable to
resist their gaiety, joins in the merriment. ‘A servant——’

‘Had a magenta feather in her hat!’ cries Betty, roaring with laughter,
‘and Aunt Jemima hates feathers, and——’

‘This is my story, Betty,’ interrupts Carew; ‘I insist on telling it.
When the Paradise hymn began, Aunt Jemima saw the feather——’

‘Pounced upon Sarah!’ cries Susan, who is nearly in hysterics. ‘Oh, did
you see her? She sang the most dreadful things at her until the poor
girl nearly fainted, and——’

‘And then our only auntie punched her in the back with her Prayer-book,’
puts in Dom. ‘Really, Betty, I did wrong you! You aren’t in it with her.
She cussed and swore like anything, but worse than all, Susan, was her
ribald rendering of music-hall songs within the sainted precincts of the
church.’

‘Nonsense, Dom! you spoil the story by exaggeration.’

‘Exaggeration! My dear girl, didn’t you hear her? Why, she was shouting
it! She got rather mixed up in the music—I’m bound to say the two times
are not the same—but she managed it wonderfully. You heard her, Carew,
didn’t you?

                     ‘“Where did you get that hat?”

I waited for the rest, but I suppose her courage failed her, or else the
organ drowned it; at all events, the second line,

                    ‘“Where did you get that tile?”

did not come in. But I think we ought to speak to our auntie, Susan,
don’t you? That sort of thing is very well outside, but in a church!
Betty, you look as if you’d love to speak to somebody. We’ll put you on
for this job. You shall expostulate with Aunt Jemima on her deplorable
weakness for low-class comic songs.’

‘I shall leave you to interview her on the subject,’ says Betty.

‘Interview! What a splendid word!’ says Dom. ‘What’ll you sell it for?’
But Betty very properly decides on not hearing him.

Softly, sweetly, the sun is going down, topping the distant hills, and
now falling behind them. A golden colour is lighting all around.
Overhead the swallows are darting here and there, and from the beds of
mignonette in the old-fashioned garden exquisite perfumes are wafted;
and now ‘at shut of evening flowers’ faint breezes rise, and corners
grow rich in shadows, and from the stream below comes a song that makes
musical the happy hours.

Crosby, with a sigh of distinct regret, rises to his feet.

‘I fear I must go,’ says he.

‘What, not so soon?’ cries Carew, getting up too. Indeed, as Crosby
persists, though evidently with reluctance, in his determination to
leave them, they all get up, the innate courtesy of this noisy group
being their best point.

‘Have another cigarette for the walk home?’ says Dom hospitably.

‘We’ll all go with you to the gate!’ cries Betty.

‘I suppose a big traveller like you doesn’t play tennis?’ says Carew
diffidently, but with an essence of hope in his tone.

‘Oh, don’t I!’ says Crosby; ‘I’m quite a dab at it, I can tell you! If I
were to come down to-morrow afternoon, would there be any chance that
any of you would be here to play a game with me?’

He looks at Susan.

‘We’ll all be here!’ cries Betty ecstatically. To have a new element
thrown into their daily games seems too enchanting for anything. ‘You
will come?’

‘May I?’ says Crosby. Susan has not answered, and now he purposely
addresses her.

‘Oh, I hope you will!’ says she cordially. She had been thinking
hurriedly if it would be possible to ask him to luncheon—to their early
dinner. But with the children and Jane’s attendance! Oh no—a thousand
times no! Yet it seems so inhospitable.

‘Thank you, I should very much like to come. It is quite taking pity on
an unfortunate bachelor,’ says he. And this being settled, they all in a
body prepare to accompany him to the gate. Even little Tom runs up to
them, and Bonnie, with uneven steps, hurries as fast as the poor mite
can. Susan turns to help him, and Crosby, watching her for a moment,
follows her, and, taking the child in his arms, without a word swings
him to his shoulder.

At the gate, having bidden them good-bye, and Dom having taken Bonnie on
his back for a race home, Crosby looks at Susan.

‘Are you fond of cherries?’ asks he. His face is profoundly grave, but
she can see the twinkle in his eyes, and her own give him back a
reproachful glance.

This playing with fire is hardly prudent.

‘Sometimes,’ says she demurely.

‘And you, Bonnie?’ asks Crosby, pinching gently the child’s pale pretty
cheek as he rests on Dominick’s back. ‘You like them, I’m sure. Well,
I’ll send you some to-morrow and every day while they last, and perhaps
the red of their cheeks will run into yours. See that it does, now.’

The child laughs shyly, and Crosby turns to Susan again.

‘Good-bye, Miss Barry.’

‘Oh, don’t call her that!’ cries Betty. ‘That makes her sound like Aunt
Jemima. Susan, tell him he can call you by your own name.’

This handsome advice ought, thinks Crosby, to fill Susan with angry
confusion. But it doesn’t.

‘You may—you may indeed!’ says she, quite sweetly and naturally, looking
him fair in the eyes. ‘I should like you to call me Susan, and I am very
much obliged to you for promising the cherries to Bonnie.’

She gives him her hand; he presses it, and goes up the road towards his
home. A little thorn in his heart goes with him. If he had been her own
age, would she so readily have permitted him to call her Susan? No doubt
she regards him as quite a middle-aged old fellow, and truly, next to
her youth, that promises to be eternal, he is nothing less.




                              CHAPTER XX.

                  ‘Fear oftentimes restraineth words,
                  But makes not thoughts to cease.’


The weather since the beginning of the summer has been exceptionally
warm, and to-day has outdone itself.

Here in the Cottage garden, surrounded by its ivied walls, the heat is
excessive, and there is a certain languor in the lithe figure of the
girl as she comes forward, the dog beside her, to greet Wyndham, that
meets his eye. Perhaps nervousness has conduced to the pallor that is
whitening her lips and brow, and is making even more striking the
darkness of her appealing eyes. There is something about her so full of
grief suppressed that he hastens to allay it.

‘I have come, you see,’ says he—he holds out his hand, and she lays hers
in it; he holds it a moment—‘to speak about our rent.’ He smiles at her.
The smile, to tell the truth, is a little grim, and hardly reassures
her. ‘I have come to the conclusion that, as you wish to become my
tenant, you must pay me a huge rent.’

‘Ah! and I have been thinking,’ says she very sadly, with the mournful
air of one who is giving up all that is worth having in this world,
‘that I shall not be your tenant at all, and shall never pay you any
rent.’

‘Do you mean to say,’ says Wyndham, reading her like a book, but
humouring her mood, ‘that you’ve found another house more suited to
you?’

‘Oh no, it isn’t that. There is no house I shall ever like so well as
this.’

‘Then, let me tell you beforehand that I shall charge you a very
handsome rent,’ persists Wyndham, trying to be genial. He smiles at her,
but the smile is a dismal failure.

‘I can’t accept your offer—I can’t indeed,’ says the girl, who, in spite
of her protests, has brightened considerably beneath his apparent
determination to let the Cottage to her. ‘This is your own house. Your
mother gave it to you. Mrs. Denis has told me all about it, and if you
give it to me you will never come here again.’

‘I shall indeed—to collect my rent,’ says Wyndham, a little touched by
her evident earnestness, and assuming a more natural air of lightness.

‘Ah, that,’ says she. She pauses a moment, and then: ‘If’—timidly—‘you
would promise to come here sometimes to see your dog and the flowers, I
might think of it.... I could keep out of your way when you came. I
could sit in my own room, and you could——’

‘What a cheerful prospect for you!’ says he. ‘I’m not a very agreeable
fellow, I know, when all is told; but I believe I am so far on the road
to respectability as to be incapable of enjoying myself at the expense
of another fellow-creature’s comfort. Fancy my taking the joys of the
country with the knowledge that you were stifling in some cellar
downstairs with a view to saving me from the annoyance of your
presence!’

‘It wouldn’t be a cellar, and it isn’t downstairs,’ says the girl
anxiously. ‘It is a pretty little room upstairs.’

‘It’s all the same,’ says Wyndham. ‘The prettiest little room in the
world is a bore if one is imprisoned in it.’

Silence follows upon this. Wyndham, going forward, stoops down to a bed
of seedlings that he had ordered to be planted a month ago. They are in
a very promising condition, and the regret he feels for this little home
of his that is slipping through his fingers increases. And yet to thrust
her out—he knows quite well now that he will never do that.

‘Mr. Wyndham,’ says the girl—she is at his elbow now—‘don’t be so sorry
about it; I shall go—to-morrow, if possible.’

He is not prepared for this, nor for the soft breathings of her voice in
his ear. He turns abruptly.

‘All that is arranged,’ says he peremptorily. ‘You cannot go; you have
nowhere to go to, as’—pointedly—‘you tell me. In the meantime, it is
absolutely necessary that you should have someone to live with you.’

‘There is Mrs. Denis,’ says she nervously.

‘Not good enough for an heiress like you,’ returns he, smiling. Now that
he has finally, most unwillingly and most ungraciously, given in to the
fact that she is to be his tenant, he feels more kindly towards her, and
more human. ‘You will want a lady companion to read with you—you say you
wish to go on with your studies—and to go out with you.’

‘Go out!’ She regards him with quick horror. ‘I shall never go out of
this—never!’ cries she.

The extraordinary passion of her manner checks him. She has sunk upon a
garden-chair, as if incapable of supporting herself any longer; and from
this she looks up at him with a sad and frightened face.

‘I will leave,’ says she at last. It is a most mournful surrender of
hope, and all things that make life still dear to her.

‘There is no necessity for that,’ says Wyndham hurriedly. ‘If I knew
more—if I knew how to help you—but’—breaking off abruptly—‘you yourself
have decided against that. You must pardon me. You have already told me
that you do not wish to tell me of yourself, your past——’

She makes a little gesture with her hand. Wyndham, standing still upon
the gravelled path, looks at her.

‘I have been thinking about that,’ says she, ‘and’—with growing
agitation—‘it has seemed very ungrateful of me to distrust you—you who
have done so much for me, who are now giving up your lovely home for me.
Mr. Wyndham’—rising and coming towards him—‘I have made up my mind; I
will tell you all.’


                             END OF VOL. I.


                 BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.

[Illustration]

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                                          [_July, 1895._

[Illustration]

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                    SOME BOOKS CLASSIFIED IN SERIES.

  ⁂ _For fuller cataloguing, see alphabetical arrangement, pp. 1–26._

=THE MAYFAIR LIBRARY.= Post 8vo, cloth limp, =2s. 6d.= per Volume.

    =A Journey Round My Room.= By X. DE MAISTRE. Translated by Sir HENRY
       ATTWELL.
    =Quips and Quiddities.= By W. D. ADAMS.
    =The Agony Column of “The Times.”=
    =Melancholy Anatomised=: Abridgment of Burton.
    =Poetical Ingenuities.= By W. T. DOBSON.
    =The Cupboard Papers.= By FIN-BEC.
    =W. S. Gilbert’s Plays.= THREE SERIES.
    =Songs of Irish Wit and Humour.=
    =Animals and their Masters.= By Sir A. HELPS.
    =Social Pressure.= By Sir A. HELPS.
    =Curiosities of Criticism.= By H. J. JENNINGS.
    =The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.= By OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
    =Pencil and Palette.= By R. KEMPT.
    =Little Essays=: from LAMB’s Letters.
    =Forensic Anecdotes.= By JACOB LARWOOD.
    =Theatrical Anecdotes.= By JACOB LARWOOD.
    =Jeux d’Esprit.= Edited by HENRY S. LEIGH.
    =Witch Stories.= By E. LYNN LINTON.
    =Ourselves.= By E. LYNN LINTON.
    =Pastimes and Players.= By R. MACGREGOR.
    =New Paul and Virginia.= By W. H. MALLOCK.
    =The New Republic.= By W. H. MALLOCK.
    =Puck on Pegasus.= By H. C. PENNELL.
    =Pegasus Re-saddled.= By H. C. PENNELL.
    =Muses of Mayfair.= Edited by H. C. PENNELL.
    =Thoreau=: His Life and Aims. By H. A. PAGE.
    =Puniana.= By Hon. HUGH ROWLEY.
    =More Puniana.= By Hon. HUGH ROWLEY.
    =The Philosophy of Handwriting.=
    =By Stream and Sea.= By WM. SENIOR.
    =Leaves from a Naturalist’s Note-Book.= By Dr. ANDREW WILSON.

=THE GOLDEN LIBRARY.= Post 8vo, cloth limp, =2s.= per Volume.

    =Diversions of the Echo Club.= BAYARD TAYLOR.
    =Songs for Sailors.= By W. C. BENNETT.
    =Lives of the Necromancers.= By W. GODWIN.
    =The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope.=
    =Scenes of Country Life.= By EDWARD JESSE.
    =Tale for a Chimney Corner.= By LEIGH HUNT.
    =The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.= By OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
    =La Mort d’Arthur=: Selections from MALLORY.
    =Provincial Letters of Blaise Pascal.=
    =Maxims and Reflections of Rochefoucauld.=

=THE WANDERER’S LIBRARY.= Crown 8vo, cloth extra, =3s. 6d.= each.

    =Wanderings in Patagonia.= By JULIUS BEERBOHM. Illustrated.
    =Camp Notes.= By FREDERICK BOYLE.
    =Savage Life.= By FREDERICK BOYLE.
    =Merrie England in the Olden Time.= By G. DANIEL. Illustrated by
       CRUIKSHANK.
    =Circus Life.= By THOMAS FROST.
    =Lives of the Conjurers.= By THOMAS FROST.
    =The Old Showmen and the Old London Fairs.= By THOMAS FROST.
    =Low-Life Deeps.= By JAMES GREENWOOD.
    =Wilds of London.= By JAMES GREENWOOD.
    =Tunis.= By Chev. HESSE-WARTEGG. 22 Illusts.
    =Life and Adventures of a Cheap Jack.=
    =World Behind the Scenes.= By P. FITZGERALD.
    =Tavern Anecdotes and Sayings.=
    =The Genial Showman.= By E. P. HINGSTON.
    =Story of London Parks.= By JACOB LARWOOD.
    =London Characters.= By HENRY MAYHEW.
    =Seven Generations of Executioners.=
    =Summer Cruising in the South Seas.= By C. WARREN STODDARD.
       Illustrated.

=HANDY NOVELS.= Fcap. 8vo, cloth boards, =1s. 6d.= each.

    =The Old Maid’s Sweetheart.= By A. ST. AUBYN.
    =Modest Little Sara.= By ALAN ST. AUBYN.
    =Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.= By M. E. COLERIDGE.
    =Taken from the Enemy.= By H. NEWBOLT.
    =A Lost Soul.= By W. L. ALDEN.
    =Dr. Palliser’s Patient.= By GRANT ALLEN.

=MY LIBRARY.= Printed on laid paper, post 8vo, half-Roxburghe, =2s. 6d.=
each.

    =Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare.= By W. S. LANDOR.
    =The Journal of Maurice de Guerin.=
    =Christie Johnstone.= By CHARLES READE.
    =Peg Woffington.= By CHARLES READE.
    =The Dramatic Essays of Charles Lamb.=

=THE POCKET LIBRARY.= Post 8vo, printed on laid paper and hf.-bd., =2s.=
each.

    =The Essays of Elia.= By CHARLES LAMB.
    =Robinson Crusoe.= Illustrated by G. CRUIKSHANK.
    =Whims and Oddities.= By THOMAS HOOD. With 85 Illustrations.
    =The Barber’s Chair.= By DOUGLAS JERROLD.
    =Gastronomy.= By BRILLAT-SAVARIN.
    =The Epicurean=, &c. By THOMAS MOORE.
    =Leigh Hunt’s Essays.= Edited by E. OLLIER.
    =White’s Natural History of Selborne.=
    =Gulliver’s Travels=, &c. By Dean SWIFT.
    =Plays.= By RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN.
    =Anecdotes of the Clergy.= By JACOB LARWOOD.
    =Thomson’s Seasons.= Illustrated.
    =The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table= and =The Professor at the
       Breakfast-Table=. By OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.


                         THE PICCADILLY NOVELS.

 LIBRARY EDITIONS OF NOVELS, many Illustrated, crown 8vo, cloth extra,
                            =3s. 6d.= each.

                           =By F. M. ALLEN.=

    Green as Grass.

                           =By GRANT ALLEN.=

    Philistia.
    Babylon.
    Strange Stories.
    Beckoning Hand.
    In all Shades.
    The Tents of Shem.
    For Maimie’s Sake.
    The Devil’s Die.
    This Mortal Coil.
    The Great Taboo.
    Dumaresq’s Daughter.
    Blood Royal.
    Duchess of Powysland.
    Ivan Greet’s Masterpiece.
    The Scallywag.

                          =By MARY ANDERSON.=

    Othello’s Occupation.

                         =By EDWIN L. ARNOLD.=

    Phra the Phœnician.
    The Constable of St. Nicholas.

                          =By ALAN ST. AUBYN.=

    A Fellow of Trinity.
    The Junior Dean.
    Master of St. Benedict’s.
    To His Own Master
    In Face of the World.
    Orchard Damerel.

                       =By Rev. S. BARING GOULD.=

    Red Spider.
    Eve.

                           =By ROBERT BARR.=

    In a Steamer Chair.
    From Whose Bourne.

                          =By FRANK BARRETT.=

    The Woman of the Iron Bracelets.

                             =By “BELLE.”=

    Vashti and Esther.

                       =Sir W. BESANT & J. RICE.=

    My Little Girl.
    Case of Mr. Lucraft.
    This Son of Vulcan.
    The Golden Butterfly.
    By Celia’s Arbour.
    The Monks of Thelema.
    The Seamy Side.
    The Ten Years’ Tenant.
    Ready-Money Mortiboy.
    With Harp and Crown.
    ’Twas in Trafalgar’s Bay.
    The Chaplain of the Fleet.

                        =By Sir WALTER BESANT.=

    All Sorts and Conditions of Men.
    The Captains’ Room.
    All in a Garden Fair.
    Herr Paulus.
    The Ivory Gate.
    The World Went Very Well Then.
    For Faith and Freedom.
    The Rebel Queen.
    Dorothy Forster.
    Uncle Jack.
    Children of Gibeon.
    Bell of St. Paul’s.
    To Call Her Mine.
    The Holy Rose.
    Armorel of Lyonesse.
    St. Katherine’s by the Tower.
    Verbena Camellia Stephanotis.

                         =By Robert BUCHANAN.=

    Shadow of the Sword.
    A Child of Nature.
    Heir of Linne.
    The Martyrdom of Madeline.
    God and the Man.
    Love Me for Ever.
    Annan Water.
    Woman and the Man.
    The New Abelard.
    Foxglove Manor.
    Master of the Mine.
    Red and White Heather.
    Matt.
    Rachel Dene.

                       =By J. MITCHELL CHAPPLE.=

    The Minor Chord.

                            =By HALL CAINE.=

    The Shadow of a Crime.
    A Son of Hagar.
    The Deemster.

                         =By MACLAREN COBBAN.=

    The Red Sultan.
    The Burden of Isabel.

MORT. & FRANCES COLLINS.

    Transmigration.
    Blacksmith & Scholar.
    The Village Comedy.
    From Midnight to Midnight.
    You Play me False.

                          =By WILKIE COLLINS.=

    Armadale.
    After Dark.
    No Name.
    Antonina.
    Basil.
    Hide and Seek.
    The Dead Secret.
    Queen of Hearts.
    My Miscellanies.
    The Woman in White.
    The Moonstone.
    Man and Wife.
    Poor Miss Finch.
    Miss or Mrs.?
    The New Magdalen.
    The Frozen Deep.
    The Two Destinies.
    The Law and the Lady.
    The Haunted Hotel.
    The Fallen Leaves.
    Jezebel’s Daughter.
    The Black Robe.
    Heart and Science.
    “I Say No.”
    Little Novels.
    The Evil Genius.
    The Legacy of Cain.
    A Rogue’s Life.
    Blind Love.

                           =By DUTTON COOK.=

    Paul Foster’s Daughter.

                           =By E. H. COOPER.=

    Geoffory Hamilton.

                          =By V. CECIL COTES.=

    Two Girls on a Barge.

                        =By C. EGBERT CRADDOCK.=

    His Vanished Star.

                          =By H. N. CRELLIN.=

    Romances of the Old Seraglio.

                            =By MATT CRIM.=

    Adventures of a Fair Rebel.

                           =By B. M. CROKER.=

    Diana Barrington.
    Proper Pride.
    A Family Likeness.
    Pretty Miss Neville.
    A Bird of Passage.
    “To Let.”
    Outcast of the People.

                          =By WILLIAM CYPLES.=

    Hearts of Gold.

                         =By ALPHONSE DAUDET.=

    The Evangelist; or, Port Salvation.

                       =By H. COLEMAN DAVIDSON.=

    Mr. Sadler’s Daughters.

                          =By ERASMUS DAWSON.=

    The Fountain of Youth.

                          =By JAMES DE MILLE.=

    A Castle in Spain.

                         =By J. LEITH DERWENT.=

    Our Lady of Tears.
    Circe’s Lovers.

                           =By DICK DONOVAN.=

    Tracked to Doom.
    Man from Manchester.

                          =By A. CONAN DOYLE.=

    The Firm of Girdlestone.

                       =By S. JEANNETTE DUNCAN.=

    A Daughter of To-day.
    Vernon’s Aunt.

                       =By Mrs. ANNIE EDWARDES.=

    Archie Lovell.

                         =By G. MANVILLE FENN.=

    The New Mistress.
    Witness to the Deed.
    The Tiger Lily.
    The White Virgin.

                         =By PERCY FITZGERALD.=

    Fatal Zero.

                         =By R. E. FRANCILLON.=

    One by One.
    A Dog and his Shadow.
    A Real Queen.
    King or Knave?
    Ropes of Sand.
    Jack Doyle’s Daughter.

Pref. by Sir BARTLE FRERE.

    Pandurang Hari.

                          =By EDWARD GARRETT.=

    The Capel Girls.

                           =By PAUL GAULOT.=

    The Red Shirts.

                          =By CHARLES GIBBON.=

    Robin Gray.
    Loving a Dream.
    The Golden Shaft.

                           =By E. GLANVILLE.=

    The Lost Heiress.
    A Fair Colonist.
    The Fossicker.

                          =By E. J. GOODMAN.=

    The Fate of Herbert Wayne.

                          =By CECIL GRIFFITH.=

    Corinthia Marazion.

                          =By SYDNEY GRUNDY.=

    The Days of his Vanity.

                           =By THOMAS HARDY.=

    Under the Greenwood Tree.

                            =By BRET HARTE.=

    A Waif of the Plains.
    A Ward of the Golden Gate.
    A Sappho of Green Springs.
    Col. Starbottle’s Client.
    Susy.
    Sally Dows.
    A Protégée of Jack Hamlin’s.
    Bell-Ringer of Angel’s.
    Clarence.

                         =By JULIAN HAWTHORNE.=

    Garth.
    Ellice Quentin.
    Sebastian Strome.
    Dust.
    Fortune’s Fool.
    Beatrix Randolph.
    David Poindexter’s Disappearance.
    The Spectre of the Camera.

                           =By Sir A. HELPS.=

    Ivan de Biron.

                           =By I. HENDERSON.=

    Agatha Page.

                           =By G. A. HENTY.=

    Rujub the Juggler.
    Dorothy’s Double.

                            =By JOHN HILL.=

    The Common Ancestor.

                         =By Mrs. HUNGERFORD.=

    Lady Verner’s Flight.
    The Red-House Mystery.

                         =By Mrs. ALFRED HUNT.=

    The Leaden Casket.
    That Other Person.
    Self-Condemned.
    Mrs. Juliet.

                          =By CUTCLIFFE HYNE.=

    Honour of Thieves.

                           =By R. ASHE KING.=

    A Drawn Game.
    “The Wearing of the Green.”

                        =By EDMOND LEPELLETIER.=

    Madame Sans-Gene.

                          =By HARRY LINDSAY.=

    Rhoda Roberts.

                          =By E. LYNN LINTON.=

    Patricia Kemball.
    Under which Lord?
    “My Love!”
    Ione.
    Paston Carew.
    Sowing the Wind.
    The Atonement of Leam Dundas.
    The World Well Lost.
    The One Too Many.

                            =By H. W. LUCY.=

    Gideon Fleyce.

                         =By JUSTIN MCCARTHY.=

    A Fair Saxon.
    Linley Rochford.
    Miss Misanthrope.
    Donna Quixote.
    Maid of Athens.
    Camiola.
    Waterdale Neighbours.
    My Enemy’s Daughter.
    Red Diamonds.
    Dear Lady Disdain.
    The Dictator.
    The Comet of a Season.

                         =By GEORGE MACDONALD.=

    Heather and Snow.
    Phantastes.

                           =By L. T. MEADE.=

    A Soldier of Fortune.

                         =By BERTRAM MITFORD.=

    The Gun-Runner.
    The Luck of Gerard Ridgeley.
    The King’s Assegai.
    Renshaw Fanning’s Quest.

                          =By J. E. MUDDOCK.=

    Maid Marian and Robin Hood.

                        =By D. CHRISTIE MURRAY.=

    A Life’s Atonement.
    Joseph’s Coat.
    Coals of Fire.
    Old Blazer’s Hero.
    Val Strange.
    Hearts.
    A Model Father.
    By the Gate of the Sea.
    A Bit of Human Nature.
    First Person Singular.
    Cynic Fortune.
    The Way of the World.
    Bob Martin’s Little Girl.
    Time’s Revenges.
    A Wasted Crime.
    In Direst Peril.
    Mount Despair.

                         =By MURRAY & HERMAN.=

    The Bishops’ Bible.
    One Traveller Returns.
    Paul Jones’s Alias.

                           =By HUME NISBET.=

    “Bail Up!”

                           =By W. E. NORRIS.=

    Saint Ann’s.

                             =By G. OHNET.=

    A Weird Gift.

                              =By OUIDA.=

    Held in Bondage.
    Strathmore.
    Chandos.
    Under Two Flags.
    Idalia.
    Cecil Castlemaine’s Gage.
    Tricotrin.
    Puck.
    Folle Farine.
    A Dog of Flanders.
    Pascarel.
    Signa.
    Princess Napraxine.
    Ariadne.
    Two Little Wooden Shoes.
    In a Winter City.
    Friendship.
    Moths.
    Ruffino.
    Pipistrello.
    A Village Commune.
    Bimbi.
    Wanda.
    Frescoes.
    Othmar.
    In Maremma.
    Syrlin.
    Guilderoy.
    Santa Barbara.
    Two Offenders.

                         =By MARGARET A. PAUL.=

    Gentle and Simple.

                            =By JAMES PAYN.=

    Lost Sir Massingberd.
    Less Black than We’re Painted.
    A Confidential Agent.
    A Grape from a Thorn.
    In Peril and Privation.
    The Mystery of Mirbridge.
    The Canon’s Ward.
    Walter’s Word.
    By Proxy.
    High Spirits.
    Under One Roof.
    From Exile.
    Glow-worm Tales.
    The Talk of the Town.
    Holiday Tasks.
    For Cash Only.
    The Burnt Million.
    The Word and the Will.
    Sunny Stories.
    A Trying Patient.

                       =By Mrs. CAMPBELL PRAED.=

    Outlaw and Lawmaker.
    Christina Chard.

                           =By E. C. PRICE.=

    Valentina.
    The Foreigners.
    Mrs. Lancaster’s Rival.

                          =By RICHARD PRYCE.=

    Miss Maxwell’s Affections.

                          =By CHARLES READE.=

    It is Never Too Late to Mend.
    The Double Marriage.
    Love Me Little, Love Me Long.
    The Cloister and the Hearth.
    The Course of True Love.
    The Autobiography of a Thief.
    Put Yourself in His Place.
    A Terrible Temptation.
    The Jilt.
    Singleheart and Doubleface.
    Good Stories of Men and other Animals.
    Hard Cash.
    Peg Woffington.
    Christie Johnstone.
    Griffith Gaunt.
    Foul Play.
    The Wandering Heir.
    A Woman-Hater.
    A Simpleton.
    A Perilous Secret.
    Readiana.

                        =By Mrs. J. H. RIDDELL.=

    Weird Stories.

                           =By AMELIE RIVES.=

    Barbara Dering.

                          =By F. W. ROBINSON.=

    The Hands of Justice.

                           =By DORA RUSSELL.=

    A Country Sweetheart.

                         =By W. CLARK RUSSELL.=

    Ocean Tragedy.
    My Shipmate Louise.
    Alone on Wide Wide Sea.
    The Phantom Death.
    Is He the Man?

                          =By JOHN SAUNDERS.=

    Guy Waterman.
    Bound to the Wheel.
    The Two Dreamers.
    The Lion in the Path.

                        =By KATHARINE SAUNDERS.=

    Margaret and Elizabeth.
    Gideon’s Rock.
    The High Mills.
    Heart Salvage.
    Sebastian.

                           =By HAWLEY SMART.=

    Without Love or Licence.

                          =By T. W. SPEIGHT.=

    A Secret of the Sea.

                         =By R. A. STERNDALE.=

    The Afghan Knife.

                          =By BERTHA THOMAS.=

    Proud Maisie.
    The Violin-Player.

                         =By ANTHONY TROLLOPE.=

    The Way we Live Now.
    Frau Frohmann.
    Scarborough’s Family.
    The Land-Leaguers.

                       =By FRANCES E. TROLLOPE.=

    Like Ships upon the Sea.
    Anne Furness.
    Mabel’s Progress.

                       =By IVAN TURGENIEFF, &c.=

    Stories from Foreign Novelists.

                            =By MARK TWAIN.=

    The American Claimant.
    The £1,000,000 Bank-note.
    Tom Sawyer Abroad.
    Pudd’nhead Wilson.

                       =By C. C. FRASER-TYTLER.=

    Mistress Judith.

                           =By SARAH TYTLER.=

    Lady Bell.
    The Bride’s Pass.
    Buried Diamonds.
    The Blackhall Ghosts.
    The Macdonald Lass.

                           =By ALLEN UPWARD.=

    The Queen against Owen.
    The Prince of Balkistan.

                         =By E. A. VIZETELLY.=

    The Scorpion: A Romance of Spain.

                           =By J. S. WINTER.=

    A Soldier’s Children.

                         =By MARGARET WYNMAN.=

    My Flirtations.

                             =By E. ZOLA.=

    The Downfall.
    The Dream.
    Dr. Pascal.
    Money.
    Lourdes.


                   CHEAP EDITIONS OF POPULAR NOVELS.

                Post 8vo, illustrated boards, 2s. each.

                           =By ARTEMUS WARD.=

    Artemus Ward Complete.

                           =By EDMOND ABOUT.=

    The Fellah.

                          =By HAMILTON AIDE.=

    Carr of Carrlyon.
    Confidences.

                           =By MARY ALBERT.=

    Brooke Finchley’s Daughter.

                          =By Mrs. ALEXANDER.=

    Maid, Wife or Widow?
    Valerie’s Fate.

                           =By GRANT ALLEN.=

    Strange Stories.
    Philistia.
    Babylon.
    The Devil’s Die.
    This Mortal Coil.
    In all Shades.
    The Beckoning Hand.
    Blood Royal.
    For Maimie’s Sake.
    The Tents of Shem.
    The Great Taboo.
    Dumaresq’s Daughter.
    The Duchess of Powysland.
    Ivan Greet’s Masterpiece.
    The Scallywag.

                         =By E. LESTER ARNOLD.=

    Phra the Phœnician.

                          =By ALAN ST. AUBYN.=

    A Fellow of Trinity.
    The Junior Dean.
    Master of St. Benedict’s.
    To His Own Master.

                       =By Rev. S. BARING GOULD.=

    Red Spider.
    Eve.

                          =By FRANK BARRETT.=

    Fettered for Life.
    Little Lady Linton.
    Between Life & Death.
    The Sin of Olga Zassoulich.
    Folly Morrison.
    Lieut. Barnabas.
    Honest Davie.
    A Prodigal’s Progress.
    Found Guilty.
    A Recoiling Vengeance.
    For Love and Honour.
    John Ford; and His Helpmate.

                        =By SHELSLEY BEAUCHAMP.=

    Grantley Grange.

                        =By Sir WALTER BESANT.=

    Dorothy Forster.
    Children of Gibeon.
    Uncle Jack.
    Herr Paulus.
    All Sorts and Conditions of Men.
    The Captains’ Room.
    All in a Garden Fair.
    The World Went Very Well Then.
    For Faith and Freedom.
    To Call Her Mine.
    The Bell of St. Paul’s.
    Armorel of Lyonesse.
    The Holy Rose.
    The Ivory Gate.
    St. Katherine’s by the Tower.
    Verbena Camellia.
    The Rebel Queen.

Sir W. BESANT & J. RICE.

    This Son of Vulcan.
    My Little Girl.
    The Case of Mr. Lucraft.
    The Golden Butterfly.
    By Celia’s Arbour.
    The Monks of Thelema.
    The Seamy Side.
    The Ten Years’ Tenant.
    Ready-Money Mortiboy.
    With Harp and Crown.
    ’Twas in Trafalgar’s Bay.
    The Chaplain of the Fleet.

                          =By AMBROSE BIERCE.=

    In the Midst of Life.

                         =By FREDERICK BOYLE.=

    Camp Notes.
    Savage Life.
    Chronicles of No man’s Land.

                            =By BRET HARTE.=

    Californian Stories.
    Gabriel Conroy.
    The Luck of Roaring Camp.
    An Heiress of Red Dog.
    Flip.
    Maruja.
    A Phyllis of the Sierras.
    A Waif of the Plains.
    A Ward of the Golden Gate.

                          =By HAROLD BRYDGES.=

    Uncle Sam at Home.

                         =By ROBERT BUCHANAN.=

    Shadow of the Sword.
    A Child of Nature.
    God and the Man.
    Love Me for Ever.
    Foxglove Manor.
    The Master of the Mine.
    The Martyrdom of Madeline.
    Annan Water.
    The New Abelard.
    Matt.
    The Heir of Linne.

                            =By HALL CAINE.=

    The Shadow of a Crime.
    A Son of Bagar.
    The Deemster.

                        =By Commander CAMERON.=

    The Cruise of the “Black Prince.”

                       =By Mrs. LOVETT CAMERON.=

    Deceivers Ever.
    Juliet’s Guardian.

                          =By HAYDEN CARRUTH.=

    The Adventures of Jones.

                           =By AUSTIN CLARE.=

    For the Love of a Lass.

                        =By Mrs. ARCHER CLIVE.=

    Paul Ferroll.
    Why Paul Ferroll Killed his Wife.

                         =By MACLAREN COBBAN.=

    The Cure of Souls.
    The Red Sultan.

                        =By C. ALLSTON COLLINS.=

    The Bar Sinister.

                     =By MORT. & FRANCES COLLINS.=

    Sweet Anne Page.
    Transmigration.
    From Midnight to Midnight.
    A Fight with Fortune.
    Sweet and Twenty.
    The Village Comedy.
    You Play Me False.
    Blacksmith and Scholar.
    Frances.

                          =By WILKIE COLLINS.=

    Armadale.
    After Dark.
    No Name.
    Antonina.
    Basil.
    Hide and Seek.
    The Dead Secret.
    Queen of Hearts.
    Miss or Mrs.?
    The New Magdalen.
    The Frozen Deep.
    The Law and the Lady.
    The Two Destinies.
    The Haunted Hotel.
    A Rogue’s Life.
    My Miscellanies.
    The Woman in White.
    The Moonstone.
    Man and Wife.
    Poor Miss Finch.
    The Fallen Leaves.
    Jezebel’s Daughter.
    The Black Robe.
    Heart and Science.
    “I Say No!”
    The Evil Genius.
    Little Novels.
    Legacy of Cain.
    Blind Love.

                         =By M. J. COLQUHOUN.=

    Every Inch a Soldier.

                           =By DUTTON COOK.=

    Leo.
    Paul Foster’s Daughter.

                        =By C. EGBERT CRADDOCK.=

    The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains.

                            =By MATT CRIM.=

    Adventures of a Fair Rebel.

                           =By B. M. CROKER.=

    Pretty Miss Neville.
    Diana Barrington.
    “To Let.”
    Bird of Passage.
    Proper Pride.
    A Family Likeness.

                            =By W. CYPLES.=

    Hearts of Gold.

                         =By ALPHONSE DAUDET.=

    The Evangelist; or, Port Salvation.

                          =By ERASMUS DAWSON.=

    The Fountain of Youth.

                          =By JAMES DE MILLE.=

    A Castle in Spain.

                         =By J. LEITH DERWENT.=

    Our Lady of Tears.
    Circe’s Lovers.

                         =By CHARLES DICKENS.=

    Sketches by Boz.
    Oliver Twist.
    Nicholas Nickleby.

                           =By DICK DONOVAN.=

    The Man-Hunter.
    Tracked and Taken.
    Caught at Last!
    Wanted!
    Who Poisoned Hetty Duncan?
    Man from Manchester.
    A Detective’s Triumphs.
    In the Grip of the Law.
    From Information Received.
    Tracked to Doom.
    Link by Link.
    Suspicion Aroused.
    Dark Deeds.
    The Long Arm of the Law.

                       =By Mrs. ANNIE EDWARDES.=

    A Point of Honour.
    Archie Lovell.

                        =By M. BETHAM-EDWARDS.=

    Felicia.
    Kitty.

                          =By EDW. EGGLESTON.=

    Roxy.

                         =By G. MANVILLE FENN.=

    The New Mistress.
    Witness to the Deed.

                         =By PERCY FITZGERALD.=

    Bella Donna.
    Never Forgotten.
    Polly.
    Fatal Zero.
    Second Mrs. Tillotson.
    Seventy-five Brooke Street.
    The Lady of Brantome.

                     =By P. FITZGERALD= and others.

    Strange Secrets.

                       =By ALBANY BE FONBLANQUE.=

    Filthy Lucre.

                         =By R. E. FRANCILLON.=

    Olympia.
    One by One.
    A Real Queen.
    Queen Cophetua.
    King or Knave?
    Romances of the Law.
    Ropes of Sand.
    A Dog and his Shadow.

                         =By HAROLD FREDERICK.=

    Seth’s Brother’s Wife.
    The Lawton Girl.

Pref. by Sir BARTLE FRERE.

    Pandurang Hari.

                          =By HAIN FRISWELL.=

    One of Two.

                          =By EDWARD GARRETT.=

    The Capel Girls.

                           =By GILBERT GAUL.=

    A Strange Manuscript.

                          =By CHARLES GIBBON.=

    Robin Gray.
    Fancy Free.
    For Lack of Gold.
    What will the World Say?
    In Love and War.
    For the King.
    In Pastures Green.
    Queen of the Meadow.
    A Heart’s Problem.
    The Dead Heart.
    In Honour Bound.
    Flower of the Forest.
    The Braes of Yarrow.
    The Golden Shaft.
    Of High Degree.
    By Mead and Stream.
    Loving a Dream.
    A Hard Knot.
    Heart’s Delight.
    Blood-Money.

                         =By WILLIAM GILBERT.=

    Dr. Austin’s Guests.
    James Duke.
    The Wizard of the Mountain.

                         =By ERNEST GLANVILLE.=

    The Lost Heiress.
    A Fair Colonist.
    The Fossicker.

                          =By HENRY GREVILLE.=

    A Noble Woman.
    Nikanor.

                          =By CECIL GRIFFITH.=

    Corinthia Marazion.

                          =By SYDNEY GRUNDY.=

    The Days of his Vanity.

                          =By JOHN HABBERTON.=

    Brueton’s Bayou
    Country Luck.

                         =By ANDREW HALLIDAY.=

    Every-day Papers.

                        =By Lady DUFFUS HARDY.=

    Paul Wynter’s Sacrifice.

                           =By THOMAS HARDY.=

    Under the Greenwood Tree.

                        =By J. BERWICK HARWOOD.=

    The Tenth Earl.

                         =By JULIAN HAWTHORNE.=

    Garth.
    Ellice Quentin.
    Fortune’s Fool.
    Miss Cadogna.
    Sebastian Strome.
    Dust.
    Beatrix Randolph.
    Love—or a Name.
    David Poindexter’s Disappearance.
    The Spectre of the Camera.

                         =By Sir ARTHUR HELPS.=

    Ivan de Biron.

                           =By HENRY HERMAN.=

    A Leading Lady.

                           =By HEADON HILL.=

    Zambra the Detective.

                            =By JOHN HILL.=

    Treason Felony.

                         =By Mrs. CASHEL HOEY.=

    The Lover’s Creed.

                        =By Mrs. GEORGE HOOPER.=

    The House of Raby.

                          =By TIGHE HOPKINS.=

    Twixt Love and Duty.

                         =By Mrs. HUNGERFORD.=

    A Maiden all Forlorn.
    In Durance Vile.
    Marvel.
    A Mental Struggle.
    A Modern Circe.
    Lady Verner’s Flight.

                         =By Mrs. ALFRED HUNT.=

    Thornicroft’s Model.
    That Other Person.
    Self-Condemned.
    The Leaden Casket.

                           =By JEAN INGELOW.=

    Fated to be Free.

                           =By WM. JAMESON.=

    My Dead Self.

                           =By HARRIETT JAY.=

    The Dark Colleen.
    Queen of Connaught.

                           =By MARK KERSHAW.=

    Colonial Facts and Fictions.

                           =By R. ASHE KING.=

    A Drawn Game.
    “The Wearing of the Green.”
    Passion’s Slave.
    Bell Barry.

                            =By JOHN LEYS.=

    The Lindsays.

                          =By E. LYNN LINTON.=

    Patricia Kemball.
    The World Well Lost.
    Under which Lord?
    Paston Carew.
    “My Love!”
    Ione.
    The Atonement of Leam Dundas.
    With a Silken Thread.
    The Rebel of the Family.
    Sowing the Wind.

                          =By HENRY W. LUCY.=

    Gideon Fleyce.

                         =By JUSTIN McCARTHY.=

    Dear Lady Disdain.
    Waterdale Neighbours.
    My Enemy’s Daughter.
    A Fair Saxon.
    Linley Rochford.
    Miss Misanthrope.
    Camiola.
    Donna Quixote.
    Maid of Athens.
    The Comet of a Season.
    The Dictator.
    Red Diamonds.

                           =By HUGH MACCOLL.=

    Mr. Stranger’s Sealed Packet.

                         =By AGNES MACDONELL.=

    Quaker Cousins.

                      =By KATHARINE S. MACQUOID.=

    The Evil Eye.
    Lost Rose.

                          =By W. H. MALLOCK.=

    A Romance of the Nineteenth Century.
    The New Republic.

                         =By FLORENCE MARRYAT.=

    Open! Sesame!
    Fighting the Air.
    A Harvest of Wild Oats.
    Written in Fire.

                           =By J. MASTERMAN.=

    Half-a-dozen Daughters.

                         =By BRANDER MATTHEWS.=

    A Secret of the Sea.

                         =By LEONARD MERRICK.=

    The Man who was Good.

                         =By JEAN MIDDLEMASS.=

    Touch and Go.
    Mr. Dorillion.

                         =By Mrs. MOLESWORTH.=

    Hathercourt Rectory.

                          =By J. E. MUDDOCK.=

    Stories Weird and Wonderful.
    The Dead Man’s Secret.
    From the Bottom of the Deep.

                        =By MURRAY and HERMAN.=

    One Traveller Returns.
    Paul Jones’s Alias.
    The Bishops’ Bible.

                        =By D. CHRISTIE MURRAY.=

    A Model Father.
    Joseph’s Coat.
    Coals of Fire.
    Val Strange.
    Old Blazer’s Hero.
    Hearts.
    The Way of the World.
    Cynic Fortune.
    A Life’s Atonement.
    By the Gate of the Sea.
    A Bit of Human Nature.
    First Person Singular.
    Bob Martin’s Little Girl.
    Time’s Revenges.
    A Wasted Crime.

                           =By HENRY MURRAY.=

    A Game of Bluff.
    A Song of Sixpence.

                           =By HUME NISBET.=

    “Ball Up!”
    Dr. Bernard St. Vincent.

                          =By ALICE O’HANLON.=

    The Unforeseen.
    Chance? or Fate?

                          =By GEORGES OHNET.=

    Dr. Rameau.
    A Last Love.
    A Weird Gift.

                          =By Mrs. OLIPHANT.=

    Whiteladies.
    The Primrose Path.
    The Greatest Heiress in England.

                       =By Mrs. ROBERT O’REILLY.=

    Phœbe’s Fortunes.

                              =By OUIDA.=

    Held in Bondage.
    Strathmore.
    Chandos.
    Idalia.
    Under Two Flags.
    Cecil Castlemaine’s Gage.
    Tricotrin.
    Puck.
    Folle Farine.
    A Dog of Flanders.
    Pascarel.
    Signa.
    Princess Napraxine.
    In a Winter City.
    Ariadne.
    Friendship.
    Two Little Wooden Shoes.
    Moths.
    Bimbi.
    Pipistrello.
    A Village Commune.
    Wanda.
    Othmar.
    Frescoes.
    In Maremma.
    Guilderoy.
    Ruffino.
    Syrlin.
    Santa Barbara.
    Ouida’s Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos.

                       =By  MARGARET AGNES PAUL.=

    Gentle and Simple.

                           =By C. L. PIRKIS.=

    Lady Lovelace.

                           =By EDGAR A. POE.=

    The Mystery of Marie Roget.

                       =By Mrs. CAMPBELL PRAED.=

    The Romance of a Station.
    The Soul of Countess Adrian.
    Outlaw and Lawmaker.

                           =By E. C. PRICE.=

    Valentina.
    The Foreigners.
    Mrs. Lancaster’s Rival.
    Gerald.

                          =By RICHARD PRYCE.=

    Miss Maxwell’s Affections.

                            =By JAMES PAYN.=

    Bentinck’s Tutor.
    Murphy’s Master.
    A County Family.
    At Her Mercy.
    Cecil’s Tryst.
    The Clyffards of Clyffe.
    The Foster Brothers.
    Found Dead.
    The Best of Husbands.
    Walter’s Word.
    Halves.
    Fallen Fortunes.
    Humorous Stories.
    £200 Reward.
    A Marine Residence.
    Mirk Abbey.
    By Proxy.
    Under One Roof.
    High Spirits.
    Carlyon’s Year.
    From Exile.
    For Cash Only.
    Kit.
    The Canon’s Ward.
    Talk of the Town.
    Holiday Tasks.
    A Perfect Treasure.
    What He Cost Her.
    A Confidential Agent.
    Glow-worm Tales.
    The Burnt Million.
    Sunny Stories.
    Lost Sir Massingberd.
    A Woman’s Vengeance.
    The Family Scapegrace.
    Gwendoline’s Harvest.
    Like Father, Like Son.
    Married Beneath Him.
    Not Wooed, but Won.
    Less Black than We’re Painted.
    Some Private Views.
    A Grape from a Thorn.
    The Mystery of Mirbridge.
    The Word and the Will.
    A Prince of the Blood.
    A Trying Patient.

                          =By CHARLES READE.=

    It is Never Too Late to Mend.
    Christie Johnstone.
    The Double Marriage.
    Put Yourself in His Place.
    Love Me Little, Love Me Long.
    The Cloister and the Hearth.
    The Course of True Love.
    The Jilt.
    The Autobiography of a Thief.
    A Terrible Temptation.
    Foul Play.
    The Wandering Heir.
    Hard Cash.
    Singleheart and Doubleface.
    Good Stories of Men and other Animals.
    Peg Woffington.
    Griffith Gaunt.
    A Perilous Secret.
    A Simpleton.
    Readiana.
    A Woman-Hater.

                        =By Mrs. J. H. RIDDELL.=

    Weird Stories.
    Fairy Water.
    Her Mother’s Darling.
    The Prince of Wales’s Garden Party.
    The Uninhabited House.
    The Mystery in Palace Gardens.
    The Nun’s Curse.
    Idle Tales.

                           =By AMELIE RIVES.=

    Barbara Dering.

                          =By F. W. ROBINSON.=

    Women are Strange.
    The Hands of Justice.

                          =By JAMES RUNCIMAN.=

    Skippers and Shellbacks.
    Grace Balmaign’s Sweetheart.
    Schools and Scholars.

                         =By W. CLARK RUSSELL.=

    Round the Galley Fire.
    On the Fo’k’sle Head.
    In the Middle Watch.
    A Voyage to the Cape.
    A Book for the Hammock.
    The Mystery of the “Ocean Star.”
    The Romance of Jenny Harlowe.
    An Ocean Tragedy.
    My Shipmate Louise.
    Alone on a Wide Wide Sea.

                       =By GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA.=

    Gaslight and Daylight.

                          =By JOHN SAUNDERS.=

    Guy Waterman.
    The Two Dreamers.
    The Lion in the Path.

                        =By KATHARINE SAUNDERS.=

    Joan Merryweather.
    The High Mills.
    Heart Salvage.
    Sebastian.
    Margaret and Elizabeth.

                          =By GEORGE R. SIMS.=

    Rogues and Vagabonds.
    The Ring o’ Bells.
    Mary Jane’s Memoirs.
    Mary Jane Married.
    Tales of To-day.
    Dramas of Life.
    Tinkletop’s Crime.
    Zeph.
    My Two Wives.
    Memoirs of a Landlady.
    Scenes from the Show.

                         =By ARTHUR SKETCHLEY.=

    A Match in the Dark.

                           =By HAWLEY SMART.=

    Without Love or Licence.

                          =By T. W. SPEIGHT.=

    The Mysteries of Heron Dyke.
    The Golden Hoop.
    Hoodwinked.
    By Devious Ways.
    Back to Life.
    The Loudwater Tragedy.
    Burgo’s Romance.
    Quittance in Full.

                         =By R. A. STERNDALE.=

    The Afghan Knife.

                        =By R. LOUIS STEVENSON.=

    New Arabian Nights.
    Prince Otto.

                          =By BERTHA THOMAS.=

    Cressida.
    Proud Maisie.
    The Violin-Player.

                         =By WALTER THORNBURY.=

    Tales for the Marines.
    Old Stories Retold.

T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE.

    Diamond Cut Diamond.

                       =By F. ELEANOR TROLLOPE.=

    Like Ships upon the Sea.
    Anne Furness.
    Mabel’s Progress.

                         =By ANTHONY TROLLOPE.=

    Frau Frohmann.
    Marion Fay.
    Kept in the Dark.
    John Caldigate.
    The Way We Live Now.
    The Land-Leaguers.
    The American Senator.
    Mr. Scarborough’s Family.
    The Golden Lion of Granpere.

                         =By J. T. TROWBRIDGE.=

    Farnell’s Folly.

                       =By IVAN TURGENIEFF, &c.=

    Stories from Foreign Novelists.

                            =By MARK TWAIN.=

    A Pleasure Trip on the Continent.
    The Gilded Age.
    Huckleberry Finn.
    Mark Twain’s Sketches.
    Tom Sawyer.
    A Tramp Abroad.
    Stolen White Elephant.
    Life on the Mississippi.
    The Prince and the Pauper.
    A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.
    The £1,000,000 Bank-Note.

                       =By C. C. FRASER-TYTLER.=

    Mistress Judith.

                           =By SARAH TYTLER.=

    The Bride’s Pass.
    Buried Diamonds.
    St. Mungo’s City.
    Lady Bell.
    Noblesse Oblige.
    Disappeared.
    The Huguenot Family.
    The Blackhall Ghosts.
    What She Came Through.
    Beauty and the Beast.
    Citoyenne Jaqueline.

                           =By ALLEN UPWARD.=

    The Queen against Owen.

                         =By AARON WATSON and=

LILLIAS WASSERMANN.

    The Marquis of Carabas.

                         =By WILLIAM WESTALL.=

    Trust-Money.

                      =By Mrs. F. H. WILLIAMSON.=

    A Child Widow.

                           =By J. S. WINTER.=

    Cavalry Life.
    Regimental Legends.

                            =By H. F. WOOD.=

    The Passenger from Scotland Yard.
    The Englishman of the Rue Cain.

                            =By Lady WOOD.=

    Sabina.

                       =By CELIA PARKER WOOLLEY.=

    Rachel Armstrong; or, Love and Theology.

                           =By EDMUND YATES.=

    The Forlorn Hope.
    Land at Last.
    Castaway.

    OGDEN, SMALE AND CO. LIMITED, PRINTERS, GREAT SAFFRON HILL, E.C.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                          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_.



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