The professor’s experiment (Vol. 2 of 3)

CHAPTER XXIII.

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

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

‘You’ve been teasing her, you know you have—and she’s mad with me now. And I didn’t mean anything. And she’s crying, I 29know she is. And you’re all beasts—beasts!’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Why don’t you go to her, then?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A slender figure is inside it—a figure flung miserably into one of the corners, and 31crying perhaps, after all, more angrily than painfully.

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

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

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

‘It wasn’t so much that,’ says she. 32‘Though’—anxiously—‘Jacky exaggerated most dreadfully. As to my objecting to their teasing me about James McIlveagh—you have not seen him, or you would understand me better. It is not only that he is uninteresting, but that he is awful! His nose is like an elephant’s trunk, and his eyes are as small as the head of a pin. And his clothes—his trousers—I don’t know where he got his trousers, but Dom used to say his mother made them in her spare moments. Not that one would care about a person’s trousers, of course,’ says Susan, with intense earnestness, ‘if he was nice himself; but James wasn’t nice, and I was never more glad in my life than when he went away.’

‘He’s coming back, however.’

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

‘Well, you see, I hardly knew what to do 33at first,’ says Crosby, quite entering into the argument. ‘And when I did, it was a little too late. Of course it seemed to me a very possible thing that you might have given your heart to this young man with the nose and the unfortunate trousers who is stewing in the Soudan.’

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

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

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

‘Well, I don’t care! He did once, all round the gooseberry bushes; and I threw a spade at him, and it hit him on the head, and I thought I had killed him. I’—with 34another glance at Crosby, now from between Bonnie’s curls—‘was dreadfully frightened then. But now I almost wish I had. Any way, he never tried to—he never, I mean’—confusedly—‘hunted me again.’

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

Susan laughs.

‘Like you,’ says she.

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

‘Ah, I’m afraid of gooseberry bushes,’ says he. ‘They have thorns in them. James, you see, surpasses me in valour. Talking of valour reminds me of those you have left behind you, and who have sent me here as their plenipotentiary, to extract from you a promise of peace. They are all very sorry 35they annoyed you so much about the redoubtable James; and they desired me to say so. I was afraid to come by myself, so I brought Bonnie with me. Bonnie, tell her to come back with me now, and say: “Peace is restored with honour.” Say it for her, Bonnie.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘They would not,’ says Crosby. ‘It is I 36alone who am in that secret. And, by the way, Susan’—stopping her as they both rise—‘that is the second secret we have between us; we are becoming quite fashionable—we are growing into a society, you and I.’

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

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

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

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

Susan laughs in spite of herself.

‘Well, at all events I can trust you, then, 37not to betray me to them.’ She points to the late temple of her tears.

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

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

CHAPTER XXIV.

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

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

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

‘Also Aunt Jemima!’ he says enthusiastically.

This joke, if it is meant for one, is a dead failure. No one even smiles. Susan, who is 39feeling a little shy, and is horribly conscious that, in spite of Crosby’s assurances, her eyes are of a very tell-tale colour, is fighting with her brain for some light, airy, amusing remark that may prove to all present that she had only run away from them in mere search of physical exercise, when suddenly the rather forced smile dies upon her lips, and her eyes become fixed on some object over there on her right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now a little silence falls upon them.

Over there, peeping out between the leaves of the soft sycamore-tree, is a face. There is 41nothing to tell if it be a boy’s or a girl’s face, as nothing can be seen but the shapely head; and its soft abundant tresses of chestnut hair are so closely drawn back into a knot behind that they are hidden by the crowding branches. The eyes are gleaming, the lips slightly parted. So might a Hamadryad look, peering through swaying leaves.

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

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

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

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

Crosby has said nothing. He is, indeed, 42deeply occupied with the face. So this is Wyndham’s tenant. A very lovely one.

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

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

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

43‘No, but what, then?’ asks Carew.

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

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

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

This startling suggestion creates a slight pause.

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

This is distinctly lame.

‘Poor thing!’ says Susan sympathetically.

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

‘But if she has lost her parents lately,’ puts in Crosby hastily, ‘she might, perhaps—one should not even with the best intentions 44force one’s self upon people in such deep grief as hers.’

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

Crosby recovers from this blow with difficulty.

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

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

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

‘Well, consult your father about it,’ says Crosby, as a last resource. In spite of his 45affection for Wyndham, he has doubts about his tenant.

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

‘Put the tray down here,’ says Betty, with quite an air, seeing that Susan has given way a little beneath the want of the table—‘down here on the grass near me. I’ll pour out the tea’—this with a withering glance at Susan, who is slightly flushed, and apparently ashamed of herself. ‘We haven’t any rustic table yet, Mr. Crosby,’ says Betty, with immense 46aplomb, ‘but were going to have one shortly’—this with all the admirable assurance of a fashionable dame who has just been ordering a garden tea-table from one of the best London houses. She nods and smiles at him. ‘Dom is going to make it. Susan’—with a freezing glance at that damsel—‘do you think you could manage to cut the sponge-cake?’

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

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

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

47They are all laughing still—indeed, their merriment has quite reached a height—when Susan, looking over her shoulder, nearly drops her cup and saucer, and sits up as if listening.

‘Someone is coming,’ says she.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘We travel a thorny road,’ says she.

Crosby sadly acquiesces.

‘True,’ says he.

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

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

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

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

‘Awful lucky she went away so soon!’ says 50Carew, as the last bit of Aunt Jemima’s tail disappears round the corner. ‘She’d have led us a life had she stayed. She’s been on the prance all day on account of those Brians.’

‘Yes, isn’t it awful?’ says Betty.

‘Who are the Brians?’ asks Crosby.

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

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

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

‘Ah, that’s it!’ says Dom. ‘Really, Betty, I think you might hold on long enough to finish your own story. It appears Aunt 51Jemima went up to the farm yesterday, and found that they had taken the bath as an ornament, and had nailed it up against the sitting-room wall with four long tenpenny nails, and—’ Here, in spite of his lecture to Betty, Mr. Fitzgerald himself gives way, and, falling back upon the grass, shouts with laughter.

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

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

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

‘Well, I can’t help it,’ says Betty, very 52rightly aggrieved, ‘if I have got a cold in my head.’

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

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

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

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

But all this is so distinctly not meant to be heard that no one takes any notice of it, and any serious consequences are prevented by the fact that Dominick, rising, throws himself between the puzzled Jacky and the irate 53Betty. In the meantime, Crosby draws himself along the rug until he is even closer to Susan, who now again is looking serious.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Brothers, you mean, or sisters?’

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

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

‘What a sympathetic mind you have!’ says 54he. ‘And yet you don’t give me a share of it. You have known me quite a long time now, and I have no father or mother, yet you have not wept with me.’

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

‘One sister,’ says he.

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

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

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

Crosby looks at her. Is she real, this pretty child? His inclination to laugh dies within him; and so dies, too, the inclination to utter the usual society speech, that with most society girls would have been considered the thing on an occasion like this. Both are 55done to death by Susan’s eyes, so calm, so sweet, so earnest, and so entirely without a second meaning of any sort.

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

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

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

Susan stares at him. He nods back at her.

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

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

‘Very much,’ says Crosby. ‘At all events, her husband is. She doesn’t give him much rope. However, you’ll see her soon, as she is coming to stay with me. She always makes a point of coming to me for my birthday, whenever I chance to be in Ireland or England for it. I suppose I must be going now. I 56say, you two fellows’—turning to Carew and Dom—‘why are you so lazy? Why don’t you come up and help me to shoot the rabbits? They are getting beyond the keepers’ control.’

Dom and Carew glance at each other.

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

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

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

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

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

They all laugh at this, and all, as usual, 57accompany him to the gate to give him a kind send-off.

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

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

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

It is slowly opening!

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

CHAPTER XXV.

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

‘Oh, how pretty!’ thinks Susan to herself, 59but she says nothing, being lost in wonder and admiration; and the girl, peeping out of the doorway, as if disheartened, draws back again, and will in another minute disappear altogether, but for Carew.

He makes a sharp gesture.

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

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

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

Susan smiles back at her, and passes 60through the small green gate. Ella, pleased and palpitating, glances back, to see Carew looking after them like a young culprit at the door of a forbidden paradise.

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

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

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

‘It is all quite true,’ says the girl distinctly. ‘I don’t want to see people—not everyone, you know. But sometimes when 61I hear your voices over there’—pointing towards the Rectory garden—‘laughing and talking, I have felt a little lonely.’ She is looking at Susan, and Susan can see that her eyes now are a little misty. ‘To-day’—wistfully—‘you were laughing a great deal.’

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

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

‘I shall never leave this place,’ says Ella 62quickly. ‘All I want is to stay here, in this lovely garden, by myself.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I have never played it.’

‘Golf, then?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here Carew turns an awful crimson, and 65casts a glance, meant to annihilate, upon the innocent Susan.

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

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

Ella has taken a step towards Susan.

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

‘Susan Barry.’

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

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

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

‘No, no; indeed, I like it.’

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

Has he thrown a bomb into the assembly? Something, at all events, has stricken the stranger dumb. She shrinks backwards, playing with a branch of the Wigelia rosea near her, as if to hide her embarrassment. What is her name? She tells herself that she does not know, that she disbelieves in the name forced upon her by those dreadful people she had lived with after—After what? Even that is vague to her. Was it after her mother’s death? Hints and innuendoes from the Moores had given her 67to believe that Moore, at all events, was not her real name. But beyond that she knows nothing.

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXVI.

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

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

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

69‘How d’ye do, Mr. Wyndham?’ says she.

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

The day after he left Ella, he had gone to that part of Dublin described by her as the place where the man Moore lived. A squalid place, though still with an air of broken respectability about it, and with quite an extraordinary number of ill-dressed urchins playing about the hall doorsteps. They were of that class, that though their garments were almost in rags they had still shoes and stockings, of sorts, on their feet, and an attempt at a frayed collar round their necks. It gave Wyndham a sense of disgust to think that the girl who was now living in his dainty cottage had once lived in such an 70atmosphere as this; and when he had gone down the hideous road twenty yards or so, the certainty that had begun at the first yard—that she could never have lived there—had deepened. But this idea gave him little comfort. If she had ever lived here, it was only, to say the least of it, deplorable. If she had not lived here, she had lied to him, and was an impostor. And if the latter supposition was true, he had rented his cottage to an impostor, and a clever one, too. She had taken him in, beyond all doubt. And he was looked upon as rather a bright and shining light amongst his confrères at the Bar and at the University Club, and in the various other resorts for rising young men in Dublin.

When he knocked at the door of the house mentioned by her, he told himself that of course he had come on a fool’s errand; yet, when the woman who answered the door—a highly respectable person, and frightfully dirty, in a respectable way—told him ‘that no Moores lived here,’ he felt as though 71someone had struck him. He must have looked extremely taken back, because the respectably-dirty lady roused herself sufficiently from the dignity that seemed to cling to her as closely as her grime, and condescended to say she had only been there a short time, ‘an’ p’raps Mrs. Morgan, nex’ door, could give him the information he was lookin’ for.’

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

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

72Yes; of course she had known Mr. Moore. He used to live next door, but some months ago his wife died, and he had seemed a little unsettled like since.

‘There was a girl?’

‘Oh yes—Ella Moore.’

‘Their daughter?’

‘Law, no, sir! Her niece, poor Mrs. Moore would call her at times, but I don’t think she was even that. I don’t know the truth of it rightly; but that girl was “quite the lady,” sir, round here. An’ she found some people who took her up an’ had her as governess for their children—big people out in some o’ the squares. Mrs. Moore had her with her when she took the house nex’ door. Ella was a little creature then, an’ used to be cryin’ always for someone—her mother, I used to say. But Mrs. Moore was very dark, entirely, an’ never let out. Is it about Ella you’re comin’, sir? I’d be glad to hear good of her. But I suppose you know she fled out of Moore’s house one night, an’ was never seen again? Some said as how Moore wanted to 73murder her, or did murder her; but he wasn’t a man for that, I say. Any way, up he sticks, and disappears after a bit. The police looked into it for a while, but nothin’ came of it. They do say’—mysteriously—‘that Moore wanted to marry her, and that she’d have nothin’ to do with him. But, law, some people would say anythin’! An’, of course, he was old enough to be her father. You wouldn’t be likely to know anythin’ of her, sir?’—in the wheedling tone of the confirmed gossip.

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

‘No, sir.... Get out!’—to two or three little children who have appeared on the threshold, anxious, no doubt, for their dinner, and wondering what is keeping their mammy. ‘But if you did hear of Miss Ella—we all used to call her “Miss Ella,” though she was, as it might be, one of ourselves—I’d be glad to get a word from you. She was very good to my little Katie, an’ she would come in of 74an evenin’ an’ give her a lesson, just as if I could pay for it. There was very few like her, sir, an’ that I tell you,’ says Mrs. Morgan, whose eyes, in spite of her wonderful dirtiness, are handsome now because of the honest, kindly tears that shine in them. ‘An’ it’s me own opinion,’ goes on the grimy woman, ‘that she never belonged to them Moores at all—that she was stolen like by Mr. Moore.’

‘Or by his wife?’ suggests Wyndham.

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

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

‘You may be right,’ he said. The interview was at an end. Seeing two of Mrs. Morgan’s children peeping in again, hungry 75and disconsolate, he beckons them to him, and after awhile they slowly, and with open distrust, creep towards him. Was that the Katie—that little dark-eyed, handsome child—that she used to teach? Wyndham caught her and drew her towards him, and pressed half-a-sovereign into her hand, and then caught the little boy hanging on her scanty skirts, and pressed another little yellow piece into his soft but unwashed palm, after which he bid the grateful Mrs. Morgan adieu, and walked out of their lives for ever.

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

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

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

‘I think we must go now,’ says Susan, holding out her hand to her new acquaintance. ‘It is very late—too late’—smiling—‘for a formal visit.’ Wyndham winces. Is his informal? ‘But we shall pay that soon, 77now that we know we may come. And, of course, you and your—’

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

So she hesitates, and Wyndham misinterprets her pause. He feels furious. What was the word she was going to use? ‘Lover,’ no doubt, in the innocence of her young and abominably stupid heart. He feels brutal even towards the unconscious Susan just now. Yes, that is what all the small world round here will think. His colour rises, and he feels all at once guilty, as though the very worst facts could be laid to his charge, whilst all the time he is innocent. Innocent! Oh, confound it! the situation is absolutely maddening ... and if it comes to the old man’s ears! Lord Shangarry is not one to be easily entreated, or to be convinced, 78either.... An obstinate old man, who, if he once caught an idea into his old brain, would find it very hard to let it go again.

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

The speech is wound up very satisfactorily, after all.

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

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

She smiles delightfully at Wyndham, and the wretched man smiles back at her in a 79way that should have moved her to tears had she seen him, but, providentially, after a mere passing glance at him, she has given her attention to Ella, who pleases her imagination immensely.

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

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

‘We are telling her,’ goes on Susan sweetly, 80‘that she must come and see us sometimes, too—just across the road, you know. But she says she will not. Can’t you persuade her, Mr. Wyndham, though you are only her landlord, as you say?’ Is there meaning in her tone? Does she think? Wyndham glances at her suspiciously, and then knows he ought to be ashamed of himself. ‘Still, landlords have weight, and you know father would be so pleased if she would come to us sometimes.’

‘I dare say,’ says Wyndham, who can almost see Mr. Barry’s face when the idea is suggested to him. The Rector, with his aristocratic tendencies, that the very depths of poverty have not been able to subdue, would think it monstrous, Susan’s being here at all with a girl so wrapped in mystery—a girl so enveloped in the base gossip that already is arising about her in the neighbourhood, because of her strange tenancy of the Cottage—a gossip that must inevitably include him, Wyndham, too. How is her coming here to be accounted for? Who will 81hold him guiltless of the knowledge of her coming?

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

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

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

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

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

82Susan bids good-bye again to Ella, who is looking a little subdued and uncertain now; Carew does the same, holding her hand lingeringly, as if wishing to say something sympathetic to her, but finding words fail him. Wyndham, following him and Susan, would have passed through the gate into the road outside, but that Ella, with a quick, softly-spoken word, full of emotion, stops him.

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

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

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

‘Yes—about that fellow.’

‘Mr. Moore?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, you will stay—you will tell me!’ cries she, in low but panting tones. ‘Oh, 83don’t leave me in suspense. Even if you can’t stay now, you can come back again, if only for five minutes! Oh, do! You will? He—’ She looks as if she were going to faint.

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

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

Susan looks at Wyndham in a startled way.

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

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

‘Father would help you,’ says Susan. 84‘Was it because of that you wanted to see him to-day?’

‘Yes,’ says Wyndham.

There is no time for more.

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

CHAPTER XXVII.

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

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

When she is gone, the Rector faces Wyndham.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘If you could explain, Wyndham.’

‘That’s what offends me,’ says Wyndham, with some passion. He has refused to return an inch, so the Rector has had to go to him. It wouldn’t do to shout his conversation, considering 87all the young people who live on one side of the road behind the right-hand wall, and the one ‘young person’ (the Rector has the gravest suspicions) who lives on the other side of it. What if they should all chance to hear?

Wyndham is still talking.

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

‘That hardly requires an answer,’ says Mr. Barry calmly. And all at once Wyndham knows that the trouble he had dreamed of is already on him. There is gossip rife in the neighbourhood about him and this mysterious tenant of his cottage. People are talking—soon it will come to the old man’s ears, and to his aunt’s, and to Josephine’s. The last idea is the least troublesome. ‘You must surely have heard some rumours yourself. I am willing, I am most anxious,’ says the Rector, with growing earnestness, ‘to hear the truth of a story that seems, as it now 88stands, to be disastrous to two people. You, Wyndham, are one of them. No, not a word. Hear me first. I want to say just this: that if I was a little harsh to you a moment ago, it was because of Susan. One’s daughter has the first claim. And she—that child—to be—You tell me you did not take her to see—’

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

The Rector stops him with an impatient gesture.

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

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

‘I do not understand your evasions.’

‘If you will let me—’

‘I want no explanations,’ says the Rector 89coldly. ‘I want only one answer to one plain question: Who is this Miss Moore?’

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

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

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

‘I—’

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

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

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

‘Be silent!’ cries Wyndham, interrupting him so imperiously that the older man stops 90short. ‘She is my tenant—my tenant, I repeat, and’—haughtily—‘no more.’

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

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

He moves away.

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

‘Just that,’ says Wyndham, who is still at white heat—‘compulsion. If you would condescend’—angrily—‘to listen to my explanation, 91I might, perhaps, make you understand.’

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

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

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

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

The Rector still remains immovable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You have a more liberal mind than mine,’ says Wyndham. ‘I have told you so much that I may as well make you my father confessor in toto.’ The smile that accompanies this is rather strained. ‘As a fact, there was a time when I did not believe in 93her story myself; and now, when I have to—well, it makes me feel rather poor, you know.’

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

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

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

‘I beg you won’t,’ says Wyndham hurriedly. ‘Have I not told you how she desires privacy above all things, how she dreads her discovery by that man? I know it all sounds mysterious, Mr. Barry—that it is asking a great deal of your credulity to expect you to believe it all—but I still hope you will believe me, and at all events I know her secret is safe in your hands. I myself have thought 94of suggesting to her to face matters bravely, and if Moore should prove troublesome, why, to fight it out with him. I cannot believe he has any actual claim on her; but she has such an almost obstinate determination not to risk the chance of meeting him that I fear she will not be moved by what I say. This shutting of herself up in that cottage seems a mania with her—such a mania that I cannot but think her story true, and that she suffered considerably at that fellow’s hands.’

‘It looks like it,’ says the Rector.

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

‘I wonder you ever consented to the arrangement.’

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

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

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

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

‘Got another situation, and a most miserable one. Left it, and was found in direst poverty by the person I got to hunt her up. Her delight at my proposal to her to live with Miss Moore was unbounded. It will, at all events, be a blessing to get her out of that stuffy room I found her in. She looked so out of place in it. You know what 96a nice-looking woman she was, and so well got up always. But yesterday ... I advanced her a little of her salary at once—to—to get anything she might want, you know; and I expect that next week she will come to the Cottage.’

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

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

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

‘Ah, we can none of us hope for that,’ says the Rector. ‘The most selfish of us have to live, not only for ourselves, but for others. You spoke of having seen Miss 97Manning yesterday. Have you—told the young lady in there of her coming?’

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

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

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

‘I?’

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXVIII.

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

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

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

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

‘Moore?’

‘Yes.’

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

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

‘Up there! What on earth for?’

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

She stops short in her somewhat dismal confession.

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

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

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

‘Mrs. Morgan?’ says Ella eagerly.

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

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

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

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

‘No, no,’ says the girl, shaking her head 103with conviction. She is very pale now. ‘To me it seems that he has left home to look for me. I know—I know’—affrightedly—‘that he is looking for me.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘I am enjoying life. Oh’—with a sudden, 104quick, happy smile—‘if you only knew how much!’

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

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

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

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

It is in Wyndham’s mind to say to her that it would be of considerable benefit to his social look-out if she would only consent to know people, and make herself known, and break through this deplorable attitude of secrecy that she has taken up; but a 105glance at her young frightened face deters him. He shrugs his shoulders over his own ill-luck, and bears it.

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

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

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

‘Always when it suited you; but not now, when it might be of some use. Of course, I can see quite plainly that that old idiot Mrs. Moriarty is backing you up in all your nonsensical fears, but there will soon be an end to that. I have engaged a lady 106to come and live with you, and give you lessons, and knock some sense into your head, I hope.’

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

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

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

‘As I have told you, I can always leave this,’ says she; ‘but it will be for a place where I can live alone, and where I shall never have to leave my home, even though it be a garret. I—I have thought of a convent’—her voice faltering—‘but I am a Protestant, and—’ She sighs heavily. ‘Mr. Wyndham,’ cries she suddenly, ‘why 107do you want me to go out—to know people? Why?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘I suppose he is that,’ says she thoughtfully. ‘Though I don’t think really he would ever murder anybody. You see, he didn’t 108even murder me. He only wanted to marry me! That was what made me so angry. If he had made me marry him’—turning to Wyndham with a quick, sharp movement—‘you think that would mean that I should have to live with him always?’

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

‘Well?’

Wyndham nods his head.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Ah! Then you have said—’

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

‘She will come?’—nervously.

‘On Thursday.’

‘And you?’

‘When you and she have reached the point 110of open war, I dare say she will drop me a line, to come to her rescue.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘And why not?’—angrily.

‘He’s bruk his arm, sir.’

‘Broke his arm?’

‘Just that, sir, bad scran to him! An’ the docther says he never saw a worse compound fraction in his life. ’Twas all through Timsey Mooney. Timsey and him’s at war for a long time, an’ yestherday Timsey said 112he’d break his head, an’ with that Denis said he’d have the life ov him; and ’twas the divil’s own row they had afther that, only’—with a regretful air—‘it was Denis’s arm that got bruk, an’ not Timsey’s head.’

‘So Denis got his arm broken?’

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

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

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

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

‘To tache her her manners is it? She’s 113got the purtiest manners I ever yet see,’ says Mrs. Moriarty, with a smothered indignation. ‘Tache her, indeed!’

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

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

‘She’s ould, thin?’—anxiously.

‘She is not young.’

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

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

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

‘I understhand, yer honour. She’s ould an’ cross, an’ Miss Ella is to follow her about 114everywhere. But’—with a last lingering remnant of hope—‘she won’t be comin’ for a while, sir, will she?’

‘She is coming on Thursday.’

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

CHAPTER XXIX.

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

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

‘Oh, they’ve scratched up all the mignonette,’ cries Susan, rushing to the point indicated—an escallonia bush in which three culprit hens are lurking. ‘Were there ever such wretches? And plenty of food in the yard, too! It isn’t as if they were starved. Cush! cush! Bother them! They 116won’t come out. Have you got a stick, Betty?’

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

‘That,’ I regret to say, is a stone directed with unerring aim by Betty, and received by the hen on her shoulder with a shock that makes her bound, not only into the air, but ‘over the garden wall’ and into the yard beyond, with a haste that perhaps she calls undue. And now Susan has routed out the other two, and, with a cackling that would rouse the dead, they rush after their companion towards that spot in the wall that is easiest for the purposes of ingress and egress from the yard to the garden. Susan races 117after them, ‘shoo-ing’ with all her might, generously supported by Betty and her shower of small stones. So ardent, so bloodthirsty, is the chase, it is matter for wonder that the hens, having once gone through such an encounter, could ever brave it again. But hens are amongst the bravest things living—Amazons in their own line. It is indeed popularly supposed in our neighbourhood that the souls of those defunct termagants have entered into them, and, at all events, there does not rest a doubt now in the minds of Susan and Betty that in half an hour’s time those hens will have returned to the charge, as fresh as ever.

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

‘I wish there was a netting put up,’ says Susan, who is distinctly flushed. ‘But who’s 118going to do it? Father won’t. Wiring costs something, and there would be a good bit of it to be put up there’—pointing to the long wall.

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

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

‘He’s nearly as good,’ says Betty.

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

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

‘I know he wouldn’t.’

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

‘No he isn’t,’ cries Susan; ‘he’s over there, near you. I see his leg. This side—this 119side, Betty. Ah, now you have him! Hold him—hold him tight.’ Betty has caught hold of the king of the yard, and is dragging him ruthlessly from his hiding-place. There are yells from the cock, and muttered execrations from Betty. But finally the cock has the best of it. With a whir and a whoop he makes a last grand sprint, and once again knows the splendours of freedom.

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

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

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

At the rustic gateway, however, that leads to it from the garden, a third enemy appears upon the scene—an enemy that takes off his hat, and makes such a magnificent attack with it that the cock, disheartened, gives way 120in turn, retreats, chassés a little, and finally, with a wild skirl, swoops over the garden wall after his wives, and is gone.

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

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

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

‘No, I was coming to see you all,’ says Crosby. He has nearly stopped at the ‘you,’ but she looks so young, so without a thought behind her, that he feels it would be useless. She would not understand, and even if she did it would only annoy her. A girl 121of the world—that would be different. She would laugh at this suggestion of a flirtation; but Susan—

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

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

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

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

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

‘Dying?’

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

‘Oh, I am sorry!’ says Susan.

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

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

‘What did he say, auntie?’

‘I hardly like to repeat it. An insult to a poor dying creature seems impossible, doesn’t it, Mr. Crosby? But I heard him myself. After all, why should not I speak? One ought to expose monsters. My dear’—to Susan—‘Lady Millbank had called to ask how Miss Blake was—at least, I suppose 123it was for that purpose—but she mumbles so, on account of those false teeth of hers, no doubt, that I scarcely heard what she was saying. But I did hear what Dr. Mulcahy said to her a moment afterwards. He was speaking of poor dear Kate Blake, and I distinctly heard him say she was “low”!’ Miss Barry pauses dramatically, but, beyond a smothered sound from Dom, nothing is heard.

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

‘But, auntie—’

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

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

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

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

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

‘I say, isn’t Aunt Jemima a regular corker?’ 125says Dom presently, addressing everybody in general.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I think so.’

‘But are they reliable authorities?’

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

‘For my birthday. Yes, next month.’

‘Your birthday?’

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

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

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

‘Is she like you?’ asks Susan.

CHAPTER XXX.

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

‘Not dull,’ says Susan.

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

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

‘Ah, Susan, that’s unkind! You shouldn’t hold up my past misdeeds to me. If you do, I’ll hold up your indiscretions to you—your 129lengthened conversation with a thief, for example. You know you did think me a thief then.’

Susan makes a gesture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’ll never mention cherries again.’

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

‘Katherine Forster.’

‘Mrs. Forster?’

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

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

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

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

‘The third of August. Didn’t I tell you? Katherine likes to think she is coming here to do me honour on that day; that’s how 132she puts it in words. To turn my house upside down, however, is what she really means. But I submit. The old house will stand it. She isn’t half bad, really, and certainly not more than half mad. I think I told you you would like her?’

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

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

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

Crosby breaks into her silent fears.

‘Hers principally; but some of them are 133mine, too, in a way. I really am so little at home that I haven’t time to cultivate lifelong friendships; but Lady Muriel Kennedy I have known all my life, and liked. I hope’—suddenly—‘when Katherine comes, you will spare her a little of your time.’

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

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

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

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

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

All at once she turns her glance straight on Crosby.

‘Were you ever in love?’ asks she.

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

135This sounds like basest subterfuge, and Susan casts a glance of scorn at him.

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

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

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

‘I am not, indeed. It is hysterics. If only you had gone through half what I have, 136I might expect a little sympathy from you. However, to continue. She was lovely, Susan, and she was tall—taller than you. She had coal-black eyes, and a nose that I have always considered Roman. I adored her. I used to walk about o’ nights looking at the moon (when there was one), and telling myself it was the image of her.’

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

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

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

‘I did—I did indeed, even quite lately,’ says Crosby. But this ambiguous speech 137receiving no recognition, he goes on: ‘If, as your contemptuous silence evidently means, Susan, you think me incapable of love, you are greatly in the wrong. I assure you I did compare her to that star. There was one special one; but somehow I can’t find it lately. It must have been removed, I think. And besides the star, I remember quite well being under a hallucination that led me to believe that the wettest day under heaven was full of sunshine when she was present; and that when she wasn’t present, no matter how brilliant the sky might be, that the sun never shone. Come, now, Susan; be just. That was real love, wasn’t it?’

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

‘Go on?’

‘Did she die?’

‘Die? Not much,’ says Crosby cheerfully. ‘Though of course’—relapsing into very suspicious gloom—‘she was dead to me. She’—with deep melancholy—‘thought I couldn’t 138furnish a house up to her form, so she threw me over.’

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

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

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

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

‘Still?’

Susan’s face grows disdainful.

‘Even more than ever I did.’

‘You are very constant.’

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

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

‘You met her? And she—she—’

‘Was a widow.’

‘A widow; and so you and she.... It is quite a romance!’ says Susan, in her soft 139voice, speaking hurriedly, almost stammering, indeed, in what is perhaps her joyful excitement over this beautiful ending to a sad love-story. ‘And she was as beautiful as ever?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

141Crosby stops, and his thoughts run swiftly to the mysterious ‘James.’ Were there unkind people behind her when that gallant youth declared his passion?

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

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

‘To which section do you belong?’

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

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

‘I’m afraid, after all, I must destroy your illusion,’ says he presently. ‘I don’t think she could have been in love with me. Not 142overpoweringly, I mean. She had a little money of her own, and I had a little of mine, so that we should not have been altogether paupers. But she was dreadfully addicted to diamonds, and man milliners, and bibelots of all kinds. I have other reasons, too, Susan, for thinking she did not really love me. She never gave me a keepsake! Now you—you have had a keepsake.’

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

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

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

‘Don’t,’ says Crosby quickly. ‘You’ll wake him.’ He points to Bonnie’s lovely little head, and Susan pauses in her flight. ‘Besides, I shan’t say another word—not one. I swear it. What I really wanted was your compassion. I have never had 143a keepsake given me in all my life, save one.’

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXXI.

‘Is this Susan?’

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

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

145Crosby has, through time, grown accustomed to think of Susan as a demure maiden, slightly Puritan in type, though no doubt with a latent wilfulness lying beneath the calm exterior. But now that the latent wilfulness has broken loose, he finds himself unprepared for it. Susan running there in the sunshine, with her hair, apparently just out of the tub and hardly yet dry, floating behind her, is another creature altogether. And such hair, too! Such glorious waves on waves glinting golden in the sun’s bright rays, with Susan’s face peeping out of it now and then. How wild, how mad, how soft, the bright hair looks, and how sweet are the ringing cries that come from Susan’s parted lips!

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

146Tommy, in his flight, turns terrified eyes on Susan over his shoulder.

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

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

Here lies the real sting. The Susan he had imagined as being a little out of joint with her world—just a very little daintily 147offended with him—is not the Susan who is here now, and who is running round the garden in merry pursuit of her little brother, with her eyes gleaming like diamonds, and evidently as gay as a lark.

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

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

All at once, even as he watches her, this joy dies out of her face. ‘She has seen me,’ says Crosby to himself; and forthwith he opens the gate and advances towards her. Tommy, in his race, has reached him, and 148now, breathless, flings himself into his arms, turning to look, with affected fright, at the coming of Susan.

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

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

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

‘Here,’ says Susan, as she steps in the most unexpected fashion from behind the tree. He can see that she is greatly disconcerted, and that she would never have come from behind it if remaining there was any longer possible. But she had seen 149and heard him, as he had seen and heard her.

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

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

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

‘How d’ye do?’ says he blandly.

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

150Crosby regards her reproachfully. ‘You are angry with me still,’ says he. ‘And after a whole night of reflection.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Tommy,’ says Mr. Crosby, ‘wait a minute; your sister won’t, but perhaps you will. There is a photographer in town to-day; he has come down from Dublin. And your aunt says she would like to have some of you 151photographed.’ Here there is a distinct slowing in Susan’s march past, though she disdains to turn her head, or show further mark of interest. ‘Don’t you want to be photographed, Tommy? I do, badly.’

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

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

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

‘It isn’t horrid.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘An admirable deed,’ says Miss Barry, who 153is in too great a state of delight to lecture with her usual fluency, and who, indeed, feels inclined to be lenient. ‘But you should not come into publicity, my dear child, until it is dry and carefully dressed again. However’—beaming upon Crosby, who begins to quite like her—‘youth will be youth, you know. And what do you think, Susan? There is a man down from the best photographer’s in Dublin—from Chancellor’s, I believe. And I am thinking of having our pictures taken, if only to send some copies to your uncle in Australia—my brother, you know, my dear. He will be so pleased to get them; and, really, it is a grand opportunity. Of course, you, Mr. Crosby, have had yours taken in every quarter of the globe, but we country mice seldom get the chance of seeing ourselves as others see us.’

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

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

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

‘And the hour?’ asks Crosby.

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

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

‘My dear Susan’—Miss Barry flushes the dull pink of the old when shamed—‘why should we send all our pictures to your uncle at once? It—it would probably confuse him. Another time we may think of that,’ says Miss Barry, who has counted up all her available shillings this morning, to see if it would be possible to send all the children, but had found they fell decidedly short. She would have died, however, rather than confess this to a stranger. ‘Just mine and yours, and—but I am afraid your father will never consent to be taken—and Betty’s and Carew’s—just the eldest ones. You can see, Mr. 155Crosby, that just the eldest ones will be those most acceptable to their uncle.’

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

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

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

‘I think you ought to wear your hair just as it is now,’ says Crosby to Susan in a low 156tone, as he bids her good-bye. It is impossible for her to refuse him her hand with her aunt looking on; and though Crosby is aware of this, it is to his shame, I confess, that he takes it and holds it in a warm clasp before he lets it go.

CHAPTER XXXII.

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

‘I won’t,’ says Betty, giggling. ‘I’ll be as honest as the sun. You looked’—pausing wickedly—‘something between Meg Merrilees and a wild Indian, with a bias toward the latter. But that needn’t put you out. He’s accustomed to wild Indians; and when one has lived with people fifty years or so, one gets to admire them. I shouldn’t wonder if he admired you. You must have taken him back to the good old days. Why didn’t 158you sing “Way down upon the Swannee River” for him? That would have finished the conquest.’

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

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

Susan is silent for a time; then:

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

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

‘No; but really, I mean how old, eh?’

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

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

‘Oh, not so old as that!’

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

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

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

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

‘That reminds me of something I read this 160morning,’ says Betty, who is beginning to enjoy herself. ‘It ran like this: “On the whole, I consider him one of the youngest men of my acquaintance.”’

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

‘In a book’—smartly.

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

‘A frisky duchess.’

‘She was young, of course?’

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t indeed. I put him in the seventies, if you remember. That would make him quite a babe to the duchess I speak of. 161She said her centenarian had the brightest, the most engaging manners, and, of course, that reminded me of Mr. Cros— Where are you going now, Susan?’

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

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

‘Have I vexed you?’ asks she.

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

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

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

‘To do your hair, for one thing,’ says the tease of the family with delightful bonhomie. 162‘Really, Susan, you can’t appear in public like this twice; and you know we are going to be photographed in— What is the hour now? Good gracious! it’s growing very late. We must run. Bonnie’s shirts can’t be done to-day, but I’ll help you with them to-morrow. Oh, there’s auntie—’

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

‘Oh, auntie!’ says poor Betty.

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

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

‘Yes, I think so; in the top drawer,’ says 163Miss Barry. ‘Susan’—suddenly—‘how could you ask such an uncomfortable question before Mr. Crosby!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Well, that’s the end of it,’ says Miss Barry, with the courage of despair. ‘I certainly won’t ask your father for a penny, as I know he hasn’t one to spare this month; and, indeed’—sighing—‘I only hope that those reports about that bank in Scotland are untrue. It is in that he has invested the £500 he has laid aside for Carew—for his crammer, you know, and his outfit, and all the rest of it. I dare say the scare will come to nothing; but, at all events, he is a little pressed just now, so that for a mere luxury 165like this I think we had better not ask him for anything.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Susan laughs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘There’s a lot in that,’ says Miss Ricketty, musing—she muses considerably. ‘Well, perhaps—’ Here she pauses again. ‘It may be,’ says she at last. She might, perhaps, have condescended to explain this last oracular speech, but that her bright eye catches sight of three young ladies going past her 170window. ‘There they go! there they go! Look at them, Miss Susan, my dear! Did ye ever see such quare crathures? May the Vargin give them sense! Look at their hats, an’ the strut o’ them! They’ve a power o’ money, I’m tould. “Articles of virtue” Mr. Connor called them the last day he was in here; but, faith, where the virtue comes in—they do say— But that’s not talk for the likes o’ you or me, dear. But tell me now, Miss Susan, what of Mr. Crosby? I’ve heard that he— Oh, murdher! talk of the divil—’

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

CHAPTER XXXIII.

Crosby looks a little surprised at finding Susan here.

‘How d’ye do?’ again says he.

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

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

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

172‘No fresh flirtations, I trust.’

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

‘And how is the giant?’

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

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

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

‘Bonnie has had a cake,’ says Susan. She would have said a great deal more if Tommy had been in question. Indeed, then she would have refused distinctly; but Bonnie’s little lovely smiling face, and the joy she knows it will give the gentle child to share Mr. Crosby’s gift with his little brother, stops her. She says nothing more, though it is actual pain to her to have to accept these 173sweets for her brother from Crosby. It is a debt she owes to Bonnie to suffer thus. But, then, what does she not owe Bonnie?

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

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

‘No,’ says Susan gently, ‘thank you.’

‘Not even an apology?’

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

‘We saw you through the window,’ cries Betty; and suddenly Susan’s thoughts run riot. Had he seen her through the window? ‘And so we came in. We must hurry, Susan; 174all the world is going to have its picture taken—even Lady Millbank, though goodness alone knows why. And such a guy as she looks in that velvet mantle—that heavy thing—’

‘A regular overmantle,’ says Dom.

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

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

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

‘It doesn’t matter; they are all old maids alike,’ says Betty lightly. ‘Any way, I have heard that some of the weird women of Curraghcloyne have said that we were short of clothes, because Susan and I had only one 175dress between us. This’—smoothing down her pretty serge frock—‘is the one in question. So I’m going to be photographed with Susan in it, if only to upset their theories, and give them some bad half-hours with their cronies; cronies never spare one.’

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

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

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

And, indeed, the poor lady had not another penny to spend beyond what she had already arranged for. If this double picture that the rash and reckless Betty speaks of becomes an accomplished fact, who is to pay for it? Not Miss Barry, certainly, because she has nothing with which to pay. And, naturally, the 176photographer will demand his just fees, and then all will come out, and—

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

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

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

It doesn’t seem folly at all to Dominick, who is a most generous youth, if extravagant, and who would give a great deal more to this photographic business if it was in his power. But a great deal has been spent of late on cartridges for the murdering of Mr. Crosby’s rabbits—so much, indeed, that cigarettes have grown scarce and pipes a luxury, spite of even the small sums that Carew has thrown into the common fund. Carew has generally a shilling or two in his pockets, the Rector 177deeming it advisable to give to his eldest son, out of his terribly inadequate income, a certain amount of pocket-money, to prepare him for the time when he will be thrown on his own resources; to teach him to economize now, so that when he is gazetted, and has to rely on his own slender allowance, he will be able to understand how to make money go as far as it can.

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

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

‘Certain.’

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

‘To my credit, yes,’ says Dom.

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

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

‘Yes—nearly,’ says he.

The ‘nearly’ is a concession to the truth. He has, indeed, three shillings left out of his monthly allowance, but these are already accounted for. They are to buy three copies of Betty for his own special apartment—one 179to be hung up over his gun, one over his bookcase, and one over his study table.

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

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

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

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

‘Young man!’ Is he a young man? Well, she has often thought so—she had even told Betty so. Here she glances at Betty, but 180Betty is now enjoying a word-to-word dispute with Dominick.

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

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

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

Upstairs they march in a body, to find themselves presently in a most evil-smelling corridor, out of which the studio opens. Here they wait perforce, until at last the studio door opens, and some people of the 181farming class, and very flurried and flushed, walk nervously down the little lane between them.

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

‘Aunt Jemima, you first,’ says Susan.

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

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

‘Now, auntie, come on. He’s looking at you.’ ‘He’ is the photographer, who has 182now, indeed, turned a lack-lustre eye on Miss Barry.

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

‘Answer him, auntie,’ says Susan.

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

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

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

But no one stirs.

‘A most insolent creature,’ says Miss Barry, who has unfortunately taken a dislike to him. ‘Look at him; one would think we 183had to have our pictures taken by law rather than by choice. Susan, did you ever see so villainous a countenance? No, my dear, I—I really feel—I couldn’t have my picture sent to your uncle if taken by an assassin like that.’ She holds back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Are you?’ retorts Miss Barry.

‘Yes, ma’am.’ He comes forward to rearrange 185her draperies and herself, her short colloquy with Susan having been sufficiently lively to disturb the recent pose. He pulls out her gown, then steps back to further study her, and finally takes her head between his hands, with a view to putting that into the right position also.

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t,’ says Miss Barry stoutly. ‘I see 186only that you are all a silly set of children, who do not understand the iniquity of man! This creature—’ She points to the photographer, who has gone back in a melancholy way to his slides, and is pulling them in and out, by way of exercise, perhaps. ‘However, Susan, I’ll go through with it, insolent and depraved as this creature evidently is; coming from a huge metropolis like Dublin, he scarcely knows how to behave himself with decent people. I must request you to tell him, however, that I refuse—absolutely refuse—to let him caress my face again!’

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

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

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

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

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

‘A lot of lies. Ah yes, that’s of course,’ says Crosby, interrupting him sympathetically. ‘But what they didn’t teach you was that there are two opinions, you know. You can show Lord Rosebery to the people who have not a shilling in the world, and not a 188grandfather amongst them; but I think you had better show Miss Barry a photograph of Lord Salisbury, and if you haven’t that, one of the Queen. She’s quite devoted to the Queen.’

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

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

‘And now, ma’am, will you kindly turn a little more this way?’ The poor man’s voice has grown quite apologetic. ‘Ah, that’s better! Thank you, ma’am. And if I 189might pull out your dress? Yes, that’s all right. And your elbow, ma’am, please.’

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

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

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

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

Miss Barry rises once more like a whirlwind.

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

There is one awful moment, a moment charged with electricity; then it is all over. The worst has come, there can be nothing 190more. Miss Barry is again pressed into her chair. The photographer, having come to the comforting conclusion that she is a confirmed lunatic, takes no more pains over her, refuses to adjust her robe, to put her face into position or revise her expression, and simply takes her as she is. The result is that he turns out the very best photograph he has taken for many a year.

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

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

‘Oh yes, one more,’ says Crosby.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

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

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

‘I hope you will let me have this charming 192face taken, if only for my own gratification,’ says he. ‘I have long wished it. And as he is here—if you will allow me. It is quite an ideal type, you know—I may have him photographed?’

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

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

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

193Meantime, Bonnie is being taken by the photographer, and so still, so calm a little subject he is, that his picture is, perhaps, the best of all, after Miss Barry’s, which is unique. Just Bonnie’s head—only that. But so sweet, so perfect, and the earnest eyes—

The photographer tells them that they shall have them all in a week or so. The photographer’s ‘week or so’ is so well understanded of the people, that the Barrys tell themselves in whispers in the little studio that if they get them in a fortnight they may thank their lucky stars.

‘A fortnight with that man!’ says Miss Barry, with ill-subdued wrath. ‘A month, you mean. I tell you he’s got the evil eye.’

Having thus relieved herself, and the photographer having vanished into a room beyond, she rises into happier ways.

‘Any way, in spite of him,’ says she, pointing towards the dark doorway into which he has vanished, ‘this must be called a most happy occasion—an auspicious one even, indeed.’ Miss Barry is always on 194immense terms with her dictionary. ‘I really think’—with sudden sprightliness—‘we should all exchange photos. I hope, Mr. Crosby’—turning pleasantly to him—‘that you will give us one of yours.’

‘I shall give you one with pleasure, Miss Barry,’ says Crosby, ‘and feel very proud about your wanting to have it. I shall, however, demand one of yours in return. As to your suggestion about a general exchange, I think it delightful.’ He turns suddenly to Susan. ‘I hope you will give me one of yours,’ says he.

Susan hesitates. To give her picture to him, when he thinks Lady Muriel Kennedy so lovely? Why, if he thinks a girl is so very lovely—she has described Lady Muriel to herself as a mere girl—why should he want a photograph of herself?

Miss Barry has noticed Susan’s hanging back, and, wondering that she should refuse her photograph to so good a friend, comes quickly forward.

‘Susan, I really think you might give 195Mr. Crosby your picture. You know, Mr. Crosby, I have always kept the girls a little strict, and perhaps Susan thinks—’

‘I don’t,’ says Susan, with sudden vehemence. She has shrunk back a little; her lovely eyes have suddenly grown shamed. ‘It—isn’t that, auntie.’

‘Oh, my dear, if it isn’t that—’ says Miss Barry; and being now called by Dominick, she turns away.

‘Auntie takes such queer views of things,’ says Susan, pale and unhappy. ‘It seems, however, that she would like me to give you my photograph. Well’—grudgingly—‘you can have it.’

‘I didn’t want it on those terms,’ says Crosby. ‘And yet’—quickly—‘I do on any terms.’

‘Oh no,’ says Susan; ‘auntie is right. Why should I refuse it to you?’

‘Susan,’ says he, ‘is the feud so strong as all that? Will you refuse me your picture?’

‘No, I shall give it,’ says she, faintly smiling; ‘but I shall make a bargain with 196you. If you will give me one of Bonnie’s, you shall have one of mine.’

‘I gain, but you do not,’ says he; ‘for you should have had one of Bonnie all the same. But what has come between us, Susan? I thought I was quite a friend of yours. Why am I to be dismissed like this, without even a character? You must remember one great occasion when you said that anyone who was allowed to go through my grounds would be sure to treat me with respect, or something like that. Now, you have often gone through my grounds, Susan, and is this respect that you are offering me?’

‘I thought,’ says Susan gravely, ‘that you promised never to speak of that again.’

‘Of what—respect?’

‘No, of that’—reluctantly—‘that day in the garden.’ The dawn of a blush appears upon her face, and her eyes rest on him reproachfully. ‘You are not to be depended on,’ says she.

‘Oh, Susan!’

His air is so abject that, in spite of herself, 197Susan laughs, and presently she holds out her hand to him with the sweetest air. ‘Any way, I have to thank you a thousand times for having had my Bonnie’s picture taken,’ says she. ‘And I know you knew that I wished for it.’ She gives him her hand. Tears rise to her eyes. ‘You could never know how I wished for it,’ says she.

CHAPTER XXXV.

‘Now, Miss Manning,’ says Wyndham, in his quick, alert, business-like way. He steps back, and motions her to go through the gateway that Mrs. Denis had opened about three inches a minute ago.

Miss Manning, a tall, thin, rather nervous-looking lady of very decided age, steps inside the gate, and glances from Wyndham to Mrs. Denis and back again interrogatively.

‘This is Miss Moore’s housekeeper, cook, and general factotum,’ says Wyndham, making a hasty introduction, and with a warning glance towards Mrs. Denis, who has dropped 199a rather stiff curtsy. ‘Yours too. She will remove all troubles from your shoulders, and will take excellent care of you, I don’t doubt.’ He pauses to give Mrs. Denis—who is looking glum, to say the least of it—room for one of her always only too ready speeches, but nothing comes. ‘Eh?’ says he, in a sharp metallic voice that brings Mrs. Denis to her senses with a jump.

‘Yes, sir,’ says she, and no more—no promises of obedience.

Wyndham hurries Miss Manning past her.

‘The other maid you can manage,’ says he, in a low tone, ‘and no doubt Mrs. Denis after awhile. She is a highly respectable woman, if a little unreasonable, and a little too devoted to your pupil. About the latter’—hastily—‘you know everything—her whole history—that is, so far as I know it—even to her peculiarities. You quite understand that she refuses to leave these grounds, and you know, too, her reasons for refusing—reasons not to be combated. They seem absurd to me, as I don’t believe that fellow has the 200slightest claim upon her; but she thinks otherwise. And—well, they are her reasons’—he pauses—‘and therefore to be respected.’

‘Certainly,’ says Miss Manning, in a low, very gentle voice, ‘and I shall respect them.’ Her voice is charming. Wyndham tells himself that he could hardly have made a better choice of a companion for this strange girl who has been so inconveniently flung into his life. Miss Manning’s face, too, is one to inspire instant confidence. Her eyes are earnest and thoughtful; her mouth kind, if sad. That she has endured much sorrow is written on every feature; but troubles have failed to embitter a spirit made up of Nature’s sweetest graces. And now, indeed, joy is lighting up her gentle eyes, and happy expectancy is making warm her heart. A month ago she had been in almost abject poverty—scarce knowing where to find the next day’s bread—when a most merciful God had sent her Paul Wyndham to lift her from her Slough of Despond to such a state of prosperity as she had never dared to 201dream of since as a child she ran gaily in her father’s meadows.

‘I am sure of that,’ says Wyndham heartily. ‘I am certain I can give her into your hands in all safety. I know very little of her, but she seems a good girl, not altogether tractable, perhaps, but I hope you will be able to get on with her. If, however, the dulness, the enforced solitude, becomes too much for you, you must let me know.’

‘I shall never have to let you know that,’ says Miss Manning, in a low, tremulous tone. ‘A home in the country, a young companion, a garden to tend—for long and very sad years I have dreamt of such things, but never with a hope of seeing them. And now, if I have seemed poor in my thanks, Paul—’

She breaks off, turning her head aside.

‘Yes, yes; I understand,’ says Wyndham hurriedly, dreading, yet feeling very tenderly towards her emotion. Once again he congratulates himself on having thought of this sweet woman in his difficulty.

202‘And for myself,’ says she, calmly now again, ‘I should never like to stir from this lovely garden.’ They are walking by one of the paths bordered with flowers. ‘I have been so long accustomed to solitude that, like my pupil, I shrink from breaking it. To see no one but her and’—delicately—‘you occasionally, I hope, is all I ask.’

‘You may perhaps have to see the Barrys now and then—the Rector’s people. They live over the way,’ says Wyndham, pointing towards where the Rectory trees can be seen. ‘I found the last time I was here that Susan, the eldest girl, had come in, or been brought in here by Miss Moore, so that there is already a slight acquaintance; and with girls,’ says the barrister, somewhat contemptuously, ‘that means an immediate, if not altogether undying, friendship.’

‘Yes,’ says Miss Manning. She feels a faint surprise. ‘It is not so much, then, that she does not desire to know people, as that she refuses to stir out of this place?’

‘That is how I take it. I wanted her very 203much to move about, to let herself be known. Honestly’—colouring slightly—‘it is rather awkward for me to have a tenant so very mysterious as she seems bent on being. I urged her to declare herself at once as my tenant and wait events; but she seemed so terrified at the idea of leaving these four walls that I gave up the argument. Perhaps you may bring her to reason, or perhaps the Rector and his youngsters may have the desired effect of putting an end to this morbidity. By-the-by, I am going over to the Rectory after I have introduced you to—’

‘Ella’ was on the tip of his tongue, but he substitutes ‘Miss Moore’ in time.

The very near slip renders him thoughtful for a moment or two. Why should he have called her Ella? Had he ever thought of her as Ella? Most positively never.

He is so absorbed in his introspection that he fails to see a slight, timid figure coming down the steps of the Cottage. Miss Manning touches his arm.

204‘Is this Miss Moore?’ cries she, in an excited whisper. ‘Oh, what a charming face!’

And, indeed, Ella is charming as she now advances—very pale, as if frightened, and with her dark eyes glancing anxiously from Wyndham to the stranger and back again. She has no hat on her head, and a sunbeam has caught her chestnut hair and turned it to glistening gold.

‘I hope you received my letter last night,’ says Wyndham, calling out to her and hastening his footsteps. ‘You see’—awkwardly—‘I have brought—brought you—’ He stops, waiting for Miss Manning to come up, and growing hopelessly embarrassed.

‘Your friend, my dear, I trust,’ says Miss Manning gently, taking the girl’s hand in both her own and regarding her with anxious eyes.

Ella flushes crimson. She has so dreaded, so feared, this moment, and now this gentle, sad-eyed woman, with her soft voice and pretty impulsive speech! Tears rise to the 205girl’s eyes. Nervously, yet eagerly, she leans forward and presses her lips to Miss Manning’s fair, if withered, cheek.

Wyndham, congratulating himself on the success of his latest enterprise, takes himself off presently to inspect a farm five miles farther out in the country, that had been left to him by his mother, with the Cottage. He has determined on taking the Rectory on his way back to meet the evening train—to enlist further Mr. Barry’s sympathy for his tenant. He tells himself, with a glow of self-satisfaction, that he is uncommonly good to his tenant; but so, of course, he ought to be, that dying promise to the Professor being sacred; and if it were not for the affection he had always felt for that great dead man, he would beyond doubt never have thought of her again.... There is much moral support in this conclusion.

Yes, he will spend half an hour at the Rectory. He can get back from the farm in plenty of time for that, and Miss Manning being an old friend of the Rector’s, the latter 206will be even more inclined to take up her pupil, which will be a good thing for the poor girl. He repeats the words ‘poor girl,’ and finds satisfaction in them. They seem to show how entirely indifferent he is to her and her fortunes. That mental slip of his awhile ago had alarmed him slightly. But ‘poor girl,’ to call her that precludes the idea of anything like—pshaw!

He dismisses the ‘poor girl’ from his mind forthwith, and succeeds admirably in getting rid of her, whilst blowing up his other tenants on the farm. But on his way back again to Curraghcloyne her memory once more becomes troublesome.

To-day, so far, things have gone well. She has seemed satisfied with Miss Manning, and Miss Manning with her. And as for the fear of an immediate scandal, that seems quite at rest. But in time the old worry is sure to mount to the surface again. For example, when Mrs. Prior hears of her—he wishes now, trudging grimly over the uneven road, that he had not led that astute woman 207to believe his tenant was a man—as she inevitably must, there will be a row on somewhere that will make the welkin ring; and after that, good-bye to his chances with Lord Shangarry, who has very special views about the right and the wrong.

If only this silly girl could be persuaded to come out of her shell and mingle with her kind, all might be got over after a faint wrestle or two. But no! Angrily he tells himself that there is no chance of that. Soft as she looks, and gentle, and lov—h’m—he kicks a stone out of his way—and pleasant-looking, and all that, he feels absolutely sure that nobody will be able to drag her out of her self-imposed imprisonment.

After this diatribe, it is only natural that he should, on entering the Rectory garden, feel himself a prey to astonishment on seeing, amongst a turbulent group upon the edges of the tennis-court, the ‘poor girl’ laughing with all her heart.

He stands still, within the shelter of the 208laurels, to ask himself if his eyesight has failed him thus early in life. But his eyesight still continues excellent, and when he sees the ‘poor girl’ pick up Tommy and plant him on her knee, he knows that all is well with his visual organs.

The fact is that, almost as he left the Cottage by the front-gate, Susan had run across the road and hammered loudly at the little green one. This primitive knocking had become a signal now with the Barrys and Ella, and soon the latter had rushed to open the door. There had been entreaties from Susan that she would come over now—now, at once—and have a game of tennis with them. She did not know tennis. All the more reason why she should begin to learn; and Aunt Jemima was quite pining to know her.

‘Yes, do come!’

‘No—no, I can’t. I have said I would never leave this place.’

‘Oh, that, of course; but—oh!—’

Here Susan breaks off abruptly. Who is 209that pretty, tall lady coming down the path? It is Miss Manning, and Ella very shyly introduces Susan to her.

‘Miss Manning, tell her to come and play tennis with us this afternoon,’ says Susan. ‘Not a soul but ourselves, and she’s very lonely here. Father says she ought to see people.’

‘I think as your father does,’ says Miss Manning gently.

‘And will you come too?’ asks Susan. ‘Aunt Jemima’—with born courtesy—‘will come and see you to-morrow, but in the meantime—’

‘I am afraid I have some unpacking to do,’ says Miss Manning, smiling, having fallen in love with Susan’s soft, flushed face and childish air. ‘But if you can persuade Ella—I know, my dear’—to Ella, who has turned a sad face to hers, a face that has yet the longing for larger life upon it—‘that you wish never to leave this place. But to go just across the road.... And there is no one there, Miss Barry tells you; and it is 210only a step or two, and’—smiling again—‘if you wish it, I’ll go over in an hour and bring you back again.’

‘No, don’t do that,’ says Ella. ‘You are tired.’ She hesitates, then looks out of the gateway, and up and down the lane. It is quite empty. ‘Well, I’ll come,’ says she, giving her hand to Susan.

It is evidently a desperate resolve. Even as she says it, she makes a last drawback, but Susan clings to her hand, and pulls her forward, and together the girls run down the lane to the Rectory gate and into it, Ella all the time holding Susan tightly, as if for protection.

This was how it happened that Ella first left the shelter of the Cottage. She was most kindly received by the Rector, who spared a moment from his precious books to welcome her—and even agreeably by Aunt Jemima. Ella had gone through the ordeal of these two introductions shyly but quietly. She had, however, been a little startled at finding that, added to the Barrys congregated 211on the lawn (a goodly number in themselves), there was a strange gentleman. Crosby struck her at first sight as being formidable—an idea that, if the young Barrys had known it, would have sent them into hysterics of mirth.

Crosby had strolled down early in the afternoon, and now Wyndham, standing gazing amongst the shrubberies, can see him turn from Susan to say something or other to Ella.

Wyndham, in his voluntary confinement, feels a sharp pang clutch at his breast. He stands still, as if unable to go on, watching the little pantomime.

Tommy is speaking now. The child’s voice rings clear and low.

‘I’ll tell you a story.’ He has put up a little fat hand, and is pinching Ella’s cheek. Ella has caught the little hand, and is kissing it. How pretty!

‘Silence!’ cries Crosby gaily. ‘Tommy is going to tell Miss Moore a story.’

There seems something significant to Wyndham 212in his tone. Why should he demand silence in that imperative manner, just because Miss Moore wishes a story to be told to her? He hesitates no longer. He comes quickly forward and up to the group.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

Susan sees him first, and, pushing Bonnie gently from her, rises to meet him.

‘How do you do?’ says she.

‘That you, Wyndham?’ cries Crosby. ‘You are just in time to hear Tommy’s story. Miss Moore has promised to lend him her support during the recital.’

For all Crosby’s lightness of tone, there is a strange, scrutinizing expression in his clever eyes as he looks at Wyndham. He knows that Ella Moore’s presence here must prove a surprise to him; and how will he take it? The girl seems well enough, but—And 214if Wyndham has been capable of placing so close to this family of young, young people someone who—

He is studying Wyndham very acutely. But all that he can make out of Wyndham’s face is surprise, and something that might be termed relief—nothing more. As for the girl, she is the one that looks confused. She rises, holding Tommy by her side, and looks appealingly at Wyndham. She would have spoken, perhaps, but that the Rector, who has not yet gone back to his study, takes up the parable.

‘We are very glad to have persuaded Miss Moore to come here to-day,’ says he, in a tone to be heard by everyone. ‘She has told me that you came down this morning, bringing Miss Manning with you. That will be a source of pleasure to us all, I am quite sure.’

He bows his courteous old head as amiably as though Miss Manning over the road could hear him. It is a tribute to her perfections. After this he buttonholes Wyndham, and draws him apart a bit.

215‘She’s a nice girl, Wyndham—a nice girl, I really think. A most guileless countenance! But not educated, you know. Betty and Susan—mere children as they are—could almost teach her.’

The Rector sighs. He always regards his girls as having stood still since his wife’s death. Children they were then, children they are now. He has not seemed to live himself since her death. Since that, indeed, all things have stood still for him.

‘Yes. But she seems intelligent—clever,’ says Wyndham, a little coldly.

‘I dare say. And now you have secured Miss Manning for her! That is a wise step,’ says the Rector thoughtfully. ‘She owes you much, Wyndham. I was glad when Susan persuaded her to come over here to-day. But I doubt if she will consent to go further. She seems terrified at the thought of being far from your—her home. Have you not yet discovered any trace of that scoundrel Moore? The bond between them might surely be broken.’

216‘There is no bond between them. Of that I am convinced,’ says Wyndham.

‘I trust not—I trust not,’ says the Rector. He makes a little gesture of farewell, and goes back to his beloved study, his head bent, his hands clasped behind his back, as usual.

‘We’re waiting for you, Mr. Wyndham,’ calls out Betty, arching her slender neck to look over Dominick’s shoulder. The wind has caught her fair, fluffy hair, and is ruffling it.

‘Yes; come along, Wyndham,’ says Crosby. ‘Tommy’s story is yet to tell.’

‘Better have one from you instead, Mr. Crosby,’ says Susan hastily. She knows Tommy. ‘You can tell us all about lions and niggers and things. You’d like to hear of lions and niggers, Tommy’—in a wheedling tone—‘wouldn’t you?’

Wyndham by this time has joined the group, and, scarcely knowing how, finds himself sitting on half of a rug, the other half of which belongs to his tenant.

‘I want to tell my own story,’ says Tommy 217with determination. He is evidently a boy possessed of much firmness, and one not to be ‘done’ by anyone if he can help it.

‘But, Tommy,’ persists Susan, who has dismal reasons for dreading his literary efforts, ‘I think you had better not tell one just now. We—that is—’

‘Oh, do let him tell it!’ says Ella softly.

‘My dear Susan,’ says Crosby, ‘would you deprive us of an entertainment so unique—one we may never enjoy again?’

‘Well, go on, Tommy,’ says Susan, resigning herself to the worst.

‘There once was a man,’ begins Tommy; and pauses. Silence reigns around. ‘An’ he fell into a big bit of water.’ The silence grows profounder. ‘’Twas as big as this’—making a movement of his short arms a foot or so from the ground. At this there are distinct groans of fear. ‘An’ he was drownded—a little fish ate him.’

‘Oh, Tommy!’ says Susan, in woeful tones. She can now pretend to be frightened with a 218free heart. Evidently Tommy’s story this time is going to be of the mildest order. ‘He didn’t really eat him?’

‘He did—he did!’ says Tommy, delighted at Susan’s fright. ‘He ate him all up—every bit of him!’

Here Susan lets her face fall into her hands, and Tommy relents.

‘But he wasn’t killed,’ says he. He looks anxiously at Susan’s bowed head. ‘No, he wasn’t.’ Susan lifts her head, and shakes it at him reproachfully. ‘Well, he wasn’t, really,’ says Tommy again. This repetition is not only meant as a help to Susan to mitigate her extreme grief, but to give him pause whilst he makes up another chapter.

‘Oh, are you sure?’ asks Susan tragically.

‘I am. The fish swallowed him, but he came up again.’

‘Who gave the emetic?’ asks Dominick; but very properly no one attends to him.

‘Yes; well, what’s after that?’ asks Betty.

219‘Well—’ Tommy stares at the earth, and then, with happy inspiration, adds: ‘The nasty witch got him.’

‘Poor old soul!’ says Carew.

‘The witch, Tommy? But—’

‘Yes, the witch’—angrily. ‘An’ then the goat said—’

‘Goat! What goat?’ asks Ella very naturally, considering all things.

‘That goat,’ says Tommy, who really is wonderful. He points his lovely fat thumb down to where, in the distant field, a goat is browsing. His wandering eye had caught it as he vaguely talked, and he had at once embezzled it and twisted it into his imagination.

‘Yes?’ says Susan, seeing the child pause, and trying to help him. ‘The goat?’

‘The goat an’ the witch—’ Long pause here, and plain incapacity to proceed. Tommy has evidently come face to face with a cul de sac.

‘Hole in the ballad,’ says Dominick to Betty in a low tone.

220‘Go on, Tommy,’ says Susan encouragingly. Really, Tommy’s story is so presentable this time that she quite likes to give him a lift, as it were.

‘Well, the witch fell down,’ says Tommy, goaded to endeavour, ‘an’ the goat sat on her.’

‘Not on her,’ says Susan, with dainty protest. ‘You know you frightened me once, Tommy, but now—’

‘Yes, they did, Susan—they did.’ In his excitement he has duplicated the enemy. ‘They all sat down on her—every one of them, twenty of them.’

‘But, Tommy, you said there was only one goat.’

This is rash of Susan.

‘I don’t care,’ cries Tommy, who is of a liberal disposition. ‘There was twenty of them. An’ they all sat down on her, first on her stomach, an’’—solemnly turning himself and clasping both his fat hands over the seat of his small breeches—‘an’ then on her here.’ He lifts his hands and smacks them down 221again. He indeed most graphically illustrates his ‘here.’

There is an awful silence. Susan, stricken dumb, sits silent. She knew how it would be if she let that wretched child speak.

Shamed and horrified, she draws back, almost praying that the earth may open and swallow her up quick. She casts a despairing glance at Crosby, to see how he has taken this horrible fiasco, before following Dathan and Abiram; but what she sees in his face stops her prayers, and, in fact, reverses them.

Crosby is shaking with laughter, and now, as she looks, catches Tommy in his arms and hugs him.

Another moment and Betty breaks into a wild burst of laughter, after which everyone else follows suit.

‘I’m going to publish your story, Tommy, at any price,’ says Mr. Crosby, putting Tommy back from him upon his knee, and gazing with interest at that tiny astonished child. ‘There will be trouble with the 222publishers. But I’ll get it done at all risks to life and limb. I don’t suppose I shall be spoken to afterwards by any respectable person, but that is of little moment when a literary gem is in question.’

Tommy, not understanding, but scenting fun, laughs gaily.

‘I don’t think you ought to encourage him like that,’ says Susan, whose pretty mouth, however, is sweet with smiles.

‘One should always encourage a genius,’ says Crosby, undismayed.

There is a little stir here. Tommy has wriggled out of Crosby’s lap and has gone back to Ella, who receives him with—literally—open arms.

Wyndham is watching her curiously. Her manner all through Tommy’s absorbingly interesting tale has been a revelation to him. He has found out for one thing that he has never heard her laugh before—at all events, not like that. No, he has never heard her really laugh before, and, indeed, perhaps poor Ella, in all her sad young life, has never 223laughed like that until now. It has been to the shrewd young barrister as though he has looked upon her for the first time to-day after quite two months of acquaintance—he who prides himself, and has often been complimented, on his knowledge of character, his grasp of a client’s real mind from his first half-hour with him or her.

Her mirth has astonished him. She, the pale, frightened girl, to laugh like that! There has been no loudness in her mirth, either; it has been soft and refined, if very gay and happy. She has laughed as a girl might who has been born to happiness in every way—to silken robes and delicate surroundings, and all the paraphernalia that go to make up the life of those born into families that can count their many grandfathers.

Once or twice he has told himself half impatiently—angry with the charge laid upon his unwitting shoulders—that the girl is good-looking. Now he tells himself something more: that she is lovely, with that smile upon her face, as she sits—all unconscious 224of his criticism—with Tommy in her arms, and

around the lucky Tommy’s waist.

But now she puts Tommy (who has evidently fallen a slave to her charms, and repudiates loudly her right to give him away like this) down on his sturdy feet, and comes a little forward to where Susan is standing.

‘I’m afraid I must go now,’ says she.

‘Oh, not yet,’ says Susan; ‘there is plenty of time. It isn’t as if you had to drive five miles to get to your home.’

‘Still—I think—’ She looks so anxious that Susan, who is always charming, understands her.

‘If you must go,’ whispers she sweetly—‘if you would rather—well, then, do go. But to-morrow, and every other day, you must come back to us. Carew—’

225‘I’m here,’ says Carew, coming up, and blushing as well as the best of girls as he takes Ella’s hand. ‘I’ll see you home,’ says he.

‘I don’t think it will be necessary,’ says Wyndham shortly. Then he stops, confounded at his own imprudence, considering all the circumstances. Yet the words have fallen from him without volition of his own. ‘The fact is,’ says he quickly, ‘I too am going now, and will be able to see Miss Moore safely within her gate.’

Carew frowns, and Susan comes to the rescue.

‘We’ll all go,’ cries she gaily.

‘The very thing,’ says Crosby. ‘That will give me a little more of your society, as I also must drag myself away.’

The ‘your’ is so very general that nobody takes any notice of it, and they all go up the small avenue together.

‘You were surprised to see me here?’ says Ella in a nervous whisper to Wyndham, who has doggedly taken possession of her, in 226spite of the knowledge that such a proceeding will in the end tell against him.

‘I confess I was’—stiffly.

‘You are displeased?’

‘On the contrary, you know I always advised you to show yourself—to defy your enemies. You can defy them, you know.’

‘Yes; but—I mean that, after all I said to you about my dislike, my fear, of leaving the Cottage, you must think it queer of me to be here to-day.’

‘I do not, indeed. I think it only natural that you should break through such a melancholy determination. Besides, no doubt’—with increasing coldness—‘you had an inducement.’

‘Yes, yes; I had,’ says she quickly.

‘Ah!’ A pause. ‘Someone you have seen lately?’

‘Quite lately.’

Second pause, and prolonged.

‘I suppose you will soon see a way out of all your difficulties?’

227No doubt she had fallen in love with Crosby, and he with her, and—

‘No; I don’t think there is any chance of that,’ says she mournfully. ‘But when Su—Miss Barry asked me to come here, I couldn’t resist it. You can see for yourself what an inducement she is.’

Susan! is it only Susan? He pulls himself up sharply. Well, and if so, where is the matter for rejoicing? Of course, being left in a sense her guardian by the Professor, he is bound to feel an interest in her; but a vague interest such as that should not be accompanied by this quick relief, this sudden sensation of—of what?

Dominick, just behind him, is singing at the top of his lungs—sound ones:

He is evidently pointing this nigger melody at Betty, who has been rash enough to go walking out with him. She has gone even 228farther. She has condescended to sing a second to his exceedingly loud first, a stroke of genius on her part, as it has taken the wind out of his sails so far as his belief in his powers of teasing her (on this occasion, at all events) are concerned.

Mr. Wyndham takes the opportunity of the second verse coming to a thrilling conclusion to break off his conversation with Ella. And now, indeed, they are all at the little green gate, and are saying their adieus to her. And presently they have all gone away again, and Ella, standing inside, feels as if life and joy and all things have been shut off from her with the locking of that small green gate.

‘Isn’t she pretty?’ cries Susan enthusiastically, when they have bidden good-bye to Crosby and Wyndham too, and are back again on their own small lawn.

‘She’s a regular bud,’ says Dom, striking a tragic attitude. He doesn’t mean anything 229really, but Carew, with darkling brow, goes up to him.

‘I think you ought to speak more respectfully of her,’ says he. ‘It isn’t because she is alone in the world that one should throw stones at her.’

‘Betty, I appeal to you,’ says Dominick. ‘Did I throw a stone? Come, speak up. I take this as a distinct insult. The man who would throw a stone at a woman—He’s gone!’ says Mr. Fitzgerald, staring at Carew’s disappearing form. ‘Well, I do call that mean. And I had arranged a peroration that would have astonished the natives. Anyway, Susan’—turning—‘what did I say to offend him? Called her a bud. Isn’t a bud a nice thing? I declare he’s as touchy about her as though she were his best girl.’

‘What’s a best girl?’ asks Betty.

‘The one you like best.’

‘Well, perhaps she’s his’—growing interested. ‘Susan, I do believe he is in love with her.’

230‘Do you?’ says Susan thoughtfully. And then: ‘Oh no! Boys never fall in love.’

‘Dom thinks they do,’ says Betty, turning a saucy glance on Fitzgerald. She flings a rose at him. ‘Who’s your best girl?’ asks she.

‘Need you ask?’ returns that youth with his most sentimental air.

‘I don’t think I quite approve of her,’ says Miss Barry, joining in the conversation at this moment, and shaking her curls severely; ‘I thought her a little free this afternoon.’

‘Oh, auntie!’

‘Certainly, Susan! Most distinctly free.’

‘I thought her one of the gentlest and quietest girls I ever met,’ says Carew, who has strolled back to them after his short ebullition of temper—unable, indeed, to keep away.

‘What do you know of girls?’ says Miss Barry scornfully.

‘I’m sure she’s gentle,’ says Dominick, who is so devoted to Carew that he would risk a great deal—even his friendship—to 231keep him out of trouble, ‘and very, very good; because she is beyond all doubt most femininely dull.’

‘Pig!’ says Betty, in a whisper. She makes a little movement towards him, and a second later gets a pinch and a wild yell out of him.

‘What I say I maintain,’ says Miss Barry magisterially. ‘She may be a nice girl, a gentle girl, the grandest girl that was ever known—I’m the last in the world to depreciate anyone—but who is she? That’s what I want to know. And no one knows who she is. Perhaps of the lower classes, for all we know. And, indeed, I noticed a few queer turns of speech. And when I said she was free, Susan, I meant it. I heard her distinctly call that child’—pointing to him—‘“Tommy.” Now, if she is, as I firmly believe—your father is a person of no discrimination, you know—a person of a lower grade than ourselves, didn’t it show great freedom to do that? Yes, she distinctly said “Tommy.”’

232‘Well, she didn’t say “Hell and Tommy,” any way,’ says Dominick, who sometimes runs over to London to see the theatres.

‘If she had,’ says Miss Barry with dignity—she has never seen the outside of a theatre—‘I should have had no hesitation whatsoever in sending for the sergeant and giving her in charge.’

CHAPTER XXXVII.

It is a week later, and the village is now stirred to its depth. Such gaieties! Such gaddings to and fro! Such wonderful tales of what Lady Forster wore and Sir William said, and how Miss Prior looked. Gossip is flowing freely, delightfully, and Miss Ricketty, whose shop is a general meeting-place, is doing a roaring business in buns and biscuits.

The Park, in fact, is full of guests.

‘Every corner,’ says Miss Blake to Mrs. Hennessy, in a mysterious whisper, ‘is full to overflowing. I hear that some of the servants have to be accommodated outside 234the house, and that Mr. Crosby has painted and papered and done up the loft over the stables in the latest Parisian style for the maids and valets.’

‘My dear!’ says Mrs. Hennessy, in an awful tone—very justly shocked; then, ‘You forget yourself, Maria!’

‘Faith I did,’ says Miss Blake, bursting into an irrepressible giggle. ‘Law, how funny y’are! But they’re safely divided, I’m told, one at one side o’ the yard, the other at this, as it were. Like the High churches we hear of in England. The goats and the sheep—ha, ha!’

‘But where are the maids?’

‘Over the stables at the western side, some of them.’

‘You don’t say so!’ says Mrs. Hennessy. ‘Bless me, but they wouldn’t like—you know, the—er—the atmosphere!’

‘Oh, there’s ways of doing away with that too,’ says Miss Blake, with a knowing air. ‘But you’ll come in for a cup of tea, won’t you? Jane’s dyin’ to have a chat with you.’

235Miss Blake is hardly to be trusted in matters such as these, her imagination being extraordinarily strong. And, indeed, the idea of those stables rose alone from her great mind. But although there are still corners in the splendid old Hall to let, it must be confessed that it is pretty full at present.

Guests at the Park! Such a thing had not been heard of for many years. Not for the last eight years, at all events.

Then Crosby, who was about twenty-five, came home from Thibet, and his sister Katherine, who was quite a girl—being six years his junior—had been brought over from England by her aunt to freshen up her old love for him, and to stay with him for his birthday. Not longer. The birthday came off within the week of their arriving. Lady Melland was a woman of Society, who hated earwigs, and early birds, and baa-lambs, and insisted on bringing quite a big company ‘on tour’ with her on this re-introduction of the brother to the sister, and had 236organized a distinct rout at the Hall during her memorable stay. It had created a fearful, if pleasurable, impression at the time, and people are beginning now to wonder in this little village if Lady Forster will be a worthy representative of her aunt. Or if perchance the aunt will again take up the deal; for Lady Melland has, they say, come here with her.

However, for once ‘they say’ is wrong. Katherine Crosby had married Sir William Forster two years after the termination of that remarkable visit, and nothing had been seen of her since that, until now. She had, however, in between shaken off Lady Melland.

She has brought an innumerable company in her train, thus justifying the idea of Curraghcloyne that she would probably follow in her aunt’s footsteps, and, as I have said, the village has waked to find itself no longer deserted, but the centre of a very brilliant crowd.

Yesterday was the first of August, Saturday, and a most unendurable one on the 237small platform of the railway-station. Possibly during its brief existence so many basket-trunks have never been laid upon its modest flags before. To-day is Sunday, and possibly also the parish church has never had so large a congregation within its whitewashed walls. Even the Methodists, quite a large portion of the Curraghcloyne people, have deserted their chapel for the orthodox church. Even Miss Ricketty has been heard to say with distinct regret that she ‘wished she was a Protestant for once.’

The Hall pews, which number four, and for which Mr. Crosby, during all his wanderings, has paid carefully, are all filled, and the three seats behind them again, that have vacant sittings in them, are all filled also with the servants of the people in the four front seats. Never was there such a display in the small church of Curraghcloyne! And it was acknowledged afterwards by everyone in the town that though the Rector did not ‘stir a hair,’ the curate was decidedly ‘onaisy.’ The curate was unnerved beyond a doubt. 238He grew fatter and stouter as the service went on, and he does not know to this day how he got through his sermon. He says now, that people oughtn’t to spring people on one without a word of preparation.

Susan tried to keep her eyes off the Hall pews, but in spite of herself her eyes wandered. Betty did not try to keep her eyes off at all, so they wandered freely. She was able, half an hour later, to tell Susan not only the number of guests Mr. Crosby had, but the exact colour of each gown the women wore, and she told Susan privately that she thought, if ever she were a rich woman, she would never let her servants wear red ribbons in their bonnets in church.

Mr. Haldane rushes through his sermon at the rate of an American liner, and presently the service is over, and all move, with the cultivated leisurely steps that are meant to hide the desire to run, towards the open door.

Some of the other Rectory people have gone through the side-door, and, with Bonnie’s hand fast clasped in hers, Susan is 239following after them, when a well-known voice calls to her:

‘Susan, my sister wants very much to know you. Will you let me introduce you to her?’

Susan turns her face, now delicately pink, and she sees a small, dainty, pretty creature holding out her hand to her with the prettiest smile in the world.

Is this Mr. Crosby’s sister?

‘How d’ye do?’ says Lady Forster, in a very clear if low voice. ‘George was chanting your praises all last night, so naturally I have been longing to see you. George’s friends, as a rule, are frauds; but—’

She pauses, evidently amused at the girl’s open surprise, not so much at her words as at her appearance.

‘I’m not a bit like George, am I?’ says she.

No, she is not. Crosby is a big man, if anything, and she is the tiniest creature. Her features are tiny too, but exquisitely moulded. The coquettish mouth, the nose ‘tip-tilted like a flower,’ the well-poised 240dainty head, the hands, the feet—all are small, and her figure slender as a fairy’s. She is wonderfully pretty in a brilliant fashion, and her bright eyes are alight with intelligence. She is altogether the last person in the world Susan would have imagined as Crosby’s sister. And yet there is certainly a likeness between them—a strange likeness—but, of course, his sister should have been large and massive, not a little thing like this. Susan has always told herself that she should be dreadfully afraid of his sister—but to be afraid of this sister!

Lady Forster, indeed, is one of those women who look as if they ought to be called ‘Baby’ or ‘Birdie,’ but in reality she was named Katherine at her birth, with a big and a stern K, not a C—which we all know is much milder—and never did Susan hear her called anything less majestic by anyone. Not even by her brother or her husband. And this was probably because, beneath her charming butterfly air, there lay a good deal of character and a strength of 241will hardly to be suspected in so slight a creature.

‘No,’ says Susan shyly. She smiles, and involuntarily tightens her fingers on those she is holding—Lady Forster’s fingers. ‘But—’ A still greater shyness overcomes her here, and she grows quite silent. The ‘but,’ however, is eloquent.

‘You see, George! She thinks I am infinitely superior to you. How lovely of her!’ She laughs at Susan and pats her hand. ‘You will come up and lunch with us to-morrow, won’t you? It is George’s birthday. And considering the slap you have given him just now, you can hardly refuse. It will be a little sop to his pride, and that’s frightful! He thinks himself a perfect joy! I’m told that in Darkest Africa the belles—’

Here Crosby gives her a surreptitious but vigorous nudge, and she breaks off her highly-spiced and distinctly interesting, if slightly unveracious, account of his doings in Uganda.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ asks she, 242whispering, of her brother, who whispers back to her many admonitory things. She turns again to Susan: ‘We shall expect you to-morrow, then. It will be a charity to enliven us, as we hardly know what to do with ourselves, being strangers in a strange land.’

‘Thank you,’ says Susan faintly. How on earth can she ever summon up courage enough to go and lunch up there with all these fashionable people? It is she who will be the stranger in a strange land.

‘That is settled then,’ says Crosby quickly. Had he feared she would go on to say something more—to say that she had an engagement? ‘I will call for you at twelve.’

‘Oh no,’ says Susan. ‘I’—confusedly—‘I can walk up. It—it is too much trouble.’

‘George doesn’t think so,’ says Lady Forster, with a faint grimace. ‘Is this your brother?’

She bends in her quick way, and turns up Bonnie’s beautiful little face and looks at it earnestly.

243‘What a face!’ cries she. ‘Is everyone beautiful down here? I shall come and live here, George—no use in your putting me off! I’m determined. It is a promise, then’—to Susan, smiling vivaciously—‘that you will come to-morrow, and another day. We must arrange another day—you will bring me up this small Adonis,’ patting Bonnie’s cheek as he smiles at her (children love all things pretty) ‘to see me?’

‘I shall be very glad,’ says Susan tremulously. Then Lady Forster trips away to rejoin her friends, who are standing beside the different carriages, and quarrelling gaily as to who shall go home with whom, and for a second Crosby is alone with Susan.

‘You said it was a promise.’

‘Yes,’ says Susan, ‘but—I have not known any very—very—’

‘Smart folk,’ says Crosby, laughing. ‘Well, you’ll know them to-morrow, and I expect you’ll be surprised how very little smart they are.’

‘But—’

244‘There shan’t be a “but” in the world.’

‘It is only this’—miserably—‘that I shall be shy, and—’

‘Not a bit of it. And even if you are’—he looks at her—‘you may depend on me. I’ll pull you through. But don’t be too shy, Susan. Extremes are attractive things—fatally attractive sometimes.’ He pauses. ‘Well, so much for the shyness, but what did your “and” mean?’

‘It meant,’ says Susan, with deep depression, ‘that they will all hate me.’

‘I almost wish I could believe that.’ He laughs again as he says this, and gives Bonnie’s ear a pinch, and follows his sister. Two minutes later, as Susan rejoins her own people at the little gate that leads by a short-cut to the Rectory, she sees him again, talking gaily, and handing into one of the carriages a tall and very handsome girl, dressed as Susan had never seen anyone dressed in all her life. It seems the very perfection of dressing. She lingers a moment—a 245bare moment—but it is long enough to see that he has seated himself beside the handsome girl, and that he is still laughing—but this time with her—over some reminiscence, as the carriage drives away.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

‘I suppose I’ll have to go,’ says Susan, who is evidently terrified at the idea, crumpling up a small note between her fingers—a most courteous little note sent by Lady Forster this morning, Monday, the third of August, to ask Miss Barry’s permission for Susan to lunch at the Park. She—Lady Forster—had met her charming niece yesterday, and had induced her to promise to come to them on this, her brother’s birthday. And she hoped Miss Barry had not quite forgotten her, but would remember that she was quite an old friend, and let her come and see her soon.

It is a pretty little note, and delights Miss 247Barry; yet Susan finds no pleasure in it, and now sits glum and miserable.

‘Go!’ cries Betty. ‘I should think so. Oh, you lucky girl!’

‘Would you like to go, Betty, if it were your case?’—this wistfully. Oh that it were Betty’s case!

‘Is there anything on earth that would keep me away?’ cries Betty enthusiastically. ‘What fun you will have there! I know by Lady Forster’s eyes that you are safe to have a good time. I think’—gloomily—‘she might have asked me too.’

‘I wish she had,’ says Susan fervently. ‘If—I had one of you with me, I should not feel half so nervous.’

‘What makes you nervous?’ asks Carew.

‘Well, they are all strangers, for one thing—and besides’—rather shamefacedly—‘they will be very big people, of course, and at luncheon there will be entrées, and dishes, and things I have never even heard of, and’—almost tearfully now—‘I shan’t know what to do.’

248‘There are only two things to be remembered really,’ says Mr. Fitzgerald slowly but forcibly. ‘One is not to pick your teeth with your fork, and the other is even more important: for goodness’ sake, Susan, whatever you do, don’t eat your peas with your knife. All that sort of thing has gone out—has been unfashionable for quite a year or more.’

‘Oh, it’s all very well for you to make fun of it,’ says Susan resentfully. ‘You haven’t to go there.’

‘And is that what you call “well for me”? I wish I was going there, if only to look after your manners, which evidently, by your own account of them, leave a great deal to be desired. By-the-by, there is one thing more I should like to impress upon you before you start: never, Susan—no matter how sorely tempted—put your feet on the table-cloth. It is quite a solecism nowadays, and—’

‘If you won’t go away, I shall,’ says Susan, rising with extreme dignity. But he leans forward, and catching the tail of 249her gown just as she is gaining her feet, brings her with a jerk to her sitting position again. After which they all laugh irrepressibly, and the émeute is at an end.

‘What a lot of servants they had in church!’ says Betty, alluding to the all-absorbing guests at the Park. ‘I suppose that tall woman was Lady Forster’s maid?’ ‘Yes, and the little woman was Mrs. Prior’s. By the way, that squares matters. Mrs. Prior has grown several yards since last year.’

‘It seemed to me that each maid sat behind her own mistress.’

‘So as to keep her eye on her. And very necessary too, no doubt.’

‘Did you see that pale young man, ever so thin and wretched-looking, but so conceited? His hair was nearly down to his waist, and he hadn’t any chin to speak of.’

‘Oh, that!’ cries Betty eagerly. ‘That’s the poet. Yes, he is, Susan. He’s a real poet. Miss Ricketty told me about him yesterday. He has written sonnets and 250whole volumes of things, and is quite a poet. Miss Ricketty says that’s why his hair grows like that.’

‘Samson must have been the laureate of his time,’ says Dominick thoughtfully.

‘So that was the poet,’ says Susan, who had heard of his coming from Crosby. ‘Well, he certainly looked queer enough for anything. I wonder’—nervously—‘who was the tall girl sitting next to Mr. Crosby?’

This was the tall girl with whom Crosby had driven away.

‘I don’t know,’ says Betty. ‘Wasn’t she pretty? And wasn’t she beautifully dressed? Oh, Susan, didn’t you want to see yourself in a gown like that?’

‘No,’ says Susan shortly.

‘Well, I did. I wanted to know how I’d look.’

‘As if you didn’t know,’ says Dominick encouragingly. ‘Like Venus herself!’

‘I never heard she had her frocks from Paris,’ says Betty, hunching up an unkind little shoulder against him.

251‘You’ve heard so little, you see,’ says Dom, with gentle protest. ‘Now, as a fact, Venus had her frocks made by—’

‘Well?’ with a threatening air.

‘Miss Fogerty,’ naming Betty’s own dressmaker.

‘Pshaw!’ says that slim damsel contemptuously. ‘However, Susan, that girl was pretty, any way. I wonder who she was? Had she a maid, I wonder? There was a dark-looking woman amongst the servants farther on, just behind the poet. Perhaps it was hers.’

‘Oh no,’ says Dom gravely, ‘that was his.’

‘His?’

‘The poet’s. Yes.’

‘Nonsense!’ says Betty. ‘What would he want a maid for?’

‘To comb his locks and copy his sonnets,’ says Dom, without blinking.

‘Nonsense! Men don’t have maids,’ says Betty, who seems to know all about it.

‘Oh, here is someone from the Park,’ cries Jacky suddenly.

252‘Is it Mr. Crosby or Lady Forster?’ asks Susan anxiously.

‘Both of ’em,’ says Jacky, in his own sweet laconic style.

The smart little cart, with its wonderful pair of ponies, rattled up to the door, and Miss Barry, who had known that someone would come to fetch Susan, and had therefore put on her best bib and tucker, emerged from the flower-crowned porch of the Rectory to receive Lady Forster, her old face wreathed in smiles. It was sweet to her to see Susan accepted and admired by the Park people. ‘Our own sort of people’ proudly thought the poor old maid, who had struggled with much poverty all her life.

And Lady Forster was quite charming to her, insisting on going to see the old garden again, ‘which she quite remembered.’ Lady Forster had never stuck at a tarradiddle or two, and was, after seeing it, genuinely enthusiastic over its old-fashioned charms. Might she bring her friends to see it? They had never, never seen anything so lovely! 253It would be a charity to show them something human, these benighted town-people. To hear her, one would imagine she despised the town herself, whereas, as a fact, she could never live for six months out of it.

Miss Barry was elated—so elated, indeed, that she took a dreadful step. She invited Lady Forster and all her friends to tea the next Friday, without a thought as to the consequences—until afterwards! Lady Forster accepted the invitation with effusion. There was no getting out of it, Miss Barry felt during that dreadful ‘afterwards.’

Meantime Susan had found herself, comparatively speaking, alone with Crosby, when she came downstairs after putting on her best gown and hat. She had brought something with her besides the best gown and hat; a little silken bag, made out of a bit of lovely old brocade she had begged from Miss Barry a month ago. She had cut it out, and stitched it, and filled it with lavender-seeds, and worked on it at odd moments when no one but Betty could see her (she was afraid 254of the boys’ jokes) the words: ‘Mr. Crosby, from Susan.’

At first she had thought of buying something for him—something at Miss Ricketty’s, who really had, at times, quite wonderful things down from Dublin, but her soul revolted from that. What could she buy him that he would care for? And besides, to buy a thing for a person one liked, and one who had been so good to Bonnie! No; she could not. It seemed cold, unkind. So she decided on the little bag that was to lie in his drawer and perfume his handkerchiefs, and tell him sometimes of her—yes, her love for him! Because she did love him, if only for his goodness to the children, and to her Bonnie first of all.

She had been afraid to run the gauntlet of the boys’ criticisms, but Betty she clung to. A confidante one must have sometimes, or die.

‘You know he told me, Betty, when his birthday would be.’

‘Yes. So clever of him!’ said Betty, who, 255if she were at the point of death, could not have refrained from a joke.

‘Well, he has been good to the chicks, hasn’t he? To darling Bonnie especially.’

‘Oh, he has—he has indeed,’ Betty declared remorsefully, melting at the thought of the little crippled brother who is so inexpressibly dear to them all.

Betty had hurried up with Susan to get her into her best things, and then had given her sound advice.

‘Give it to him now, Susan. Lady Forster’—glancing out of the window—‘is talking to Aunt Jemima. Hurry down and give it to him at once. It is the sweetest bag. No one’—giggling—‘can say less than that for it. It’s quite crammed with lavender.’

‘Yes, I will,’ says Susan valiantly.

She doesn’t, however. She hesitates, and is, as usual, lost. She tries and tries to take that little bag out of her pocket and give it to him, but her courage fails her. And 256presently Lady Forster carries her off, and now the Park is reached, and she finds herself in the lovely, sunny drawing-room, and after a while in the dining-room, and still that little fragrant bag lies perdu.

Susan glances shyly round her. Sir William Forster, a tall young man with a kindly eye, takes her fancy at once, and there is a big girl over there and a big woman here (they must be mother and daughter), who make her wonder a great deal about their strange garments. Mrs. Prior is here, too, and Miss Prior—Mr. Wyndham’s people. And at the opposite side of the table Mr. Wyndham himself. Beside him sits the poet, a lachrymose young man with long hair and a crooked eye, and the name of Jones. No wonder he looks depressed!

He has got his best eye fixed immovably on Susan, who seems to appeal even to his high ideal of beauty—and, indeed, throughout the day she suffers a good deal, off and on, from his unspoken, but quite open, 257adoration of her. Poets never admire: they adore. And for a simple country maiden this style is somewhat embarrassing. On Mr. Crosby’s right hand is sitting the tall and beautiful girl, with the pale roses near her throat, with whom he had driven home from church on Sunday. It seems all quite clear to Susan. Yes, this is the girl he is going to marry. But a girl so beautiful as that could make anyone happy. She had heard someone call her Lady Muriel. Rank and beauty and sweetness—all are for him. And surely he deserves them all; and that is why she is at his right hand.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

Susan is seated beside a very fashionably-dressed girl with an extremely good-humoured face, and Captain Lennox—a man of about thirty or thereabouts—who seems to find pleasure in an every two minutes’ contemplation of her young and charming face. In this, the good-humoured looking girl—Miss Forbes—is not a whit behind Captain Lennox, she too seeming to be delighted with Susan. And, indeed, everyone seems to have fallen in love with pretty Susan, for presently the 259stately young beauty sitting next to Crosby, who has come in a little late for luncheon, whispers something to him, and then looks smilingly at Susan. Crosby, in answer to her words, says quietly:

‘Susan—Lady Muriel Kennedy is very anxious to know you. Miss Barry, Lady Muriel.’

‘I went past your charming old home yesterday,’ says Lady Muriel, in tones barely above a whisper, but which seem to carry a long distance. ‘I quite wanted to go in, but I was afraid.’

‘Well, you’ll be able to satiate your curiosity on Friday,’ says Lady Forster, ‘as we have been asked to tea on that day at the Rectory.’

‘How delightful!’ says Lady Muriel.

‘Your house is quite close to the Cottage, is it not, Miss Barry?’ asks Mrs. Prior. ‘My nephew’s place, you know’—nodding at Wyndham, who changes colour perceptibly. Good heavens! what is going to happen next?

260‘Yes,’ says Susan; ‘only the road divides us.’

‘Then you can tell us about Mr. Wyndham’s new tenant. You’—smiling archly—‘are quite an old friend of my nephew’s, eh?’ It is quite safe to make a jest of the friendship with this insignificant little country girl, as, of course, Paul, or any other man of consequence, would not waste a thought over her.

‘Almost, indeed,’ says Susan. ‘But as to the tenant—’

Crosby drops a spoon, and Susan, a little startled, turns her head. It is not on him, however, her eyes rest, but on Wyndham, who is looking at her with a strange expression. Is it imploring, despairing, or what? It checks her, at all events.

‘I know very little,’ she murmurs faintly.

‘Been flirting with him,’ thinks Mrs. Prior promptly. ‘All country girls are so vulgar. Any new man.... And I dare say this tenant of Paul’s is by no means a nice man either.’

There might have been a slight awkwardness here, but providentially Lady Forster, 261who is never silent for two minutes together, breaks into the gap.

‘What’s this, George?’ asks she, peering into a dish before her. ‘Are you prepared to guarantee it? It’s your cook, you know, not mine. Looks dangerous, and therefore tempting; and any way, one can only die once. Oh! is that you?’—to a late man who has strolled in. ‘Been losing yourself as usual? Come over here and sit beside me, you innocent lamb’—patting the empty chair near her—‘and I’ll look after you. I’ll give you one of these’—pointing to the dish—‘I hate to die alone. What on earth are they?’—glancing at the little brown curled-up things that seem filled with burnt crumbs. ‘Will they go off, George? Bombs, eh?’

Here the butler murmurs something to her in a discreet tone.

‘Oh, mushrooms! Good gracious, then why don’t they try to look like them!’

‘Have you any brothers?’ asks Miss Forbes, turning to Susan.

‘Don’t answer,’ says Captain Lennox. 262‘She’s always asking after one’s brothers. Tell me, instead, how many sisters you have. Much more interesting. I love people’s sisters.’

‘I’m George’s sister,’ says Lady Forster, glancing at him thoughtfully.

‘And my wife!’ says Sir William, with such an over-assumption of marital authority that they all laugh, and his wife throws a pellet of bread at him.

Susan grows thoughtful, filled with a slight amazement. She had been nervous, almost distressed, at the idea of having to lunch at the Park. Its habitués, she told herself, would be very grand folk, and clever, and learned, and would talk very far above her little countrified head. And now how is it? Why, after all, they are more like Dom in his queerest moods than anything else.

‘What shall we do after luncheon?’ says Lady Forster. ‘I am willing to chaperon anybody.’ She glances at Lady Muriel, and Susan intercepts the glance.

Is it Lady Muriel and Mr. Crosby she is thinking of chaperoning?

263‘Oh, I like your idea of supervision,’ says the Guardsman who has come in late, and who is called Lord Jack by everybody, only because, as Susan discovers afterwards, his name is Jack Lord. This, naturally, is inevitable. ‘You once undertook to chaperon me, and let me in for about the most risqué situation of my life. I came out of it barely alive, and very nearly maimed.’

‘Yes—I don’t think Katherine would make a very excellent chaperon,’ says Mrs. Prior, who likes Crosby, but cordially detests his sister.

‘What a slander!’ cries Lady Forster; ‘easy to see you don’t understand me! I’m a splendid chaperon—a born one. Always half a mile ahead—or else in the rear. One should always be ahead if possible, as it gives the poor creatures a chance of getting up to you in an honourable way, if the enemy should come in sight. Whereas the turning and running back business always looks so bad. No, better be in front of them. I’m going to write a little treatise on the art 264of chaperoning for all right-minded married women—and I hope you will accept a copy, dear Mrs. Prior.’

‘I don’t expect I shall get one,’ says Mrs. Prior, with a distinct sneer.

‘Oh, you shall indeed, “honest Injun,”’ says Lady Forster. ‘You’ll be delighted with it.’

‘I feel sure of that,’ says Captain Lennox in an aside to Miss Forbes.

‘But really what shall we do this afternoon, George?’ asks his sister; ‘ride—drive?’ She has left her seat, and has perched herself on the arm of the handsome old chair in which her husband is sitting at the foot of the table.

‘What about the Abbey, Bill?’ asks Crosby, addressing his brother-in-law.

‘No use in asking “Billee Barlow” anything,’ says that young man’s wife. ‘He hasn’t an idea on earth. Have you, Billee? And the Abbey is miles off, and— Do you ride, Susan? I am going to call you Susan, if I may.’

265She pauses just long enough to give Susan time to smile a pleased, if shy, assent.

‘Susan is so pretty,’ says Captain Lennox absently.

‘Eh?’ says Crosby quickly, and with a suspicion of a frown.

‘Very, very pretty,’ repeats Lennox fervently.

Crosby glances at Susan. This absurd joke, this jest on her name—with anyone else here it would be a jest only, but Susan—would she.... Her colour is faintly, very faintly accentuated, and she is looking straight at Lennox.

‘My name?’ says she, taking up the meaning he had not meant. ‘Do you really think it pretty? The boys and Betty despise it.’

Her gentle dignity goes home to all. Crosby is indignant with Lennox, and, indeed, so is Sir William. Sir William’s wife, however, I regret to say, is convulsed with laughter.

‘It is certainly not a name to be despised,’ 266says Lennox courteously, who is now a little ashamed of himself.

‘I like to be called by my Christian name,’ says a singularly young-looking married woman. ‘Puts people out so. They never know whether you are married or not for the first half-hour, at all events.’

They are now in a body strolling into the drawing-rooms, and Miss Forbes has gone back to her cross-examination of Susan.

‘Four brothers? So many? And all grown up?’

‘Oh no! Carew is the eldest, and he is only seventeen. But we have a cousin living with us, and he is twenty.’

‘What lovely ages!’ cries Lady Forster. ‘George, why didn’t you tell me about Susan’s boys? You know I adore boys. Susan, you must bring them up to-morrow. Do you hear?’

‘They will be so glad,’ says Susan; ‘do you know’—blushing shyly and divinely—‘they were quite envious of me because I was coming here to-day.’

267‘Oh! why didn’t you bring them with you? Seventeen and twenty—the nicest ages in the world!’

‘Certainly not the nicest,’ says Lennox, who is a born tease. ‘You, Miss Barry’—looking at Susan—‘are thirteen, aren’t you?’

‘Oh no; much, much more than that!’ says Susan, laughing. Strangely enough, she has begun to feel quite a liking for her tormentor, divining with the wisdom of youth that his saucy sallies are filled with mischief only, and no venom. ‘I was eighteen last May.’

‘How very candid!’ says Miss Prior, whose own age is growing uncertain, and who is feeling a little bitter over the attention paid to Susan. If Paul should prove inconstant, there is always the master of the Park to fall back upon, or so she has fondly hoped till now. But there is no denying the fact that Crosby has been very anxious all this afternoon about Susan’s happiness.

‘Nonsense!’ says Lennox. ‘Tell that to—well, to somebody else.’

268‘But that’s what I am really,’ says Susan, who is secretly disgusted at being thought thirteen. ‘I was born in—’

‘Don’t tell that,’ says Lady Forster, putting up her finger. ‘It will be fatal twenty years hence.’

‘Still, I’m not thirteen,’ says Susan, with gentle protest. ‘And I think anyone could see that I’m not.’

‘I could, certainly,’ says Crosby, coming to the rescue. ‘In my opinion, anyone that looked at you would know at once that you were forty.’

At this they laugh, and Susan casts her so very unusual ire behind her.

‘You will bring up the boys to-morrow, then?’ says Lady Forster, who is always chattering. ‘And we’ll go for a long drive, and have a gipsy tea. That will be better than nothing. And as we go Susan shall show us the bits. No use in depending on George for that. He knows nothing of the scenery round here, or any other scenery for the matter of that, except African interiors, 269kraals, and nasty naked nigger women, and that. So immodest of him! He’ll come to grief some day. We can go somewhere for a gipsy tea to-morrow, can’t we, George? I’m dying to light a fire.’

‘What, another!’ says Lord Jack, regarding her with a would-be woe-begone air. He lays his hand lightly on his heart.

‘It’s going to rain, I think,’ says Sir William presently; he is standing in one of the windows.

‘“Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!”’ exclaims Miss Forbes. ‘What a thing to say!’

‘It always rains in Ireland, doesn’t it?’ asks Lady Muriel, in her soft, low voice.

‘Oh no—no indeed!’ cries Susan eagerly. ‘Does it, Mr. Crosby?’

‘Certainly not. Lady Muriel must prolong her stay here’—smiling at the beautiful girl leaning in a picturesque attitude against the window-shutter—‘and take back with her a more kindly view of our climate.’

Yes; it is quite settled, thinks Susan. He loves her, and she—of course she loves him. 270And he wants her to prolong her stay, most naturally. And most naturally, too, he would like her to take back to England a kindly impression of her future home, of her future climate. Oh, how pretty, how lovely she is!

Heavily, heavily beat the raindrops on the window-pane.

‘Never mind,’ says Lady Forster, whom nothing daunts; ‘we’ll have a dance. You love dancing, Susan, don’t you? Come along, then. Take your partners all, and let’s waltz into the music-room.’

In a second Susan finds Captain Lennox’s arm round her waist, and through the halls and the library they dance right into the music-room beyond. After her comes Crosby with Lady Muriel, and after them Lady Forster with—no, not Lord Jack, after all, but Sir William.

And now the big woman whom Susan had noticed at luncheon has seated herself at the piano, and the poet has caught up a fiddle, and if the big woman can do nothing else on earth, she can at least play dance music 271to perfection, and the poet, ‘poor little fellow,’ as Susan calls him to herself—if he could only have heard her!—does not make too many false notes on the fiddle, so that she dances very gaily, feeling as if her feet are treading on air, and answering Captain Lennox’s whispered honeyed words with soft smiles and hurried breathing. Oh, how lovely it all is! And, oh, how happy Lady Muriel is going to be!

The waltz has come to an end, and now Crosby is standing before her. And now his arm is round her waist, and he—oh yes, there is no doubt of it—he dances even better than Captain Lennox, and it is good of him, too, to spare so much time from the lovely Lady Muriel.

‘Susan,’ says Crosby, as they pause at the end of the room, ‘I consider your conduct distinctly immoral! The way you have been going on—’

‘Who—I?’

‘Yes, you! Don’t attempt to deny it. Your open flirtation with Lennox—’

272‘What?’ Susan lifts her dewy eyes to his. Suddenly she breaks into the merriest laughter. ‘You’re too funny for anything,’ says she.

‘Not for another dance, I hope.’ He laughs too, and so gaily. And again his arm is round her, and away they go once more, dancing to the big lady’s happiest strains. There is a conservatory off the music-room, and into this he leads her presently.

‘You have no flowers,’ says he. ‘I must give you some. These roses will suit you.’

‘They suit Lady Muriel too,’ says Susan, remembering.

‘Yes? Oh yes! I gave them to her this morning. Well, it shan’t be roses, then. These pink begonias?’

‘I should like those better,’ says Susan; she takes them tranquilly. It is, of course, quite right that he should wish to give her flowers different from those he has just given his fiancée. She had reminded him just in time.

273Crosby is thankful for her suggestion, but for very different reasons. He had forgotten about Lady Muriel’s roses, and to give her the same—

‘The rain is clearing away,’ says he, looking out of the window. ‘Still’—as if to himself—‘I think we had better take an umbrella.’

‘An umbrella?’

‘On our way home.’

‘Mr. Crosby’—eagerly—‘you need not take me home. You must not. There is really no necessity. Oh!’—anxiously, thinking of Lady Muriel and his desire to be with her—‘I hope you won’t come.’

‘That is not very civil, Susan, is it?’ says he, smiling. He pauses and looks suddenly at her, a new expression growing in his eyes. ‘Of course, if you have arranged to go home with anyone else—’

‘No—no indeed. But to take you away from your guests—’

‘My guests will live without me for half an hour, I have no doubt.’ His tone is quite 274its old joyous self again. ‘And I promised your aunt to see that you got safely back to her, and, as the children say, “a promise is a promise.” Here are your begonias. Shall I fasten them in for you?’

He arranges them under her pretty chin, she holding up her head to let him do it, and then they go back to the music-room, where Sir William catches him and carries him off for something or other. Susan, sinking into a chair, finds Josephine Prior almost immediately beside her.

‘Those pretty begonias!’ says she. ‘How they suit you, though hardly your frock! Of course’—with elephantine archness—‘I need not ask who gave them to you. Mr. Crosby is always showering little favours on his women friends. Those roses to Lady Muriel’—Susan holds her breath a moment—‘and these begonias to you, and opera-tickets to others, and last night such a delicious box of marron glaces to me.’ She forgets to add that he gave a similar box to each of his lady guests, having run up to 275Dublin in the morning and brought them back with him from Mitchell’s.

‘I declare the sun is coming out at last,’ says Lady Forster. ‘It is going to be a glorious evening. What a swindle! We have been quite done out of our day. I do call that maddening. Never mind, we must make up for it to-night. We will have—what shall we have, Dolly?’—to Miss Forbes. ‘A pillow scuffle? Yes; that will be the very thing. And, Susan, you shall stay and sleep and help us. And we’ll get the boys up. They would be splendid at it, and give even us points, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘I have promised Miss Barry,’ says Crosby, in a distinct tone, ‘to take Susan home this evening at six, and I’m afraid it is rather after that now. Will you go and put on your hat, Susan?’