PART II

I

FINANCIAL INTELLIGENCE

Four years ago--no very long time, even to those who must count it by the ruins and ghosts it has made--the light-hearted wayfarer amid financial pitfalls--_vacuus coram latrone viator_--not more a snob than an antiquary with a wistful regard for survivals need confess himself, spared a glance, as he passed along Throgmorton Avenue, for a big brass plate on the door of the corner building which overlooks the crouched statue and smoky fig-trees of the "Draper's Garden." For him the legend it bore called up a vision, unique amid the alien and masqueradingly Semitic names with which the dreary canyon is plastered, of other and very different days, fiercer perhaps but at least less meanly cruel; of hard knocks given and taken in a selfless quarrel; of blows upon helmet and corselet, thrusts that the buff coat haply turned; of a fight that raged one whole September afternoon through the streets of the "ever faithful city."[2]

"BRYAN LUMSDEN, CALVERT & CO., Stock and Share Brokers."

[Footnote 2: Worcester]

A stranger to the ephemeral record of London society--if such a one can be imagined in this day of "open letters" and the ubiquitous lens--who met the genial head of the firm upon the lawn at Cowes, or among his yearlings at Stanmore, at the pigeon butts of Pau and Cannes, or in the thrice-guarded sanctuary of the Turf Club writing-room, or who, as is likelier far, merely passed him in Austin Friars, silk hat cocked rakishly, one hand holding the lapel of his coat and the other laid lightly and characteristically upon the shoulder of some olive-skinned lord of the market, would probably have carried away a totally false impression of the man and of his history. Official text-books--the one, for instance, in which poor Fenella discovered a romance so enthralling, would not greatly have helped him. He would have learned from them that Sir Bryan Lumsden was twelfth baronet of either a very old or a very short-lived dynasty; that he was the son of Denzil Lumsden, of Coffers Castle, Kincardineshire; that he had served his country in the Scots Guards, been an aide-de-camp during the Tirah Campaign (medal and clasps), and had left the service at twenty-five. No less than three residences housed all this greatness: the castle aforesaid, "The Chase," Stanmore, and 369 Mount Street. "Clubs: the Turf, Marlboro, and Royal Yacht. Unmarried." And from the silence concerning the sphere in which three parts of his life were spent, and upon whose harvest, presumably, these glories were supported, he would have conjectured that here was a case common enough in latter-day life: the scion of an old house, bought in to finance by family money and connection, gradually acquiring sufficient zest for the game to justify a predominant interest, and, with position assured, returning blithely to the life of his younger days, while, under the griffin wings that hatch so many a clutch of golden eggs, Calvert, imaginable as a rather vulgar but discreet person, buttoning a black coat high on his chest and redressing the senior partner's ebullience by Apollinaris and bulb-culture at Sutton, watched the processes that, by a law of growth as simple as that which sows the pollen on the wind, make the rich man daily and hourly richer.

They would have been quite wrong. No titled food-adulterer or gutter journalist--no drab figure in all the broadclothed gallery with which Dr. Smiles seeks to fire the imagination of youth--was more literally the architect of his own fortunes. Twelve years ago, when he was an attaché at Vienna, with a long night of ruinous play behind him and a scented but heartless letter under his elbow, Bryan Lumsden had spun a coin to decide whether he should continue the battle elsewhere and under less tangled conditions or pass to the completer simplification which was all his pagan soul conceived of death. He had tossed the double thaler into the air simply, with no consciousness of pose, and since it fell for life, had played the game out that way. Returning to London, he had sent in his papers, paid his debts with what was left of an attenuated property, and asked for "desk-room" in the office of the broker through whom the final transactions were conducted--a dark, secretive man, little susceptible to the appeal of the incongruous or to the glamour of a barren title.

At the end of a year, upon the quarter per cent. margin allowed to those outside the house for business they introduce, he was earning an income in excess of many sworn members of repute, who struggle on from settlement to settlement with the hammer suspended over their heads like a sword of Damocles. In three years he was a member of the house and a partner. Business flowed to him. His gay, casual manners, his cheery voice, melted the senile heart of Mammon. The baffling blue eye, behind which a purpose quick and strong as steel was kept bright, pierced its pompous parade from the outset, and, holding his adversary at a deflated value, he was never tempted to take himself any the more seriously for his success. To the last the moves for which the market watched would be made between a chat with his trainer and a chaffing and recondite conversation over the telephone with the Tower mess. History is always repeating itself in unlooked for fashions. A hundred and sixty years ago the great Marshal Saxe, forming his squadrons for the charge that was to give Lauffeld to the French, ordered aside their black-avised brigadier and picked on a subaltern, careless and rosy, whom he espied laughing in his saddle, to lead the human avalanche. And in the meaner struggle that seems to have displaced war indefinitely, it will still happen that a light heart with a constitutional cheerfulness in taking risks finds all manner of blind forces following headlong at its heels.

His great chance came when he was just over thirty. For two hours of a sunny afternoon, and to the clouding of a fair brow at Ranelagh, a gaunt, hungry-eyed Western American, referred to him in despair by a friend whose time the stranger had daily and pertinaciously returned to waste, sat in his private office. The man's story was a fantastic one. Of a tunnel which he had been excavating under subvention, for years, and timbering furlong by furlong, sometimes more, sometimes less, as the rusty ore with which the mountain teemed assayed well or ill; of a suspicion, dawning on him little by little as he proceeded, that a wild miner's tale of the district--the legend of the lost lode of Troublesome Gulch--might not, after all, be a myth; the sudden discovery of free gold in the rarest and most precious of ores, "running up through the rock, sir, like a fern"; the theft of the samples that would have justified him; the sudden withdrawal of his subvention, and the decision of the railroad to build its connecting line at a lower level and at an easier gradient; the offers that had been made him for his property, in all of which his fevered mind saw only a threat and evidence of conspiracy. The man was no smooth-tongued exploiter: he spoke roughly, uncouthly, chewing to rags the first dry cigar he had ever smoked, in an evident sweat of fear lest somehow or other his secret should be torn from him--straining to be back and on guard again. His eyes blazed as he talked and his hand shook. He had been nursing his dreams on aerated bread and coffee.

Lumsden kept his visitor by him--wired to Ranelagh--telephoned to various quarters. That night in a private room at the Carlton the company was (unofficially) formed. Within a week from their issue "Gulches" were the sensation of the market. They started well at parity, dropped to fifteen shillings and twelve and a half on an attack of nerves and a truculent attitude on the part of the railroad; recovered, rose to thirty, soared to forty, to four, to six pounds. Fresh shares were issued; the public, almost kept out of the first issue, responded greedily, and the opportunity was seized to unload more of the old debentures than certain cool heads approved. It might be another Camp Bird; it might be the most colossal swindle since Kaffir days; in either case, its proportions inspired respect. There was a shuffle on the financial checker-board. West Hampstead moved to Mayfair, Porchester Gate to Park Lane, and was, so to speak, _crowned_ there, with power to move either way for the future, in a bull or bear direction, capturing meaner uncrowned pieces _en route_. Stanwood went back to Sleepy Cat Mountain with the light of victory in his eye.

Before the snow had melted round the feet of the burros which were bringing down his six-dollar quartz to the smelter he was a ruined man. It was everybody's fault and nobody's fault. The necessary delays had not been discounted; holders were pressed in other directions; finally a discovery that Lumsden, to fill an order for a thousand shares, was buying outside and privately at three-fifteen, stampeded the market. The collapse was complete enough to become a joke. Clerks asked one another: "Will you take it in half-crowns or in Gulch debentures?"

In the summer Lumsden went out to the States. He found Stanwood, a baffled but not a beaten man, and his son, a strong silent lad with steady eyes, "batching" in a log shanty with an earthen roof. Tin kettles and saucepans were hung on pegs all around the outside walls. Behind the hut, among whortle bushes, an ice-cold spring bubbled out of the ground, and all manner of wild mountain flowers--rabbit-ears, puccoons, and thimble-berries--grew to the threshold. They were seven thousand feet above sea-level; all around was space and silence--an air like sparkling wine: his feet, as he ascended the track, crushed sweet harsh odors out of the barren earth.

In long but not aimless rambles over the boulder-strewn slopes; in elk hunts up in the timber reserve; in naked male talk by the cedar fire under the star-bewildered dome of night, the two men grew to learn, to esteem, and to trust one another. There was cheering news, even before Lumsden returned East, for the worn woman who was keeping an Omaha boarding-house for brawling Swedish clerks. He travelled slowly, by way of Denver, New York, Washington, and Paris, seeing a good many people in business hours, and, it must be admitted, amusing himself pretty strenuously out of them. He was back in London by October, and the rest is financial history. People said: "Oh! but what about the original shareholders?" Yet it was amazing how few ever came forward. Lumsden and Lumsden's friends seemed to have gobbled them all up.

There is only one thing more which, in this place, it becomes necessary to record of Bryan Lumsden. Once a month or so, sometimes oftener, sometimes less, at the busiest hour of the afternoon, a big closed motor-car made its way, with many grunts and turns, to the big corner building in Throgmorton Avenue. Sir Bryan would issue from the swing doors, throwing instructions over his shoulder as he passed through the office, sometimes would even dictate a letter to the clerk at his elbow, with one foot on the step of the coupé. After a single word to the chauffeur, which the man acknowledged by touching his peaked cap, he would fling himself back against the cushions of the limousine and busy himself with a pile of papers which he had brought under his arm. Occasionally, at some stoppage or temporary eclipse of light, he would look up from them. It was noticeable then that his face had lost its pleasant quality, was even hard and cruel.

The car rolled on, slowly and softly, through the congested city streets, noisily insistent amid heavy van traffic in Clerkenwell, quickened its speed as it turned into Bloomsbury's drab squares. Presently Regents Park flashed green or ghostly gray outside the windows; long brown garden walls and shabby stucco of St. John's Wood reeled past; the car breasted the hill to Frognal, along a steep avenue of widely spaced, fantastic red-brick houses, set amid shrubs and old timber, and with an occasional glimpse, in lichened roof or clustered chimneys, of an older suburb.

It stopped outside a low wide house which overlooked the heath and was separated from the road by a clipped hedge. Generally, warned by the tumult of the car's approach, the door would fly open before he could reach it from the garden gate; if not, he pulled the wrought iron bell-handle. If the summons remained unanswered beyond a few seconds, he felt impatiently in his pocket for a key and admitted himself. Inside, he looked round the low, wide hall, with the hard air of proprietorship which a man keeps for the place that is his house but not his home. He summoned the laggard servants, spoke sharply to them (in French), pushed open the door of the drawing-room, and waited, biting his moustache restlessly, and looking out of the window over the wide heath. A novel, face downward, or a wisp of embroidery generally decorated the cushions of the window seat.

Presently the door would open behind his back, and a soft rustle of silk and chink of jewelled ornaments cease of a sudden as a woman stood at gaze, watching the broad back or clear profile, silhouetted against the diamond panes of the bow window. With the same undisguised air of ownership, unutterably hideous now when a human creature endured it, Lumsden turned and looked--looked at a slave whom his money had bought and of whom he had tired.

Either one of two things might happen then: She might be peevish, perverse, and bitter, answering his perfunctory questions as shortly, with many shrugs of her shoulders and deprecatory motions of her bare arms; striving with all the advantage her native tongue, the language of cruel inflection and bitter meanings, could give her, to plant her own chagrins, like poisoned arrows, in his breast. Or else, abandoning herself upon his shoulder in an attitude for which everything about her--her dress, the very fashion of her hair--seemed calculated, she would force him to a seat, fling her arms around his neck, recall old tendernesses, never forgetting to mingle her kisses with complaints of her servants--so insolent; her tradesmen--so pressing; the view over the heath--so _triste_ in winter. Her eyes would be dilated, their pupils at a point. Looking down, Lumsden could see little black dots all over the large white arms. He bore kisses and reproaches with exactly the same stoicism, still waiting, still keeping his eyes upon the door.

Suddenly their expression changed. There would be a shrill chatter of women in the hall--every one in this house seemed to speak and scold in French--cries of "_Prenez garde! M. Cyrille!_" "_Une marche de plus!_" "_Voilà!_"--a child's voice asking for "papa! papa!" Led by a French bonne, though he appeared full five years old, and struggling in her grasp, a little boy would enter the room with eager precipitancy. He walked sturdily but somehow clumsily too, holding his free arm out before him and tossing the fair curls from his forehead with a curious baffled gesture. Reaching Lumsden's knee or outstretched hand, he would give a shrill, glad cry, break once for all from the woman who had guided him, and next moment be clasped and gathered into his father's long powerful arms.

Fate has a fine unseemliness, now and then, in her dispensations. It was in a house leased for the service of shame, among brazen foreign women whose hard black eyes belied the respect of their voices, that Lumsden was forced from time to time to plumb the depth of tenderness that lurked in his own heart. He loved his little son as he loved nothing else in the world. And the boy was stone blind from birth.

II

TWO TELEGRAMS

Sir Bryan sat in his study at Mount Street one dark Saturday afternoon late in December, sucking happily upon a calcined briar, but with a watchful eye on the clock, for it was nearly time he began to dress. He was by now a man of thirty-seven or thirty-eight, with a beautiful but rather battered face, strikingly like certain portraits of Marshal Blucher. He had heavy shoulders, straight legs, and lean flanks. His enemies and men who boxed with him said his arms were disproportionate even to his height. His hair was fair and longer than most men wear it to-day: it was thinning over his forehead, and his wavy moustache was streaked with gray. There are people, like buildings, who, for all their size and show, we suspect of being hurriedly and cheaply put together. The paucity or poverty of material shows somewhere: in a mouth that doesn't quite shut, in ears that protrude--hair badly planted on the scalp. No better description of Lumsden could be ventured than that he seemed to have been built slowly and with a good deal of thought. He was expensive in grain, like the pipe he was smoking or the tie he was wearing.

He had been golfing all the afternoon, and was dressed, with happy slouchiness, in a brown flannel suit and a limp shirt-collar. His soft white waistcoat was a little soiled and lacked a button. The room he sat in was clear and light, but simply furnished, a refuge in fact from other splendors. _Estampes galantes_ of Fragonard and the younger Morean decorated its walls sparsely. There was only one photograph, of a woman, which stood by itself in a narrow gilt frame on a side table. It was a large modern chiaroscuro affair. One noted frail emergent shoulders, a head turned aside, delicate lines of neck and chin, and a cloud of hair.

A dark, discreet man-servant knocked and showed his face in the doorway.

"Gentleman to see you, sir."

"Who is it, Becket?"

"Mr. Dollfus, sir."

"Oh! show him up!" But with the precipitancy of his race Mr. Dollfus had shown himself up, and entered hard upon the man's heels.

The baronet hailed him after his cheery wont.

"Hello, Dolly! Another five minutes and I'd have been shaving. Sit down and make yourself a whiskey and soda. Cigars are over there. How are the girls kicking?"

"They're kicking too much," said Mr. Dollfus; "on the stage and off too."

"Rotten notices the _Motor Girl_ got," said Lumsden, reaching for a crumpled paper.

"That's all right," answered Dollfus with easy confidence. "We'll pull it rount. Got a new College Song from America. Came too late to put in. With a chorus, my boy, a chorus! 'Cher want to hear it?"

"Go ahead!"

"Back oar--back roar--back waller--back nigger and bantabaloo."

"Sounds useful."

"Eh! ah! Cantcher hear it on the organs? And--I say, Lumpsden?"

"What is it?"

"Remember a little girl we saw at La Palèze in the summer?"

Lumsden's face altered ever so little.

"Can't say I do very clearly. We saw so many."

"Went rount wit' a kind of fisherman. Artist feller. Eh? ah? Danced, too. Remember now?"

"Oh yes! I do, now. You were professional on the subject of her legs."

"That's the one. Well, she's come to me, my boy."

"Come to you? What the deuce for?"

"What do they all come for?" the Jew asked with sub-acidity. "Money. A lead. A 'shance.'"

"And what did you say, Dolly? Took her on your knee--played uncle--told her that if she was good to her mother you might give her a place in the back row some day if you thought of it."

Dollfus looked at him keenly for a moment. He had a theory that Lumsden remembered the girl better than he pretended; that he had, in fact, spoken to her at La Palèze and been rebuffed.

"Yer on the wrong track, Lumpsden," he said; "she's quite respectable. Madame de Rudder brought her--voman that useter teach the princesses. She's vell connected, too."

"What's her name?"

"Fenella Barbour."

Sir Bryan started a little at the name, and his sudden movement did not escape the Dominion manager.

"I say, Lumpsden," he went on casually; "aintcher a relation of the Lady Lulford that died this year?"

"A little. Why do you ask?"

"That's who she is, my boy. They were talking about all being together at Christmas."

"Who were talking?"

"Voman she called her cousin Leslie, that came wit' 'em too. At their country house. The name's gone outer my head."

Sir Bryan yawned, stretched himself, and gave a meaning look at the clock.

"Sorry I can't keep you any longer, Dolly. I'm dining out. What is it exactly you want?"

"Vell, I believe the girl's a find, Lumpsden. And natcherally I can't do anything at the Dominion--wit'out--wit'out----You understand?"

"I understand. You've seen her dance, I suppose? Is it any good? You know how much of this humbug there's been lately. Is hers something quite special?"

"Quite," said Mr. Dollfus, briefly. He seemed to weigh his opinion once more. "Oh quite!" he said again.

"You see a furore, in fact?"

"Maybe a riot," said Joe.

The financial support smiled. "You've made it such a family matter, Joe, that you won't mind my telling you I don't particularly want riots about relations of mine."

The manager shrugged his shoulders, but did not revise his opinion. Lumsden held out his hand.

"I'll telephone you to-morrow, and fix a night after Christmas when we can talk this over. Meantime, of course, you'll be discreet. Ta-ta, Dolly. I like your song."

An hour later he re-entered the room and flung a fur coat and crush hat on a lounge. He was dressed for dinner, was polishing his nails and appeared thoughtful. Sitting down before a big knee-hole desk, that was tucked away in a corner underneath a telephone, he switched on a light, drew a letter-pad toward him and wrote:

"DEAR LESLIE:

"May I usurp your sex's privilege and change my mind about coming to Freres Lulford for Christmas. I was going to Ponty's, as you know, but somehow, this year, don't feel keyed up to the light-hearted crowd they get together at Capelant. I want somewhere to hide my unrevered head until the Spirit of Christmas is gone out of the land, and I should like a look at Saleratus. The alternative is to go to Scotland and turn myself into a sort of Dana Gibson picture of the sorrows of the rich. You know the sort of thing: 'Where Get-there Lumsden really got to.'

"To tell you the truth, dear Leslie, I should never have refused your invitation if you hadn't frightened me with our mysterious newly discovered relative. Even, now, when I've decided to take the risk, I'll feel nervous. You say 'brilliant.' Suppose it turns out to be some dreadful little artist or writer person who'll want to paint me, or use me as 'a type.'..."

When he had got so far he re-read the letter, tore it up, and wrote out two telegrams. One was addressed to Lady Pontardawe, Capelant, Flintshire, and its contents are no affair of ours. The other said--

"Changed my mind. Motoring down, if fine, Wednesday."

His tickled sense of expectancy supported him through a dull dinner--possessed him, in fact, to the extent of making him rather a _distrait_ companion. Once he laughed out unaccountably. Expectation was as rare with him as regret. He probably regarded them as equivalent weaknesses, but there was no doubt which was the pleasanter to indulge. Not quite a satyr, he was still less a saint. Men who knew him well, contented themselves by saying that Bryan "stayed it well," and the secret of his power to last was probably that, for him, the life that began when he was called in the morning ended when he switched the light off from above his pillow. He was not an imaginative man, but if he had been, his morning bath might justly have been conceived by him as a wide cool river, reflecting a gray morning sky, that flowed between him and all follies and fevers of the night. He took no heed what phantoms waved to him from the other shore, nor what urgency and significance might be in their gestures.

He got back before twelve, changed his coat for a wadded Indian silk smoking-jacket, and finished a long black cigar before he turned in. He felt tranquil, and, for reasons possibly connected with his telegram to Wales, even virtuous. Lulford, with its cloister terrace, its gray walled fruit-gardens beneath the "Prior's oriel," and its lilied carp-wood, girt with bastion and towers of clipped yew, had always been a favorite house with him, far beyond the wind-tortured barrack in Scotland that was the cradle of his own grim race, and which all his money could not make bloom afresh. The glamour of his youth still invested it. He had spent many a long holiday there, the while his mother, widowed but no ways desolate, was seeking her own distractions at Wiesbaden or Lausanne, and to the end of his school days (not particularly pleasant ones, for he had been in an unfashionable house and perpetually short of pocket-money) whatever sentiment of eclogue or pastoral survived the drudgery of construe, always had for its stage and background the remembered pleasantness of Lulford. Wonderful, not how little had survived, but how much!

And to-night something else haunted it, something that was real, that rather appealed to imagination than was evoked by it. Youth, flushed, timorously daring, beckoned and eluded him down those alleys and groves. (Eternal illusion, making your own summer wherever your feet choose to pass!) He was of the age when a man is looking for the heralds of middle life, and his _empressement_ struck him as one rather ominous sign. The growing simplification of life was another. The match-makers were giving Bryan up at last. He remembered a time when it would not have been so easy to sneak away for two weeks in the hunting season.

Dollfus had, after all, not been so far astray in his surmise. There had been an encounter at La Palèze--one of those secrets which the most transparent of women never seem to feel the need of telling. She had not appeared frightened nor very much surprised--had let him walk by her side across the dunes and through the pine woods, even chatted a little, lightly. But then neither had she made any attempt to keep the appointment he had so subtly forced upon her for the morrow. He had never seen her alone again.

Ill at ease among abstractions, his mind turned with relief to the case in point. Condensed slightly, his reflections ran something after this fashion:

"I wonder what Leslie's game is. Of course she's stark mad, but it's funny the others making a mystery about it too. Are they just giving a hard-worked little relation a holiday, or do they mean to take her up and bring her out next year. If they do, I'll wager she marries a title or is ruined inside the year. I know what I'm talking about. All my sweethearts do well. Things ain't like what they used to be. There's a sight too much young blood about, and the cubs will be in everywhere. A girl that can play 'em can land 'em. Good lord! Look at Bewdley! look at the Colfax good boy! With the Nampore rubies round her blasted neck! This one's clever, but I don't think she's that kind. But if she isn't, what the devil was she doing at Palèze? Funny, Dollfus coming to me! And I believe I'd rather see her on the stage after all, as long as it's decent. What did he mean by 'a riot'?"

He got up, yawned, and threw his cigar butt into the fire. As he did so his reflection confronted him, a little flattered by the red-shaded globe. He pushed his face closer.

"Not much youth there, old man!" he said, referring to the eyes; "but how many of the young 'uns will be where you are in fifteen years' time? Money! Money! Gad! I can't spend it if I try."

He frowned at the fire and turned impatiently away. "I'm a fool," he said. "None of 'em live up to their faces. Besides, you can never corner that market. A lot is not knowing when to pull out, and idleness and over-feeding, and seeing too many new faces. Heigho! I wonder what Stanwood will be doing in the spring."

He yawned again, and, an hour later, was fast asleep.

III

IN THE FIRELIGHT

Snow had been drifting again, softly, thickly, and persistently, since dawn. The angles of the window sills were filled with it, every square and diamond in the leaded gallery windows was rimmed with the crystalline fur. The coats of the deer in the home park glowed a rich rusty red against its intense and sparkling purity; half of every trunk and branch at the edge of the wood was erased by it like a crayon drawing by the india rubber of some impatient drawing-room master. Fenella had spent the short winter afternoon roaming through galleries and chambers of state, or watching the flakes that tumbled giddily from the shrouded sky turn blue and green and red as they passed the painted blazons in the great oriel window--coats fessed and barrelled and ermined, of Alfords, and Corbets, and Danseys, and Maddocks, whose hale and temperate blood ran in her own veins.

She was alone for the first time in the home of her forefathers. Her uncle was away in the old capital of Powysland on some political business or another; her cousins had driven down to the church an hour ago, in a governess-cart heaped with ropes and garlands of holly and fir. There were wreaths and crosses, too, for the woman who was spending her first Christmas beneath the frozen earth, and Fenella had shrunk from sharing the pious duty in which her heart could have so little part. She was glad to be alone, and to muse undisturbed in the ghostly protracted twilight. After the tempest of her grief something of weakness and passivity lingered still; her heart felt the languor of convalescence. Her movements were slower, her poises more consciously graceful; with the restlessness of childhood the last of its angles had gone. So imperative is nature, that she can make even a broken heart subsidiary to her purpose. She had prayed to die, and was three pounds heavier.

When the twilight glimmer in the long gallery was too ghostly to be borne she descended to the dining-hall. Under its hooded fireplace the roaring grate was heaped with blocks of ligneous coal almost as large as boulders. Freres Lulford is in that borderland 'twixt the old England and the new where, for a ten-mile walk, one may make choice between coal-shafts and rolling mills, or ancient timbered hamlets and the "forest fleece" of Wenlock Edge. She called Perseus, the house-dog, to her, an eerie, feathery creature with a mouth like a shark, and, holding his head in her lap with one hand, rested her round cheek, dusky red from the fire into which she gazed, upon the other. The flames, as they rose and fell, tossed a distorted shadow of her head and shoulders, now low along the faded Persian carpets that covered the polished oak boards, now high up on the diapered wall, across helmet and cuirass, fringed silken banner, or antlered head, until, reaching the straddled legs or flowered petticoat of some high-hung ancestor, it sank again to the carpeted floor. She was dressed in a high-waisted frock of some soft white material, with short sleeves that left most of her arms bare, and with a high net collar kept pointed to the ears with little whalebones, after a senseless momentary fashion that forced her to carry her chin in the air. It was a very pretty chin, however; and wherefore does fashion change at all if not to call attention, through successive exaggerations, to the varied prettinesses of woman.

Was she beginning to taste content again? Was she even resigned? She could not tell. A broken heart is such a relative term, one so justly discredited by those who have not the patience or the knowledge to follow its deadly sequelae that, except as the loosest of illustration, it is grown to be a useless one as well. But without flattering her own constancy in the least, Fenella could well perceive that, but for a providence so despised at the time, it might have gone very hard with her. Never, she owned it humbly and thankfully, could power to endure so timely have followed the blow, ministering angels the draining of the chalice. The worth or tenacity of a love that death or something else violently disrupts is not to be measured in an instant. At first, while the soul is nothing save a shocked protesting mass of severed nerve and impulse, all comfort is welcome, no matter whence it comes. It is not until the pain has abated that a perverse relish for it becomes possible, and that its ameliorations can seem a treachery done to love. So she had judged her own once, with the indignation of youth for wise restraining laws that will let no passion, by taking thought, grow beyond a certain stature. She was wiser now as well as humbler--could bless the diversion even for the poor perished love's sake. It had saved her from the meaner vexations that, for the woman, follow the breaking of an engagement, the unwelcome sympathy and the meaning glance, the loneliness of the long empty hours, and the perpetual challenge to memory of familiar scenes and faces. New skies, as the poet sings, may not change the heart, but this much is certain--nowhere is disappointment borne so hardly as among those who have been witness to the illusion. She went from her lover's arms discredited, soiled even, but, at least, to those who were ignorant of her history, and could not compare her with the Fenella of old. Meantime, her sorrow lurked somewhere, to wake, she felt instinctively, the day another man should ask her for love.

Her cousins were kind and natural, so natural that, after three months, she seemed to have known them all her life. Leslie Barbour was tall, thin and melancholy, mildly mad, and with the good looks that were the only unentailed heritage in the Barbour family marred in her case by ill-health and emaciation. She spoke little, and regarded her new-found cousin with a purblind stare that it took Fenella a long time to get used to, but which she was content now to accept as a tribute of adoring affection. She loved white, waxy flowers with heavy odors, and was psychically inquisitive.

Nelly was rather afraid of her uncle, a _bruyant_ peer with a past of which the late Lady Lulford had been a very small part. He had a fine head and heavy, fleshy face, opulently bearded, that Holbein would have loved to paint, the face of one of the terrible new lords of the English Renaissance who hung the abbots and gobbled up the abbeys. In the country he affected knickerbockers and velvet coats, and was sophisticated rather than intellectual, with a sophistication that he had placed a whole life long at the service of his pleasures. His pursuits being apt to clash with his eldest son's, Basil was at present in Damaraland shooting big game; but Jack Barbour, the younger son, a cheery and casual young lancer, fell unreservedly in love with his pretty cousin, with a fine quality of hopeless adoration in his homage (he has since married money and freckles) that the girl was used to by now, and could deal with competently. The two became great chums. Jack liked to have his well-turned-out little kinswoman for brisk walks across the Park, or for a saunter down Bond Street at the hours of resort. He did not mind how many of his comrades-in-arms caught him in company that did him so much credit. "Where did you find the pretty lady you were with in Burlington Street, Suds?" "Don't be an ass, Bogey," Suds would make reply. "She's a little cousin of ours. I'll introduce you in the spring when we start goin' round again." Fenella, wearing her own sad colors in her heart, looked forward to the promised gaieties almost with dismay. Life had become such a serious thing. She worked hard at her dancing, teaching, and learning while she taught, and making strides that carried her rapidly beyond Mme. de Rudder's power to appreciate justly. On the morning of her interview with Joe Dollfus she thought it well to take her eccentric cousin into her confidence. The look of hopeless adoration only intensified in the vacant, troubled face. Leslie put out her hand and touched the girl's black hair timidly.

"Blame you, child?" she repeated. "Does one blame the butterfly for seeking the sun? Will you forget me, darling, in your success--for I see success written on your brow? Will you be only one other sad memory in my breast--one pearl white head the more along the long rosary of my regrets?" She sighed luxuriously. "I shall recall you best," she decided after a moment's consideration, "when I see a creamy-white rose, half-blown."

Fenella wriggled uneasily. She did not want to be any one else's regret. Brows and breasts, moreover, had a mortuary flavor. Foreheads and chests were much cheerfuller everyday matters. They were at lunch, and she caught her cousin's hand under the table-cloth.

"Don't be gloomy, Les," she pleaded; "you make me feel all _squiggly_ when you talk that way. Of course I sha'n't forget you. I want you to come with me and madame this afternoon."

We know now what Mr. Dollfus thought; but his outward recognition of his opportunity had been temperate, and the three women discussed his attitude rather ruefully over their tea. Leslie looked at the girl's flushed, chagrined face a long while in silence.

"Don't be afraid, Cousin Nelly," she said at last. "It's going to be all right. That man is wild to have you."

Fenella turned on her breathlessly. "Oh, Les! do you mean it? How can you know?"

Leslie narrowed her pale eyes and shook her head slowly.

"Never mind how I know," she said cryptically. "These things aren't withheld from me. They wouldn't be from _you_ if you could empty your mind of _self_ for even a moment."

No reinforcement to hope is really insignificant. Nelly had glowed at the eerie assurance. She was recalling it now, and smiling over poor Les's unearthly manner, when the hairy head under her hand moved convulsively. Perseus uttered a wild, strangling bark. A man was standing on the opposite side of the fireplace, looking at the pretty group of girl and animal--the dog asleep, the girl dreaming.

"Hello!" he said cheerfully.

IV

AN AFFAIR OF OUTPOSTS

He was a big man, and in his long hairy coat he looked a giant. After the first glance the girl's first wild fear vanished. Burglars and murderers don't wear fur coats in business hours, nor hold goggles in their hand. Perseus, too, having given the alarm, had gone over to the stranger, and was sniffing at him in a way that suggested recognition. The unknown slapped his lean flank.

"Hello, Perse! You don't get any fatter, old man."

As he unwound a great woollen scarf from his neck, a fair, pleasant face, rather damp and weather beaten, emerged. She recognized her chatty friend of La Palèze immediately.

"I'm sorry if I startled you," he said, "but they told me Miss Barbour was in the hall, so I walked in. Were they pleasant dreams?"

Even in the red firelight the color on the girl's cheeks deepened perceptibly. "How can I slip past him?" she said to herself and then aloud: "If you don't mind waiting, I'll go and see whether my cousins are back. My uncle is at Shrewsbury."

"Please don't move," the man answered. "I asked. They're all out still. But perhaps I'd better introduce myself. I'm Bryan Lumsden. I think I'm expected."

"Sir Bryan Lumsden," she repeated. "Oh! we thought you'd come this morning. Leslie waited luncheon."

"I burst a tire at Welshpool," Bryan explained. "Often do in snow, you know."

"Shall I ring for tea?"

"Yes, please. And meantime, let's talk." He took off his coat and flung it over a high-railed chair. "Shall we?"

She sat back, further into the shadow as she hoped, but the vicious flame chose that moment to spurt out--a spurt of peculiar brilliance.

"Now, what can we talk about?" he asked pleasantly, when the footman had gone, carrying the great coat with him.

"The weather?" poor Fenella suggested, with a hollow laugh.

"Or foreign travel, eh? That's even more interesting."

Nelly abandoned her treacherous ambush.

"I couldn't help it," she protested, rubbing the arms of her chair nervously with open palms. "You _would_ talk to me. And it's--it's so hard to be rude."

"----in return, eh?"

"Yes. You know you shouldn't have done it."

"You had your revenge next day, remember!" he said, and stopped abruptly, as another absurdly big footman, who should have been breaking the glebe in Canada, entered with the tea-tray.

"Shall I turn on the light, miss?" the man asked, disposing various silver-covered dishes on the wide hearth.

"No!--oh yes--if you please, Philip. Why do you say 'revenge'?" she asked, when they were alone again. "I'm not a revengeful person."

"We shall see," he said, taking a cup from her hands. "Power's a great temptation."

Under his steady gaze, which never left her face, except to scan her figure, the ministry of the tea-table was a sad ordeal. In the intervals of discharging her duties she called the hound to her and fondled him anew. That hid one arm, anyway.

"I waited for you a whole morning."

"Oh! I don't believe that!" Said without any coquetry.

"It's the simple fact. And I've heard about you since."

"From Leslie? Of course you would."

"No; she only said, unaccountably: 'A cousin,' leaving me to guess whether it was he, she, or it. I'm thinking of Joe Dollfus."

Suddenly he held his hand up. He had fine senses. "I can hear wheels in the snow. You haven't told me your name."

"Fenella."

"Well, Cousin Fenella! Are we going to be friends?"

"Why not?" faintly.

"I shall be discreet, you know, about--_things_ at La Palèze."

The girl's eyes brimmed. Instead of this face, blonde, confident, and animal, another one--lean, spiritualized, with far-seeking, visionary eyes, swam through her tears. "Paul! Paul!" Like any poor maid, beset, at bay in a robber-haunted forest, her heart called to her true love.

"In return, will you keep a secret for me?"

No answer.

"Don't mention Welshpool. I'm supposed to have come straight from London."

"Why should I say anything at all?"

"Oh! one never knows. Give me your hand on it."

What could she do? He was in no hurry to release her, and had hardly dropped it when, chilled and dazed but boisterously light-hearted after their mournful errand, her cousins entered the hall.

V

CICISPEO

The next morning was stirless but bracing. Snow covered the park in soft mounds and waves, with a little black pit round the roots of each tree, as though some hibernating animal were breathing beneath. The laden branches balanced their fairy load daintily, against a sky, low, buff-colored and heavy with the promise of a further fall toward afternoon. The atmosphere was so still that the shouts of children snowballing in the village half a mile beyond the lodge gates, the rattling of antlers round the feeding-trough, reached the terrace, swept and sand-strewn already, where Fenella walked before breakfast, her arms folded under a warm golfing cape that she had found hanging in the hall. In the morning light, austere, temperate and shadowless, a good many of the misgivings that had robbed her of sleep were re-examined and found ludicrously unworthy of the sacrifice. There was no mistake about it. She had had her hour of unreasoning panic--had even meditated excuses that should cover a precipitate homeward flight. But that mood was over now. Women have their own code of bravery in the only warfare they know--their own perception of the ignominy of flight. If they act oftener upon their fears than upon the braver impulse, it is only because, in this warfare, it is their adversary himself who has set the rules and poisoned the weapons, decreeing that the slightest wound as well as the mortal shall be held matter for shame.

"I've heard of you--from Dollfus." What did that mean? What could be said of her yet? Of course, afterward, she was prepared for far worse. She was going on the stage with her eyes remarkably wide open. But that women--girls like herself, living at home, protected and obscure--should be made subject of men's conversation, she felt was an injustice--a treacherous thrust before the battle was joined. What was its motive? To rob her of self-respect before her character could be assailed? To cheapen, degrade her in her own eyes at the outset?

All at once a light dawned upon her--a light that beamed softly through her eyes, that wreathed her lips with the faintest, saddest little smile that ever was near neighbor to tears.

"It's all your fault, darling," she murmured. "It's all through you. You've been and lost me my character, Paul. Oh, my dear, my dear! What a joke! If the beasts only knew you?"

A foot grated upon the sand behind her. She turned and saw Sir Bryan, very fresh and smart and youthful in his tweeds and breeches.

"Good-morning, Miss Barbour. I'm sent to call you into breakfast."

"I never heard the gong."

"You don't hear it from this side." He came nearer and drew in great breaths of the cold, pure air. "Feeding's a bore, isn't it, a morning like this? I like houses where everything's kept hot and you eat any time; don't you?"

"I don't know. I haven't visited very much."

She tried to meet his new impersonal tone with perfunctory brightness; but Bryan knew how a woman looks who hasn't slept.

"You look tired," he said. "I'm afraid I worried you a bit last night."

"I did think you a little--a little----"

"Disrespectful, eh?" Lumsden hazarded. He had that useful sort of tact in conversation which consists in supplying the word that suits one's own purpose best.

"We were such strangers, you see," urged Fenella, with gentle reproof. "That time in France shouldn't have counted at all."

"If it did, the score was on your side," the baronet said quickly. "But I'm content so long as you don't mark it against me."

"Then you hinted people were talking about me," Nelly went on, reddening, but gaining confidence. "It was that worried me. It was so vague."

"We were interrupted just then," Lumsden reminded her. "A word or two would have explained, but you wouldn't let me get near you the whole evening."

"Why should I? When women are talked about it's never _well_."

"Oh, isn't it?" said Lumsden. "I'm not a philanthropist, but I assure you I've done my part bravely in holding lots of shaky reputations together."

She raised her head now, and looked him quite proudly in the eyes.

"Thank you. I'm not conscious mine's in bad repair."

It was a different voice and another woman. Lumsden leaned over the parapet and gathered a handful of snow.

"Snow's packing," he said. "We'll have sleighing after lunch. Ever been on a bob-sleigh?"

"No," said Fenella. Maidenly dignity relented a little. It sounded "fun."

Sir Bryan gave a boyish laugh.

"You've missed half your life," said he, making use of one of a collection of phrases he had brought from over the Atlantic. "Look here!" He touched her ever so lightly on the shoulder and pointed across the park. "From the Belvedere down to the 'ha-ha' there's two hundred and fifty yards if you know how. We laid it out years ago, and marked it with stones. It's known all round. Lots of people, probably, will turn up here this afternoon. You'll let me take you down, won't you, Miss Barbour? I say; do I have to go on calling you 'Miss Barbour'?"

"Yes," demurely; "I think it's best."

"For how long?"

She faced him with her hand upon the sash of the long French window. If it was "just flirting," Fenella was "all there."

"Until you've told me truthfully what Mr. Dollfus said."

"I'll do it while we're sleighing. It won't take ten minutes."

* * * * *

The conversation, however, lasted more than ten minutes, and it was one Fenella was never to forget. As Bryan had prophesied, the news that the slide was being banked and made spread rapidly, and a host of people turned up in the afternoon, in country carts with sledges trailing and bumping behind, or in motor-cars, with an occasional pair of skis sticking up in the air. The run had been laid out years ago under Lumsden's own direction, when "crooked run" tobogganing was a newly discovered rapture. More than one future hero of the Kloster or Cresta had taken his first powdery tumble, amid ecstatic laughter from friends and relations, on the snowy slopes of Freres Lulford, and even now, after the sophistication had set in that so quickly reduces any English pastime to a science, with its canting vocabulary and inner circle of the expert, whenever snow fell thickly enough to stop shooting and hunting, two or three days' sleighing in Lulford Park was thought rather "sport" by a society watchfully anxious never to be thrown upon its intellectual resources by any trick of wind or weather.

Game-keepers and gardeners had been at work all the morning, and after lunch people began to arrive. Fenella had met a good many of them before--Lord Warrener, with his fiery whiskered cheeks and grave little Philadelphia wife; Bill Arkcoll, whose gray face, seamed with a million tiny wrinkles, was twisted into a permanent grin round a black-rimmed eyeglass, which he had, moreover, a disconcerting habit in the evening of letting fall with a sudden crash on his shirt front; "Snip" Hannaford, the gentleman jockey, who had sacrificed his chest to the sport of kings; finally Lady Wills-Pechell, alone condescendingly literary on the strength of half a dozen pottering little garden books: "Among my Syringas," "The Chatelaine's Year," "Shadow and Sun on Spurlock Edge." Lady Warrener was of the latest type of trans-Atlantic heiress, devoted to the peerage from the nursery, and "very carefully brought up" by an ambitious and circumspect mother. Her opinions were predigested and all her life nothing really unforeseen had ever happened her, except twins. She adored her husband and babies, thought Bryan's occasional Americanisms vulgar, and her favorite comment was, "_Oh, fahncy!_"

As a class they had for some time ceased to force comparisons upon Fenella; but this afternoon their low, clear voices, frank, unimpressed greetings, absence of anxiety, and general air of being all afloat together upon a stream that might be trusted never to carry them too far out of one another's reach struck pleasantly upon her senses. A great coke stove had been lighted in the Belvedere and the curved stone benches covered with carriage-rugs and cushions. The trampled snow outside was littered with an assortment of bob-sleighs, "Cheshires" and frail steel clipper-sleds. The run started practically at the door, with a nearly sheer fall of twenty feet; ran out a hundred yards into the straight, turned--at first gently, then more sharply--on a heaped embankment around the shoulder of the hill, and finished close to the old carp pond, whose black ramparts and pointed turrets of yew were roofed and spired to-day with a white thatch of snow. From the gardens a sort of rough stairway, made of faggots and bundles of brush-wood, had been made to the top of the hill. A few belated guests were straggling up it, pulling up their sleds to one side through the snow. Round the stove the vocabulary of the sport was being briskly interchanged.

"_Sprawl_ on Battledore, and use your right foot, not your left." "Never got beyond the duffer's handicap myself." "You'll 'yaw' all over, Arkcoll, if you use rakes on the straight." "Hands are best." "No, they're not: 'gouties,' when they get a bit worn, are just as good." "He was killed because he held on, Warrener. Let go and bunch yourself, and you can't be more than bruised even there." "Who's going to start?" "That thing's no good on a snow-run, Barbour."

Jack Barbour was standing on the edge of the descent, a light steel frame with a cushion held against his chest. He put it down and glanced at his pretty cousin.

"Shall we show 'em how?"

Fenella caught her breath, but nodded.

"Oh, Jack, take care of her!" reproachfully, from his sister, while Warrener, in the background, already a little _épris_, expressed an opinion that it was "damned dangerous."

"Dangerous? Down that thing?" cried Barbour scornfully, pushing the nose of what is technically known as a "tin-bottom" over the slope.

"What am I to do?" asked Nelly.

"Just sit still and hang on to my knees. Now, are you ready?"

Fenella bit her lip and suppressed a vulgar inclination to scream. The toboggan seemed to fall headlong--to rebound--to shoot out with the evident intention of either burying itself in the embankment or of leaping it altogether. When its nose was not more than ten yards away she felt the speed suddenly slacken, the toboggan slewed round with a twist that nearly overset it, and, steadying, slipped swiftly and cleanly round a wide curve. Almost before the rapture of the unaccustomed motion had been realized, it came to a stop, for want of snow, in the shadow of the prior's garden.

"How do you like it?" asked cousin Jack, brushing the snow off his sleeve.

"Oh, Jack!"--Fenella pressed her mittened hands together--"it's--it's _glorious_!"

Barbour smiled at her glowing face. "Pooh! You should see the real thing. Ask Lumsden. He did the Kloster in five-fifteen once."

"Is he very good at it?"

"He's good at everything he takes up," said Jack, unreservedly. "How do you like him, Flash? I forgot to ask."

Jack Barbour had heard of this old school nickname from a brother officer who had had a sister at Sharland College and seldom called her by any other.

"M--m--pretty well. Is he really a cousin of--of--ours?"

"Not really, I think. It's a kind of old joke."

"Why is he so much at home here, then, Jack?"

Barbour had evidently found the situation ready made, and had never thought of questioning it.

"I think he and the governor were racing partners once. There are some of his horses here now: I don't mean hunters. Saleratus is his, the big bay. We all hope he's going to win some races next year. Snip Hannaford's going to ride him."

"Is he married, Jack?"

Barbour laughed sarcastically. "Bryan married! No fear! He knows too much."

"_Jack!_"

"Oh! I'm sorry, coz. It wasn't a very pretty speech to a lady. I mean he's a bit spoilt. Shall we go up?"

"No; let us sit here awhile. It's so warm. Why is he spoilt?"

"'Cos he's awful rich."

"Heaps of people are rich."

"Well, then, he's got a good deal to do with theatres, and knows that kind of people. The Dominion really belongs to him. Why, your teeth are chattering, Flash. Are you cold?"

"No. It's nothing. I thought Mr. Dollfus was the manager of the Dominion."

"He is in a way. I don't quite understand these things, but I suppose Bryan puts up the money."

"I see," said Fenella, with the accent of full comprehension. "Jack," she said, after a moment, "do you think it's quite right to have a man like that meeting--proper women?"

Barbour jerked his head. He was a rather nice lad, singularly susceptible to the influence of the moment.

"I suppose it isn't, when one thinks of it. We've thrashed this out before, haven't we, Flash? Same law for both, eh?"

"I think men, and women too, ought to choose what kind of people they're going to know, and be made _stick_ to that sort. I don't like _mixings_. Come, let's go up. Here come some others. Oh, Jack! aren't you glad you're young? I _hate_ men after twenty-five."

* * * * *

The sport was over, together with the short-lived day, before she stood in the same place with the older man. Servants carrying tea-baskets and kettles had made their way up the slope. Lanterns twinkled in the pergola, and gay chat floated down to them. She had kept out of his way all the afternoon without difficulty. It was not until she had made the tantalizingly short descent with one man after another, and finally, amid much vain dissuasion and subsequent applause, headforemost by herself on Jack's steel clipper, that he came to her side and asked her, without a trace of the manner she resented, to take the last run with him. It was growing dark, and meaning glances were not wanting, but she had consented without any hesitation. She felt the glances, but she felt also a strange elation and a consciousness of strength that made her a very different creature to the nervous tongue-tied little girl of the night before. She did not quite know why, but, as she stood, a little breathless from her upward climb, with the first flakes of the new fall melting on her glowing cheek, life, even shadowed life such as was hers, seemed something intensely interesting, and something that, given courage, might be mastered as easily as the sport she was essaying now. He was the first to speak when they reached the sheltered gloom below.

"Don't you think our explanation's about due?"

He saw her smile. "I'm not a bit anxious for it now, Sir Bryan."

"I can believe that. You've even seemed to me to be keeping out of its way, or out of mine, which comes to the same thing, all the afternoon."

"It's not really worth worrying over. When you've given it there won't be much gained."

"You mean calling you--your name. It was your own idea to wait, you know."

"You can call me it now without any conditions. Jack has told me we're kind of cousins."

"Is that all he's told you?"

"A little more."

"Oh! Enough to make you hesitate about a certain step you had thought of taking?"

"Enough to make me think I'd better take it in some other place."

"Don't take it anywhere else"--earnestly.

She was startled at his intensity, and looked uneasily up the hill.

"Cousin Fenella, does history bore you?"

"It must be a very short lesson, please."

"A few minutes is enough. Years ago, then, cousin, in certain parts of Italy, when a bride was starting her new life, besides the usual stuff about pin-money, settlements, etcetera, the marriage contract contained another clause that seems to our insular minds intensely shocking. You'd never guess what it provided for."

"If it's shocking, I'd best not try."

His mouth twitched. "Baldly, then, one friend--neither more nor less. A third partner in the terrestrial paradise. Seems rather a scandalous person, doesn't he?"

"I think so."

Lumsden lit a cigar. "And yet"--_puff! puff!_--"the more one thinks of him the more reasonable he becomes. Men were so busy in those days, cousin. Fighting, don't you know--treaty making--in prison for indefinite periods. Don't you see with how much easier mind the soldier or diplomatic or captive husband must have laid his head on his lonely pillow for knowing there was a stout arm, ready blade, keen wit at home, authorized to keep marauders off. Do you wonder why I'm telling you all this?"

"To frighten me, perhaps."

"Pshaw! I know better than that. Come! put prejudice aside. Remember, too, that his name was probably the worst thing about him. Some poor relative, unrewarded soldier, I always imagine him--generally a cousin, by the way. Still wondering?"

No answer.

"Cousin Fenella, listen to me! Under ordinary conditions, for a girl like yourself to dance on the stage would be to risk more unhappiness and humiliation and treachery than you'd believe if I told you. There's one place in which a word from me can secure you your peace of mind. That's the Dominion. Don't turn away from luck."

"You mean that I--that you----"

"That the mere hint, in quarters where it's most wanted, that you're a _protégée_ of mine will rid you once for all of unwelcome attentions."

Fenella considered. "In fact, in order to keep my peace of mind, I must lose my reputation."

"Do you care very much what the world says? Do you have to--still?"

The last word was pitched so low that she hardly caught it. But, whisper as it was, it decided her.

"No. I don't care. Not--_that_." She snapped her fingers.

"That's right," said the sporting baronet encouragingly. "It's a bargain then? Dominion or nothing?"

"Yes."

"I'm writing Joe to-night. Shall I tell him we go into training after Christmas?"

"Yes."

He put his hands in his pockets and puffed his cigar to a glow.

"Quite ready to fight the world, ain't you, cousin?"

"The _world_."

"----but not me, eh? Oh! I keep my word. I'm Cicispeo."

"_Who?_"

"The man who's history I've just been telling you."

"Why are you taking all this trouble then?"

"Good! I like a 'facer' sometimes. Well, it's because I admire pluck. Because I saw you swim a mile out at Palèze. Oh! I often watched you. Because you took a header down that slide just now. What'll you be at next. Shall we go back to the house or will you go up with me and face the Wills-Pechell eye? It's celebrated, I warn you--got enough pluck left for that?"

And as she climbed the brushwood path--her hand in this new friend's--Fenella, all her elation gone, was wondering how much share after all her will had had in the choice just made, and whether this dazzling dream-vista of success and applause, out of which, as earnest of her right to all it promised, a rush of warm-scented air seemed to meet her through the snow-filled dusk, were not really a decree of fate, hostile and inexorable to her heart's desire as death would have seemed three months ago--peace, salty suffocation on the dark, lonely, foreign beach, clasped in her lover's arms.

And Lumsden, quite possibly, was measuring the moral distance between the cad who shoots a pheasant on the ground and the sportsman who flushes it and gives it a fly for its life. Or for better sport--which is it?--and to take a surer aim.

VI

THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT

Among the minor penalties with which fate, presumably solicitous for a true balance, hampers excellence in this world, not alone the acquired excellence, which, being achieved in its teeth, explicably earns its maleficence, but even the natural advantages which were its own unsolicited gift, one, we think, has escaped the attention it deserves. We refer to a certain isolation and lack of touch with their immediate _entourage_ which those who are marked for the world's prizes never quite succeed in overcoming, however modestly they wear or anticipate their honors. They are interesting, and for a correct view a certain distance, respectful, (though not necessarily so to them), is judged advisable. Society opens its ranks to receive them, but never quite closes on them again. None who have studied the lives of the giants but will have noticed how rarely a friendship disinterestedly worthy of them came their way, and is not the fatality of beauty, encountering the spoiler where the friend was imagined, a proverb? Fenella had not lived her new life a month before she was aware of a subtle atmosphere which was not treachery and which could not, without begging the question, have been called disrespect, but which partook a little of both. One does not feel a thing less keenly for being unable to exactly define it. Instincts are given women to be acted on, not to be explored. Its manifestations as yet had been only vaguely disquieting. Among the men it was apparent rather as a half jocular reservation of judgment--a determination, in view of possible developments, not to be committed to any one view of her character now, and, above all, never to be in the position of having more knowing brothers administer a rebuke to worldly wisdom. And among the women it took the shape of a coldness in meeting her advances which contrasted puzzlingly with the outspoken admiration that invited them. Poor, warm-hearted, ignorant Fenella! experiencing for the first time the full benefits of the benefit of the doubt.

It might be inevitable, or it might not, that, as day followed day of a visit so rapidly losing its charm, the broad-shouldered figure of the sporting baronet should begin to stand out more and more sympathetically against this background of veiled disrespect and thwarting reserve. It is true that the openness of his first advances had been the thing nearest approaching insult that she could remember, but, such as it was, it was forgiven now and, womanlike, the fault, frankly owned, brought him nearer. More womanlike still, perhaps, she liked him the better because he had been a witness to the old lost love of the summer. He at least saw her in no half light. She did not care greatly if he believed the worst--took a perverse joy, indeed, in believing it was possible he did. She was on her way now to a life where such things were no handicap, to which, indeed, she half suspected they were sometimes the initiation. She was content the knowledge of her own integrity should remain--a secret satisfaction to herself--content to feel it as a dancer of the fervid south, beneath her languorous draperies, may feel the chill of the dagger that she carries thrust through her garter.

He was kind and helpful too, not with the troublesome insistence of a man anxious to make amends for a former mistake, but as though, the ground having been cleared once for all of false conceptions, misunderstanding was no longer likely between them. Mourning and seclusion, she discovered, were comparative terms among country neighbors, and amid the men with whom the house intermittently abounded he showed both a finer creature and a finer gentleman. Once, in the billiard-room, when Warrener the full-blooded hinted that her cheeks lacked roses, and made as if to pour out whiskey for her, Lumsden took the decanter from his hand without a word, and put it back on the wooden ledge that ran round the room. She had come on a message to him from Leslie.

"I'd send one of the maids, Flash, when it's as late as this," he said, simply, as soon as they were in the corridor.

He had adopted Jack's favorite nickname for her when they were alone once and for all, but it was noticeable he never used it in the hearing of a third person. The thing had no importance, but it is a type of the assumptions she was finding it so difficult to resist.

It was he who, after all, taught her to ride. Jack Barbour, to do him justice, was prepared to redeem an old promise so soon as, to use his own words, "the bone was gone out of the ground," but frost followed the snow and held for days after tobogganing had been voted flat, stale and unprofitable. It wasn't Bryan's way to wait. He had more tan and straw laid down over the path, bordered with evergreens, that led from the stable-yard to poor Lady Lulford's steam laundry, and along which the horses were exercised every day. Fenella's heart fluttered and there was no lack in her cheeks of the roses whose absence Warrener deplored as, dressed in a borrowed habit of Leslie's that pinched her unconfined waist sorely, and with her hair in a pigtail again, she put her foot in her master's looped hand. Maids and stable-boys were peeping round the outbuildings.

He flicked the gray mare with his whip, and for more than an hour, letting the rope he held run out to its full length, pulled the animal backward and forward in a kind of "eight" figure. He threw away his cigar, and his voice rang out crisp and decisive as on a barrack square.

"Straight between his ears! Now look down. Can you see the feet? That's right! Now, then, press down in the stirrup as her fore-leg goes out, then lift. _Hup! hup!_ Oh, fine! Coz! you're a fraud. You've learnt before."

"Have I really done so very well?" she asked, when the lesson was over and they were on their way to the stables. She looked up in his face; her own tingling with pleasure at his appreciation.

"I've never seen 'em trot so well the first time." He looked her over critically. "I suppose it's all balance. When we're back in town, I'll mount you and show you lots of things. We'll have a turn in Richmond Park."

She caught her breath at the last two words, as at a positive physical pang. This must be the future, she supposed. Stray ends of pleasure, caught at and let go, an uneasy sense of something missing that could have woven them all into happiness, and now and then, when the nerve was touched, just such a spasm of pain as made her wince now. Lumsden did not notice her. He was looking at a large bay horse with a bandaged ankle that a stableman was leading across the paved yard.

"How's his hock this morning, Collett?"

Collett touched his cap twice. "Walks a bit lame still, I fancy, Sir Bryan."

"What does Brodribb say about him?"

"Well, ye know what Mr. Brodribb be, Sir Bryan. 'E wunt 'ave the harse slung. 'Get the condition right fust,' 'e says."

"Lift up his cloths."

Lumsden rubbed his hand over the lean-barrelled flank and regarded the animal gloomily.

"Bit hide-bound still. Still cooking his food, Collett?"

"Yes, Sir Bryan."

"Feed him on corn a day or two, and let him have the boiled water warm. I'll come down this afternoon and have another look at him. Well, Flash, what do you think of him? Pretty horse, isn't he?"

"He's rather--_thin_, isn't he, Sir Bryan?"

"Thin?" Bryan looked down banteringly at his little cockney friend in her borrowed riding-habit. "That's a race-horse. That's Saleratus."

* * * * *

On New Year's Eve the Lulford party dined at Chubley, Lady Wills-Pechell's new but much photographed and be-paragraphed castle high up on Spurlock Edge. Despite the roaring log fire, there was quite a baronial rawness in the air of the dining-room, and most of the women came to dinner with lace shawls or spangled Egyptian scarves over their bare shoulders. Toward the end of dinner Lady Wills-Pechell leaned from her chair for a whispered conversation with her right-hand neighbor.

"Miss Barbour," she said. "Oh! I beg your pardon, Leslie; I meant your cousin."

Fenella, who was genuinely absorbed in the technicalities of Snip Hannaford, turned to meet her hostess's unconvincing smile.

"Miss Barbour, a little bird has been very busy lately twittering that you dance. Aren't we to be shown anything before you go back to town?"

"There are too many little birds in S--shire," Bill Arkcoll remarked in a penetrating undertone. "Pity the cold hasn't killed some of them."

Fenella reddened and turned pale by turns.

"Oh, I can't!" she said quickly. She flashed a quick appeal across the table for her cousin's sympathy, but Leslie kept her eyes on her plate. Leslie's manner had been strange lately.

"Oh, but you _must_--you really must! Talents oughtn't to be hid. Ought they, Lord Lulford?"

The bearded widower, who had been engaged in demolishing the private reputation of a Liberal leader, turned from the horrified face of the great lady he had taken in to dinner.

"What is it?"

"We're asking your niece to dance here some night before she goes back. She thinks it wouldn't be quite--quite, you know----"

Lulford tugged at his thick beard. "I don't know why you shouldn't, Fenella. We're almost a family party."

"Don't worry the child," Lady Warrener put in, noticing her distress. She had forgotten much that was American, but not the tradition that kindness and consideration are budding womanhood's due.

"Be a sport, Flash," said Jack Barbour, cheerily but unhelpfully.

"We'll persuade her when we've got her in the drawing-room," said Lady Warrener.

"I think," said the chatelaine, "that there's more chance of her being persuaded here. Won't _you_ try, Sir Bryan?" in her sweetest tone.

"It may be a serious matter," said Lumsden, without looking at any one in particular. "Perhaps Miss Barbour's in training."

"Yes," said the lady of the Syringas. "But who's the trainer? That's what we all want to know."

"I've--I've got no clothes."

A smothered laugh, not only from the men.

"My dear child, we've got boxes and boxes of them upstairs--five generations."

There was a crash on a shirt-front, at which every one jumped but Arkcoll. He would have very much liked to see the box belonging to, say, generation three.

"And I've no music. Oh!" moving impatiently, "it's absurd."

Lady Warrener thought she detected a suppressed ambition in the restless movement.

"If you really don't mind, I've got volumes of old dance music over at Captoft. I was going to ask Jack to motor you and Leslie over to-morrow. Couldn't you rummage then?"

Fenella, hard pressed, looked over to Lumsden, as nearly every one had intended she should look. There was the strangest, quizzical expression on his face. It seemed to say:

"Now then! Who said they weren't afraid? First fence, and we're funking already."

"I'll dance," she said abruptly, amid general applause, headed rather shrilly from the top of the table; "but please don't trouble about dresses, Lady Pechell. I'll write to mother to send me my own."

Lumsden came to her side soon after the men entered the drawing-room with such undisguised intention that Lady Warrener, who had been trying to interest her in the dawning intelligence of the miraculous twins, drew away, puzzled and a little shaken in her advocacy.

"Bravo!" Bryan said encouragingly; but the girl did not respond, and he thought he saw a tear roll down one bare arm. Nelly's tears were still larger than ordinary.

"You looked across the table to me just now," he said. "I hope you saw nothing in my face except a wish you should do the best for your own interests."

"It's settled now," said Fenella coldly, after a gulp which she hoped he didn't notice. "Lady Warrener had the _Chaconne_ from _Iphigénie_ and I can do my _Rosetta_ dance to any six-four time. I'll write for the dresses as soon as we get back to Lulford."

Saying which, she got up, grown stately somehow for all her girlish short frock, and crossed the room to where the joyful mother of twins was sitting silently, an expression of diffused and impartial sweetness on her face. She touched her elbow.

"Lady Warrener, won't you go on and tell me some more about your babies? I was really interested?"

The woman looked up, noted the mute appeal in voice and eyes, and, drawing the girl down next her on the couch, took her hand and held it as she chatted.

"Where had I got to? Oh, yes--Bunter said: 'Mother, there's something tickling my red lane.' 'Your red lane, Bunter?' 'Oh, mother,' said Patch, 'he's such a baby. He means his _froat_.' Now wasn't that _sweet_. Miss Barbour? _Fahncy!_ And only three years old, both of them. I'm so proud, I simply _bore_ all my friends. But you love children, don't you, Miss Barbour? How can any one _not_?"

VII

A DRESS REHEARSAL

Her own interests? Not many days had passed before she had a chance to value them anew. The evening of the dance came and went. She was a little surprised at the size of the gathering it called together. There must have been eighty people in the hall, neighbors mostly, jovial, temperately enthusiastic, in after-dinner mood, and with the additional prospect of a first meet to hounds next day after the long frost. She noticed, however, that Bryan seemed to be introducing a good many strangers. She had danced amid a buzz of whispers, exclamations, and frequently a loud "Bravo!" taken up and echoed wherever a white shirt-front glimmered in the darkened hall. None of them knew how well it was done, but every one could appreciate a graceful child in a white satin Watteau dress with a great pointed frill, black sausage curls falling upon her shoulders under a quaint glazed hat, whose bones seemed to be of whalebone, whose feet never were still, and whose face, through all her changing gestures of appeal, hesitancy, curiosity, disdain, cunning, and weariness never altered from the grave set expression with which she faced the first round of applause. Or an odalisque, in a long striped tunic of the thinnest, softest silk and baggy Turkish trousers that sagged in great wide folds over her bare slippered feet, who swayed in time to sleepy _traumerei_ music almost like a top--rousing every now and then with a braying jar of the little cymbals that were fastened on her hands, to straighten and poise and twirl herself anew--sinking on the floor with the last faint chords, a soft limp heap of silk and dishevelled black hair.

Already, as she sat by her bedroom fire in night-dress and wrapper, her hair plaited on each side of her head, and cuddling her knee, she was paying for her brief hour of triumph. She had the indefinable feeling of having "gone too far" that makes one dread the coming day like the face of an enemy. She thought people had looked strangely at her when she returned dressed, collected, and a little paler, to the hall. It was not because here and there she had caught a false note in the tempest of congratulation that overwhelmed her. It seemed set altogether in a key that was strange and new; she could judge, for, after all, it was not the first time she had danced in public. Even the impulse which had made her at the end of her second dance run forward and kiss Lady Warrener (at the piano) seemed to be misunderstood. The gentle peeress, so kind before, had shrunk from her palpably. And yet it was so natural; for she had never danced to music played like that before. How she longed for her public, her real public, obtuse and leather-lunged if you will, but whom a smile can conquer and whose loyalty, once gained, is gained forever!

Then she had her own private motives for misgiving. Her cousin's manner had been strange for days. Leslie avoided her plainly, but followed her with her eyes. When forced to speak she seemed, not harsh, but confused, shocked, and anxious for escape. Jack had gone back to his regiment in Ireland the day after the dinner, grumbling, and feeling the iron of disinheritance in his soul as only the younger son of a great house can. He would have told her everything. But she must have an explanation from Leslie to-morrow. On no other prospect could she face the night.

The fire was burning low. The little Sheraton clock on the mantelpiece shrilled _two_. She threw off her slippers and wrapper, opened the window, and, drawing a screen across the sinking fire, crept between the smooth linen sheets. But, once in bed, her excitement returned on her. Three o'clock--four o'clock--struck, and she was awake, the pulse of the music still in her relaxed body, listening to the fire shifting in the grate, watching the red dusk turn slowly to black.

Suddenly she heard the handle of the door move, very gently and very steadily. The bed-curtains hid it from view; but she remembered that she had forgotten to lock it, and when it closed again as gently she knew that some one was in the room. But there was something else she had not forgotten. She felt under her pillow and closed her hand upon it. The very day she saw him last her lover had given her a little steel repeating pistol. She remembered his words: "I've never had occasion to use it, Nelly, but I should be giving you a false impression of the world, as I know it, if I didn't tell you there's ten times as much chance you'll have to defend your honor some day as there is I'll ever have to defend my property."

She lay still, her heart beating to suffocation, but she did not quite close her eyes, and the next moment a fear that was never to be named went out of her heart. It was only her cousin Leslie. She recognized her plainly--long and emaciated, with tawny, lifeless hair about her shoulders. She was carrying a night-light in a cone-shaped glass.

Now that fear was gone she had time to be puzzled. Up to a week ago a visit from her cousin at the hour of "combing and confidences" had been a regular affair, but one of the changes noticeable in her attitude had been the abandonment of the nightly habit. It was a great opportunity for the clear understanding on which she meant to insist, but it was very late, she was tired, and, as often happens, felt a sudden disinclination to put her resolution to the test. She decided to simulate sleep. She breathed a little heavier and closed her eyes.

Leslie set down her lamp--she heard it distinctly on the little marble-topped table beside the bed--and bent over her. She felt her cousin's breath on her cheek. The thin, weak hand began to stroke her forehead and hair. Nelly was proof against a good many things, but not against tickling. She laughed and opened her eyes.

Next moment, with a leap as lithe as a panther's, she had jumped out of bed and, gripping her cousin's wrists, bore her backward on to the floor. She was strong as well as active, and upon the thick carpet the struggle was as brief as it was noiseless. Something fell from the older woman's hand. She tossed it back on the bed and, switching on the electric current, flooded the room with light. Leslie picked herself up, crawled to the wall and crouched there, her knees drawn up to her chin, looking at her cousin through her tawny mane, with eyes wide and distraught in her white, quivering face.

Fenella gave one look at the little stiletto on the bed, and covered her face with her hands in a reaction of terror.

"Oh, Leslie! Wicked--wicked woman! What had I done to you? Oh, what a horror! And under your own roof! Oh, you must be mad!"

"Go on!" said Leslie, thickly. "Ring the bell--wake the house! Have me put in a mad-house. Father wouldn't care, nor any one else. He's cursed me and called me a wet blanket heaps of times before people. I'm in every one's way now mother's gone."

Fenella still looked at her incredulously. She was expecting every moment to wake from her nightmare. A thing like this couldn't be real--couldn't be life! Suddenly the wretched woman flung herself at her feet, weeping and kissing them.

"Oh! my darling, don't look at me like that, as though I were some poisonous reptile. Oh, my God! what have I done? Do you think I really meant to harm you? Do you think I'm jealous? But if I am, it's only for your own good name. It's their fault. Of course you're nothing to them; they didn't know you when you were a little baby girl. I only wanted to be sure. And then something said to me that if--that if--Why do you shrink that way? Do you loathe to have me touch you?"

Fenella bent forward and laid her hand across the hysterical woman's mouth.

"Leslie, be quiet this instant, or I won't answer for what I'll do. And throw this over you or you'll get a chill. Now, are you quieter? I'm not going to make a fuss, or even tell a living soul what's happened to-night. But it's on a condition."

"I know what you mean."

"Yes. You must tell me what's being said about me?"

"They say that he--that you----"

"Yes. Go on!"

"That you were Bryan Lumsden's mistress in France, and that he's spending money on bringing you out and paying for your dresses and lessons, and that he----" She hesitated.

"What? Is there more?"

"Yes. That--oh! that he wasn't the first. That when he--found you, you were posing as a model to some French artist."

"What a picturesque past I've got! And have you believed it all?"

Leslie made a despondent and penitent gesture.

"Not now I've seen you. Not now I've told you to your face. But you can't live in a house like Lulford all your life and not hear--things. Well, are you going to loathe me forever?"

Fenella seemed thoughtful. "I don't loathe you," she said, "not more than any one else. Go back to bed now. I'm tired after last night."

"You won't refer to this to-morrow, will you? I shall be hunting all day, but you won't throw it in my face when we meet at night."

"No. Here, take this thing back to where you got it. No, I'm not afraid to let you have it. Yes, I'll kiss you good-night. Oh, Leslie, _go_!" She stamped her bare foot desperately.

As soon as her cousin was out of the room she locked the door and began to pack her trunks, turning keys and opening drawers as stealthily as a thief in the night. Her teeth chattered and her heart was filled with the wild panic instinct of flight. She only cried once, as she folded the clothes in which she had danced. "They said--his money!" How well she remembered the day they had been made, the whirring and bumping of the machine, her mother's perplexed face over the paper patterns, the very smell of Paul's pipe. "Theatricals," she had told him, and he had not asked a single question. The poor wounded heart ached for home. When her trunks were packed she lay down and watched for the dawn.

The house was astir early. There was shouting from room to room, running hither and thither of ladies' maids and gentlemen's gentlemen, brushing of habits and knocking out of wooden boot-trees. She breakfasted in her room, and sent down word that she was getting up late--that she was over-tired. She had to endure cheerful proposals to come in and pull her out, cries of "Tally-ho!" and "Gone to earth!"--even try to answer them in kind. When they had all ridden away, she got up and dressed herself to her hat and coat and furs, her hands numb and clumsy from haste and agitation. There was a Bradshaw in the library, through whose mazes she ran with a finger in which she could feel the very beat of her disordered pulse, but she could make little or nothing of it. The house seemed to be empty of men-servants, but in the stable yard she ran across one of the helpers. He eyed her strangely and rasped a stubbly chin with a broken finger nail at her question.

"Lunnon train? Noa, miss, baint no Lunnon train through Lulford 'fore two-twenty, an' that doant stop fur to take up nor fur to set down, 'cept ye tellygraff down the line. There's a slow to Wolv'r'ampton at three-thritty, but ye'll have to wait forty minutes f'r yewr connexshuns. Two trunks, ye say, miss? Now, let me think----"

Fenella slid ten shillings in silver into a hand that seemed to be in the way.

"Thank'ee kindly, miss. 'Tis a bad marnen, miss, ye see: bein' a huntin' marnen all oor men be haff th' place. Come twelve o'clock, I'm taken 'nother harse to Wrogwarden Wood m'self, but if ye don't mind the bit of a walk to stash'n, I can harness Marvine to th' bailiff's cart, and tak' yewr trunks to stashun now in a casulty way like, and bid 'em wait till ye come. Thank'ee, miss."

After a wretched pretence of eating a cold lunch, served in the solitude of the morning-room by maid-servants who whispered together outside and even peeped through the crack of the door, Fenella took her muff and dressing-case and set off to walk to the station. Snow lay still in recesses and hollows of the trees beneath the drive, and there were dirty lumps and patches on the slope of the hill where the slide had been made. She breathed freer when a corner of the drive hid the gray walls and turrets of the old priory, and more freely still when she had passed the round white lodge with its one smoking chimney and was out on the public road. Often, upon her summer holidays, passing such a lodge with its escutcheoned pillars and long dove-haunted avenue curving away into a dim and baffling perspective, she had wondered what sort of life was led beyond its swinging gates. Her lip curled at the thought that now she knew.

The road she was walking along was sheltered and lonely, but sunken between high banks. The thawing uplands on either side had drained into it, and she was forced to pick her way very carefully, her heavy skirts held up with one hand and the baize-covered dressing-case, which seemed to grow heavier and which she hated more each moment (it had been one of mummy's ridiculous ideas), knocking against her knees on the other side. She had only gone some few hundred yards when, beyond a turn in the narrow road, she heard the splash of a hard-ridden horse, and clambered up the clayey bank to be out of its way. At sight of her the rider pulled up so hard as almost to bring his steed upon its haunches. She had not time to pull her veil down.

"You of all the world!" exclaimed Lumsden. "What's up, Flash? Playing lady bountiful on the sly?"

"I'm going home."

Bryan whistled softly. He was wearing a black coat with wide skirts, a low-crowned silk hat and the palest of pale blue stocks. His white breeches and boots were covered with mud and his horse's miry flanks heaved like a bellows.

"Going home?" he repeated, in open-mouthed surprise. "What on earth has happened?"

"Please let me go on! I've had bad news from home this morning, that's all."

"That's a fib, Flash. You've been awake again all night. The second time. Oh, fie!"

No remark from Fenella.

"Any one been rude to you?"

The girl shook her head.

"You won't tell me, eh?"

"Sir Bryan, I can't. I've promised----Oh, you've _no right_!"

Lumsden swung himself out of the saddle.

"At any rate, you're not going to walk any further in those thin shoes and sit four hours in a train with wet feet. Come! up you get. The lane gets worse the farther you go."

With sudden docility she put her dressing-case down on the wet grass.

"That's right! Put your foot here. Steady--Greaser! Don't be afraid. He's quite blown; going's far too heavy to-day. Now take the bag in your lap. What's in it, Flash? Diamonds?"

He looked at her quizzically as he laid the reins over his shoulder.

"For two two's I'd come up with you to London. Oh, don't look so frightened. It's only an impulse. I've been fighting impulses every day for the last fortnight. I don't want to worry you," he went on, as the horse began to pick his way downhill with stiff, tired legs; "but you'll have to give some reason for all this. Did you leave any message behind?"

She shook her head.

"Then we'll have to fake a telegram. You simply can't leave like this, and that's all there is about it. Hullo! who's this?"

A small boy in corduroys and with a red badge on his arm was drifting up the lane toward them, examining the hedge-rows first on one side, then on another, in search of diversion. At Lumsden's call he started and adopted a more official gait.

"Come here, boy! Can you take a telegram?"

"Ahve got one," said the leaden-footed herald unfastening his satchel. "Miss Fen--Fen----"

Bryan snatched it from his hand.

"Open it, please," said Fenella in the ghost of a voice.

"By George!" said the baronet, looking up, "this is Providence. This lets us all out."

"Read it, please."

"_Lady Anne very ill. Asks for you. Think you had better come. Wire._"

"I don't think that's good news at all."

"Well, it suits us, doesn't it?" with a quick look at the troubled, indignant face. "You mustn't feel things too much, you know. Fancy Anne Caslon dying in her bed at last! 'Tattering Annie' they used to call her in the West Meath. Fate! fate! there's nothing else. Here, boy," he said, putting his hand in his breeches pocket, "take this, and cut away to the station and tell 'em to stop the two-twenty. Shocked at me, ain't you?" he said, as the boy trotted off after a backward gape at the strange couple.

"I think it's horrid to talk about fate as if it was meant to do our little odd lying jobs for us. I'm very much upset at the news."

"No, but isn't it true--I mean my meeting you this way? Confess, now. You were on your way back to town wounded and indignant, with a firm resolve never to see any one you'd met at Lulford again, weren't you?"

"Yes, I think so."

"But you're not now?"

"I don't know. I must have time to think."

He seemed quite satisfied with the answer, being used possibly to oblique affirmations from women.

A culvert and signal-box appeared suddenly above the hedge to their right.

"You'd better get down here. There's a foot-path at the side of the main road." He flushed deeply as he held her in his arms. Another checked impulse, no doubt.

In the waiting-room they sat, one on each side of a sullen fire in a black stove. He smoked a cigar, and steam rose from the drenched skirts of his coat.

"I'm going to Biarritz almost immediately," he said; "but Dollfus knows what to do. Call on him as soon as you possibly can. I don't see myself there's much more training wanted, but you must be fitted in somewhere, and that takes time."

He might have added that it takes money too--some one's money--but it was not the moment to enlarge on this. Fenella listened to his advice respectfully and gave him her address when he asked for it. She liked him no better, but, at the point they had reached, she felt it necessary, for her own satisfaction, that she should take the least complicated view of his helpfulness that was possible. To take a great deal and to give a little is a prerogative that the nicest of women think it no shame to use. She bought her own ticket, but let him order foot-warmers and even literature--_The Tattler_, _Photo Bits_, and a novel by Charles Garvice, to be brought her at Wolverhampton. He was back at her side as the train, chafing fussily at the check to its course, began to move out of the little country station.

"Don't worry over whatever's happened you down there," he said at the last, jerking back his head at the hospitable mansion she had just left. "They're a dull crowd. We'll meet a very different lot later on. Good-bye! Keep fit and don't grizzle. I'll wire your mother that you're on your way."

He stood gazing after the tail of the train as the gray distance sucked it in to a point.

"You were a pretty wench, Bill," he heard a voice say behind him in the porters' room. The homely comment jarred him, but it also readjusted a view that had been inclining dangerously toward the romantic. Is there, I often wonder, some inbred memory of old disaster that makes Englishmen afraid of romance? Bryan, as he plodded homeward on his stiff hunter, almost laughed to remember that he had suddenly sickened of the chase, sickened of everything, and ridden back eight muddy miles on a beaten horse to see this girl, and--who knows?--perhaps to ask her to be his wife--if she had insisted upon it.

* * * * *

Shawled and pillowed at Wolverhampton by the guard's care, and quite tired out, Fenella slept, as warm as a dormouse under the snow, nearly all the way to Euston. A new ring from the clanging permanent way, more metallic, more menacing, as the train, sighting its goal afar off, made up its schedule time, roused her from a dream--ah! how deadly sweet of sun-steeped dunes, of outspread skies and seas, her poor little "land of lost content." The carriage pitched and rocked, lights twinkled together behind the bare trees, suburban pavements, and broadways blazing in blue-white light flashed past the windows. She put out her head against the cold, gritty rush of wind, and looked toward a red glare in the sky. Somewhere in that man-made wilderness of stone and brick, from whose smouldering discontents reddened smoke seemed to be ascending to heaven, he lived and moved and had his being who but now, in the lilied meadows of her dream, had held her against his breast and kissed away the desolate ache at her heart. Back to him, and he could not hinder--straight, straight as a homing-bird she was flying. With every moment that passed the distance that sundered them was being annihilated. Intense unreasoning joys! triumph almost lyrical of spirit over matter! God's crowning mercy in affliction!--manna from Heaven, and portion of the outcast!

VIII

LADY ANNE'S DEPOSITION

We wonder if it has ever happened to any of our readers--being a common human experience, it probably has--on the very morrow of some change which they had assayed, light-heartedly, experimentally, and with all provision made for honorable retreat in case of failure, to find the retreat, as it were, cut off, the old life put out of their reach once and for all, and success in the new becomes the condition not of a pleasanter manner of existence, but of very existence itself.

We know that Fenella's independence of the career she had chosen was never as complete as appearances seemed to warrant. Even if it had been so, hers was not the temperament to discover comfort in any such ignoble security. She had the bright confidence of her youth. Eager for the contest, she was not afraid of any of the rules. And if the comfortable thought that, after all, the worst that could happen her would be a return to domestic conditions with her one ambition quenched, visited her at all in despondent moods, it was rather owing to Madame de Rudder's insistence upon the fact, as the great strategic advantage in a campaign which about this time that lady began to conduct with Mr. Joseph Dollfus--a campaign carried on so pertinaciously and with such utter disregard for the Dominion manager's feelings, that he often wondered whether any inkling of the secret clause, the Lumsden clause, of the treaty could have reached her. If it hadn't, her bluff was a masterpiece.

"I'm afraid Joe Dollfus was rather rude to you to-day, dear," Fenella said to her old mistress one afternoon over the teacups. Madame's irruption into the affair upon the strength of an old "understanding" which her pupil could neither remember nor would deny, had, in fact, at last proved too much for Mr. Dollfus's manners.

"Pooh!" said madame, airily. "I'm not hurt. I don't care what the little bounder says. It's rather a good sign, in fact, that he _should_ lose his temper. That type always does when they see you've the whip hand."

"How have we the whip hand?" Fenella never questioned the implied association of interest.

"My dear, because we're not dependent on Joe's say-so for a living. We're not a bankrupt solicitor's daughter with a mother and young sisters to support. We're not poor."

This was about the time that doubts were beginning to assail Fenella.

"Oh, but I am _really_," she persisted, rather ruefully.

"Well, you're not to all appearance, and it's appearances that count. Look at where you live! look at your relations! Oh, I've rubbed that all in; trust me."

Fenella sighed. A home in which strangers gave orders; relations under whose roof she would never be tempted again--for that chapter in her life was closed definitely. She had answered one incoherent, penitent letter, and sent back two more unopened.

"My dear Nellikins," said the kind-hearted dame, "have some more tea and don't look so worried. I know we're rather a sham, but try to _feel_ the part. Be a winner!" She patted the slim hand held out for the teacup. "You do _look_ one so, my dear. Once you admit," she went on, in a voice slightly veiled by buttered toast, "once you admit, even to yourself, that you're not doing a thing for fun and because you like it, the game's up. Because it's this sort of people who are coming to the front everywhere now--in books, and pictures, and music, and the stage--and everything."

"I've always heard that dabblers never did anything!"

"My dear, who said 'dabblers'? And besides"--impatiently--"a lot of that musty, fusty old wisdom wants tearing up and writing over again. How can any one who has to worry do the work that _pays_. Clever! Oh, yes, they may be very clever, but all they succeed in doing with their cleverness is in making the people who matter--the rich, important people--uncomfortable. And they _will--not--be--made--uncomfortable_, my dear. Besides, they never last long. Worry kills them off like the cold kills the flies."

Fenella did not pursue the subject. She felt all the vulgarity of her old mistress, but she felt also an unaccountable sense of protection in her company. Brazen, alert, competent, grasping, utterly disillusioned, mature; with good looks that seem to have settled down for fifteen years' hard service; smartly dressed, opaque of eye, unrestrained of laugh and anecdote with condescending patrons; living in discreet little houses, in discreet little streets off fashionable thoroughfares, with open-work lace blinds at their windows--Berthe, Clarice, Suzanne, Estelle, as the case may be--latterly even, Elizabeth and Kate: polishing nails, crimping hair, ironing out wrinkles, reducing flesh, kneading and anointing the pampered body; teaching dancing, selling fans and lace; "advising" decoration, dabbling in magic, undertaking "confidential" commissions; with a range of service that touches impropriety at one extreme and heroism at the other, and often with a past of their own behind them in which the finer feelings have perished, but not a good heart, the De Rudders of the world play their part in the parasitical life of the rich bravely enough--play it often, too, with a secret hatred and contempt for the class whose follies they fatten on that would be a revelation to the mere reformer.

* * * * *

The trouble began with an interview that poor Lady Anne was "accorded" early in November. The place, a sober "Adams" parlor, distempered in green, furnished in the old oak of commerce, and hung with Romney engravings in black carved wood frames. Between the two gaunt windows a writing-desk, littered with memorandum blocks, supports a large silver inkstand bearing the legend: "To JAS. PEMMER-LLOYD, Esq., M. R. C. S., from a grateful patient." To right, a low couch covered with a white linen cloth and with some mysterious mechanism or other at its head. At its foot, a glass table on rubber wheels, its two tiers loaded with multiform electro-plated apparatus. Carpet obtrusively thick.

"But are you quite sure?" she was saying.

Her companion, a dark, keen-faced man of few words, seems to consider awhile. Conversation in Harley and Weymouth Streets is expensive: even so, it was felt that Pemmer-Lloyd gave short weight.

"Personally," he answered, "I have no doubt whatever. Of course, if you wish, I can arrange a consultation or meet your own doctor. It was quite irregular you're not bringing him."

"Never ride again! Never--ride--again!" Poor Lady Anne kept repeating the dreadful sentence over and over to herself.

"Doctor!" she said aloud. "I have no doctor. Never been ill in my life. And what's the use of paying more money to a lot of men who'll only dot your i's and cross your t's for you? You're the top of the tree, ain't you?"

Pemmer-Lloyd, who was writing at his desk, did not deny the soft impeachment.

"I've written two names," he said, "on the back of your prescription. The apparatus can be obtained at either. The massage should be done in the evening--at your own house, if possible. You will find it a little exhausting at first. Thank you."

Lady Anne laid down two golden coins and a florin near the grateful patient's inkstand, stuffed the prescription into the pocket of her tweed coat, and stumped out to her cab.

"Druce," she said, when the door was opened for her at Suffolk Square, "I shall want you and Twyford to come up and help me pack after lunch. I am going to Market Harborough to-morrow."

She returned unexpectedly after the Christmas holidays, walking a thought more lamely than before, and with a new absorbed gentleness in her manner. She kept her room for three days, writing busily. Many callers, some of them strangers to the servants who admitted them, drove up in cabs and carriages. For the first time since she had taken the rooms her brother, Lord Windybank, spent two nights in the house. Fenella's empty bed was made up for him. On the evening of the second day, after dinner, the two maid-servants were called up to Lady Anne's sitting-room. The earl, a little horsey-legged man, with the face, hair, chin, and voice of his sister, was standing on the hearth-rug. His eyes were inflamed, and he blew his nose violently from time to time on an Indian silk handkerchief, an assortment of which he seemed to keep in the various pockets of his frieze suit. Old Mr. Attneave, the solicitor, stood by the writing-desk, wrapped in the grave professional manner that covers all human contingencies. The girls curtsied, signed a document, laboriously, in a space indicated by the lawyer's chalky finger, curtsied again, and turned to leave the room. Lady Anne called them back, handed each of them a couple of bank-notes from a little pile beneath an enamelled paper-weight, and kissed the dazed hand-maidens on the cheek.

"Be good women," she said, gravely. "Do your duty by your mistress. If I have given cause of offence to either of you, or made your work hard and ungrateful, by word or deed, remember I asked your pardon for it. And now bid your mistress come and see me as soon as is convenient."

Mrs. Barbour entered the room five minutes later with a white, scared face.

"Mrs. Barbour, this is Lord Windybank, my brother. Mr. Attneave I think you have met before. Stop snivelling, Windy;--please do. Won't you sit down? I'm going away to-morrow, Mrs. Barbour, for a short stay in another neighborhood, and whether I shall come back is rather doubtful. No, it isn't nonsense, Windy; I caught the red-headed one's eye when he didn't know I was looking. The other was too old to let anything out. Mrs. Barbour, I want to see your little girl before I go away."

"I'll telegraph for her at once, m'lady."

Lady Anne pursed her lip. "Telegraph for her in the morning," she said. "It's late, and I don't want the child to come up at night. Besides, it will spoil her rest."

"Are you ill, m'lady?" Mrs. Barbour asked, much mystified. There seemed to be so little change in the long white fretful face.

"Oh, dear, yes; quite seriously, ceremoniously ill, I assure you. Please don't look at me that way. You can't see anything. I don't believe any of them can, though they pretend to. And now about Fenella. Mr. Attneave, will you please explain?"

As the lawyer, in dry calculated sentences, explained the details and conditions of the little legacy, Mrs. Barbour broke down and wept after the fashion of her class, with great whoops, and holding her housekeeping apron to her eyes. All her little world seemed to be crumbling. She was not, by nature, an impressionable woman, but had it been her lot, as it is the lot of so many of her kind, to hear, month by month, new footsteps echo on her stairs; to see, month by month, strange faces people her rooms, the dignity of proprietorship, the sense of being mistress of a home, which had done so much to soften and sweeten her, must have missed her altogether, and the wear and tear upon her perceptions vulgarized her heart far quicker than feet or hands shabbied her house. During fifteen years, as far as Lady Anne was concerned, without the slightest temptation to anything that could be construed as a "liberty," or a single soul-searching as regards her own equivocal social status, the service of love had, little by little, been substituting itself for the service of gain. Custom and habit are strong with all who have attained middle life, but with women, after a certain age is reached, they are tyrants. Nor was it in its monetary aspect chiefly, though that might well have given her pause, that the sense of bereavement reached her. Simple words are most convincing. She was wondering how, "if anything should happen," poor Lady Anne in the nursing home, to which she was evidently bound, she could ever find the heart to wait upon strangers in her rooms.

"----five hundred pounds, until the age of twenty-one, unless upon an occasion of urgent necessity, the nature of which shall be determined by said trustees, appointed on the one part by the said Honorable Mrs. Nigel Kedo Barbour----"

"Boo-hoo!" wept the honorable lady.

The invalid patted her upon the shoulder. "My dear, good friend, do control yourself!"

"Oh, I can't, I can't! Oh! I never shall stop in this house. It won't be the same to me."

The broken phrases struggled through her tears like bubbles through water. The lawyer had to stop.

"I suppose," Lady Anne said, after the faithful Druce had led her weeping mistress away, "that class doesn't really know what their ideas are until they've put them into words. They say a lot over, and then pick out the ones they want to keep. Oh, I shall be glad when it's over one way or another, Windy. I think I know now how poor Uncle Eustace must have felt the day before Major Hartnett shot him. There's not much difference between a duel and an operation."

* * * * *

Thus it was to a house cold and dark with the shadow of change and worse that Fenella came home. Mercifully she was spared questioning on her own pale cheeks and dull eyes. Mrs. Barbour was in no mood to be entertained with a description of her doings among the fine folk. Lady Anne was dozing when she arrived, and might not be disturbed. The poor lady was already invested with something of her perilous state. A nurse in a blue linen dress and goffered cap, whose lightest word was law, moved softly up and down stairs in felt ward slippers, carrying various mysterious burdens. She called Fenella at about midnight. The girl had taken off her outer garments and put on a fleecy dressing-gown.

"You must be very quiet," Nurse Adelaide said, "and not stay more than half an hour. I want her to settle for the night while she is out of pain."

Inside a fire burnt cheerily, and a kettle sung its happy and heartless song. A tilted lamp plunged half the room into shadow and the air was sickly with the smell of some anodyne.

"Is that Nelly?" said a voice from the shadow.

The girl bent over the bed and put her lips to the high bony forehead.

"You mustn't cry so, child. You always had such fat tears, Nelly. There's one running in my eye now. Are you dressed?"

"Only ha-half."

"Get under the quilt, then. Be careful, child. I'm 'this side up; fragile; with care.'"

"Dear Lady Anne, is it true what they say? Are you very ill?"

"My dear, I have about one chance in a thousand of ever walking the streets again. It's all my own fault. I had an awful spill, child; none of them know how bad it was. But what could I do? There was the gate with some patent latch or other and I didn't dare get down. I'd never have got up again. Pepper knew it was no use. He tried to roll his dear old eyes back to tell me, bless his heart. And the off-hoof was just a little lazy. Ugh! I'm very wicked, I suppose. Often, after lying awake all night, I've had to bite my lip not to scream when some clumsy lout put me up wrong. Once I was up, I didn't mind. But it was worth it. Oh, Lord! it was worth it. One only has one life. I'd do it again. I'd have been a poor creature, Nelly, without horses and dogs. They've always understood me better than people. If there's a God for them, He's good enough for me, and if there isn't I don't want one either. Windy was shocked because I wanted to call a vet in consultation.... What did I want to tell you, child? Oh! I've been hearing tales about you in the last week. Of course they're all lies. What's become of your pirate friend?--don't pretend you don't know who I mean--Paul Ingram. Wasn't that the creature's name. All over, is it? So much the better. He was no good, Nelly. I saw that the night we talked together. A man can't play beggar-my-neighbor with the world and win, and that's what he wanted. Bryan's better, but I'm afraid he's spoilt another way. But don't let a lot of old-woman talk frighten you away from him. There's a lot of nonsense talked about girls' 'characters.' Every poor girl has to take risks, and every poor girl's mother knows it. There's only two rules. Never do what would lose you your own self-respect, and never love a poor man for his handsome face. You won't, will you, child? You know, when a person's dying they're allowed to make a deposition; so here's mine: There's nothing matters on this earth but just--money. You think every one knows that? Oh! they don't. It wouldn't do if they