CHAPTER IV

Within doors a bedroom, littered and dismantled, showed a pile of luggage stacked in the middle of the floor. Without was a grey cloudy sky, such as we sometimes have in June, and a nipping east wind that blew roughly; a wind almost visible to the man moodily gnawing his nails at the window. He found no comfort within or without, in the past or the future. Behind him he had a retrospect of humiliation, of vain hopes and ambitions; before him no prospect but that dreary one of starting afresh in a new place among new people, unfriended, save by three thousand and odd pounds. It had come to this.

"D----n him!" he whispered between his clenched teeth. It was no formal expletive. He meant it--every letter of it.

By and by he turned from the window, and his eyes fell on a small article lying on the dressing-table. It was almost the only thing, save a stout walking-stick, which he had not packed up. It was a pistol. He had hit on it the day before in a dark nook behind the medicine bottles in the surgery; and finding it in good condition, with one barrel of the two undischarged, he had had no difficulty in conjecturing whose it was and how it came there. No doubt it was Walton's, the pistol with which he had shot himself--as indeed it was. Nickson had brought it to the doctor, and the latter with a natural distaste had thrust it into the first out-of-the-way place which lay ready to his hand.

This piece of evidence Woolley presently put in his pocket, and taking his stick left the room; leaving it, as he knew, for good, and not without a last bitter glance round the place where he had slept, and schemed, and hoped for two years. He went down the stairs, and through the house to the back door, seeing no one except Daniel, who was rubbing down the mare in the yard. To the surgeon's fancy the house, as he passed through it, seemed abnormally still; as if in the hush and silence which fall upon a house in the afternoon it awaited something--as if it knew that something strange was in the air, and all the stones were saying "Hist!"

Shaking off this feeling, the surgeon took a back path, which, passing through the shrubbery, came into the main drive near the white gate. From that point the track mounted between the bracken-covered flanks of the ravine until it emerged on the crown of the moor. In one place both path and glen turned at a sharp angle, and Woolley at this corner happened to lift his eyes. He stopped short with an exclamation. Before him, strolling slowly along in the same direction as himself, with his hands behind him and his eyes on the path, was the tall gentleman--Walton.

"Ah!" Woolley whispered to himself, hating the other the more for falling in his way now, "the devil take you for a mooning lunatic! I would like to give you in charge here, and this minute, and swear you were going to try it again!"

He laughed grimly at this, his first thought; a natural thought enough, since his intention at starting had been to swear an information against Walton, and get him locked up if possible; at any rate, to cause him as much vexation as he could. But that first natural thought led to another which drove the blood from his cheek and kindled an unholy fire in his eyes. That revenge was a poor one. But was there not another within his grasp? What if Walton were found lying on the path shot and dead, his own pistol beside him?

Ah! what then? What would people say? Would they not say--would not Nickson be ready to swear that the madman had done it again, and with more thoroughness? Woolley's hand closed convulsively on the butt of the weapon in his pocket. One barrel of it was still loaded. No one had seen him take it. No one knew that he knew of its existence. Would not even the doctor conclude that Walton had repossessed himself of it, and in some temporary return of his moody aberration had used it--this time with fatal effect?

The perspiration stood on the tempted man's brow. Though the wind was blowing keenly, and a wrack of white clouds was sweeping over his head, the glen seemed to grow close and confined, roofed in by a leaden sky. "It is a devil's thought!" he muttered, his eyes on the figure before him, "a devil's thought!" At that moment there could be no question with him of the existence of a devil. He felt him at his elbow tempting him, promising revenge and impunity.

"No! Not that!" He rather gasped the words than said them, yet gasped them aloud, the more thoroughly to convince himself that he did reject the idea. "Not that!"

No, not that. Yet he began to walk on at a pace which must bring him up with the other. His brain too dwelt on the ease and safety with which he might carry out the scheme. He remembered that before he turned the corner he had looked back and seen no one. Therefore for some minutes he was secure from interruption from behind. All round the ravine he could command the sky-line. There was one no visible. He and Walton were alone. And he was overtaking Walton.

The latter heard him walking behind him, and turned and stopped. He showed no surprise on discovering who his follower was, but spoke as if he had eyes in his back, and had watched him drawing gradually nearer. "I have been waiting for you, Woolley," he said. "I thought I should meet you."

"Did you?" Woolley said softly, eying him in a curious fashion, and himself very pale.

"Yes, I wanted to say this to you." There the tall gentleman paused and looked down, prodding the turf with his stick. He seemed to find a difficulty in going on. "It is this," he continued at last. "I have done you a mischief here, acting honestly, and doing only what seemed to me to be right. But I have harmed you--that is the fact--and I am anxious to know that you will not leave here a hardened man--a worse man than I found you."

"Thank you," the other said. His lips were dry, and he moistened them with his tongue. But he did not take his eyes from Walton's face.

"If you will let me know," the tall gentleman continued haltingly--he was still intent upon the ground--"what your plans are, I will see if I can further them. Until lately I thought you had spoiled my life, and I bore you malice for it. I would have done you what harm I could. Now----"

"Yes?"

"I think--I trust it may not be so. I have dwelt too much on that old affair. I hope to begin a new life now."

"With her?"

The tall gentleman looked up, as if the other had struck him. There was menace in the tone, and menace more dreadful in the face and gleaming eyes which he found confronting him. "You fool!" Woolley hissed--passion in the calmness of his voice--and he took a step nearer to the other. "You fool, to come and tell me this!--to come and taunt me! _You_ help me! _You_ pardon me! _You_ will not leave me worse than you found me! Ay, but you will!" His voice rose. A wicked smile nickered on his lips. His eyes still dwelling on the other's face, he drew the pistol slowly from his pocket and levelled it at Walton's head. "You will, for I--am going--to kill you."

Walton heard the click of the hammer as it rose. For a second, during which his tongue refused obedience, he tasted of the bitterness of the cup which he had held to his own lips. It flashed across him, as his heart gave a bound and stood still, that this was his punishment. Then he recovered himself.

"Not before that child!" he said coolly. He forced his eyes to quit the dark muzzle which threatened him and to glance aside.

There was no one there, but Woolley turned to look, and in an instant Walton sprang upon him, and, knocking up the pistol with his stick, closed with him. The one loaded barrel exploded in the air, and the men went writhing and stumbling to and fro, Woolley striking savagely at the other's face with the muzzle of the pistol. The taller man contented himself with parrying these attacks, while he clutched Woolley's left wrist with his disengaged hand.

Presently they were down in a heap together. Then they rose and drew apart, breathless and dishevelled, but there remained unnoticed on the ground between them a tiny white object, a small packet about the size of a letter. It was very light, for in the twinkling of an eye the wind turned it over and over, and carried it three or four paces away.

"You villain!" Walton gasped, trembling with excitement. His nerves were shaken as much by the narrowness of his escape as by the struggle. "You would have murdered me!"

"I would!" the other said, with vengeful emphasis, and the two men stood a moment glaring at one another. Meanwhile the wind, toying with the white packet, rolled it slowly along the path; then, getting under it at a place where a break in the ridge produced an eddy, it began to hoist it merrily up the slope. At this point Walton's eye, straying for a second from his opponent, alighted on it.

Just then Woolley spoke. "You have had a lucky escape!" he said, with a reckless gesture, half menace, half farewell. "Good-bye! Don't come across my path again, or you will fail to come off so easily. And don't--don't, you fool!" he added, returning in a fresh fit of anger when he had already turned his back, "pat a man on the head when you have got him down, or he will----"

He stopped short, his hand at his breast pocket. For a moment, while his face underwent a marvellous change, he searched frantically in the pocket, in other pockets. "My notes!" he panted. "They were here! Where are they?" Then a dreadful expression of rage and suspicion distorted his features, and he advanced on Walton, his hands outstretched. "What have you done with them?" he cried, scarcely able to articulate. "Where are they?"

"There!" the other answered sternly. He pointed to a little space of clear turf halfway up the slope. On this the white packet could be seen fluttering gently over and over. "There! But if you are not pretty quick, you villain, you will pay a heavy price for this business!"

With an oath Woolley turned and started up the hill, the tall man watching his exertions with grim satisfaction. The pursuer speedily overtook the notes, but to gain possession of them was a different matter. Three times he stooped to clutch them, and three times a mischievous gust swept them away. Then he tripped and fell, and his hat tumbled off, and his oaths flew freely on the breeze.

Altogether it was not a dignified retreat, but it was a very characteristic one. The last time Walton got a glimpse of him, he was on the crown of the hill. He was still running, bent double with his face to the ground, and his hand outstretched. Walton never saw him again.

The latter, getting back to the house unnoticed, said nothing for the time of what had happened. But at night before he went to bed he told the doctor. "He ought to go to prison!" the latter said sternly. He was shocked beyond measure.

"So ought I," said Walton, "if it is to come to prisons."

"Pish!"

A little word, but it cheered the tall gentleman, who, notwithstanding his escape, stood in need of cheering. He had not seen Pleasance since she had escaped from the room after hearing his explanation. She might have taken his story in many different ways, and he was anxious to know in which way she had taken it. But all day she had not shown herself. Even at dinner the doctor apologised for her absence. "She is not very well," he said. "She was a little upset this morning." And of course the tall gentleman accepted the excuse with a heavy heart, and presaged the worst.

But dressing next morning he caught sight of Pleasance on the lawn. She was walking with her father--talking to him earnestly, as Walton could see. Apparently she was urging him to some course of action, and the doctor, with his hands under his coattails, was assenting with a poor grace.

When Walton descended, however, they were already seated at breakfast, and nothing was said during the meal either of this prelude or of what was in their minds. But presently, when the doctor rose, he had something to say. It was something which it went against the grain to say; for he walked to the door--they were breakfasting in the hall, and it stood open--and looked out as if he had more mind to fly than speak. But he returned suddenly, and sat down with a bump.

"Mr. Walton," he said, his florid face more florid than usual, "I think there is something I ought to tell you. I do not think that I can repay you the money you have advanced. And the place is not worth it. What am I to do?"

"Do?" the other said, looking up. "Take another cup of tea, as I am doing, and think no more about it."

"That is impossible," Pleasance cried impulsively. She turned red the next instant, under the tall gentleman's eyes. She had not meant to interfere.

"Indeed!" he said, rising from his chair. "Then please listen to me. There came to a certain house a man who had been a thief."

"No!" she said firmly.

"A man hopeless and despairing."

"No."

"Alas! yes," he answered, shaking his head soberly. "These are facts."

"No, no, no!" she cried. There were tears in her eyes. "I do not want to hear. I care nothing for facts!"

"You will not hear me?"

"No!"

Something in her face, her voice, the pose of her figure told him the truth. "If you will not listen to me," he said, leaning with both hands on the table and speaking in a voice scarcely audible to the doctor, "I will not say what I was going to propose. If I must be repaid, I must. But you must repay me, Pleasance. Will you?"

The doctor did not wait to hear the answer. He found the open door very convenient. He got away and to horse with a lighter heart than he had carried under his waistcoat for months. He felt no great doubt about the answer; and indeed all that June morning, which was by good luck as fine as the preceding one had been gloomy, while he rode from house to house with an unprofessional smile on his lips and in his eyes, the two left at home walked up and down the lawn in the sunshine, planning the life which lay before them, and of which every day was to be as cloudless as this day. A hundred times they passed and repassed the old sundial, but it was nothing to them. Lovers count only the hours when the sun does _not_ shine.

THE COLONEL'S BOY

THE COLONEL'S BOY

A stranger, coming upon the Colonel as he sat in the morning-room of the club and read his newspaper with an angelic smile, would have sought for another copy of the paper and searched its columns with pleasant anticipations. But I knew better. I knew that the Colonel, though he had put on his glasses and was pretending to cull the news, was only doing what I believe he did after lunch and after dinner, and after he got into bed, and at every one of those periods when the old campaigner, with a care for his digestion and his conscience, selects some soothing matter for meditation. He was thinking of his boy; and I went up to him and smacked him on the shoulder. "Well, Colonel," I said, "how is Jim?"

"Hallo! Why, it's Jolly Joe Bratton!" he replied, dropping his glasses, and gripping my hand tightly--for we did not ride and tie at Inkerman for nothing. "The very man I wanted to see."

"And Jim, Colonel? How is the boy?" I asked.

"Oh, just as fit as a--a middy on shore!" he answered, speaking cheerfully, yet, it seemed to me, with an effort; so that I wondered whether anything was wrong with the boy--a little bill or some small indiscretion, such as might be pardoned in as fine a lad as ever stepped, with a six-months'-old commission, a new uniform, and a station fifty minutes from London. "But come," the Colonel continued before I could make my comment, "you have lunched, Joe? Will you take a turn?"

"To be sure," I said; "on one condition--that you let Kitty give you a cup of tea afterwards."

"That is a bargain!" he answered. And we went into the hall. Every one knows the "Junior United" hall. I had taken down my hat, and was stepping back from the rack, when some one coming downstairs two at a time--that is the worst of having any one under field rank in a club--hit me sharply with his elbow. Perhaps my coat fits a bit tightly round the waist nowadays, and perhaps not; any way, I particularly object to being poked in the back--it may be a fad, or it may not--and I turned round and cried "Confound----"

I did not say any more, for I saw who had done it. My gentleman stammered a confused apology, and taking a letter which it seemed I had knocked out of his hand, from the Colonel, who had politely picked it up, he passed into the morning-room with a red face. "Clumsy scoundrel!" I said, but not so loudly that he could hear.

"Hallo!" the Colonel exclaimed, standing still, and looking at me.

"Well?" I said, perhaps rather testily. "What is the matter?"

"You are not on very good terms with young Farquhar, then?"

"I am not on any terms at all with him," I answered grumpily.

The Colonel whistled. "Indeed!" he said, looking down at me with a kind of wistfulness in his eyes; Dick is tall, and I am--well, I was up to standard once. "I thought--that is, Jim told me--that he was a good deal about your house, Joe. And I rather gathered that he was making up to Kitty, don't you know."

"You did, did you?" I grunted. "Well, perhaps he was, and perhaps he wasn't. Any way, she is not for him. And he would not take an answer, the young whipper-snapper!" I continued, giving my anger a little vent, and feeling all the better for it. "He came persecuting her, if you want to know. And I had to show him the door."

I think I never saw a man--certainly on the steps of the "Junior United"--look more pleased than the Colonel looked at that moment. "Gad!" he said, "Then Jim will have a chance?"

"Ho! ho!" I answered, chuckling. "The wind sets in that quarter, does it? A chance? I should think he would have a chance, Colonel!"

"And you would not object?"

"Object?" I said. "Why, it would make me the happiest man in the world, Dick. Are we not the oldest friends? And I have only Kitty and you have only Jim. Why, it is--it is just Inkerman over again!"

Really it was, and we stumped down the steps in great delight. Only I felt a little anxious about Kitty's answer, for though I had a suspicion that her affections were inclined in the right direction, I could not be sure. The young soldier might not have won her heart as he had mine: so that I was still more pleased when the Colonel informed me that he believed Jim intended to put it to the test this very afternoon.

"She is at home," I said, standing still.

"Ha! ha! ha!" he responded, taking my arm to lead me on.

But I declined to move. "I'll tell you what," I said--"it is a quarter to four; if Jim has not popped the question by now, he is not the man I think him. Let us go home, Colonel, and hear the news."

He demurred a little, but I had him in a hansom in the time it takes to blow "Lights out," and we were bowling along Piccadilly in two minutes more. Suddenly he uttered an exclamation, and, following the direction of his hand, I was in time to catch a glimpse of Jim's face--no other's--as he shot past us in a cab going eastwards. It left us in no doubt, for the lad's cheeks were flushed and his eyes shining, and as he swept by and saw us, he raised his hat with a gesture of triumph.

"Gad!" the Colonel exclaimed, "I'll bet a guinea he has kissed her! Happy dog!"

"Tra! la! la!" I answered. "I dare swear we shall not find Kitty in tears."

The words were scarcely out of my mouth when the cab swerved to one side, throwing me against my companion. I heard our driver shout, and caught sight of a bareheaded man mixed up with the near shaft. The next moment we gave a lurch and stopped, and a crowd came round us. The Colonel was the first out, but I joined him as quickly as I could. "I do not think he is much hurt, sir," I heard the policeman say. "He is drunk, I fancy. Come, old chap, pull yourself together," he continued, giving a shake to the grey-haired man whom he and a bystander were supporting. "There, hold up now. Here is your hat. You are all right."

And sure enough the man, whose red nose and shabby attire lent probability to the policeman's charge, managed when left to himself to keep his balance; but with some wavering. "Hallo!" he muttered, looking uncertainly upon the crowd round him. "Is my son here to take me home? Isaac? Where is Isaac?"

"He's one part shaken," the policeman said, viewing him with an air of experience. "And three parts drunk. He had better go to the station."

"Where do you live?" the Colonel asked.

"Greek Street, Soho, number twenty-seven, top floor"--this was answered glibly enough. "And I'll tell you what," the man added with a drunken hiccough and a reel which left him on the policeman's shoulder--"if any gentleman will take another gentleman home, I will make him rich beyond the dreams of avarice. I'll present him his weight in gold. That I will. His weight in gold!"

"I think----" the Colonel began, turning and meeting my eye.

"His weight in gold!" murmured the drunken man.

"Quite so!" I said, accepting the Colonel's unspoken suggestion. "We will see him home, policeman." And paying our cabman, I hailed a crawling four-wheeler, into which the officer bundled our man. We got in, and in a moment were jolting eastwards at a snail's pace.

"Perhaps we might have sent some one with him," the Colonel said, looking at me apologetically.

"Not at all!" I answered. I have no doubt that we both had the same feeling, that, happy ourselves, it behooved us to do a good turn to this poor wretch, whose shaking hands and tattered clothes showed that he had almost reached the bottom of the hill. I have seen more than one brother officer, once as gallant a lad as Jim, brought as low; and, perhaps, but for Providence, old Joe Bratton himself---- But there, it may have been some such thought as this, or it may have been an extra glass of sherry at lunch, made us take the man home. We did it; and the Lord only knows why fellows do things--good or bad.

Hauling out our charge at the door of twenty-seven, we guided him up the dingy stairs, the gibberish which he never ceased to repeat about the dreams of avarice and our weight in gold sounding ten times as absurd on the common stairs of this dirty tenth-rate lodging-house. The attic gained, he straightened himself, and, winking at us with drunken gravity, he laid his hand upon the latch of one of the doors. "You shall see--what you shall see!" he muttered, and throwing open the door he stumbled into the room. The Colonel raised his eyebrows in a protest against our folly, but entered after him, and I followed.

We found only one person in the garret, which was as miserable and poverty-stricken as a room could be; and he rose and faced us with an exclamation of anger. He was a young fellow, twenty years old perhaps, of middle size, sallow and dark-eyed; to my thinking half-starved. The drunken man seemed unaware of his feelings, however; for he balanced himself on the floor between us, and waved his hand towards him.

"Here you are, gentlemen!" he cried. "I'm a man of my word! Let me introduce you! My son, Isaac Gold. Did not I tell you? Present you--your weight in gold--or nearly so!"

"Father!" the lad said, eyeing him gloomily, "go and lie down."

"Great joke! Your weight in gold, gentlemen!"

"Your father was knocked down by a cab," the Colonel said quietly, "and finding that he was not able to take care of himself we brought him home."

The young man looked at us furtively, but he did not answer. Instead, he took his father by the arm and forced him gently to a mattress which lay in one corner, half hidden by a towel-rail--the latter bearing a shirt, evidently home-washed and hung out to dry. Twice the old fool started up muttering the same rubbish; but the third time he went off into a heavy sleep. There was something pitiful to my eyes in the boy's patience with him: so that when the lad turned to us at last, and, with eyes which resented our presence, bade us begone if we had satisfied our curiosity, I was not surprised that the Colonel held his ground. "I am afraid you are badly off," he said gently.

"What's that to you?" was the other's insolent reply. "Do you want to be paid for your services?"

"Steady! steady, my lad!" I put in. "You get nothing by that."

"I think I know you," the Colonel continued, regarding him steadily. "There was a charge preferred against you, or some one of your name, a few weeks ago, of personating a candidate at the examination for commissions in the army. The charge failed, I know."

The young man's colour rose as the Colonel spoke. But his manner indicated rather triumph than shame, and his dark eyes sparkled with malice as he retorted: "It failed? Yes, you are right there. You have been in the army yourself, I dare say?"

"I have," the Colonel said gravely.

"An honourable profession, is it not?" the lad continued in a tone of mockery. "How many of your young friends, do you think, pass in honestly? It is a competitive examination, too, mind you. And how many do you think employ me--me--to pass for them?"

"You should be ashamed to boast of it," the Colonel replied, "if you are not afraid."

"And what should they be? Tell me that!"

"They are mean fellows, whoever they are."

"So! so! You think so!" the young man laughed triumphantly. And then all at once the light seemed to die out of his clever face, and I saw before me only a half-starved lad, with his shabby clerk's coat buttoned up to his throat to hide the want of a shirt. The same change was visible, I think, to the Colonel's eye; for he looked at me and muttered something about the cab. Understanding that he wanted a word with the young fellow alone, I went to the window and for a moment or so pretended to gaze through its murky panes. When I turned, the two men were talking by the door; the drunken father was snoring behind his improvised screen; and on a painted deal table beside me I remarked the one and only article of luxury in the room--a small soiled album. With a grunt I threw it open. It disclosed the portraits of two lads, simpering whiskerless faces, surmounting irreproachable dog-collars and sporting pins. I turned a page and came on two more bearing a family resemblance in features, dog-collars, and pins to the others. I turned again with a pish! and a pshaw! and found a vacant place, and opposite it--a portrait of Jim!

I stared at it for a moment in unthinking wonder, and then in a twinkling it flashed across me what these portraits were, and above all, what this portrait of Jim, placed in this scoundrel's album meant. I remembered how anxious the Colonel had been as the lad's examination drew near; how bitterly he had denounced the competitive system, and vowed a dozen times a day that, what with pundits and crammers and young officers who should have been girls and gone to Girton, the service was going to the dogs. "To the dogs, do you hear me, sir!" And then I recalled his great relief when the boy came out quite high up; and the change which had at once taken place in his sentiments. "We must move with the times, sir; it is no good running your head against a brick wall! We must move with the times, begad!" and so forth. And--well, I let fall a pretty strong word, at which the Colonel turned.

"What is it, Major?" he said. But, seeing me standing motionless by the window, he turned again and spoke to the young man beside him. "Well, think about it, and let me know at that address. Now," he continued, advancing towards me, "what is it, Joe?"

"What is what?" I said. I had shut the album by this time, and was standing between him and the table on which it lay. I do not know why--perhaps it came of the kindness he had been doing--but I noticed in a way I had never noticed before what a fine figure of a man, tall and straight, my old comrade still was. And a bit of a dimness, such as I have experienced once or twice lately when I have taken a third glass of sherry at lunch, came over my sight. "Confound it!" I said.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Something in my eye!"

"Let me get it out," he said--always the kindest fellow under the sun.

"No! I'll get it out myself!" I snarled like a bear with a sore head. And, without stopping to explain I plunged out of the room and down the stairs. The Colonel, wondering no doubt what was the matter with me, followed more at his leisure, after pausing to say a last word to the young rascal at the door, whom I had not had the patience to speak to: so that I had already closed a warm dispute with the cabman, by sending him off with a flea in his ear and his fare to a sixpence, when the Colonel overtook me.

"What is up, Joe?" he asked, laying his hand on my shoulder.

"That d----d dizziness came over me again. But there, I have always said the '73 sherry at the club is not sound. I do not feel quite up to the mark," I continued with truth. "I think I will go home alone, Colonel--for to-day, if you do not mind."

"I do mind," he said stoutly. "You may want an arm." But somehow I made it clear to him that I would rather go alone, and that the walk would do me good, and he got into a hansom at last and drove off, his grey moustache and fine old nose peering at me round the side of the cab, until a corner hid him altogether.

I walked on a few paces, waving my umbrella cheerfully. Then I stopped, and, retracing my steps, I mounted the staircase of twenty-seven, and without parley opened the door. The young fellow we had left was pacing the floor, turning over in his mind, I fancied, what the Colonel had said to him. He stood still on seeing me, and then glanced round the room. "Have you forgotten anything?" he said.

"Nothing, young man," I answered. "I want to ask you a question."

"You can ask," he replied, eyeing me askance.

"That album," I said, pointing to it--"it contains, I suppose, the photographs of the people you have been employed to personate?"

"Possibly."

"But does it?"

"I did not know," he said slowly, the most provoking manner, "that I had to do with a detective. What is the charge?"

"There is no charge," I answered, keeping my temper really admirably. "But I have seen the face of a friend of mine in that book, and I'll in a word, I'll be hanged, young man, if I don't learn all about it!" I continued. "All--do you hear? So there! Now, out with it, and do not keep me waiting, you young rascal!"

He only whistled and stared; and finding I was getting a little warm, I took out my handkerchief, and wiping my forehead, sat down, the thought of the Colonel's grief taking all the strength out of me. "Look here," I said in a different tone, "I'll take back what I have just said, and I give you my word of honour I do not want to harm the--the gentleman. But I have seen his portrait, and, if I know no more, must think the worse. Now I will give you a ten-pound note if you will answer three questions."

He shook his head; but I saw that he wavered. "I did not show you the portrait," he said. "If you have seen it, that is your business. I will name no names."

"I want none," I answered. I threw open the album at the tell-tale photograph, and laid my shaky finger on the face. "Was this sent to you that you might personate the original?"

He nodded.

"From what place?"

He considered a moment. Then he said reluctantly: "From Frome, in Somerset, I believe."

"Last year?"

He nodded. Alas! Jim had been at a crammer's near Frome. Jim had passed his examination during the last year. I took out the money and gave it to the man; and a minute later I was standing in the street with a sentence common enough at mess in the old days, ringing in my ears: "Refer it to the Colonel! He is the soul of honour."

The soul of honour! Ay! And what would he think of this? The soul of honour! And his son, his son Jim, had done this! I walked through the streets, lost in amazement. I had loved the boy right well myself, and was ready to choke on my own account when I thought of him. But his father--I knew that his father was wrapped up in him. His father had been a mother to him as well, and that for years--had bought him toys as a lad, and furnished his quarters later with things of which only a mother would have thought. It would kill his father.

I wiped my forehead as I thought of this and put my latchkey into the door in Pont Street. I walked in with a heavy sigh--I do not know that I ever entered with so sad a heart--and the next moment, with a flutter of skirts, Kitty was out of the dining-room, where I do not doubt she had been watching for me, and in my arms. Before Heaven! until I saw her I had not thought of her--I had never considered her at all in connection with this matter! No, nor how I should deal with her, until I heard her say, with her face on my shoulder, and her eyes looking into mine: "Oh, father, father, I am happy! Be the first to wish me joy."

Wish her joy! I could not. I could only mutter, "Wait, girl--wait, wait!" and lead her into the dining-room, and, turning my back on her, go to the window and look out--though for all I saw I might have had my head in a soot-bag. She was alarmed of course--but to save her that I could not face her. She came after me and clung to my arm, asking me again and again what it was.

"Nothing, nothing," I said. "There--wait a minute; don't you know that I shall lose you?"

"Father," she said, trying to look into my face, "it is not that. You know you will not lose me! There is something else the matter. There is something you are hiding from me! Ah! Jim went in a cab, and----"

"Jim is all right." I answered, feeling her hand fall from my arm. "In that way at any rate."

"Then I am not afraid," she answered stoutly, "if you and Jim are all right."

"Look here, Kitty," I said, making up my mind, "sit down, I want to talk to you."

And she did sit down, and I told her all. With some girls it might not have been the best course; but Kitty is not like most of the girls I meet nowadays--of whom one half are blue stockings, with no more fitness for the duties of wives and mothers than the statuettes in a shop window, and the other half are misses in white muslin, who are always giggling pertly or sitting with their thumbs in their mouths. Kitty is a companion, a helpmeet, God bless her! She knows that Wellington did not fight at Blenheim, and she does not think that Lucknow is in the Crimea. She knows so much, though she knows no Greek and she loves dancing--her very eyes dance at the thought of it. But she would rather sit at home with the man she loves than waltz at Marlborough House. And if she has not learned a little fortification on the sly, and does not know how many men stand between Jim and his company--I am a Dutchman! Lord! when I see a man marry a doll with a pretty face--not that Kitty has not a pretty face, and a sweet one too, no thanks to her father--I wonder whether he has considered what it will be to sit opposite my lady at, say, twenty thousand nine hundred meals on an average! That is the test, sir.

So I told Kitty all, and the way she took it showed me that I was right. "What?" she exclaimed, when I had finished the story, to which she had listened, with her face turned from me, and her arm on the mantelpiece, "is that all, father?"

"My dear," I said sadly, "you do not understand." I remembered how often I had heard--and sometimes noticed--that women's ideas of honour differ from men's.

"Understand!" she retorted, turning upon me, fiery hot. "I understand that you think Jim has done this mean, miserable, wretched thing. Father," she continued, with sudden gravity, and she laid both her hands on my shoulders, so that her brave eyes looked into my eyes, "if three people came to you and told you that I had gone into your bedroom and taken money from the cash-box in your cupboard to pay a bill of mine, and that when I had done it I had kept it from you, and told stories about it--if three, four, five people told you that they had seen me do it, would you believe them?"

"No, Kitty," I said, smiling against my will, "not though five angels told me so, my dear. I know you too well."

"And, sir, though five angels told me this, I would not believe it! Do you think I do not know him--and love him?"

And the foolish girl, who had begun to waltz round the room like a mad thing, stopped and looked at me with tears in her eyes and her lips quivering.

I could not but take some comfort from her confidence.

"True," I said. "The Colonel brought him up, and it seems hardly possible that the lad should turn out so bad. But the photograph, my girl--the photograph? What do you say to that? It was Jim, I swear. I could not be mistaken. There could not be another so like him."

"There is no one like him," she said softly.

"Very well. And then I have noticed that he has been in bad spirits lately. I'm afraid--I'm afraid a bad conscience, my dear."

"You dear old donkey!" she answered, shaking me with both her hands. "That was about me. He has told me all that. He thought Mr. Farquhar--Mr. Farquhar, indeed!"

"Oh, that was it, was it?" I said. "Well, that may account for his depression. But look you here, Kitty; was he not rather nervous about his examination?"

"A little," she answered with reluctance.

"And, nonetheless, did he not come out pretty high?"

"Seventeenth. Thirteen thousand four hundred and twenty-six marks," Kitty replied glibly.

"Just so! And if he had failed he would have suffered in your eyes?"

"Not a scrap. And, besides, he did not fail," she retorted.

"But he may have thought he would suffer," I answered, "if he failed. That would be a sharp temptation, Kitty."

She did not reply at once. She was busy rolling up a ribbon of her frock into the smallest possible compass, and unrolling it again. At last--it was clear I had made her think--

"I know he did not do it," she said, "but that is all I do know. I cannot prove to you that white is not black; but it is not, and I know it is not."

"Well, my dear, I hope you are right," I answered. And it cheered me to find that she held him worthy of confidence.

She promised readily to let me have the first word with the lad when he called next day. And as for undertaking to have nothing more to do with him if the charge proved to be true, she made nothing of that--because, as she said, it meant nothing.

"A Jim who had done that would not be my Jim at all," she explained gaily, "but quite a different Jim--a James, sir."

Certainly, a girl's faith is a wonderful thing. And hers so far affected me that I regretted I had not taken a bolder course, and, showing the photograph to the Colonel, had the whole thing threshed out on the spot. Possibly I might have saved myself a very wretched hour or two. But no; on second thoughts I could not see how the boy could be innocent. I could not help piecing the evidence together--the damning evidence, as it seemed to me; the certain identity of Jim with the original of the photograph, the arrival of the latter from Frome, where the lad had spent the last weeks previous to his examination, the fears he had expressed before the ordeal, and his success beyond his hopes at it; these things seemed almost conclusive. I had only the boy's character, his father's training, and his sweetheart's faith, to set against them.

His sweetheart's faith, did I say? Ah, well! when I came down to breakfast next morning, whom should I find in tears--and she, as a rule, the most equable girl in the world--but Kitty.

"Hallo!" I said. "What is all this?"

At the sound of my voice she sprang to her feet. She had been kneeling by the fireplace groping with her hands inside the fender. Her cheeks were crimson, and she was crying--yes, certainly crying, although she tried by a hasty dab of the flimsy thing she calls a pocket-handkerchief to remove the traces.

"Well!" I said, for she was dumb. "What is it, my dear?"

"I have--torn up a letter," she answered, a little sob dividing the sentence into two.

"So I see," I answered dryly. "And now, I suppose, you are sorry for it."

"It was a horrid letter, father," she cried, her eyes shining like electric lamps in a shower--"about Jim."

"Indeed," I said, with a very nasty feeling inside me. "What about Jim? And why did you tear it up, my dear? One half of it, I should say, has gone into the fire."

"It was from--a woman!" she answered.

And presently she told me that the letter, which was unsigned, asserted that Jim had played with the affections of the writer, and warned Kitty to be on her guard against him, and not to be a party to the wrong he was doing an innocent girl.

"Pooh!" I said, with a contemptuous laugh. "That cock will not fight, my dear. It has been tried over and over again. You do not mean to say that that has made you cry? Why, if so, you are--you are just as big a fool as any girl I know."

In truth, I was surprised to find Kitty's faith in her lover, which had been proof against a charge made on the best of evidence, fail before an unsigned accusation--because, forsooth, it mentioned a woman. "What postmark did it bear?" I asked.

"Frome," she murmured.

That was certainly odd--very odd. Pretty devilments I knew those fellows at crammers' were up to sometimes. Could it be that we were mistaken in Master Jim, as I have once or twice known a lad's family to be mistaken in him? Was he all the time an out-and-out bad one? Or had he some enemy at Frome plotting against his happiness? This seemed most unlikely and absurd besides; since we had lit upon Isaac Gold by a chance, and on the portrait by a chance within a chance, and no enemy, however acute--not Machiavelli himself--could have foreseen the _rencontre_ or arranged the circumstances which had led me to the photograph. Therefore, though the anonymous letter might be the work of an ill-wisher, I did not see how the other could be. However, I gathered up the few fragments of writing which had escaped the fire, and put them aside, to serve, if need be, for evidence.

On one thing I was making up my mind, however--I must put an end to the matter between Jim and my girl unless he could clear himself of these suspicions--when what should I hear but his voice, and his father's, in the hall. There is something in the sound of a familiar voice which so recalls our knowledge of the speaker that I know nothing which pierces the cloud of doubt more thoroughly. At any rate, when the two came in, I jumped up and gave a hand to each. Behind Jim's back one might suspect him: confronted by his open eyes, and his brown, honest, boyish face--well, by the Lord! I could as soon suspect my old comrade, God bless him!

"Jim," I found myself saying, his hand in mine, and every one of my prudent resolutions gone to the wind, "Jim, my boy, I am a happy man. Take her and be good to her, and God bless you! No, Colonel, no," I continued in desperate haste, "I do not ask a question. Let the lad take her. If your son cannot be trusted no one can. There, I am glad that is settled."

I verily believe I was almost blubbering; and though I said only what I should have said if this confounded matter had never arisen, I let drop, it seems, enough to set the Colonel questioning, for in five minutes I had told him the whole story of the photograph.

It was pleasant to observe his demeanour. Though he never for a moment lost his faith in Jim--mind, he had not seen the portrait--and his eyes continued to shoot little glances of confidence at his son, he drew back his chair and squared his shoulders, and assumed a judicial air.

"Now, sir," he said, with his hands on his knees, "this must be explained. We are much obliged to the Major for bringing it to our notice. You will be good enough to explain, my lad."

Jim did explain; or, rather, he answered frankly that he had never heard Isaac Gold's name before and certainly had never given him a photograph, and I believed him. Then he jumped up with his usual impetuosity and proposed to go at once to Gold's house and see the photograph, and I was delighted. In half a minute we were all three in a cab, and in twenty more had the good luck to discover old Gold alone at home. A five-shilling piece slipped into the drunkard's hand sufficed to obtain for us the view we desired.

"I suppose it _is_ a likeness of me," Jim murmured, looking hard at the photograph.

"Certainly it is!" the Colonel replied rather curtly. Up to this moment he had thought me deceived by a chance resemblance.

"Then let us see who took it, and where it was printed," Jim answered in a matter-of-fact tone. "I do not believe I have ever been taken in this dress. See, it bears no photographer's name; so an amateur has taken it. Let me think."

While he thought, old Gold pottered about the open door of the room on the watch for Isaac's return. "Yes," Jim said at last, "I think I have it. I was photographed in this dress as one of a group before a meet of the hounds at Old Bulcher's.

"At Frome?"

"Yes. And this has been enlarged, I have no doubt, from the head in the group. But why, or who has done it, or how it comes to be here, I give you my honour, sir, I know no more than you do."

At this moment young Gold's footsteps were heard ascending. He seemed to have some suspicion that his secrets were in danger, for he came up the stairs three at a time, and bounced into the room--looking for a moment, as his eyes alighted on us and the open album, as if he would knock us down. When his glance fell on Jim, however, a change came over him. It was singular to see the two looking at one another, Jim eyeing him with the supercilious stare of the boy-officer, and young Gold returning the look with a covert recognition in his defiant eyes. "Well," said Jim, "do you know me?"

"I have never seen you before, to my knowledge."

"Perhaps you will explain how you came by this photograph?"

"That is my business!" said Gold sternly.

"Oh, is it?" retorted Jim with fire. "We will see about that." I think it annoyed him, as it certainly did me, to detect in the other's glance and tone a subtle meaning--a covert understanding. "If you do not explain, I'll--I will call in the police, my man."

But here the Colonel interfered. He told me afterwards that he felt some sympathy for Gold. He silenced Jim, and, telling the other that he should hear from him again, he led us downstairs. I noticed that, as we passed into the street, he slipped his arm through his son's, and I have no doubt he managed to convey to the young fellow as plainly as by words that his faith was unshaken.

Very naturally, however, Jim was not satisfied with this or with the present position of things; which was certainly puzzling. "But, look here!" he said, standing still in the middle of the pavement, "what is to be done, sir? That fellow believes or pretends to believe, though he will not say a word, that I have used him to do my dirty work. And I have not! Then why the deuce does he parade my photograph? Do you think--by George! I believe I have got it--do you think it is a case of blackmail?"

"No," the Colonel said with decision, "it cannot be. We came upon the photograph by the purest accident. It was not sent to us, or used against you. No! But see here!" The Colonel in his turn stopped in the middle of the pavement and struck the latter with his stick. He had got his idea, and his eyes sparkled.

"Well?" we said.

"Suppose some other fellow employed Gold to pass the examination, and, having this very fear--of being blackmailed--in his mind, got a photograph of a friend tolerably like himself? And sent it up instead of his own? What then?"

"What then? Precisely!" I said. And we all nodded at one another like so many Chinese mandarins, and the Colonel looked proudly at his son, as though saying, "Now what do you think of your father, my boy?"

"I think you have hit it, sir!" Jim said, answering the unspoken question. "There were nearly thirty fellows at Bulcher's."

"And among them there was one low rascal--a low rascal, sir," replied the Colonel, his eyes sparkling, "who did not even trust his companion in iniquity, but arranged to have an answer ready if his accomplice turned upon him! 'I suborned him?' he resolved to say--'I deny it. He has my name pat enough, but has he any proof? A photograph? But that is not my photograph!' Do you see, Major?"

"I see," I said. "And now come home with me, both of you, and we will talk it over with Kitty."

By this time, however, it was two o'clock. Jim, who had only come up for an hour or two, found he must resign the hope of seeing Kitty to-day, and take a cab to Charing Cross if he would catch his train. The Colonel had a luncheon engagement--for which he was already late. And so we separated then and there in something of a hurry. When I got back the first question Kitty--who, you may be sure, met me in the hall--asked was: "Where is Jim, father?" The second: "And what does he say about the letter?"

"God bless my soul!" I exclaimed, "I never gave a thought to the letter! I am afraid I never mentioned it, my dear. I was thinking about the photograph. I fancy we have got to something like the bottom of that."

"Pooh!" she said. And, she pretended to take very little interest in the explanation I gave her, though--the sly little cat!--when I dropped the subject, she was quite ready to take it up again, rather than not talk about Jim at all.

I am sometimes late for breakfast; she rarely or never. But next morning on entering the dining-room I found the table laid for one only, and Matthews, the maid, waiting modestly before the coffeepot. "Where is Miss Bratton?" I said grumpily, taking the _Times_ from the fender. "Miss Kitty had a headache," was the answer, "and is taking a cup of tea in bed, sir." "Ho, ho!" thought I, "this comes of being in love! Confound the lads! Sausage? No, I won't have sausage. Who the deuce ordered sausages at this time of year? Bacon? Seems half done. This coffee is thick. There, that will do! That will do. Don't rattle those cups and saucers all day! Confound the girl!--do you hear? You can go!" The way women bully a man when they get him alone is a caution.

When I returned from my morning stroll, I heard voices in the dining-room, and looked in to see how Kitty was. Well, she was--in brief, there was a scene going on. Miss Kitty, her cheeks crimson and her eyes bright, was standing with her back to the window; and facing her, half angry and half embarrassed, was Jim. "Hoity, toity, you two!" I said, closing the door behind me. "These are early times for this kind of thing. What is up?"

"I'll be hanged if I know, sir!" Jim answered, looking rather foolish.

"What have you got there, my dear?" I continued, for Kitty had one hand behind her, and I was not slow to connect this hand with the expression on her pretty face.

"He knows," she said, trembling with anger--the little vixen.

"I know nothing!" Jim returned sheepishly. "I came in, and when I--Kitty flew out and attacked me, don't you see, sir?"

"Very well, my dear," I answered, "if you do not feel able to explain, Jim had better go. Only, if he goes now, of course I cannot say when he will come back."

"I will come back, Kitty, whenever you want me," said the young fool.

"Shut your mouth, sir," I shouted. "Now, Kitty, attend to me. What is it?"

"Ask him--to whom he gave his photograph at Frome!" she said, in a breathless sort of way.

"His photograph? Why, that is just what we were talking about yesterday," I replied sharply. "I thought it did not interest you, my girl, when I told you all about it last night."

"That photograph!"--with withering contempt--"I do not mean _that!_ Do you think I suspect him of _that?_" She stepped forward as though to go to him, and her face altered wonderfully. Then she recollected herself and fell back. "No," she said coldly, "to what woman, sir, did you give your photograph at Frome?"

"To no woman at all," he said emphatically.

"Then look at this!" she retorted. She held out as she spoke a photograph, which I identified at once as the portrait we had seen at Gold's, or a copy of that one. I snatched it from Jim. "Where did you get this, my girl?" I asked briskly.

"It came this morning--with another letter from that woman," she murmured.

I think she began to feel ashamed of herself; and in two minutes I got the letter from her. It was written by the same hand as the letter of the day before, and was, like it, unsigned. It merely said that the writer, in proof of her good faith, enclosed a photograph which Master Jim--that gay Lothario!--had given her. We were still looking at the letter, when the Colonel came in. I explained the matter to him, and I will answer for it, before he understood it, Kitty was more ashamed of herself than ever.

"This photograph and the one at Gold's are facsimiles," said he thoughtfully. "That is certain. And both come from Frome. Doesn't it seem probable that the gentleman who obtained Jim's photograph for his own purpose last year--to send to Gold--printed off more than one copy? And having this one by him, and wishing to cause mischief between Kitty and Jim, thought of this and used it? The sender is, therefore, some one who passed his examination last year and is still at Frome."

Jim shook his head.

"If he passed, sir, he would not be at Bulcher's now," he said.

"On second thoughts he may not be," the Colonel replied. "He may have sent the two letters to Frome to a confidential friend with orders to post them. Wait--wait a minute," my old chum added, looking at me with a new light in his eyes. "Where have I seen a letter addressed to Frome--within the last day or two? Eh? Wait a bit."

We did wait; and presently the Colonel announced his discovery in a grim voice.

"I have it," he said. "It is that scoundrel, Farquhar!"

"Farquhar!" I said. "What do you mean, Colonel?"

"Just that, Major, just that. Do you remember him knocking against you in the hall at the club the day before yesterday? He dropped a letter, and I picked it up. It was addressed--I could not help seeing so much--to Frome."

"Well," Jim said slowly, "he was at Bulcher's, and he passed last year."

"And the letter," continued the Colonel in his turn, "was in a large envelope--an envelope large enough to contain a cabinet photograph."

There was silence in the room. Kitty's face was hidden. Jim moved at last--towards her? No, towards the door. He had his hand on it when the Colonel observed him.

"Stop!" he said sharply. "Come back, my boy. None of that. The Major and I will deal with him."

Jim lingered with his hand on the door.

"Well, sir," he said, "I will only----"

"Come back!" roared the Colonel, but with a smile in his eyes as he looked at his boy. "You will stop here, you lucky dog, you. And I hope this will be a lesson to you not to give your photograph to young ladies at Frome!"

If Kitty squirmed a little at that, she deserved it. I said before that a woman's faith is a wonderful thing. But when there is another woman in the case--umph!

* * * * *

"Mr. Farquhar, sir? Yes, sir, he is in the house," the club porter said, turning in his glass case to consult his book. "I believe he went upstairs to the drawing-room, sir."

"Thank you," the Colonel replied, and he glanced at me and I at him; and then, fixing our hats on tightly, and grasping our sticks, we went upstairs.

We were in luck, as it turned out, for not only was Farquhar in the drawing-room, but there was no one else in the long, stiff, splendid room. He looked up from his writing, and saw us piloting our way towards him between the chairs and tables. And I think he turned green. At any rate, my last doubt left me at the sight of his face.

"A word with you, Mr. Farquhar," the Colonel said grimly, keeping a tight hand on my arm, for I confess I had been in favour of more drastic measures. "It is about a photograph."

"A photograph?" the startled wretch exclaimed, his mouth ajar.

"Well, perhaps I should have said two photographs," the Colonel replied gravely; "photographs of my son which are lying, one in the possession of Major Bratton, and one in the album of a friend of yours, Mr. Isaac Gold."

He tried to frame the words, "A friend of mine!" and to feign astonishment and stare us down. But it was a pitiable attempt, and his eyes sank. He could only mutter, "I do not know--any Gold. There is some mistake."

"Perhaps so," the Colonel answered smoothly. "I hope there is some mistake. But let me tell you this, Mr. Farquhar. Unless you apply within a week for leave to resign your commission, I shall lay certain facts concerning these photographs before the Commander-in-Chief and before the mess of your regiment. You understand me, I am sure. Very well. That is all I wish to say to you."

Apparently he had nothing to say to us in return. And we were both glad to turn our backs on that baffled, spiteful face, in which the horror of discovery strove with the fear of ruin. It is ill striking a man when he is down, and I was glad to get out of the house and breathe a purer air.

We had no need to go to the Commander-in-Chief. Lieutenant Farquhar applied for leave to resign within the week, and Her Majesty obtained, I think, a better bargain in Private Isaac Gold, who, following the Colonel's advice, enlisted about this time. He is already a corporal, and, aided by an education rare in the ranks, bids fair to earn a sergeant's stripes at an early date. He has turned over a new leaf--the Colonel always maintained that he had a keen sense of honour; and I feel little doubt that if he ever has the luck to rise to Farquhar's grade, and bear the Queen's commission, he will be a credit to it and to his friend and brother officer--the Colonel's boy. Not, mind you, that I think he will ever be as good a fellow as Jim! No, no.

A GOOD MAN'S DILEMMA

A GOOD MAN'S DILEMMA

The clock of St. Martin's was striking ten as Archdeacon Yale, of Studbury, in Gloucestershire, who had taken breakfast at the Athenæum, walked down the club steps, eastward bound. He was a man of fresh complexion and good presence; of tolerable means and some reputation as the author of a curiously morbid book, "Timon Defended." As he walked the pavement briskly, an unopened letter which peeped from his pocket seemed--and rightly--to indicate a man free from anxieties: a man without a care.

Before he left the dignified stillness of Pall Mall, however, he found leisure to read the note. "I enclose," wrote his wife, "a letter which came for you this morning. I trust, Cyprian, that you are not fretting about the visitation question and that you get your meals fairly well cooked." The Archdeacon paused at this point and smiled as at some pleasant reminiscence. "Give my love to dear Jack. Oh--h'm--I do not recognise your correspondent's handwriting."

"Nor do I!" the Archdeacon said aloud; and he opened the enclosure with a curiosity that had in it no fear of trouble. After glancing at the signature, however, he turned into a side street and read the letter to the end. He sighed. "Oh dear, dear!" he muttered. "What can I do? I must go! There is no room for refusal. And yet--oh dear!--after all these years. Number 14, Sidmouth Street, Gray's Inn Road? What a place!"

It was a shabby third-rate lodging-house place, as perhaps he knew. But he called a cab and had himself driven thither forthwith. At the corner of the street he dismissed the cab and looked about him furtively. For a man who had left his club so free from care, and whose wife at Studbury and son at Lincoln's Inn were well, he wore an anxious face. It could not be--for he was an Archdeacon--that he was about to do anything of which he was ashamed. Bishops, and others of that class, may be open to temptations, or have pages of their lives folded down, which they would not wish turned. But an Archdeacon?

Yet when he was distant a house or so from No. 14 he started guiltily at a very ordinary occurrence; at nothing more than the arrival of a hansom cab at the door. True, a young woman descended from it, and let herself into the house with a latchkey. But young women and latchkeys are common in London, as common as--as dirt. It could hardly be that which darkened his face as he rang the bell.

In the hall, where a dun was sitting, there was little to remove the prejudice he may have conceived; little, too, in the dingy staircase, cumbered with plates and stale food; or in the first-floor rooms, from which some one peeped and another whispered, and both giggled; or in that second-floor room, at once smart and shabby, and remarkable for many photographs of one young girl, where he was bidden to wait--little or nothing. But when he had pished and pshawed at the tenth photograph, he was called into an inner room, where a strange silence prevailed. Involuntarily he stepped softly. "It was kind of you to come," some one said--some one who was lying in a great chair brought very near to the open window that the speaker might breathe more easily--"very kind. And you have come so quickly."

"I have been in London some days," he answered gently, the fastidious expression gone from his face. "Your daughter's letter followed me from the country and reached me an hour ago. It has been no trouble to me to come. I am only pained at finding you so ill."

"Ah!" she answered. Doubtless her thoughts were busy; while his flew back nearly thirty years to a summer evening, when he had walked with her under the trees in Chelsea Gardens and heard her pour into his ear--she was a young actress in the first blush of success--her hopes and ambitions. There was nothing in the memory of which he had need to be ashamed. In those days he had been reading for orders, and, having lodgings in a respectable street, had come by chance to know two of his neighbours--her mother and herself. The two were living a quiet domestic life, which surprised and impressed him. The girl's talent and the contrast between her notoriety and her simple ways had had a charm for him. For some months the neophyte and the actress were as brother and sister. But there the feeling had stopped; and when his appointment to a country curacy had closed this pretty episode in his life, the exchange of a few letters had but added grace to its ending.

Now old feelings rose to swell his pity as he traced the girl's features in the woman's face. "You have a daughter. You have been married since we parted," he said.

"Yes. It is for her sake I have troubled you," was her answer. "She is a good girl--oh, so good! But she has no one in the world except me, and I am leaving her. Poor Grissel!"

"She is on the stage?" he inquired gravely.

"Yes; and she has succeeded young, as I did. We have not been unhappy together. You remember the life my mother and I had? I think it has been the same over again."

She smiled ever so little. He remembered something of the quiet pathos of that life. "Your husband is dead?" he asked.

"Dead! I wish he were!" she answered bitterly, the smile passing from her face. "My girl had better be alone than with her father. Ah, you do not know! When he went to America years ago--with another woman--I thanked God for it. Dead? Oh, no! There is no chance that he is dead."

Mr. Yale was shocked. "You have not got a divorce?" he said.

"No. After he left me I fell ill, and there were expenses. We were very poor until last year, when Grissel made a good engagement. That is why we are here. Now that her name is known he will come back and find her out. She plays as Kittie Latouche, but the profession know who she is, and--and what can I do? Oh, Mr. Yale! tell me what I can do for her."

Her anxiety unnerved him. Her terror of the future, not her own, but her child's, wrung his heart. He had a presentiment whither she was leading him; and he tried to escape, he tried to murmur some commonplace of encouragement.

"You may yet recover," he urged. "At any rate, there will be time to talk of this again."

"There will not be time," she entreated him. "I have scarcely three days to live, and then my child will be alone. Oh, Mr. Yale! help me. She is young and handsome, with no one to guide her. If her father return, he will be her worst enemy. There is some one, too--some gentleman--who has fallen in with her, and been here. He may be a friend--what you were to me--or not! Don't you understand me?" she cried piteously. "How can I leave her unless you--there is no one else whom I can ask--will protect her?"

He started and looked round for relief, but found none. "I? It is impossible!" he cried. "Oh dear, dear! I am afraid that it is impossible, Mrs. Kent."

"Not impossible! I do not ask you to give her a home or money! Only care. If you will be her guardian--her friend----"

She was a woman dying in sore straits. He was a merciful man. In the end he promised to do what she wished. Then he hastened to escape her gratitude, unconscious, as he passed down the stairs, of the whispering and giggling, the slatternliness and dirt, which had been so dreadful to him on his entrance.

He walked along Oxford Street in a reverie, "Poor thing!" falling from him at intervals, until he reached the corner of Tottenham Court Road, and his eye rested upon a hoarding--at the first idly, then with a purpose, finally with a sidelong glance. The advertisement which had caught his attention was a coarse engraving of half a dozen heads, arranged in a circle, with one in the centre. Under this last, which was larger and more staring, and less to be evaded than the others, appeared the words, "Miss Kittie Latouche." He went on with a shiver, crossing here and there to avoid the hoardings, but only to fall in with a string of sandwich-men bearing the same device. He plunged into the haven of Soho as if he were a political conspirator.

The portrait and the name of his ward! In a few days he would be left in charge of an actress whose name was known to all London--guardian, _in loco parentis_, what you will, of the closest and most responsible, to a giddy girl of unknown antecedents, and too well-known name! He wondered whether Archdeacon had ever been in such a position before, a position which it would be hard to acknowledge and impossible to explain. He could talk of his old friendship for her mother, the actress, and his duty to a dying woman. But would the world believe him? Would even his wife believe him? Would not she read much between the lines, though the space were white as snow? He, a man of nearly sixty, grew red and white by turns as he thought of this.

"I will tell Jack the story," was his first resolve. "I will tell it him at dinner to-night," he groaned. But would he have the courage? He had much respect for his son's practical nature. He had heard him called "hard as nails." And when he found himself opposite to him, and eyed the close-shaven young lawyer, who looked a decade older than his years, he resorted to a subterfuge.

"Jack," he said, "I want your opinion for a friend of mine."

"It is at your service, sir," his son said, his hand upon the apricots. "What is the subject? Law?"

"Not precisely," the Archdeacon replied, clearing his throat. "It is rather a question of knowledge of the world. You know, my boy," he went on, "that I have a very high opinion of your discretion."

"You are very good," said Jack. And he did that which was unusual with him. He blushed; but the other did not observe it.

"My friend, who, I may say, is a clergyman in my archdeaconry," the elder gentleman resumed, "has been appointed guardian--it is a ridiculous thing for a man in his position--to a--a young actress. She is quite a girl, I understand, but of some notoriety."

"Indeed," said Jack drily. "May I ask how that came about? Wards of that kind do not fall from heaven--as a rule."

The Archdeacon winced. "He tells me," he explained, "that her mother was an old friend of his, and when she died, some time back, she left the girl as a kind of legacy, you see."

"A legacy to him, sir?"

"To him, certainly," the elder man said in some distress. "You follow me?"

"Quite so," said Jack. "Oh, quite so! A common thing, no doubt. Did you say that your friend was a married man, sir?"

"Yes," the Archdeacon replied faintly.

"Just so! just so!" his son said, in the same tone, a tone that was so dreadful to the Archdeacon that it needed Jack's question, "And what is the point upon which he wants advice?" to induce him to go on.

"What he had better do, being a clergyman."

"He should have thought of that earlier--ahem!--I mean it depends a good deal on the young lady. There are actresses _and_ actresses, you know."

"I suppose so," the Archdeacon admitted grudgingly. He was in a mood to see the darkest side of his difficulty.

"Of course there are!" Jack said, for him quite warmly. And indeed that is the worst of barristers. They will argue in season and out of season if you do not agree with them quickly. "Some are as good--as good girls as my mother when you married her, sir."

"Well, well, she may be a good girl--I do not know," the elder man allowed.

"You always had a prejudice against the stage, sir."

The Archdeacon looked up sharply, thinking this uncalled for; unless, horrible thought! his son knew something of the matter, and was chaffing him. He made an effort to get on firmer ground. "Granted she is a good girl," he said, "there are still two difficulties. Her father is a rascal, and there is a man, probably a rascal too, hanging about her, and likely to give trouble in another way."

Jack nodded and sagely pondered the position. "I think I should advise your friend to get some respectable woman to live with the girl," he suggested, "and play the duenna--first getting rid of your second rascal."

"But how will you do that? And what would you do about the father?"

"Buy him off!" said Jack curtly. "As to the lover, have an interview with him. Say to him, 'Do you wish to marry my ward? If you do, who are you? If you do not, go about your business.'"

"But if he will not go," the Archdeacon said, "what can my friend do?"

"Well, indeed," replied Jack, looking rather nonplussed, "I hardly know, unless you make her a ward of court. You see," he added apologetically, "your friend's position is a little--shall I say a little anomalous?"

The Archdeacon shuddered. He dropped his napkin and picked it up again, to hide his dismay. Then he plunged into a fresh subject. When his son upon some excuse left him early, he was glad to be alone. He had now a course laid down for him, and acting upon it, he next day saw the landlady in Sidmouth Street and requested her to take charge of the young lady in the event of the mother's death and to guard her from intrusion until other arrangements could be made. "You will look to me for all expenses," the Archdeacon added, seizing with eagerness the only ground on which he felt himself at home. To which the landlady gladly said she would, and accepted Mr. Yale's address at the Athenæum Club as a personal favour to herself.

So the Archdeacon, free for the moment, went down to Studbury, and as he walked about his shrubberies with the scent of his wife's old-fashioned flowers in the air, or sat drinking his glass of Leoville '74 after dinner while Vinnells the butler, anxious to get to his supper, rattled the spoons on the sideboard, he tried to believe it a dream. What, he wondered, would Vinnells say if he knew that master had a ward, and that ward a play-actress? Or, as Studbury would prefer to style her, a painted Jezebel? And what would Mrs. Yale say, who loved lavender, and had seen a ballet--once? Was Archdeacon ever, he asked himself, in a position so--so anomalous before?

"My dear," his wife remarked when he had read his letters one morning, a week or two later, "I am sure you are not well. I have noticed that you have not been yourself since you were in London."

"Nonsense," he replied tartly.

"It is not nonsense. There is something preying on your mind. I believe," she persisted, "it is that visitation, Cyprian, that is troubling you."

"Visitation? What visitation?" he asked incautiously. For indeed he had forgotten all about that very important business, and could think only of a visitation more personal to himself. Before his wife could hold up her hands in astonishment, "What visitation! indeed!" he had escaped into the open air. Mrs. Kent was dead.

Yes, the blow had fallen; but the first shock over, things were made easy for him. He wrote to his ward as soon after the funeral as seemed decent, and her answer pleased him greatly. Ready as he was to scent misbehaviour in the air, he thought it a proper letter, a good girl's letter. She did not deny his right to give advice. She had not, she said, seen the gentleman he mentioned since her mother's death, although Mr. Charles Williams--that was his name--had called several times. But she had given him an appointment for the following Tuesday, and was willing that Mr. Yale should see him on that occasion.

All this in a formal and precise way; but there was something in the tone of her reference to Mr. Williams which led the Archdeacon to smile. "She is over head and ears in love," he thought. And in his reply, after saying that he would be in Sidmouth Street on Tuesday at the hour named, he added that if there appeared to be nothing against Mr. Charles Williams he, the Archdeacon, would have pleasure in forwarding his ward's happiness.

"I am going to London to-morrow, my dear, for two nights," he said to his wife on the Sunday evening. "I have some business there."

Mrs. Yale sat silent for a moment, as if she had not heard. Then she laid down her book and folded her hands. "Cyprian," she said, "what is it?"

The Archdeacon was fussing with his pile of sermons and did not turn. "What is what, my dear?" he asked.

"Why are you going to London?"

"On business, my dear; business," he said lightly.

"Yes, but what business?" replied Mrs. Yale with decision. "Cyprian, you are keeping something from me; you were not used to have secrets from me. Tell me what it is."

But he remained obstinately silent. He would not tell a lie, and he could not tell the truth.

"Is it about Jack?" with sudden conviction. "I know what it is; he has entangled himself with some girl!"

The Archdeacon laughed oddly. "You ought to know your son better by this time, my dear. He is about as likely to entangle himself with a girl as--as I am."

But Mrs. Yale shook her head unconvinced. The Archdeacon was a landowner, though a poor one. It was his ambition, and his wife's, that Jack should some day be rich enough to live at the Hall, instead of letting it, as his father found it necessary to do. But while the Archdeacon considered that Jack's way to the Hall lay over the woolsack, his wife had in view a short cut through the marriage market; being a woman, and so thinking it a small sin in a man to marry for money. Consequently she lived in fear lest Jack should be entrapped by some penniless fair one, and was not wholly reassured now. "Well, I shall be sure to find out, Cyprian," she said warningly, "if you are deceiving me."

And these words recurred disagreeably to the Archdeacon's mind on his way to town and afterwards. They rendered him as sensitive as a mole in the sunshine. He found London almost intolerable. He could not walk the streets without seeing those horrid placards, nor take up a newspaper without being stared out of countenance by the name "Kittie Latouche." While his conscience so multiplied each bill and poster and programme that in twenty-four hours London seemed to him a great hoarding of which his ward was the sole lessee.

Naturally he shrank into himself as he passed down Sidmouth Street next day. He pondered, standing on the steps of No. 14, what the neighbours thought of the house; whether they knew that "Kittie Latouche" lived there. He was spared the giggling and dirty plates on the stairs, but looking round the room at the ten photographs, and thinking what Mrs. Yale would say could she see him, he shuddered. Nervously he picked up the first pamphlet he saw on the table. It was a trifle in one act: "The Tench," Lacy's edition, by Charles Williams. He set it down with a grimace, and a word about birds of a feather. And then the door by which he had entered opened behind him, and he turned.

One look was enough. The kindly expression faded from his handsome features. His face turned to flame. The veins of his forehead swelled with passion, and he strode forward as though he would lay hands on the intruder. "How dare you," he cried when he could find his voice--"how dare you follow me? How dare you play the spy upon me, sir? Speak!"

But Jack--for Jack it was--had no answer ready. He seemed to have lost for once (astonished at being taken in this way, perhaps) his presence of mind. "I do not--understand," he said helplessly.

"Understand? You understand," the Archdeacon cried, his son's very confusion condemning him unheard, "that you have meanly followed me to--to detect me in--in----" And then he came to a deadlock, and, redder than before, thundered, "Are you not ashamed of yourself, sir?"

"I thought I saw a back I knew," Jack muttered, looking everywhere but at his father, which was terribly irritating. "I was coming through the street."

"You were coming through the street? I suppose you often pass through Sidmouth Street!" retorted the Archdeacon with withering sarcasm. But his wrath was growing cool.

"Very often," said Jack so sturdily that his father could not but believe him, and was further sobered. "I saw a back I thought I knew, and I came in here. I had no intention of offending you, sir. And now I think I will go," he added, looking about him uneasily, "and--and speak to you another time."

But the Archdeacon's anger was quite gone now. A wretched embarrassment was taking its place as it dawned upon him that after all Jack might by pure chance have seen him enter and have followed innocently. In that case how had he committed himself by his outbreak--how indeed! "Jack," he said, "I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon, Jack. I see I was mistaken. Do not go, my boy, until I have explained to you why I am here. It is not," he went on, smiling a wretched smile at the pretty faces round him, "quite the place in which you would expect to find me."

"It is certainly not the place in which I did expect to find you," Jack said bluntly. And he looked about him, also in a dazed fashion, as if the Archdeacon and the photographs were not a conjunction for which he was prepared.

"No, no," assented the Archdeacon, wincing, however. "But it is the simplest piece of business in the world which has brought me here." And he recalled to his son's memory their talk at the club.

"Ah, I understand!" Jack said, as if he did, too. "You have come about your friend's business."

The Archdeacon could not hide a spasm. "Well, not precisely. To tell you the truth, there never was a friend, Jack. But," he went on hurriedly, holding up a hand of dignified protest, for Jack was looking at him queerly, very queerly, "you know me too well to doubt me, I hope, when I say there is no ground for doubt?"

The son's keen eyes met the father's for an instant, and then a rare smile softened them as the men's hands met. "I do, sir. You may be sure of that!" he said brightly.

The Archdeacon cleared his throat. "Thank you," he said; "now I think you will understand the position. Miss Kent, the young lady in question, lives here; and I have called to-day to see her by appointment."

"The dickens you have! It is like your impudence!" cried some one--some one behind them.

Both men swung round at the interruption. In the doorway, holding the door open with one hand, while with the other set against the wall he balanced himself on his feet, stood a smart Jewish-looking man. "The dickens you have!" this gentleman repeated, leering on the two most unpleasantly. "So that is your game, is it? Ain't you ashamed of yourself," he continued, addressing himself to the shuddering Archdeacon--and how far away seemed Vinnells and the lavender, and the calm delights of Studbury at that moment!--"ain't you ashamed of yourself, old man?"

"This is a private room," Jack said sternly, anticipating his father's outburst. "You do not seem to be aware of it, my friend."

"A private room, is it?" the visitor replied, closing one eye with much enjoyment. "A private room, and what then?"

"This much, that you are requested to leave it."

"Ho, ho!" the man replied; "so you would put me out of my daughter's room, would you--out of my own daughter's room? I daresay that you would like to do it." Then, with a sudden change to ferocity, he added, "You are bragging above your cards, young man, you are! Dry up, do you hear? Dry up."

And Jack did dry up, falling back against the table with a white face. The Archdeacon, even in his own misery--misery which far exceeded his presentiments--saw and marvelled at his son's collapse. That Jack, keen, practical, hard-headed, should be so completely overwhelmed by collision with this creature, so plainly scared by his insinuations, infected the Archdeacon with a kind of terror. Yet, struggling against the feeling, he forced himself to say, "You are Mr. Kent, I presume?"

"I am, sir; yours to command," swaggered the wretch.

"Then I may tell you that your daughter," the Archdeacon continued, resuming something of his natural self-possession, "was left in my charge by your wife, and that I am here in consequence of that arrangement."

"Gammon!" Mr. Kent replied, distinctly, putting his tongue in his cheek. "Gammon! Do you think that that story will go down with me? Do you think it will go down with any one?"

"It is the truth."

"All right; but look here, when did you see my wife? On her death-bed. And before that--not for twenty years. Well, what do you make of it now? Why," he exclaimed, with admiration in his tone, "you have the impudence of the old one himself! Fie on you, sir! Ain't you ashamed of hanging about stage doors, and following actresses home at your age? But I know you. And your friends shall know you, Archdeacon Yale, of the Athenæum Club. You will hear more of this!"

"You are an insolent fellow!" the clergyman cried. But the perspiration stood in great beads upon his brow, and his quivering lips betrayed the agony of his soul as he writhed under the man's coarse insinuations. The awkwardness, the improbability of the tale he would have to tell in his defence flashed across his mind while the other spoke. He saw how cogently the silence he had maintained about the matter would tell against him. He pictured the nudge of one friend, the wink of another, and his own crimsoning cheeks. His son's unwonted silence, too, touched him home. Yet he tried to bear himself as an innocent man; he struggled to give back look for look. "You are a madman and a scoundrel, besides being drunk!" he said stoutly. "If it were not so, or--or I were as young as my son here----"

"I do not see him," the man answered curtly.

"Jack!" the Archdeacon cried, purple with indignation. "Jack! if you have a voice, speak to him, sir!"

"It won't do," Mr. Kent replied, shaking his head. "Call him Charley, and I might believe you."

"Charley?" repeated the Archdeacon mechanically.

"Ay, Charley--Charley Williams. Oh I know him, too," with vulgar triumph. "I have not been hanging about this house for two days for nothing. He has been here heaps of times! What you two are doing together beats me, I confess. But I am certain of this, that I have caught you both--killed two birds with one stone."

It was the Archdeacon's turn to fall back, aghast. The light that shone upon him with those words so blinded him that every spark of his anger paled and dwindled before it. His son, Charles Williams? He sought in that son's eyes some gleam of denial. But Jack's eyes avoided his; Jack's downcast air seemed only too strongly to confirm the charge. The shock was a severe one, taking from him all thought of himself. The why and wherefore of his presence there could never again be questioned. A real sorrow, a real trouble, gave him courage. "Jack!" he said, "we had better go from here. Come with me. For you, sir," he continued, turning to the actor, "your suspicions are natural to you. Nothing I can say will remove them. So be it. They affect me not one whit. It is enough for me that I came here in all honour, and with an honourable purpose."

"Indeed," replied Mr. Kent mockingly. "Indeed? And your son, Mr. Charles Jack Williams Yale, Archdeacon? No doubt you will answer for him, as he has not got a word to say for himself? He, too, came with an honourable purpose, I suppose? Oh yes, of course; we are all honourable men!"

For an instant the Archdeacon quailed. He saw the pitfall dug before him. He knew all that his answer would imply of disappointed hopes and a vain ambition. He recognised all that might be made of it by his listeners, friend or foe, and he blenched. But the cynical eye and sneering lip of the wretch recalled him to himself. Nay, he seemed to rise above himself, as he replied more sternly, "Yes, sir; I _will_ answer for my son, as for myself! I will answer for him that he came here in all honour."

The man sneered still. But he knew better things if he did not ensue them, and he stood aside with secret respect and let the two go unmolested.

"Sir," Jack said, when they had walked halfway down the street in silence, which his father showed no sign of breaking, "you are thinking more ill of me than I deserve."

"You gave a false name," the Archdeacon snarled.

"Not in a sense--not wilfully, I mean. I wrote a play some time ago, and, as is usual for professional men, I submitted it under a _nom de plume_. I was known as Charles Williams at the theatre, and I had no more idea of doing wrong when I was introduced to Grissel in that name than I have now."

"I hope not," the Archdeacon said grimly. He was not a man to go back from an engagement. "I trust not," he added with a bitterness. "You may break your word to the girl if you please, but I will not break mine to the mother. So help me Heaven!"

"Sir," Jack said, his utterance a little husky, "God bless you! She is a good girl, and some day she will honour you as I do."

They parted without more words. The Archdeacon, hardly master of his thoughts, walked on until he reached the corner of Oxford Street. There he paused, and seeing girls pass, young, graceful, soft-eyed, leaning back in carriages with parcels round them, ay, and thinking that Jack might have chosen out of all these, while he had chosen in Sidmouth Street--Sidmouth Street, Gray's Inn Road--he could not stifle a groan. He plunged recklessly across and found himself presently in St. James' Square, and round and round this he walked, fighting the battle with himself. His poor wife, that was the burden of his cry. His poor wife, and the shock it would be to her, and the downfall of hopes! He knew that she a woman would recoil from such a daughter-in-law far more than he did, who had known Grissel's mother, and knew that actresses may be good and true women. It would be dreadful for her, with her old-world notions; the Archdeacon knew it. But he valued one thing above even the peace of his home, and that was his honour. It was not in sarcasm we called him a good man. To break his word to the dead woman who had trusted him; to leave this girl, whom it behooved him to protect, in the hands of her wretched father, and so to leave her with her faith in goodness shattered--this he could not do.

But he was tempted to think hard things of Jack, to think that Jack, who had never given him the heartache before, had better not have been born than bring this trouble on them. It went no farther than temptation; and he was marvellously thankful next morning that he had not framed the thought in words; for, as he entered the breakfast-room, looking a year older than he had looked, chipping his egg yesterday, the hall-porter put a telegram into his hands. "Come at once--Jack," were the words that first made themselves intelligible to him; and then, a few seconds later, the address "St. Thomas's Hospital."

How swiftly does a great misfortune, a great loss, a great pain, expel a less! I have known a man lose his wife and go heavily for a month, and then losing a thousand pounds become as oblivious of her as if she had never been born. But the Archdeacon was not such a man, and rattling towards Westminster in a cab he felt not only that a thousand pounds would be a small price to pay for his son's safety, but that, if Providence should take him at his thought, he might have worse news for his wife than those tidings which had almost aged him in a night.

His son, however, met him at the great gates, whole and sound, but with a grave face. "You are too late, sir," he said quietly. But he flushed a little at the grasp of his father's hand, and a little more when the Archdeacon told him to pay the cabman a double fare. "I have brought you here for nothing. He died a quarter of an hour ago, sinking very rapidly after I sent to you."

"Who? Who died?" the Archdeacon asked, pressing one hand heavily on the other's shoulder, as they walked back towards the bridge.

"Mr. Kent."

The elder man said nothing for a while--aloud at least. But presently he asked Jack to tell him about it.

"There is little to tell. After we left him he went out. Going home late last night, and not I fear sober, he was run down by a road-car. When they brought him to the hospital he was hopelessly injured, but quite sensible. They fetched his daughter, and then he asked for me--as your son. He did not know my address, but the assistant-surgeon happened to be a friend of mine, and did, and he sent a cab for me."

And really that seemed all. "It is very, very sudden; but--Heaven forgive me!--I cannot regret his death," the clergyman said. "It is impossible."

They had reached the corner of the bridge. "There is something else I should tell you," Jack said nervously. "When he had sent for me he had a lawyer brought, and made his will."

"His will!" the Archdeacon repeated, somewhat startled. "Had he anything to leave?" He asked the question, rather in pity for so wretched a creature as the man seemed to him, than out of curiosity.

"If we may believe him," Jack said slowly, "and I think he was telling the truth, he was worth thirty thousand pounds."

"Impossible!" the Archdeacon cried.

"I do not know," replied Jack. "But we shall learn. He said he had made it in oil, and had come home a poor man to see how his wife and child would receive him. I do not think he was all bad," Jack continued thoughtfully. "There must have been a streak of romance in him."

"I fear," the Archdeacon muttered very sensibly, "that it is all romance!"

But it was not all romance; there is oil in the States yet, and Mr. Kent, of whom since he is dead we all speak with respect, by hook or crook had got his share. The thirty thousand pounds were discovered pleasantly fructifying in Argentine railways, and proved as many reasons why Mrs. Yale, when Jack's fate became known to her, should smile again. The Archdeacon put it neatly: To marry an actress is a grave offence because a common one, and one easily committed; but to marry an actress with thirty thousand pounds! Such ladies are not blackberries, not do they grow on every bush.

"Mr. and Mrs. John Yale have not yet established themselves at the Hall. They live at Henley, and their house is the summer resort of all kinds of people, among whom the Archdeacon is a very butterfly. An idea prevails--though a few of us are in the secret--that Mrs. Jack comes, in common with so many pretty women, of an old Irish family; and the other day I overheard an amusing scrap of conversation at her table. 'Mrs. Yale,' some one said, 'do you know that you remind me, I if may say it without offence, of Miss Kittie Latouche, the actress?'"

"Indeed?" the lady replied with a charming blush. "But do you know that you are on dangerous ground? My husband was in love with that lady before he knew me. And I believe that he regrets her now."

"Tit for tat!" cried Jack. "Let us all tell tales. If my wife was not in love with one Mr. Charles Williams a month--only a month--before she married me, I will eat her."

"Oh, Jack!" the lady exclaimed, covered with confusion. But this story would not be believed in Studbury, where Mrs. John passes for being a little shy, a little timid, and not a little prudish.

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