CHAPTER II.

Miss Gwendoline Beattison, the lady who with her companion, an elderly Frenchwoman, occupied the adjoining compartment, was the daughter of General Beattison and of his wife, a Spanish lady of renowned beauty.

After acquiring great wealth in India, General Beattison--a Scotchman by birth--had returned to his native town, and there during the intervals of her visiting and education abroad his daughter had resided, and had made the acquaintance of Richard Dalrymple, the only son of Doctor Dalrymple, senior physician of the town.

When the younger Dalrymple had established a medical practice in the West-end of London it seemed only natural that the Beattisons, who generally spent from five to six months in the Metropolis each year, should patronize him, more especially as they knew him to be well trained in his profession, and well thought of among his brother practitioners.

Dalrymple was an attractive man, a good talker and possessed of a magnetism which drew other men to him. He was popular and was accordingly in demand and at no house was he more welcome than at the home of General Beattison.

But complications soon arose.

Mrs. Beattison had died while her daughter Gwendoline, an only child, was still in the nursery, and the latter’s education had largely devolved upon governesses at home and abroad, whom her naturally dominant will soon reduced to subjection.

The result was that by the time she was sixteen years of age, Miss Beattison was a law unto herself, and it might be added with some show of truth, to her father also.

She was now twenty-one years of age and all the talk of “London-town,” in her matchless beauty--the despair alike of painters and poets. From her mother she had inherited her black Castilian hair and glorious dark eyes, together with that magnetism of glance and capacity for arousing or manifesting passion which seems the heritage of Spain’s seductive daughters.

From her father’s side had sprung the height and stateliness which marked her carriage; and the unresting audacity of the warrior’s blood was readily visible when Miss Gwendoline entered the lists.

Courted by all, and the belle of the London season, Gwendoline was true to an early--but undisclosed--infatuation for Richard Dalrymple, and with scant courtesy she refused the best offers of the season “by the score,” bent upon securing the only being she had made up her mind she could love.

Richard, although by no means insensible to Miss Beattison’s charms, was true to his Scotch _fiancée_, and feeling the fair Gwendoline’s passion for him becoming more and more marked, and unable to see that he was holding his own satisfactorily, he deemed discretion the better part of valor and, as we have seen, fled.

Miss Beattison, who had fathomed his plans, determined to follow him, believing that only some mistaken notion of chivalry on his side kept them apart, and convinced in her own mind that they were made for each other, and wholly unwilling that both their lives should be ruined by a false delicacy on her part.

It will be seen that her views were very far indeed from being orthodox on the question of woman’s rights, so far as they relate to courtship, but as against this it may be said that no breath of suspicion had ever been raised against her fair fame, and that her determination in following Mr. Dalrymple was consistent with a hereditary obstinacy in legitimate pursuits, once she was satisfied as to what was the right thing for her to do.

As Richard Dalrymple finished his third cigar the train was nearing Rugby station, its first stopping place.

“The preacher was entirely right,” he muttered, as he threw away the end of his cigar; “‘fill a bushel full of wheat and there will be no room for chaff.’ I have not been thinking enough of Jeannie, or this thing would never have worried me.

“The dear little darling,” he suddenly burst out with a new accession of fervor, as he took a photograph from his pocket and kissed it again and again. “I will have a thousand copies of that photograph made, and I will put them everywhere in my house and study and in my pockets, so that people will say ‘what a model lover he is!’ and that will stimulate me to be still better than I am.”

He kept on talking for some time until he became conscious of an undue earnestness in his avowals. “Great Heavens!” he suddenly exclaimed, “I hope I am not protesting too much--Oh no, no--how can I talk like that when I am within eight hours of the sweetest lips in Christendom, all mine too--exclusively--unkissed, unreaped for three years and just, just (here hyperbole failed him)--just too sweet for anything.”

“Those lovely blue eyes, that rounded neck and that yellow hair, and those dear arms! O dear, I feel them now even after three long years.

“I hate dark eyes and black hair and all your over-ripe Southern beauty; I wonder I ever gave it a thought; it is so commonplace beside the charm of the ravishing blond.”

In his excitement he had risen to his feet and was pacing backwards and forwards in his carriage, thrusting his arms out forcibly in front of him, as if in an effort to throw off excitement.

In turning, his hand struck the frame of the window forcibly, and the photograph fell from his grasp underneath the seat.

As he stooped to recover it he saw a handkerchief alongside it. This he at first mistook for his own until the softness of its texture undeceived him.

Rising to his feet he held the handkerchief somewhat carelessly to the light with the air of one who had nothing better to do, to see if he could discover any initials upon it. As he did so he became conscious of a subtle perfume, and it moved him horribly, as some men die without being moved.

His knees gave way through the weakness and he sat down. There was, he felt, but one person in all England who used that dainty Oriental perfume. She had told him so, and that one was herself.

Lest there should be any doubt as to the identity of the handkerchief, there, too, was the monogram in gold and black on the corner, the initials G. B. subtly intertwined.

In silence Richard Dalrymple sat with whitening face looking at the delicate piece of cambric in his hands.

“My God!” he suddenly burst out, “What is the matter with me; it is all I can do to keep myself from kissing it!”

His hand shook as it held the piece of vagrant cambric, and when the train entered Rugby station a man in the depths of self-abasement knelt on the floor of Dalrymple’s compartment with his head buried in the cushions of the seat.