CHAPTER XXXIV.

SUSPENSE.

Mr. Brion stood at his gate when the little buggy drove up, beaming with contentment and hospitality. He respectfully begged that Mr. Yelverton would grant them the favour of his company a little longer--would take pot-luck and smoke an evening pipe before he returned to his hotel in the town, whither he, Mr. Brion, would be only too happy to drive him. Mr. Yelverton declared, and with perfect truth, that nothing would give him greater pleasure. Whereupon the hotel servant was dismissed in charge of the larger vehicle, and the horses of the other were put into the stable. The girls went in to wash and dress, and the housekeeper put forth her best efforts to raise the character of the dinner from the respectable to the genteel in honour of a guest who was presumably accustomed to genteel dining.

The meal was served in the one sitting-room of the house, by the light of a single lamp on the round table and a flood of moonlight that poured in from the sea through the wide-open doors. After the feasts and fatigues of the day, no one had any appetite to speak of for the company dishes that Mrs. Harris hastily compounded, course by course, in the kitchen; but everyone felt that the meal was a pleasant one, notwithstanding. Mr. Yelverton, his host, and Patty, who was unusually sprightly, had the conversation to themselves. Patty talked incessantly. Nelly was amiable and charming, but decidedly sleepy; and Elizabeth, at her lover's side, was not, perhaps, unhappy, but visibly pale and noticeably silent. After dinner they went out upon the verandah, and sat there in a group on the comfortable old chairs and about the floor, and drank coffee, and chatted in subdued tones, and looked at the lovely water shining in the moonlight, and listened to it booming and splashing on the beach below. The two men, by virtue of their respective and yet common qualities, "took to" each other, and, by the time the girls had persuaded them to light the soothing cigarette, Mr. Brion was talking freely of his clever lad in Melbourne, and Mr. Yelverton of the mysterious disappearance of his uncle, as if it were quite a usual thing with them to confide their family affairs to strangers. Eleanor meanwhile swayed herself softly to and fro in a ragged rocking chair, half awake and half asleep; Elizabeth, still irresistibly attracted to the neighbourhood of her beloved, sat in the shadow of his large form, listening and pondering, with her eyes fixed on the veiled horizon, and all her senses on the alert; Patty squatted on the edge of the verandah, leaning against a post and looking up into the sky. She was the leading spirit of the group to-night. It was a long time since she had been so lively and entertaining.

"I wonder," she conjectured, in a pause of the conversation, "whether the inhabitants of any of those other worlds are sitting out on their verandahs to-night, and looking at _us_. I suppose we are not so absolutely insignificant but that _some_ of them, our own brother and sister planets, at any rate, can see us if they use their best telescopes--are we, Mr. Yelverton?"

"We will hope not," said Mr. Yelverton.

"To think that the moon--miserable impostor that she is!--should be able to put them out," continued Patty, still gazing at the palely-shining stars. "The other Sunday we heard a clergyman liken her to something or other which on its appearance quenched the ineffectual fires of the _lesser_ luminaries--"

"He said the sun," corrected Elizabeth.

"Well, it's all the same. What's the sun? The stars he hides are better suns than he is--not to speak of their being no end to them. It shows how easily we allow ourselves to be taken in by mere superficial appearances."

"The sun and moon quench the stars for _us_, Patty."

"Pooh! That's a very petty parish-vestry sort of way to look at things. Just what you might expect in a little bit of a world like this. In Jupiter now"--she paused, and turned her bright eyes upon a deep-set pair that were watching her amusedly. "Mr. Yelverton, I hope you are not going to insist upon it that Jupiter is too hot to do anything but blaze and shine and keep life going on his little satellites--are you?"

"O dear no!" he replied. "I wouldn't dream of such a thing."

"Very well. We will assume, then, that Jupiter is a habitable world, as there is no reason why he shouldn't be that _I_ can see---just for the sake of enlarging Elizabeth's mind. And, having assumed that, the least we can suppose--seeing that a few billions of years are of no account in the chronology of the heavenly bodies--is that a world on such a superior scale was fully up to _our_ little standard before we began. I mean our present standard. Don't you think we may reasonably suppose that, Mr. Yelverton?"

"In the absence of information to the contrary, I think we may," he said. "Though I would ask to be allowed to reserve my own opinion."

"Certainly. I don't ask for anybody's opinion. I am merely throwing out suggestions. I want to extend Elizabeth's vision in these matters beyond the range of the sun and moon. So I say that Jupiter--and if not Jupiter, one of the countless millions of cooler planets, perhaps ever so much bigger than he is, which lie out in the other sun-systems--was well on with his railways and telegraphs when we began to get a crust, and to condense vapours. You will allow me to say as much as that, for the sake of argument?"

"I think you argue beautifully," said Mr. Yelverton.

"Very well then. Millions of years ago, if you had lived in Jupiter, you could have travelled in luxury as long as your life lasted, and seen countries whose numbers and resources never came to an end. Think of the railway system, and the shipping interest, of a world of that size!"

"_Don't_, Patty," interposed Elizabeth. "Think what a little, little life it would have been, by comparison! If we can't make it do us now, what would its insufficiency be under such conditions?"

Patty waved her hand to indicate the irrelevancy of the suggestion. "In a planet where, we are told, there are no vicissitudes of climate, people can't catch colds, Elizabeth; and colds, all the doctors say, are the primary cause of illness, and it is because they get ill that people die. That is a detail. Don't interrupt me. So you see, Mr. Yelverton, assuming that they knew all that we know, and did all that we do, before the fire and the water made our rocks and seas, and the chalk beds grew, and the slimy things crawled, and primitive man began to chip stones into wedges to kill the saurians with--just imagine for a moment the state of civilisation that must exist in Jupiter, _now_. Not necessarily our own Jupiter--any of the older and more improved Jupiters that must be spinning about in space."

"I can't," said Mr. Yelverton. "My imagination is not equal to such a task."

"I want Elizabeth to think of it," said Patty. "She is a little inclined to be provincial, as you see, and I want to elevate her ideas."

"Thank you, dear," said Elizabeth.

"It is a pity," Patty went on, "that we can't have a Federal Convention. That's what we want. If only the inhabited planets could send representatives to meet and confer together somewhere occasionally, then we should all have broad views--then we might find out at once how to set everything right, without any more trouble."

"Space would have to be annihilated indeed, Miss Patty."

"Yes, I know--I know. Of course I know it can't be done--at any rate, not _yet_--not in the present embryonic stage of things. If a meteor takes a million years to travel from star to star, going at the rate of thousands of miles per second--and keeps on paying visits indefinitely--Ah, what was that?"

She sprang from her low seat suddenly, all her celestial fancies scattered to the mundane winds, at the sound of a wakeful magpie beginning to pipe plaintively on the house roof. She thought she recognised one of the dear voices of the past. "_Can_ it be Peter?" she cried, breathlessly. "Oh, Elizabeth, I do believe it is Peter! Do come out and let us call him down!"

They hurried, hand in hand, down to the shelving terrace that divided the verandah from the edge of the cliff, and there called and cooed and coaxed in their most seductive tones. The magpie looked at them for a moment, with his head cocked on one side, and then flew away.

"No," said Patty, with a groan, "it is _not_ Peter! They are all gone, every one of them. I have no doubt the Hawkins boys shot them--little bloodthirsty wretches! Come down to the beach, Elizabeth."

They descended the steep and perilous footpath zig-zagging down the face of the cliff, with the confidence of young goats, and reaching the little bathing-house, sat down on the threshold. The tide was high, and the surf seething within a few inches of the bottom step of the short ladder up and down which they had glided bare-footed daily for so many years. The fine spray damped their faces; the salt sea-breezes fanned them deliciously. Patty put her arms impulsively round her sister's neck.

"Oh, Elizabeth," she said, "I am so glad for you--I _am_ so glad! It has crossed my mind several times, but I was never sure of it till to-day, and I wouldn't say anything until I was sure, or until you told me yourself."

"My darling," said Elizabeth, responding to the caress, "don't be sure yet. _I_ am not sure."

"_You_ are not!" exclaimed Patty, with derisive energy. "Don't try to make me believe you are a born idiot, now, because I know you too well. Why, a baby in arms could see it!"

"I see it, dear, of course; both of us see it. We understand each other. But--but I don't know yet whether I shall accept him, Patty."

"Don't you?" responded Patty. She had taken her arms from her sister's neck, and was clasping her knees with them in a most unsympathetic attitude. "Do you happen to know whether you love him, Elizabeth?"

"Yes," whispered Elizabeth, blushing in the darkness; "I know that."

"And whether he loves you?"

"Yes."

"Of course you do. You can't help knowing it. Nobody could. And if," proceeded Patty sternly, fixing the fatuous countenance of the man in the moon with a baleful eye, "if, under those circumstances, you don't accept him, you deserve to be a miserable, lonely woman for all the rest of your wretched life. That's my opinion if you ask me for it."

Elizabeth looked at the sea in tranquil contemplation for a few seconds. Then she told Patty the story of her perplexity from the beginning to the end.

"Now _what_ would you do?" she finally asked of her sister, who had listened with the utmost interest and intelligent sympathy. "If it were your own case, my darling, and you wanted to do what was right, _how_ would you decide?"

"Well, Elizabeth," said Patty; "I'll tell you the truth. I should not stop to think whether it was right or wrong."

"Patty!"

"No. A year ago I would not have said so--a year ago I might have been able to give you the very best advice. But now--but now"--the girl stretched out her hands with the pathetic gesture that Elizabeth had seen and been struck with once before--"now, if it were my own case, I should take the man I loved, no matter _what_ he was, if he would take me."

Elizabeth heaved a long sigh from the bottom of her troubled heart. She felt that Patty, to whom she had looked for help, had made her burden of responsibility heavier instead of lighter. "Let us go up to the house again," she said wearily. "There is no need to decide to-night."

When they reached the house, they found Eleanor gone to bed, and the gentlemen sitting on the verandah together, still talking of Mr. Yelverton's family history, in which the lawyer was professionally interested. The horses were in the little buggy, which stood at the gate.

"Ah, here they are!" said Mr. Brion. "Mr. Yelverton is waiting to say good-night, my dears. He has to settle at the hotel, and go on board to-night."

Patty bade her potential brother-in-law an affectionate farewell, and then vanished into her bedroom. The old man bustled off at her heels, under pretence of speaking to the lad-of-all-work who held the horses; and Elizabeth and her lover were left for a brief interval alone.

"You will not keep me in suspense longer than you can help, will you?" Mr. Yelverton said, holding her hands. "Won't a week be long enough?"

"Yes," she said; "I will decide it in a week."

"And may I come back to you here, to learn my fate? Or will you come to Melbourne to me?"

"Had I not better write?"

"No. Certainly not."

"Then I will come to you," she said.

He drew her to him and kissed her forehead gravely. "Good-night, my love," he said. "You will be my love, whatever happens."

And so he departed to the township, accompanied by his hospitable host, and she went miserable to bed. And at the first pale streak of dawn the little steamer sounded her whistle and puffed away from the little jetty, carrying him back to the world, and she stood on the cliff, a mile away from Seaview Villa, to watch the last whiff of smoke from its funnels fade like a breath upon the horizon.