Into this large pond, which the duck had been making towards from the

beginning of its precipitate flight, it had dived out of sight. The

excited and breathless runner was in a few moments close enough to see

the disappointed hawk hovering and floating in the air as if waiting for

the reappearance of its prey, upon which grim pastime it was so intent

that by creeping along softly she was enabled to get very near the edge

of the pool and witness the conclusion of the episode. Whenever the duck

was under the necessity of showing its head to breathe, the other bird

would dart towards it, invariably too late, however; for the diver was

far too experienced in the rough humour of the buzzard family at this

game to come up twice near the same spot, unaccountably emerging from

opposite sides of the pool in succession, and bobbing again by the time

its adversary reached each place, so that at length the hawk gave up the

contest and flew away, a satanic moodiness being almost perceptible in

the motion of its wings.

The young lady now looked around her for the first time, and began to

perceive that she had run a long distance-very much further than she had

originally intended to come. Her eyes had been so long fixed upon the

hawk, as it soared against the bright and mottled field of sky, that on

regarding the heather and plain again it was as if she had returned to a

half-forgotten region after an absence, and the whole prospect was

darkened to one uniform shade of approaching night. She began at once to

retrace her steps, but having been indiscriminately wheeling round the

pond to get a good view of the performance, and having followed no path

thither, she found the proper direction of her journey to be a matter of

some uncertainty.

'Surely,' she said to herself, 'I faced the north at starting:' and yet

on walking now with her back where her face had been set, she did not

approach any marks on the horizon which might seem to signify the town.

Thus dubiously, but with little real concern, she walked on till the

evening light began to turn to dusk, and the shadows to darkness.

Presently in front of her Ethelberta saw a white spot in the shade, and

it proved to be in some way attached to the head of a man who was coming

towards her out of a slight depression in the ground. It was as yet too

early in the evening to be afraid, but it was too late to be altogether

courageous; and with balanced sensations Ethelberta kept her eye sharply

upon him as he rose by degrees into view. The peculiar arrangement of

his hat and pugree soon struck her as being that she had casually

noticed on a peg in one of the rooms of the 'Red Lion,' and when he came

close she saw that his arms diminished to a peculiar smallness at their

junction with his shoulders, like those of a doll, which was explained

by their being girt round at that point with the straps of a knapsack

that he carried behind him. Encouraged by the probability that he, like

herself, was staying or had been staying at the 'Red Lion,' she said,

'Can you tell me if this is the way back to Anglebury?'

'It is one way; but the nearest is in this direction,' said the tourist-

the same who had been criticized by the two old men.

At hearing him speak all the delicate activities in the young lady's

person stood still: she stopped like a clock. When she could again fence

with the perception which had caused all this, she breathed.

'Mr. Julian!' she exclaimed. The words were uttered in a way which would

have told anybody in a moment that here lay something connected with the

light of other days.

'Ah, Mrs. Petherwin!-Yes, I am Mr. Julian-though that can matter very

little, I should think, after all these years, and what has passed.'

No remark was returned to this rugged reply, and he continued

unconcernedly, 'Shall I put you in the path-it is just here?'

'If you please.'

'Come with me, then.'

She walked in silence at his heels, not a word passing between them all

the way: the only noises which came from the two were the brushing of

her dress and his gaiters against the heather, or the smart rap of a

stray flint against his boot.

They had now reached a little knoll, and he turned abruptly: 'That is

Anglebury-just where you see those lights. The path down there is the

one you must follow; it leads round the hill yonder and directly into

the town.'

'Thank you,' she murmured, and found that he had never removed his eyes

from her since speaking, keeping them fixed with mathematical exactness

upon one point in her face. She moved a little to go on her way; he

moved a little less-to go on his.

'Good-night,' said Mr. Julian.

The moment, upon the very face of it, was critical; and yet it was one

of those which have to wait for a future before they acquire a definite

character as good or bad.

Thus much would have been obvious to any outsider; it may have been

doubly so to Ethelberta, for she gave back more than she had got,

replying, 'Good-bye-if you are going to say no more.'

Then in struck Mr. Julian: 'What can I say? You are nothing to me. . . .

I could forgive a woman doing anything for spite, except marrying for

spite.'

'The connection of that with our present meeting does not appear, unless

it refers to what you have done. It does not refer to me.'

'I am not married: you are.'

She did not contradict him, as she might have done. 'Christopher,' she

said at last, 'this is how it is: you knew too much of me to respect me,

and too little to pity me. A half knowledge of another's life mostly

does injustice to the life half known.'

'Then since circumstances forbid my knowing you more, I must do my best

to know you less, and elevate my opinion of your nature by forgetting

what it consists in,' he said in a voice from which all feeling was

polished away.

'If I did not know that bitterness had more to do with those words than

judgment, I-should be-bitter too! You never knew half about me; you only

knew me as a governess; you little think what my beginnings were.'

'I have guessed. I have many times told myself that your early life was

superior to your position when I first met you. I think I may say

without presumption that I recognize a lady by birth when I see her,

even under reverses of an extreme kind. And certainly there is this to

be said, that the fact of having been bred in a wealthy home does

slightly redeem an attempt to attain to such a one again.'

Ethelberta smiled a smile of many meanings.

'However, we are wasting words,' he resumed cheerfully. 'It is better

for us to part as we met, and continue to be the strangers that we have

become to each other. I owe you an apology for having been betrayed into

more feeling than I had a right to show, and let us part friends. Good

night, Mrs. Petherwin, and success to you. We may meet again, some day,

I hope.'

'Good night,' she said, extending her hand. He touched it, turned about,

and in a short time nothing remained of him but quick regular brushings

against the heather in the deep broad shadow of the moor.

Ethelberta slowly moved on in the direction that he had pointed out.

This meeting had surprised her in several ways. First, there was the

conjuncture itself; but more than that was the fact that he had not

parted from her with any of the tragic resentment that she had from time

to time imagined for that scene if it ever occurred. Yet there was

really nothing wonderful in this: it is part of the generous nature of a

bachelor to be not indisposed to forgive a portionless sweetheart who,

by marrying elsewhere, has deprived him of the bliss of being obliged to

marry her himself. Ethelberta would have been disappointed quite had

there not been a comforting development of exasperation in the middle

part of his talk; but after all it formed a poor substitute for the

loving hatred she had expected.

When she reached the hotel the lamp over the door showed a face a little

flushed, but the agitation which at first had possessed her was gone to

a mere nothing. In the hall she met a slender woman wearing a silk dress

of that peculiar black which in sunlight proclaims itself to have once

seen better days as a brown, and days even better than those as a

lavender, green, or blue.

'Menlove,' said the lady, 'did you notice if any gentleman observed and

followed me when I left the hotel to go for a walk this evening?'

The lady's-maid, thus suddenly pulled up in a night forage after lovers,

put a hand to her forehead to show that there was no mistake about her

having begun to meditate on receiving orders to that effect, and said at

last, 'You once told me, ma'am, if you recollect, that when you were

dressed, I was not to go staring out of the window after you as if you

were a doll I had just manufactured and sent round for sale.'

'Yes, so I did.'

'So I didn't see if anybody followed you this evening.'

'Then did you hear any gentleman arrive here by the late train last

night?'

'O no, ma'am-how could I?' said Mrs. Menlove-an exclamation which was

more apposite than her mistress suspected, considering that the speaker,

after retiring from duty, had slipped down her dark skirt to reveal a

light, puffed, and festooned one, put on a hat and feather, together

with several pennyweights of metal in the form of rings, brooches, and

earrings-all in a time whilst one could count a hundred-and enjoyed

half-an-hour of prime courtship by an honourable young waiter of the

town, who had proved constant as the magnet to the pole for the space of

the day and a half that she had known him.

Going at once upstairs, Ethelberta ran down the passage, and after some

hesitation softly opened the door of the sitting-room in the best suite

of apartments that the inn could boast of.

In this room sat an elderly lady writing by the light of two candles

with green shades. Well knowing, as it seemed, who the intruder was, she

continued her occupation, and her visitor advanced and stood beside the

table. The old lady wore her spectacles low down her cheek, her glance

being depressed to about the slope of her straight white nose in order

to look through them. Her mouth was pursed up to almost a youthful shape

as she formed the letters with her pen, and a slight move of the lip

accompanied every downstroke. There were two large antique rings on her

forefinger, against which the quill rubbed in moving backwards and

forwards, thereby causing a secondary noise rivalling the primary one of

the nib upon the paper.

'Mamma,' said the younger lady, 'here I am at last.'

A writer's mind in the midst of a sentence being like a ship at sea,

knowing no rest or comfort till safely piloted into the harbour of a

full stop, Lady Petherwin just replied with 'What,' in an occupied tone,

not rising to interrogation. After signing her name to the letter, she

raised her eyes.

'Why, how late you are, Ethelberta, and how heated you look!' she said.

'I have been quite alarmed about you. What do you say has happened?'

The great, chief, and altogether eclipsing thing that had happened was

the accidental meeting with an old lover whom she had once quarrelled

with; and Ethelberta's honesty would have delivered the tidings at once,

had not, unfortunately, all the rest of her attributes been dead against

that act, for the old lady's sake even more than for her own.

'I saw a great cruel bird chasing a harmless duck!' she exclaimed

innocently. 'And I ran after to see what the end of it would be-much

further than I had any idea of going. However, the duck came to a pond,

and in running round it to see the end of the fight, I could not

remember which way I had come.'

'Mercy!' said her mother-in-law, lifting her large eyelids, heavy as

window-shutters, and spreading out her fingers like the horns of a

snail. 'You might have sunk up to your knees and got lost in that swampy

place-such a time of night, too. What a tomboy you are! And how did you

find your way home after all!'

'O, some man showed me the way, and then I had no difficulty, and after

that I came along leisurely.'

'I thought you had been running all the way; you look so warm.'

'It is a warm evening. . . . Yes, and I have been thinking of old times

as I walked along,' she said, 'and how people's positions in life alter.

Have I not heard you say that while I was at Bonn, at school, some

family that we had known had their household broken up when the father

died, and that the children went away you didn't know where?'

'Do you mean the Julians?'

'Yes, that was the name.'

'Why, of course you know it was the Julians. Young Julian had a day or

two's fancy for you one summer, had he not?-just after you came to us,

at the same time, or just before it, that my poor boy and you were so

desperately attached to each other.'

'O yes, I recollect,' said Ethelberta. 'And he had a sister, I think. I

wonder where they went to live after the family collapse.'

'I do not know,' said Lady Petherwin, taking up another sheet of paper.

'I have a dim notion that the son, who had been brought up to no

profession, became a teacher of music in some country town-music having

always been his hobby. But the facts are not very distinct in my

memory.' And she dipped her pen for another letter.

Ethelberta, with a rather fallen countenance, then left her mother-in-

law, and went where all ladies are supposed to go when they want to

torment their minds in comfort-to her own room. Here she thoughtfully

sat down awhile, and some time later she rang for her maid.

'Menlove,' she said, without looking towards a rustle and half a

footstep that had just come in at the door, but leaning back in her

chair and speaking towards the corner of the looking-glass, 'will you go

down and find out if any gentleman named Julian has been staying in this

house? Get to know it, I mean, Menlove, not by directly inquiring; you

have ways of getting to know things, have you not? If the devoted George

were here now, he would help-'

'George was nothing to me, ma'am.'

'James, then.'

'And I only had James for a week or ten days: when I found he was a

married man, I encouraged his addresses very little indeed.'

'If you had encouraged him heart and soul, you couldn't have fumed more

at the loss of him. But please to go and make that inquiry, will you,

Menlove?'

In a few minutes Ethelberta's woman was back again. 'A gentleman of that

name stayed here last night, and left this afternoon.'

'Will you find out his address?'

Now the lady's-maid had already been quick-witted enough to find out

that, and indeed all about him; but it chanced that a fashionable

illustrated weekly paper had just been sent from the bookseller's, and

being in want of a little time to look it over before it reached her

mistress's hands, Mrs. Menlove retired, as if to go and ask the

question-to stand meanwhile under the gas-lamp in the passage,

inspecting the fascinating engravings. But as time will not wait for

tire-women, a natural length of absence soon elapsed, and she returned

again and said,

'His address is, Upper Street, Sandbourne.'

'Thank you, that will do,' replied her mistress.

The hour grew later, and that dreamy period came round when ladies'

fancies, that have lain shut up close as their fans during the day,

begin to assert themselves anew. At this time a good guess at

Ethelberta's thoughts might have been made from her manner of passing

the minutes away. Instead of reading, entering notes in her diary, or

doing any ordinary thing, she walked to and fro, curled her pretty

nether lip within her pretty upper one a great many times, made a cradle

of her locked fingers, and paused with fixed eyes where the walls of the

room set limits upon her walk to look at nothing but a picture within

her mind.

2. CHRISTOPHER'S HOUSE-SANDBOURNE TOWN-SANDBOURNE MOOR

During the wet autumn of the same year, the postman passed one morning

as usual into a plain street that ran through the less fashionable

portion of Sandbourne, a modern coast town and watering-place not many

miles from the ancient Anglebury. He knocked at the door of a flat-faced

brick house, and it was opened by a slight, thoughtful young man, with

his hat on, just then coming out. The postman put into his hands a book

packet, addressed, 'Christopher Julian, Esq.'

Christopher took the package upstairs, opened it with curiosity, and

discovered within a green volume of poems, by an anonymous writer, the

title-page bearing the inscription, 'Metres by E.' The book was new,

though it was cut, and it appeared to have been looked into. The young

man, after turning it over and wondering where it came from, laid it on

the table and went his way, being in haste to fulfil his engagements for

the day.

In the evening, on returning home from his occupations, he sat himself

down cosily to read the newly-arrived volume. The winds of this

uncertain season were snarling in the chimneys, and drops of rain spat

themselves into the fire, revealing plainly that the young man's room

was not far enough from the top of the house to admit of a twist in the

flue, and revealing darkly a little more, if that social rule-of-three

inverse, the higher in lodgings the lower in pocket, were applicable

here. However, the aspect of the room, though homely, was cheerful, a

somewhat contradictory group of furniture suggesting that the collection

consisted of waifs and strays from a former home, the grimy faces of the

old articles exercising a curious and subduing effect on the bright

faces of the new. An oval mirror of rococo workmanship, and a heavy

cabinet-piano with a cornice like that of an Egyptian temple, adjoined a

harmonium of yesterday, and a harp that was almost as new. Printed music

of the last century, and manuscript music of the previous evening, lay

there in such quantity as to endanger the tidiness of a retreat which

was indeed only saved from a chronic state of litter by a pair of hands

that sometimes played, with the lightness of breezes, about the sewing-

machine standing in a remote corner-if any corner could be called remote

in a room so small.

Fire lights and shades from the shaking flames struck in a butterfly

flutter on the underparts of the mantelshelf, and upon the reader's

cheek as he sat. Presently, and all at once, a much greater intentness

pervaded his face: he turned back again, and read anew the subject that

had arrested his eyes. He was a man whose countenance varied with his

mood, though it kept somewhat in the rear of that mood. He looked sad

when he felt almost serene, and only serene when he felt quite cheerful.

It is a habit people acquire who have had repressing experiences.

A faint smile and flush now lightened his face, and jumping up he opened

the door and exclaimed, 'Faith! will you come here for a moment?'

A prompt step was heard on the stairs, and the young person addressed as

Faith entered the room. She was small in figure, and bore less in the

form of her features than in their shades when changing from expression

to expression the evidence that she was his sister.

'Faith-I want your opinion. But, stop, read this first.' He laid his

finger upon a page in the book, and placed it in her hand.

The girl drew from her pocket a little green-leather sheath, worn at the

edges to whity-brown, and out of that a pair of spectacles,

unconsciously looking round the room for a moment as she did so, as if

to ensure that no stranger saw her in the act of using them. Here a

weakness was uncovered at once; it was a small, pretty, and natural one;

indeed, as weaknesses go in the great world, it might almost have been

called a commendable trait. She then began to read, without sitting

down.

These 'Metres by E.' composed a collection of soft and marvellously

musical rhymes, of a nature known as the vers de soci�t�. The lines

presented a series of playful defences of the supposed strategy of

womankind in fascination, courtship, and marriage-the whole teeming with

ideas bright as mirrors and just as unsubstantial, yet forming a

brilliant argument to justify the ways of girls to men. The pervading

characteristic of the mass was the means of forcing into notice, by

strangeness of contrast, the single mournful poem that the book

contained. It was placed at the very end, and under the title of

'Cancelled Words,' formed a whimsical and rather affecting love-lament,

somewhat in the tone of many of Sir Thomas Wyatt's poems. This was the

piece which had arrested Christopher's attention, and had been pointed

out by him to his sister Faith.

'It is very touching,' she said, looking up.

'What do you think I suspect about it-that the poem is addressed to me!

Do you remember, when father was alive and we were at Solentsea that

season, about a governess who came there with a Sir Ralph Petherwin and

his wife, people with a sickly little daughter and a grown-up son?'

'I never saw any of them. I think I remember your knowing something

about a young man of that name.'

'Yes, that was the family. Well, the governess there was a very

attractive woman, and somehow or other I got more interested in her than

I ought to have done (this is necessary to the history), and we used to

meet in romantic places-and-and that kind of thing, you know. The end of

it was, she jilted me and married the son.'

'You were anxious to get away from Solentsea.'

'Was I? Then that was chiefly the reason. Well, I decided to think no

more of her, and I was helped to do it by the troubles that came upon us

shortly afterwards; it is a blessed arrangement that one does not feel a

sentimental grief at all when additional grief comes in the shape of

practical misfortune. However, on the first afternoon of the little

holiday I took for my walking tour last summer, I came to Anglebury, and

stayed about the neighbourhood for a day or two to see what it was like,

thinking we might settle there if this place failed us. The next evening

I left, and walked across the heath to Flychett-that's a village about

five miles further on-so as to be that distance on my way for next

morning; and while I was crossing the heath there I met this very woman.

We talked a little, because we couldn't help it-you may imagine the kind

of talk it was-and parted as coolly as we had met. Now this strange book

comes to me; and I have a strong conviction that she is the writer of

it, for that poem sketches a similar scene-or rather suggests it; and

the tone generally seems the kind of thing she would write-not that she

was a sad woman, either.'

'She seems to be a warm-hearted, impulsive woman, to judge from these

tender verses.'

'People who print very warm words have sometimes very cold manners. I

wonder if it is really her writing, and if she has sent it to me!'

'Would it not be a singular thing for a married woman to do? Though of

course'-(she removed her spectacles as if they hindered her from

thinking, and hid them under the timepiece till she should go on

reading)-'of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and

custom is no argument with them. I am sure I would not have sent it to a

man for the world!'

'I do not see any absolute harm in her sending it. Perhaps she thinks

that, since it is all over, we may as well die friends.'

'If I were her husband I should have doubts about the dying. And "all

over" may not be so plain to other people as it is to you.'

'Perhaps not. And when a man checks all a woman's finer sentiments

towards him by marrying her, it is only natural that it should find a

vent somewhere. However, she probably does not know of my downfall since

father's death. I hardly think she would have cared to do it had she

known that. (I am assuming that it is Ethelberta-Mrs. Petherwin-who

sends it: of course I am not sure.) We must remember that when I knew

her I was a gentleman at ease, who had not the least notion that I

should have to work for a living, and not only so, but should have first

to invent a profession to work at out of my old tastes.'

'Kit, you have made two mistakes in your thoughts of that lady. Even

though I don't know her, I can show you that. Now I'll tell you! the

first is in thinking that a married lady would send the book with that

poem in it without at any rate a slight doubt as to its propriety: the

second is in supposing that, had she wished to do it, she would have

given the thing up because of our misfortunes. With a true woman the

second reason would have had no effect had she once got over the first.

I'm a woman, and that's why I know.'

Christopher said nothing, and turned over the poems.

He lived by teaching music, and, in comparison with starving, thrived;

though the wealthy might possibly have said that in comparison with

thriving he starved. During this night he hummed airs in bed, thought he

would do for the ballad of the fair poetess what other musicians had

done for the ballads of other fair poetesses, and dreamed that she

smiled on him as her prototype Sappho smiled on Phaon.

The next morning before starting on his rounds a new circumstance

induced him to direct his steps to the bookseller's, and ask a question.

He had found on examining the wrapper of the volume that it was posted

in his own town.

'No copy of the book has been sold by me,' the bookseller's voice

replied from far up the Alpine height of the shop-ladder, where he stood

dusting stale volumes, as was his habit of a morning before customers

came. 'I have never heard of it-probably never shall;' and he shook out

the duster, so as to hit the delicate mean between stifling Christopher

and not stifling him.

'Surely you don't live by your shop?' said Christopher, drawing back.

The bookseller's eyes rested on the speaker's; his face changed; he came

down and placed his hand on the lapel of Christopher's coat. 'Sir,' he

said, 'country bookselling is a miserable, impoverishing, exasperating

thing in these days. Can you understand the rest?'

'I can; I forgive a starving man anything,' said Christopher.

'You go a long way very suddenly,' said the book seller. 'Half as much

pity would have seemed better. However, wait a moment.' He looked into a

list of new books, and added: 'The work you allude to was only published

last week; though, mind you, if it had been published last century I

might not have sold a copy.'

Although his time was precious, Christopher had now become so interested

in the circumstance that the unseen sender was somebody breathing his

own atmosphere, possibly the very writer herself-the book being too new

to be known-that he again passed through the blue shadow of the spire

which stretched across the street to-day, and went towards the post-

office, animated by a bright intention-to ask the postmaster if he knew

the handwriting in which the packet was addressed.

Now the postmaster was an acquaintance of Christopher's, but, as

regarded putting that question to him, there was a difficulty.

Everything turned upon whether the postmaster at the moment of asking

would be in his under-government manner, or in the manner with which

mere nature had endowed him. In the latter case his reply would be all

that could be wished; in the former, a man who had sunk in society might

as well put his tongue into a mousetrap as make an inquiry so obviously

outside the pale of legality as was this.

So he postponed his business for the present, and refrained from

entering till he passed by after dinner, when pleasant malt liquor, of

that capacity for cheering which is expressed by four large letter X's

marching in a row, had refilled the globular trunk of the postmaster and

neutralized some of the effects of officiality. The time was well

chosen, but the inquiry threatened to prove fruitless: the postmaster

had never, to his knowledge, seen the writing before. Christopher was

turning away when a clerk in the background looked up and stated that

some young lady had brought a packet with such an address upon it into

the office two days earlier to get it stamped.

'Do you know her?' said Christopher.

'I have seen her about the neighbourhood. She goes by every morning; I

think she comes into the town from beyond the common, and returns again

between four and five in the afternoon.'

'What does she wear?'

'A white wool jacket with zigzags of black braid.'

Christopher left the post-office and went his way. Among his other

pupils there were two who lived at some distance from Sandbourne-one of

them in the direction indicated as that habitually taken by the young

person; and in the afternoon, as he returned homeward, Christopher

loitered and looked around. At first he could see nobody; but when about

a mile from the outskirts of the town he discerned a light spot ahead of

him, which actually turned out to be the jacket alluded to. In due time

he met the wearer face to face; she was not Ethelberta Petherwin-quite a

different sort of individual. He had long made up his mind that this

would be the case, yet he was in some indescribable way disappointed.

Of the two classes into which gentle young women naturally divide, those

who grow red at their weddings, and those who grow pale, the present one

belonged to the former class. She was an April-natured, pink-cheeked

girl, with eyes that would have made any jeweller in England think of

his trade-one who evidently took her day in the daytime, frequently

caught the early worm, and had little to do with yawns or candlelight.

She came and passed him; he fancied that her countenance changed. But

one may fancy anything, and the pair receded each from each without

turning their heads. He could not speak to her, plain and simple as she

seemed.

It is rarely that a man who can be entered and made to throb by the

channel of his ears is not open to a similar attack through the channel

of his eyes-for many doors will admit to one mansion-allowance being

made for the readier capacity of chosen and practised organs. Hence the

beauties, concords, and eloquences of the female form were never without

their effect upon Christopher, a born musician, artist, poet, seer,

mouthpiece-whichever a translator of Nature's oracles into simple speech

may be called. The young girl who had gone by was fresh and pleasant;

moreover, she was a sort of mysterious HANDlink between himself and the

past, which these things were vividly reviving in him.

The following week Christopher met her again. She had not much dignity,

he had not much reserve, and the sudden resolution to have a holiday

which sometimes impels a plump heart to rise up against a brain that

overweights it was not to be resisted. He just lifted his hat, and put

the only question he could think of as a beginning: 'Have I the pleasure

of addressing the author of a book of very melodious poems that was sent

me the other day?'

The girl's forefinger twirled rapidly the loop of braid that it had

previously been twirling slowly, and drawing in her breath, she said,

'No, sir.'

'The sender, then?'

'Yes.'

She somehow presented herself as so insignificant by the combined effect

of the manner and the words that Christopher lowered his method of

address to her level at once. 'Ah,' he said, 'such an atmosphere as the

writer of "Metres by E." seems to breathe would soon spoil cheeks that

are fresh and round as lady-apples-eh, little girl? But are you disposed

to tell me that writer's name?'

By applying a general idea to a particular case a person with the best

of intentions may find himself immediately landed in a quandary. In

saying to the country girl before him what would have suited the mass of

country lasses well enough, Christopher had offended her beyond the cure

of compliment.

'I am not disposed to tell the writer's name,' she replied, with a

dudgeon that was very great for one whose whole stock of it was a

trifle. And she passed on and left him standing alone.

Thus further conversation was checked; but, through having rearranged

the hours of his country lessons, Christopher met her the next

Wednesday, and the next Friday, and throughout the following week-no

further words passing between them. For a while she went by very

demurely, apparently mindful of his offence. But effrontery is not

proved to be part of a man's nature till he has been guilty of a second

act: the best of men may commit a first through accident or ignorance-

may even be betrayed into it by over-zeal for experiment. Some such

conclusion may or may not have been arrived at by the girl with the

lady-apple cheeks; at any rate, after the lapse of another week a new

spectacle presented itself; her redness deepened whenever Christopher

passed her by, and embarrassment pervaded her from the lowest stitch to

the tip of her feather. She had little chance of escaping him by

diverging from the road, for a figure could be seen across the open

ground to the distance of half a mile on either side. One day as he drew

near as usual, she met him as women meet a cloud of dust-she turned and

looked backwards till he had passed.

This would have been disconcerting but for one reason: Christopher was

ceasing to notice her. He was a man who often, when walking abroad, and

looking as it were at the scene before his eyes, discerned successes and

failures, friends and relations, episodes of childhood, wedding feasts

and funerals, the landscape suffering greatly by these visions, until it

became no more than the patterned wall-tints about the paintings in a

gallery; something necessary to the tone, yet not regarded. Nothing but

a special concentration of himself on externals could interrupt this

habit, and now that her appearance along the way had changed from a

chance to a custom he began to lapse again into the old trick. He gazed

once or twice at her form without seeing it: he did not notice that she

trembled.

He sometimes read as he walked, and book in hand he frequently

approached her now. This went on till six weeks had passed from the time

of their first encounter. Latterly might have been once or twice heard,

when he had moved out of earshot, a sound like a small gasping sigh; but

no arrangements were disturbed, and Christopher continued to keep down

his eyes as persistently as a saint in a church window.

The last day of his engagement had arrived, and with it the last of his

walks that way. On his final return he carried in his hand a bunch of

flowers which had been presented to him at the country-house where his

lessons were given. He was taking them home to his sister Faith, who

prized the lingering blossoms of the seeding season. Soon appeared as

usual his fellow-traveller; whereupon Christopher looked down upon his

nosegay. 'Sweet simple girl,' he thought, 'I'll endeavour to make peace

with her by means of these flowers before we part for good.'

When she came up he held them out to her and said, 'Will you allow me to

present you with these?'

The bright colours of the nosegay instantly attracted the girl's hand-

perhaps before there had been time for thought to thoroughly construe

the position; for it happened that when her arm was stretched into the

air she steadied it quickly, and stood with the pose of a statue-rigid

with uncertainty. But it was too late to refuse: Christopher had put the

nosegay within her fingers. Whatever pleasant expression of thanks may

have appeared in her eyes fell only on the bunch of flowers, for during

the whole transaction they reached to no higher level than that. To say

that he was coming no more seemed scarcely necessary under the

circumstances, and wishing her 'Good afternoon' very heartily, he passed

on.

He had learnt by this time her occupation, which was that of pupil-

teacher at one of the schools in the town, whither she walked daily from

a village near. If he had not been poor and the little teacher humble,

Christopher might possibly have been tempted to inquire more briskly

about her, and who knows how such a pursuit might have ended? But hard

externals rule volatile sentiment, and under these untoward influences

the girl and the book and the truth about its author were matters upon

which he could not afford to expend much time. All Christopher did was

to think now and then of the pretty innocent face and round deep eyes,

not once wondering if the mind which enlivened them ever thought of him.

3. SANDBOURNE MOOR (continued)

It was one of those hostile days of the year when chatterbox ladies

remain miserably in their homes to save the carriage and harness, when

clerks' wives hate living in lodgings, when vehicles and people appear

in the street with duplicates of themselves underfoot, when bricklayers,

slaters, and other out-door journeymen sit in a shed and drink beer,

when ducks and drakes play with hilarious delight at their own family

game, or spread out one wing after another in the slower enjoyment of

letting the delicious moisture penetrate to their innermost down. The

smoke from the flues of Sandbourne had barely strength enough to emerge

into the drizzling rain, and hung down the sides of each chimney-pot

like the streamer of a becalmed ship; and a troop of rats might have

rattled down the pipes from roof to basement with less noise than did

the water that day.

On the broad moor beyond the town, where Christopher's meetings with the

teacher had so regularly occurred, were a stream and some large pools;

and beside one of these, near some hatches and a weir, stood a little

square building, not much larger inside than the Lord Mayor's coach. It

was known simply as 'The Weir House.' On this wet afternoon, which was

the one following the day of Christopher's last lesson over the plain, a

nearly invisible smoke came from the puny chimney of the hut. Though the

door was closed, sounds of chatting and mirth fizzed from the interior,

and would have told anybody who had come near-which nobody did-that the

usually empty shell was tenanted to-day.

The scene within was a large fire in a fireplace to which the whole

floor of the house was no more than a hearthstone. The occupants were

two gentlemanly persons, in shooting costume, who had been traversing

the moor for miles in search of wild duck and teal, a waterman, and a

small spaniel. In the corner stood their guns, and two or three wild

mallards, which represented the scanty product of their morning's

labour, the iridescent necks of the dead birds replying to every flicker

of the fire. The two sportsmen were smoking, and their man was mostly

occupying himself in poking and stirring the fire with a stick: all

three appeared to be pretty well wetted.

One of the gentlemen, by way of varying the not very exhilarating study

of four brick walls within microscopic distance of his eye, turned to a

small square hole which admitted light and air to the hut, and looked

out upon the dreary prospect before him. The wide concave of cloud, of

the monotonous hue of dull pewter, formed an unbroken hood over the

level from horizon to horizon; beneath it, reflecting its wan lustre,

was the glazed high-road which stretched, hedgeless and ditchless, past

a directing-post where another road joined it, and on to the less

regular ground beyond, lying like a riband unrolled across the scene,

till it vanished over the furthermost undulation. Beside the pools were

occasional tall sheaves of flags and sedge, and about the plain a few

bushes, these forming the only obstructions to a view otherwise

unbroken.

The sportsman's attention was attracted by a figure in a state of

gradual enlargement as it approached along the road.

'I should think that if pleasure can't tempt a native out of doors to-

day, business will never force him out,' he observed. 'There is, for the

first time, somebody coming along the road.'

'If business don't drag him out pleasure'll never tempt en, is more like

our nater in these parts, sir,' said the man, who was looking into the

fire.

The conversation showed no vitality, and down it dropped dead as before,

the man who was standing up continuing to gaze into the moisture. What

had at first appeared as an epicene shape the decreasing space resolved

into a cloaked female under an umbrella: she now relaxed her pace, till,

reaching the directing-post where the road branched into two, she paused

and looked about her. Instead of coming further she slowly retraced her

steps for about a hundred yards.

'That's an appointment,' said the first speaker, as he removed the cigar

from his lips; 'and by the lords, what a day and place for an

appointment with a woman!'

'What's an appointment?' inquired his friend, a town young man, with a

Tussaud complexion and well-pencilled brows half way up his forehead, so

that his upper eyelids appeared to possess the uncommon quality of

tallness.

'Look out here, and you'll see. By that directing-post, where the two

roads meet. As a man devoted to art, Ladywell, who has had the honour of

being hung higher up on the Academy walls than any other living painter,

you should take out your sketch-book and dash off the scene.'

Where nothing particular is going on, one incident makes a drama; and,

interested in that proportion, the art-sportsman puts up his eyeglass (a

form he adhered to before firing at game that had risen, by which

merciful arrangement the bird got safe off), placed his face beside his

companion's, and also peered through the opening. The young pupil-

teacher-for she was the object of their scrutiny-re-approached the spot

whereon she had been accustomed for the last many weeks of her journey

home to meet Christopher, now for the first time missing, and again she

seemed reluctant to pass the hand-post, for that marked the point where

the chance of seeing him ended. She glided backwards as before, this

time keeping her face still to the front, as if trying to persuade the

world at large, and her own shamefacedness, that she had not yet

approached the place at all.

'Query, how long will she wait for him (for it is a man to a

certainty)?' resumed the elder of the smokers, at the end of several

minutes of silence, when, full of vacillation and doubt, she became lost

to view behind some bushes. 'Will she reappear?' The smoking went on,

and up she came into open ground as before, and walked by.

'I wonder who the girl is, to come to such a place in this weather?

There she is again,' said the young man called Ladywell.

'Some cottage lass, not yet old enough to make the most of the value set

on her by her follower, small as that appears to be. Now we may get an

idea of the hour named by the fellow for the appointment, for, depend

upon it, the time when she first came-about five minutes ago-was the

time he should have been there. It is now getting on towards five-half-

past four was doubtless the time mentioned.'

'She's not come o' purpose: 'tis her way home from school every day,'

said the waterman.

'An experiment on woman's endurance and patience under neglect. Two to

one against her staying a quarter of an hour.'

'The same odds against her not staying till five would be nearer

probability. What's half-an-hour to a girl in love?'

'On a moorland in wet weather it is thirty perceptible minutes to any

fireside man, woman, or beast in Christendom-minutes that can be felt,

like the Egyptian plague of darkness. Now, little girl, go home: he is

not worth it.'

Twenty minutes passed, and the girl returned miserably to the hand-post,

still to wander back to her retreat behind the sedge, and lead any

chance comer from the opposite quarter to believe that she had not yet

reached this ultimate point beyond which a meeting with Christopher was

impossible.

'Now you'll find that she means to wait the complete half-hour, and then

off she goes with a broken heart.'

All three now looked through the hole to test the truth of the

prognostication. The hour of five completed itself on their watches; the

girl again came forward. And then the three in ambuscade could see her

pull out her handkerchief and place it to her eyes.

'She's grieving now because he has not come. Poor little woman, what a

brute he must be; for a broken heart in a woman means a broken vow in a

man, as I infer from a thousand instances in experience, romance, and

history. Don't open the door till she is gone, Ladywell; it will only

disturb her.'

As they had guessed, the pupil-teacher, hearing the distant town-clock

strike the hour, gave way to her fancy no longer, and launched into the

diverging path. This lingering for Christopher's arrival had, as is

known, been founded on nothing more of the nature of an assignation than

lay in his regular walk along the plain at that time every Monday,

Wednesday, and Friday of the six previous weeks. It must be said that he

was very far indeed from divining that his injudicious peace-offering of

the flowers had stirred into life such a wearing, anxious, hopeful,

despairing solicitude as this, which had been latent for some time

during his constant meetings with the little stranger.

She vanished in the mist towards the left, and the loiterers in the hut

began to move and open the door, remarking, 'Now then for Wyndway House,

a change of clothes, and a dinner.'

4. SANDBOURNE PIER-ROAD TO WYNDWAY-BALL-ROOM IN WYNDWAY HOUSE

The last light of a winter day had gone down behind the houses of

Sandbourne, and night was shut close over all. Christopher, about eight

o'clock, was standing at the end of the pier with his back towards the

open sea, whence the waves were pushing to the shore in frills and coils

that were just rendered visible in all their bleak instability by the

row of lights along the sides of the jetty, the rapid motion landward of

the wavetips producing upon his eye an apparent progress of the pier out

to sea. This pier-head was a spot which Christopher enjoyed visiting on

such moaning and sighing nights as the present, when the sportive and

variegated throng that haunted the pier on autumn days was no longer

there, and he seemed alone with weather and the invincible sea.

Somebody came towards him along the deserted footway, and rays from the

nearest lamp streaked the face of his sister Faith.

'O Christopher, I knew you were here,' she said eagerly. 'You are

wanted; there's a servant come from Wyndway House for you. He is sent to

ask if you can come immediately to play at a little dance they have

resolved upon this evening-quite suddenly it seems. If you can come, you

must bring with you any assistant you can lay your hands upon at a

moment's notice, he says.'

'Wyndway House; why should the people send for me above all other

musicians in the town?'

Faith did not know. 'If you really decide to go,' she said, as they

walked homeward, 'you might take me as your assistant. I should answer

the purpose, should I not, Kit? since it is only a dance or two they

seem to want.'

'And your harp I suppose you mean. Yes; you might be competent to take a

part. It cannot be a regular ball; they would have had the quadrille

band for anything of that sort. Faith-we'll go. However, let us see the

man first, and inquire particulars.'

Reaching home, Christopher found at his door a horse and wagonette in

charge of a man-servant in livery, who repeated what Faith had told her

brother. Wyndway House was a well-known country-seat three or four miles

out of the town, and the coachman mentioned that if they were going it

would be well that they should get ready to start as soon as they

conveniently could, since he had been told to return by ten if possible.

Christopher quickly prepared himself, and put a new string or two into

Faith's harp, by which time she also was dressed; and, wrapping up

herself and her instrument safe from the night air, away they drove at

half-past nine.

'Is it a large party?' said Christopher, as they whizzed along.

'No, sir; it is what we call a dance-that is, 'tis like a ball, you

know, on a small scale-a ball on a spurt, that you never thought of till

you had it. In short, it grew out of a talk at dinner, I believe; and

some of the young people present wanted a jig, and didn't care to play

themselves, you know, young ladies being an idle class of society at the

best of times. We've a house full of sleeping company, you understand-

been there a week some of 'em-most of 'em being mistress's relations.'

'They probably found it a little dull.'

'Well, yes-it is rather dull for 'em-Christmas-time and all. As soon as

it was proposed they were wild for sending post-haste for somebody or

other to play to them.'

'Did they name me particularly?' said Christopher.

'Yes; "Mr. Christopher Julian," she says. "The gent who's turned music-

man?" I said. "Yes, that's him," says she.'

'There were music-men living nearer to your end of the town than I.'

'Yes, but I know it was you particular: though I don't think mistress

thought anything about you at first. Mr. Joyce-that's the butler-said

that your name was mentioned to our old party, when he was in the room,

by a young lady staying with us, and mistress says then, "The Julians

have had a downfall, and the son has taken to music." Then when dancing

was talked of, they said, "O, let's have him by all means."'

'Was the young lady who first inquired for my family the same one who

said, "Let's have him by all means?"'

'O no; but it was on account of her asking that the rest said they would

like you to play-at least that's as I had it from Joyce.'

'Do you know that lady's name?'

'Mrs. Petherwin.'

'Ah!'

'Cold, sir?'

'O no.'

Christopher did not like to question the man any further, though what he

had heard added new life to his previous curiosity; and they drove along

the way in silence, Faith's figure, wrapped up to the top of her head,

cutting into the sky behind them like a sugar-loaf. Such gates as

crossed the roads had been left open by the forethought of the coachman,

and, passing the lodge, they proceeded about half-a-mile along a private

drive, then ascended a rise, and came in view of the front of the

mansion, punctured with windows that were now mostly lighted up.

'What is that?' said Faith, catching a glimpse of something that the

carriage-lamp showed on the face of one wall as they passed, a marble

bas-relief of some battle-piece, built into the stonework.

'That's the scene of the death of one of the squire's forefathers-

Colonel Sir Martin Jones, who was killed at the moment of victory in the

battle of Salamanca-but I haven't been here long enough to know the

rights of it. When I am in one of my meditations, as I wait here with

the carriage sometimes, I think how many more get killed at the moment

of victory than at the moment of defeat. This is the entrance for you,

sir.' And he turned the corner and pulled up before a side door.

They alighted and went in, Christopher shouldering Faith's harp, and she

marching modestly behind, with curly-eared music-books under her arm.

They were shown into the house-steward's room, and ushered thence along

a badly-lit passage and past a door within which a hum and laughter were

audible. The door next to this was then opened for them, and they

entered.

Scarcely had Faith, or Christopher either, ever beheld a more shining

scene than was presented by the saloon in which they now found

themselves. Coming direct from the gloomy park, and led to the room by

that back passage from the servants' quarter, the light from the

chandelier and branches against the walls, striking on gilding at all

points, quite dazzled their sight for a minute or two; it caused Faith

to move forward with her eyes on the floor, and filled Christopher with

an impulse to turn back again into some dusky corner where every thread

of his not over-new dress suit-rather moth-eaten through lack of feasts

for airing it-could be counted less easily.

He was soon seated before a grand piano, and Faith sat down under the

shadow of her harp, both being arranged on a dais within an alcove at

one end of the room. A screen of ivy and holly had been constructed

across the front of this recess for the games of the children on

Christmas Eve, and it still remained there, a small creep-hole being

left for entrance and exit.

Then the merry guests tumbled through doors at the further end, and

dancing began. The mingling of black-coated men and bright ladies gave a

charming appearance to the groups as seen by Faith and her brother, the

whole spectacle deriving an unexpected novelty from the accident of

reaching their eyes through interstices in the tracery of green leaves,

which added to the picture a softness that it would not otherwise have

possessed. On the other hand, the musicians, having a much weaker light,

could hardly be discerned by the performers in the dance.

The music was now rattling on, and the ladies in their foam-like dresses

were busily threading and spinning about the floor, when Faith, casually

looking up into her brother's face, was surprised to see that a change

had come over it. At the end of the quadrille he leant across to her

before she had time to speak, and said quietly, 'She's here!'

'Who?' said Faith, for she had not heard the words of the coachman.

'Ethelberta.'

'Which is she?' asked Faith, peeping through with the keenest interest.

'The one who has the skirts of her dress looped up with convolvulus

flowers-the one with her hair fastened in a sort of Venus knot behind;

she has just been dancing with that perfumed piece of a man they call

Mr. Ladywell-it is he with the high eyebrows arched like a girl's.' He

added, with a wrinkled smile, 'I cannot for my life see anybody

answering to the character of husband to her, for every man takes notice

of her.'

They were interrupted by another dance being called for, and then, his

fingers tapping about upon the keys as mechanically as fowls pecking at

barleycorns, Christopher gave himself up with a curious and far from

unalloyed pleasure to the occupation of watching Ethelberta, now again

crossing the field of his vision like a returned comet whose

characteristics were becoming purely historical. She was a plump-armed

creature, with a white round neck as firm as a fort-altogether a

vigorous shape, as refreshing to the eye as the green leaves through

which he beheld her. She danced freely, and with a zest that was

apparently irrespective of partners. He had been waiting long to hear

her speak, and when at length her voice did reach his ears, it was the

revelation of a strange matter to find how great a thing that small

event had become to him. He knew the old utterance-rapid but not

frequent, an obstructive thought causing sometimes a sudden halt in the

midst of a stream of words. But the features by which a cool observer

would have singled her out from others in his memory when asking himself

what she was like, was a peculiar gaze into imaginary far-away distance

when making a quiet remark to a partner-not with contracted eyes like a

seafaring man, but with an open full look-a remark in which little words

in a low tone were made to express a great deal, as several single

gentlemen afterwards found.

The production of dance-music when the criticizing stage among the

dancers has passed, and they have grown full of excitement and animal

spirits, does not require much concentration of thought in the producers

thereof; and desultory conversation accordingly went on between Faith

and her brother from time to time.

'Kit,' she said on one occasion, 'are you looking at the way in which

the flowers are fastened to the leaves?-taking a mean advantage of being

at the back of the tapestry? You cannot think how you stare at them.'

'I was looking through them-certainly not at them. I have a feeling of

being moved about like a puppet in the hands of a person who legally can

be nothing to me.'

'That charming woman with the shining bunch of hair and convolvuluses?'

'Yes: it is through her that we are brought here, and through her

writing that poem, "Cancelled Words," that the book was sent me, and

through the accidental renewal of acquaintance between us on Anglebury

Heath, that she wrote the poem. I was, however, at the moment you spoke,

thinking more particularly of the little teacher whom Ethelberta must

have commissioned to send the book to me; and why that girl was chosen

to do it.'

'There may be a hundred reasons. Kit, I have never yet seen her look

once this way.'

Christopher had certainly not yet received look or gesture from her; but

his time came. It was while he was for a moment outside the recess, and

he caught her in the act. She became slightly confused, turned aside,

and entered into conversation with a neighbour.

It was only a look, and yet what a look it was! One may say of a look

that it is capable of division into as many species, genera, orders, and

classes, as the animal world itself. Christopher saw Ethelberta

Petherwin's performance in this kind-the well-known spark of light upon

the well-known depths of mystery-and felt something going out of him

which had gone out of him once before.

Thus continually beholding her and her companions in the giddy whirl,

the night wore on with the musicians, last dances and more last dances

being added, till the intentions of the old on the matter were thrice

exceeded in the interests of the young. Watching the couples whirl and

turn, advance and recede as gently as spirits, knot themselves like

house-flies and part again, and lullabied by the faint regular beat of

their footsteps to the tune, the players sank into the peculiar mesmeric

quiet which comes over impressionable people who play for a great length

of time in the midst of such scenes; and at last the only noises that

Christopher took cognizance of were those of the exceptional kind,

breaking above the general sea of sound-a casual smart rustle of silk, a

laugh, a stumble, the monosyllabic talk of those who happened to linger

for a moment close to the leafy screen-all coming to his ears like

voices from those old times when he had mingled in similar scenes, not

as servant but as guest.

5. AT THE WINDOW-THE ROAD HOME

The dancing was over at last, and the radiant company had left the room.

A long and weary night it had been for the two players, though a

stimulated interest had hindered physical exhaustion in one of them for

a while. With tingling fingers and aching arms they came out of the

alcove into the long and deserted apartment, now pervaded by a dry haze.

The lights had burnt low, and Faith and her brother were waiting by

request till the wagonette was ready to take them home, a breakfast

being in course of preparation for them meanwhile.

Christopher had crossed the room to relieve his cramped limbs, and now,

peeping through a crevice in the window curtains, he said suddenly,

'Who's for a transformation scene? Faith, look here!'

He touched the blind, up it flew, and a gorgeous scene presented itself

to her eyes. A huge inflamed sun was breasting the horizon of a wide

sheet of sea which, to her surprise and delight, the mansion overlooked.

The brilliant disc fired all the waves that lay between it and the shore

at the bottom of the grounds, where the water tossed the ruddy light

from one undulation to another in glares as large and clear as mirrors,

incessantly altering them, destroying them, and creating them again;

while further off they multiplied, thickened, and ran into one another

like struggling armies, till they met the fiery source of them all.

'O, how wonderful it is!' said Faith, putting her hand on Christopher's

arm. 'Who knew that whilst we were all shut in here with our puny

illumination such an exhibition as this was going on outside! How sorry

and mean the grand and stately room looks now!'

Christopher turned his back upon the window, and there were the hitherto

beaming candle-flames shining no more radiantly than tarnished javelin-

heads, while the snow-white lengths of wax showed themselves clammy and

cadaverous as the fingers of a corpse. The leaves and flowers which had

appeared so very green and blooming by the artificial light were now

seen to be faded and dusty. Only the gilding of the room in some degree

brought itself into keeping with the splendours outside, stray darts of

light seizing upon it and lengthening themselves out along fillet,

quirk, arris, and moulding, till wasted away.

'It seems,' said Faith, 'as if all the people who were lately so merry

here had died: we ourselves look no more than ghosts.' She turned up her

weary face to her brother's, which the incoming rays smote aslant,

making little furrows of every wrinkle thereon, and shady ravines of

every little furrow.

'You are very tired, Faith,' he said. 'Such a heavy night's work has

been almost too much for you.'

'O, I don't mind that,' said Faith. 'But I could not have played so long

by myself.'

'We filled up one another's gaps; and there were plenty of them towards

the morning; but, luckily, people don't notice those things when the

small hours draw on.'

'What troubles me most,' said Faith, 'is not that I have worked, but

that you should be so situated as to need such miserable assistance as

mine. We are poor, are we not, Kit?'

'Yes, we know a little about poverty,' he replied.

While thus lingering

'In shadowy thoroughfares of thought,'

Faith interrupted with, 'I believe there is one of the dancers now!-why,

I should have thought they had all gone to bed, and wouldn't get up

again for days.' She indicated to him a figure on the lawn towards the

left, looking upon the same flashing scene as that they themselves

beheld.

'It is your own particular one,' continued Faith. 'Yes, I see the blue

flowers under the edge of her cloak.'

'And I see her squirrel-coloured hair,' said Christopher.

Both stood looking at this apparition, who once, and only once, thought

fit to turn her head towards the front of the house they were gazing

from. Faith was one in whom the meditative somewhat overpowered the

active faculties; she went on, with no abundance of love, to theorize

upon this gratuitously charming woman, who, striking freakishly into her

brother's path, seemed likely to do him no good in her sisterly

estimation. Ethelberta's bright and shapely form stood before her critic

now, smartened by the motes of sunlight from head to heel: what Faith

would have given to see her so clearly within!

'Without doubt she is already a lady of many romantic experiences,' she

said dubiously.

'And on the way to many more,' said Christopher. The tone was just of

the kind which may be imagined of a sombre man who had been up all night

piping that others might dance.

Faith parted her lips as if in consternation at possibilities.

Ethelberta, having already become an influence in Christopher's system,

might soon become more-an indestructible fascination-to drag him about,

turn his soul inside out, harrow him, twist him, and otherwise torment

him, according to the stereotyped form of such processes.

They were interrupted by the opening of a door. A servant entered and

came up to them.

'This is for you, I believe, sir,' he said. 'Two guineas;' and he placed

the money in Christopher's hand. 'Some breakfast will be ready for you

in a moment if you like to have it. Would you wish it brought in here;

or will you come to the steward's room?'

'Yes, we will come.' And the man then began to extinguish the lights one

by one. Christopher dropped the two pounds and two shillings singly into

his pocket, and looking listlessly at the footman said, 'Can you tell me

the address of that lady on the lawn? Ah, she has disappeared!'

'She wore a dress with blue flowers,' said Faith.

'And remarkable bright in her manner? O, that's the young widow, Mrs-

what's that name-I forget for the moment.'

'Widow?' said Christopher, the eyes of his understanding getting

wonderfully clear, and Faith uttering a private ejaculation of thanks

that after all no commandments were likely to be broken in this matter.

'The lady I mean is quite a girlish sort of woman.'

'Yes, yes, so she is-that's the one. Coachman says she must have been

born a widow, for there is not time for her ever to have been made one.

However, she's not quite such a chicken as all that. Mrs. Petherwin,

that's the party's name.'

'Does she live here?'

'No, she is staying in the house visiting for a few days with her

mother-in-law. They are a London family, I don't know her address.'

'Is she a poetess?'

'That I cannot say. She is very clever at verses; but she don't lean

over gates to see the sun, and goes to church as regular as you or I, so

I should hardly be inclined to say that she's the complete thing. When

she's up in one of her vagaries she'll sit with the ladies and make up

pretty things out of her head as fast as sticks a-breaking. They will

run off her tongue like cotton from a reel, and if she can ever be got

in the mind of telling a story she will bring it out that serious and

awful that it makes your flesh creep upon your bones; if she's only got

to say that she walked out of one door into another, she'll tell it so

that there seems something wonderful in it. 'Tis a bother to start her,

so our people say behind her back, but, once set going, the house is all

alive with her. However, it will soon be dull enough; she and Lady

Petherwin are off to-morrow for Rookington, where I believe they are

going to stay over New Year's Day.'

'Where do you say they are going?' inquired Christopher, as they

followed the footman.

'Rookington Park-about three miles out of Sandbourne, in the opposite

direction to this.'

'A widow,' Christopher murmured.

Faith overheard him. 'That makes no difference to us, does it?' she said

wistfully.

Forty minutes later they were driving along an open road over a ridge

which commanded a view of a small inlet below them, the sands of this

nook being sheltered by crumbling cliffs. Here at once they saw, in the

full light of the sun, two women standing side by side, their faces

directed over the sea.

'There she is again!' said Faith. 'She has walked along the shore from

the lawn where we saw her before.'

'Yes,' said the coachman, 'she's a curious woman seemingly. She'll talk

to any poor body she meets. You see she had been out for a morning walk

instead of going to bed, and that is some queer mortal or other she has

picked up with on her way.'

'I wonder she does not prefer some rest,' Faith observed.

The road then dropped into a hollow, and the women by the sea were no

longer within view from the carriage, which rapidly neared Sandbourne

with the two musicians.

6. THE SHORE BY WYNDWAY

The east gleamed upon Ethelberta's squirrel-coloured hair as she said to

her companion, 'I have come, Picotee; but not, as you imagine, from a

night's sleep. We have actually been dancing till daylight at Wyndway.'

'Then you should not have troubled to come! I could have borne the

disappointment under such circumstances,' said the pupil-teacher, who,

wearing a dress not so familiar to Christopher's eyes as had been the

little white jacket, had not been recognized by him from the hill. 'You

look so tired, Berta. I could not stay up all night for the world!'

'One gets used to these things,' said Ethelberta quietly. 'I should have

been in bed certainly, had I not particularly wished to use this

opportunity of meeting you before you go home to-morrow. I could not

have come to Sandbourne to-day, because we are leaving to return again

to Rookington. This is all that I wish you to take to mother-only a few

little things which may be useful to her; but you will see what it

contains when you open it.' She handed to Picotee a small parcel. 'This

is for yourself,' she went on, giving a small packet besides. 'It will

pay your fare home and back, and leave you something to spare.'

'Thank you,' said Picotee docilely.

'Now, Picotee,' continued the elder, 'let us talk for a few minutes

before I go back: we may not meet again for some time.' She put her arm

round the waist of Picotee, who did the same by Ethelberta; and thus

interlaced they walked backwards and forwards upon the firm flat sand

with the motion of one body animated by one will.

'Well, what did you think of my poems?'

'I liked them; but naturally, I did not understand all the experience

you describe. It is so different from mine. Yet that made them more

interesting to me. I thought I should so much like to mix in the same

scenes; but that of course is impossible.'

'I am afraid it is. And you posted the book as I said?'

'Yes.' She added hurriedly, as if to change the subject, 'I have told

nobody that we are sisters, or that you are known in any way to me or to

mother or to any of us. I thought that would be best, from what you

said.'

'Yes, perhaps it is best for the present.'

'The box of clothes came safely, and I find very little alteration will

be necessary to make the dress do beautifully for me on Sundays. It is

quite new-fashioned to me, though I suppose it was old-fashioned to you.

O, and Berta, will the title of Lady Petherwin descend to you when your

mother-in-law dies?'

'No, of course not. She is only a knight's widow, and that's nothing.'

'The lady of a knight looks as good on paper as the lady of a lord.'

'Yes. And in other places too sometimes. However, about your journey

home. Be very careful; and don't make any inquiries at the stations of

anybody but officials. If any man wants to be friendly with you, try to

find out if it is from a genuine wish to assist you, or from admiration

of your fresh face.'

'How shall I know which?' said Picotee.

Ethelberta laughed. 'If Heaven does not tell you at the moment I

cannot,' she said. 'But humanity looks with a different eye from love,

and upon the whole it is most to be prized by all of us. I believe it

ends oftener in marriage than do a lover's flying smiles. So that for

this and other reasons love from a stranger is mostly worthless as a

speculation; and it is certainly dangerous as a game. Well, Picotee, has

any one paid you real attentions yet?'

'No-that is-'

'There is something going on.'

'Only a wee bit.'

'I thought so. There was a dishonesty about your dear eyes which has

never been there before, and love-making and dishonesty are inseparable

as coupled hounds. Up comes man, and away goes innocence. Are you going

to tell me anything about him?'

'I would rather not, Ethelberta; because it is hardly anything.'

'Well, be careful. And mind this, never tell him what you feel.'

'But then he will never know it.'

'Nor must he. He must think it only. The difference between his thinking

and knowing is often the difference between your winning and losing. But

general advice is not of much use, and I cannot give more unless you

tell more. What is his name?'

Picotee did not reply.

'Never mind: keep your secret. However, listen to this: not a kiss-not

so much as the shadow, hint, or merest seedling of a kiss!'

'There is no fear of it,' murmured Picotee; 'though not because of me!'

'You see, my dear Picotee, a lover is not a relative; and he isn't quite

a stranger; but he may end in being either, and the way to reduce him to

whichever of the two you wish him to be is to treat him like the other.

Men who come courting are just like bad cooks: if you are kind to them,

instead of ascribing it to an exceptional courtesy on your part, they

instantly set it down to their own marvellous worth.'

'But I ought to favour him just a little, poor thing? Just the smallest

glimmer of a gleam!'

'Only a very little indeed-so that it comes as a relief to his misery,

not as adding to his happiness.'

'It is being too clever, all this; and we ought to be harmless as

doves.'

'Ah, Picotee! to continue harmless as a dove you must be wise as a

serpent, you'll find-ay, ten serpents, for that matter.'

'But if I cannot get at him, how can I manage him in these ways you

speak of?'

'Get at him? I suppose he gets at you in some way, does he not?-tries to

see you, or to be near you?'

'No-that's just the point-he doesn't do any such thing, and there's the

worry of it!'

'Well, what a silly girl! Then he is not your lover at all?'

'Perhaps he's not. But I am his, at any rate-twice over.'

'That's no use. Supply the love for both sides? Why, it's worse than

furnishing money for both. You don't suppose a man will give his heart

in exchange for a woman's when he has already got hers for nothing?

That's not the way old Adam does business at all.'

Picotee sighed. 'Have you got a young man, too, Berta?'

'A young man?'

'A lover I mean-that's what we call 'em down here.'

'It is difficult to explain,' said Ethelberta evasively. 'I knew one

many years ago, and I have seen him again, and-that is all.'

'According to my idea you have one, but according to your own you have

not; he does not love you, but you love him-is that how it is?'

'I have not quite considered how it is.'

'Do you love him?'

'I have never seen a man I hate less.'

'A great deal lies covered up there, I expect!'

'He was in that carriage which drove over the hill at the moment we met

here.'

'Ah-ah-some great lord or another who has his day by candlelight, and so

on. I guess the style. Somebody who no more knows how much bread is a

loaf than I do the price of diamonds and pearls.'

'I am afraid he's only a commoner as yet, and not a very great one

either. But surely you guess, Picotee? But I'll set you an example of

frankness by telling his name. My friend, Mr. Julian, to whom you posted

the book. Such changes as he has seen!-from affluence to poverty. He and

his sister have been playing dances all night at Wyndway-What is the

matter?'

'Only a pain!'

'My dear Picotee-'

'I think I'll sit down for a moment, Berta.'

'What-have you over-walked yourself, dear?'

'Yes-and I got up very early, you see.'

'I hope you are not going to be ill, child. You look as if you ought not

to be here.'

'O, it is quite trifling. Does not getting up in a hurry cause a sense

of faintness sometimes?'

'Yes, in people who are not strong.'

'If we don't talk about being faint it will go off. Faintness is such a

queer thing that to think of it is to have it. Let us talk as we were

talking before-about your young man and other indifferent matters, so as

to divert my thoughts from fainting, dear Berta. I have always thought

the book was to be forwarded to that gentleman because he was a

connection of yours by marriage, and he had asked for it. And so you

have met this-this Mr. Julian, and gone for walks with him in evenings,

I suppose, just as young men and women do who are courting?'

'No, indeed-what an absurd child you are!' said Ethelberta. 'I knew him

once, and he is interesting; a few little things like that make it all

up.'

'The love is all on one side, as with me.'

'O no, no: there is nothing like that. I am not attached to any one,

strictly speaking-though, more strictly speaking, I am not unattached.'

''Tis a delightful middle mind to be in. I know it, for I was like it

once; but I had scarcely been so long enough to know where I was before

I was gone past.'

'You should have commanded yourself, or drawn back entirely; for let me

tell you that at the beginning of caring for a man-just when you are

suspended between thinking and feeling-there is a hair's-breadth of time

at which the question of getting into love or not getting in is a matter

of will-quite a thing of choice. At the same time, drawing back is a

tame dance, and the best of all is to stay balanced awhile.'

'You do that well, I'll warrant.'

'Well, no; for what between continually wanting to love, to escape the

blank lives of those who do not, and wanting not to love, to keep out of

the miseries of those who do, I get foolishly warm and foolishly cold by

turns.'

'Yes-and I am like you as far as the "foolishly" goes. I wish we poor

girls could contrive to bring a little wisdom into our love by way of a

change!'

'That's the very thing that leading minds in town have begun to do, but

there are difficulties. It is easy to love wisely, but the rich man may

not marry you; and it is not very hard to reject wisely, but the poor

man doesn't care. Altogether it is a precious problem. But shall we

clamber out upon those shining blocks of rock, and find some of the

little yellow shells that are in the crevices? I have ten minutes

longer, and then I must go.'

7. THE DINING-ROOM OF A TOWN HOUSE-THE BUTLER'S PANTRY

A few weeks later there was a friendly dinner-party at the house of a

gentleman called Doncastle, who lived in a moderately fashionable square

of west London. All the friends and relatives present were nice people,

who exhibited becoming signs of pleasure and gaiety at being there; but

as regards the vigour with which these emotions were expressed, it may

be stated that a slight laugh from far down the throat and a slight

narrowing of the eye were equivalent as indices of the degree of mirth

felt to a Ha-ha-ha! and a shaking of the shoulders among the minor

traders of the kingdom; and to a Ho-ho-ho! contorted features, purple

face, and stamping foot among the gentlemen in corduroy and fustian who

adorn the remoter provinces.

The conversation was chiefly about a volume of musical, tender, and

humorous rhapsodies lately issued to the world in the guise of verse,

which had been reviewed and talked about everywhere. This topic,

beginning as a private dialogue between a young painter named Ladywell

and the lady on his right hand, had enlarged its ground by degrees, as a

subject will extend on those rare occasions when it happens to be one

about which each person has thought something beforehand, instead of, as

in the natural order of things, one to which the oblivious listener

replies mechanically, with earnest features, but with thoughts far away.

And so the whole table made the matter a thing to inquire or reply upon

at once, and isolated rills of other chat died out like a river in the

sands.

'Witty things, and occasionally Anacreontic: and they have the

originality which such a style must naturally possess when carried out

by a feminine hand,' said Ladywell.

'If it is a feminine hand,' said a man near.

Ladywell looked as if he sometimes knew secrets, though he did not wish

to boast.

'Written, I presume you mean, in the Anacreontic measure of three feet

and a half-spondees and iambics?' said a gentleman in spectacles,

glancing round, and giving emphasis to his inquiry by causing bland

glares of a circular shape to proceed from his glasses towards the

person interrogated.

The company appeared willing to give consideration to the words of a man

who knew such things as that, and hung forward to listen. But Ladywell

stopped the whole current of affairs in that direction by saying-

'O no; I was speaking rather of the matter and tone. In fact, the Seven

Days' Review said they were Anacreontic, you know; and so they are-any

one may feel they are.'

The general look then implied a false encouragement, and the man in

spectacles looked down again, being a nervous person, who never had time

to show his merits because he was so much occupied in hiding his faults.

'Do you know the authoress, Mr. Neigh?' continued Ladywell.

'Can't say that I do,' he replied.

Neigh was a man who never disturbed the flesh upon his face except when

he was obliged to do so, and paused ten seconds where other people only

paused one; as he moved his chin in speaking, motes of light from under

the candle-shade caught, lost, and caught again the outlying threads of

his burnished beard.

'She will be famous some day; and you ought at any rate to read her

book.'

'Yes, I ought, I know. In fact, some years ago I should have done it

immediately, because I had a reason for pushing on that way just then.'

'Ah, what was that?'

'Well, I thought of going in for Westminster Abbey myself at that time;

but a fellow has so much to do, and-'

'What a pity that you didn't follow it up. A man of your powers, Mr.

Neigh-'

'Afterwards I found I was too steady for it, and had too much of the

respectable householder in me. Besides, so many other men are on the

same tack; and then I didn't care about it, somehow.'

'I don't understand high art, and am utterly in the dark on what are the

true laws of criticism,' a plain married lady, who wore archaeological

jewellery, was saying at this time. 'But I know that I have derived an

unusual amount of amusement from those verses, and I am heartily

thankful to "E." for them.'

'I am afraid,' said a gentleman who was suffering from a bad shirt-

front, 'that an estimate which depends upon feeling in that way is not

to be trusted as permanent opinion.'

The subject now flitted to the other end.

'Somebody has it that when the heart flies out before the understanding,

it saves the judgment a world of pains,' came from a voice in that

quarter.

'I, for my part, like something merry,' said an elderly woman, whose

face was bisected by the edge of a shadow, which toned her forehead and

eyelids to a livid neutral tint, and left her cheeks and mouth like

metal at a white heat in the uninterrupted light. 'I think the

liveliness of those ballads as great a recommendation as any. After all,

enough misery is known to us by our experiences and those of our

friends, and what we see in the newspapers, for all purposes of

chastening, without having gratuitous grief inflicted upon us.'

'But you would not have wished that "Romeo and Juliet" should have ended

happily, or that Othello should have discovered the perfidy of his

Ancient in time to prevent all fatal consequences?'

'I am not afraid to go so far as that,' said the old lady. 'Shakespeare

is not everybody, and I am sure that thousands of people who have seen

those plays would have driven home more cheerfully afterwards if by some

contrivance the characters could all have been joined together

respectively. I uphold our anonymous author on the general ground of her

levity.'

'Well, it is an old and worn argument-that about the inexpedience of

tragedy-and much may be said on both sides. It is not to be denied that

the anonymous Sappho's verses-for it seems that she is really a woman-

are clever.'

'Clever!' said Ladywell-the young man who had been one of the shooting-

party at Sandbourne-'they are marvellously brilliant.'

'She is rather warm in her assumed character.'

'That's a sign of her actual coldness; she lets off her feeling in

theoretic grooves, and there is sure to be none left for practical ones.

Whatever seems to be the most prominent vice, or the most prominent

virtue in anybody's writing is the one thing you are safest from in

personal dealings with the writer.'

'O, I don't mean to call her warmth of feeling a vice or virtue exactly-

'

'I agree with you,' said Neigh to the last speaker but one, in tones as

emphatic as they possibly could be without losing their proper character

of indifference to the whole matter. 'Warm sentiment of any sort,

whenever we have it, disturbs us too much to leave us repose enough for

writing it down.'

'I am sure, when I was at the ardent age,' said the mistress of the

house, in a tone of pleasantly agreeing with every one, particularly

those who were diametrically opposed to each other, 'I could no more

have printed such emotions and made them public than I-could have helped

privately feeling them.'

'I wonder if she has gone through half she says? If so, what an

experience!'

'O no-not at all likely,' said Mr. Neigh. 'It is as risky to calculate

people's ways of living from their writings as their incomes from their

way of living.'

'She is as true to nature as fashion is false,' said the painter, in his

warmth becoming scarcely complimentary, as sometimes happens with young

persons. 'I don't think that she has written a word more than what every

woman would deny feeling in a society where no woman says what she means

or does what she says. And can any praise be greater than that?'

'Ha-ha! Capital!'

'All her verses seem to me,' said a rather stupid person, 'to be simply-

"Tral'-la-la-lal'-la-la-la', Tral'-la-la-lal'-la-la-lu', Tral'-la-la-

lal'-la-la-lalla', Tral'-la-la-lu'."

When you take away the music there is nothing left. Yet she is plainly a

woman of great culture.'

'Have you seen what the London Light says about them-one of the finest

things I have ever read in the way of admiration?' continued Ladywell,

paying no attention to the previous speaker. He lingered for a reply,

and then impulsively quoted several lines from the periodical he had

named, without aid or hesitation. 'Good, is it not?' added Ladywell.

They assented, but in such an unqualified manner that half as much

readiness would have meant more. But Ladywell, though not experienced

enough to be quite free from enthusiasm, was too experienced to mind

indifference for more than a minute or two. When the ladies had

withdrawn, the young man went on-

'Colonel Staff said a funny thing to me yesterday about these very

poems. He asked me if I knew her, and-'

'Her? Why, he knows that it is a lady all the time, and we were only

just now doubting whether the sex of the writer could be really what it

seems. Shame, Ladywell!' said his friend Neigh.

'Ah, Mr. Ladywell,' said another, 'now we have found you out. You know

her!'

'Now-I say-ha-ha!' continued the painter, with a face expressing that he

had not at all tried to be found out as the man possessing incomparably

superior knowledge of the poetess. 'I beg pardon really, but don't press

me on the matter. Upon my word the secret is not my own. As I was

saying, the Colonel said, "Do you know her?"-but you don't care to

hear?'

'We shall be delighted!'

'So the Colonel said, "Do you know her?" adding, in a most comic way,

"Between U. and E., Ladywell, I believe there is a close affinity"-

meaning me, you know, by U. Just like the Colonel-ha-ha-ha!'

The older men did not oblige Ladywell a second time with any attempt at

appreciation; but a weird silence ensued, during which the smile upon

Ladywell's face became frozen to painful permanence.

'Meaning by E., you know, the "E" of the poems-heh-heh!' he added.

'It was a very humorous incident certainly,' said his friend Neigh, at

which there was a laugh-not from anything connected with what he said,

but simply because it was the right thing to laugh when Neigh meant you

to do so.

'Now don't, Neigh-you are too hard upon me. But, seriously, two or three

fellows were there when I said it, and they all began laughing-but,

then, the Colonel said it in such a queer way, you know. But you were

asking me about her? Well, the fact is, between ourselves, I do know

that she is a lady; and I don't mind telling a word-'

'But we would not for the world be the means of making you betray her

confidence-would we, Jones?'

'No, indeed; we would not.'

'No, no; it is not that at all-this is really too bad!-you must listen

just for a moment-'

'Ladywell, don't betray anybody on our account.'

'Whoever the illustrious young lady may be she has seen a great deal of

the world,' said Mr. Doncastle blandly, 'and puts her experience of the

comedy of its emotions, and of its method of showing them, in a very

vivid light.'

'I heard a man say that the novelty with which the ideas are presented

is more noticeable than the originality of the ideas themselves,'

observed Neigh. 'The woman has made a great talk about herself; and I am

quite weary of people asking of her condition, place of abode, has she a

father, has she a mother, or dearer one yet than all other.'

'I would have burlesque quotation put down by Act of Parliament, and all

who dabble in it placed with him who can cite Scripture for his

purposes,' said Ladywell, in retaliation.

After a pause Neigh remarked half-privately to their host, who was his

uncle: 'Your butler Chickerel is a very intelligent man, as I have

heard.'

'Yes, he does very well,' said Mr. Doncastle.

'But is he not a-very extraordinary man?'

'Not to my knowledge,' said Doncastle, looking up surprised. 'Why do you

think that, Alfred?'

'Well, perhaps it was not a matter to mention. He reads a great deal, I

dare say?'

'I don't think so.'

'I noticed how wonderfully his face kindled when we began talking about

the poems during dinner. Perhaps he is a poet himself in disguise. Did

you observe it?'

'No. To the best of my belief he is a very trustworthy and honourable

man. He has been with us-let me see, how long?-five months, I think, and

he was fifteen years in his last place. It certainly is a new side to

his character if he publicly showed any interest in the conversation,

whatever he might have felt.'

'Since the matter has been mentioned,' said Mr. Jones, 'I may say that I

too noticed the singularity of it.'

'If you had not said otherwise,' replied Doncastle somewhat warmly, 'I

should have asserted him to be the last man-servant in London to

infringe such an elementary rule. If he did so this evening, it is

certainly for the first time, and I sincerely hope that no annoyance was

caused-'

'O no, no-not at all-it might have been a mistake of mine,' said Jones.

'I should quite have forgotten the circumstance if Mr. Neigh's words had

not brought it to my mind. It was really nothing to notice, and I beg

that you will not say a word to him about it on my account.'

'He has a taste that way, my dear uncle, nothing more, depend upon it,'

said Neigh. 'If I had such a man belonging to me I should only be too

proud. Certainly do not mention it.'

'Of course Chickerel is Chickerel,' Mr. Doncastle rejoined. 'We all know

what that means. And really, on reflecting, I do remember that he is of

a literary turn of mind-not further by an inch than is commendable, you

know. I am quite aware as I glance down the papers and prints any

morning that Chickerel's eyes have been over the ground before mine, and

that he generally forestalls the rest of us by a chapter or so in the

last new book sent home; but in these vicious days that particular

weakness is really virtue, just because it is not quite a vice.'

'Yes,' said Mr. Jones, the reflective man in spectacles, 'positive

virtues are getting moved off the stage: negative ones are moved on to

the place of positives; we thank bare justice as we used only to thank

generosity; call a man honest who steals only by law, and consider him a

benefactor if he does not steal at all.'

'Hear, hear!' said Neigh. 'We will decide that Chickerel is even a

better trained fellow than if he had shown no interest at all in his

face.'

'The action being like those trifling irregularities in art at its

vigorous periods, which seemed designed to hide the unpleasant monotony

of absolute symmetry,' said Ladywell.

'On the other hand, an affected want of training of that sort would be

even a better disguise for an artful man than a perfectly impassible

demeanour. He is two removes from discovery in a hidden scheme, whilst a

neutral face is only one.'

'You quite alarm me by these subtle theories,' said Mr. Doncastle,

laughing; and the subject then became compounded with other matters,

till the speakers rose to rejoin the charming flock upstairs.

In the basement story at this hour Mr. Chickerel the butler, who had

formed the subject of discussion on the floor above, was busily engaged

in looking after his two subordinates as they bustled about in the

operations of clearing away. He was a man of whom, if the shape of

certain bones and muscles of the face is ever to be taken as a guide to

the character, one might safely have predicated conscientiousness in the

performance of duties, a thorough knowledge of all that appertained to

them, a general desire to live on without troubling his mind about

anything which did not concern him. Any person interested in the matter

would have assumed without hesitation that the estimate his employer had

given of Chickerel was a true one-more, that not only would the butler

under all ordinary circumstances resolutely prevent his face from

showing curiosity in an unbecoming way, but that, with the soul of a

true gentleman, he would, if necessary, equivocate as readily as the

noblest of his betters to remove any stain upon his honour in such

trifles. Hence it is apparent that if Chickerel's countenance really

appeared, as Neigh had asserted, full of curiosity with regard to the

gossip that was going on, the feelings which led to the exhibition must

have been of a very unusual and irrepressible kind.

His hair was of that peculiar bluish-white which is to be observed when

the oncoming years, instead of singling out special locks of a man's

head for operating against, advance uniformly over the whole field, and

enfeeble the colour at all points before absolutely extinguishing it

anywhere; his nose was of the knotty shape in the gristle and earthward

tendency in the flesh which is commonly said to carry sound judgment

above it, his eyes were thoughtful, and his face was thin-a contour

which, if it at once abstracted from his features that cheerful

assurance of single-minded honesty which adorns the exteriors of so many

of his brethren, might have raised a presumption in the minds of some

beholders that perhaps in this case the quality might not be altogether

wanting within.

The coffee having been served to the people upstairs, one of the footmen

rushed into his bedroom on the lower floor, and in a few minutes emerged

again in the dress of a respectable clerk who had been born for better

things, with the trifling exceptions that he wore a low-crowned hat, and

instead of knocking his heels on the pavement walked with a gait as

delicate as a lady's. Going out of the area-door with a cigar in his

mouth, he mounted the steps hastily to keep an appointment round the

corner-the keeping of which as a private gentleman necessitated the

change of the greater part of his clothes twice within a quarter of an

hour-the limit of his time of absence. The other footman was upstairs,

and the butler, finding that he had a few minutes to himself, sat down

at the table and wrote:-

'MY DEAR ETHELBERTA,-I did not intend to write to you for some few days

to come, but the way in which you have been talked about here this

evening makes me anxious to send a line or two at once, though I have

very little time to spare, as usual. We have just had a dinner-party-

indeed the carriages have not yet been brought round-and the talk at

dinner was about your verses, of course. The thing was brought up by a

young fellow named Ladywell-do you know him? He is a painter by

profession, but he has a pretty good private income beyond what he gets

by practising his line of business among the nobility, and that I expect

is not little, for he is well known, and encouraged because he is young,

and good-looking, and so forth. His family own a good bit of land

somewhere out Aldbrickham way. However, I am before my story. From what

they all said it is pretty clear that you are thought a great deal of in

fashionable society as a poetess-but perhaps you know this as well as I-

moving in it as you do yourself, my dear.

'The ladies afterwards got very curious about your age, so curious, in

fact, and so full of certainty that you were thirty-five and a blighted

existence, if an hour, that I felt inclined to rap out there and then,

and hang what came of it: "My daughter, ladies, was to my own and her

mother's certain knowledge only twenty-one last birthday, and has as

bright a heart as anybody in London." One of them actually said that

you must be fifty to have got such an experience. Her guess was a very

shrewd one in the bottom of it, however, for it was grounded upon the

way you use those strange experiences of mine in the society that I tell

you of, and dress them up as if they were yours; and, as you see, she

hit off my own age to a year. I thought it was very sharp of her to be

so right, although so wrong.

'I do not want to influence your plans in any way about things which

your school learning fits you to understand much better than I, who

never had such opportunities, but I think that if I were in your place,

Berta, I would not let my name be known just yet, for people always want

what's kept from them, and don't value what's given. I am not sure, but

I think that after the women had gone upstairs the others turned their

thoughts upon you again; what they said about you I don't know, for if

there's one thing I hate 'tis hanging about the doors when the men begin

to get moved by their wine, which they did to a large extent to-night,

and spoke very loud. They always do here, for old Don is a hearty giver

in his way. However, as you see these people from their own level now,

it is not much that I can tell you in seeing them only from the under

side, though I see strange things sometimes, and of course-

"What great ones do the less will prattle of,"

as it says in that book of select pieces that you gave me.

'Well, my dear girl, I hope you will prosper. One thing above all

others you'll have to mind, and it is that folk must continually strain

to advance in order to remain where they are: and you particularly. But

as for trying too hard, I wouldn't do it. Much lies in minding this,

that your best plan for lightness of heart is to raise yourself a little

higher than your old mates, but not so high as to be quite out of their

reach. All human beings enjoy themselves from the outside, and so

getting on a little has this good in it, you still keep in your old

class where your feelings are, and are thoughtfully treated by this

class: while by getting on too much you are sneered at by your new

acquaintance, who don't know the skill of your rise, and you are parted

from and forgot by the old ones who do. Whatever happens, don't be too

quick to feel. You will surely get some hard blows when you are found

out, for if the great can find no excuse for hitting with a mind,

they'll do it and say 'twas in fun. But you are young and healthy, and

youth and health are power. I wish I could have a decent footman here

with me, but I suppose it is no use trying. It is such men as these

that provoke the contempt we get. Well, thank God a few years will see

the end of me, for I am growing ashamed of my company-so different as

they are to the servants of old times.-Your affectionate father,

R. CHICKEREL.

'P.S.-Do not press Lady Petherwin any further to remove the rules on

which you live with her. She is quite right: she cannot keep us, and to

recognize us would do you no good, nor us either. We are content to see

you secretly, since it is best for you.'

8. CHRISTOPHER'S LODGINGS-THE GROUNDS ABOUT ROOKINGTON

Meanwhile, in the distant town of Sandbourne, Christopher Julian had

recovered from the weariness produced by his labours at the Wyndway

evening-party where Ethelberta had been a star. Instead of engaging his

energies to clear encumbrances from the tangled way of his life, he now

set about reading the popular 'Metres by E.' with more interest and

assiduity than ever; for though Julian was a thinker by instinct, he was

a worker by effort only; and the higher of these kinds being dependent

upon the lower for its exhibition, there was often a lamentable lack of

evidence of his power in either. It is a provoking correlation, and has

conduced to the obscurity of many a genius.

'Kit,' said his sister, on reviving at the end of the bad headache which

had followed the dance, 'those poems seem to have increased in value

with you. The lady, lofty as she appears to be, would be flattered if

she only could know how much you study them. Have you decided to thank

her for them? Now let us talk it over-I like having a chat about such a

pretty new subject.'

'I would thank her in a moment if I were absolutely certain that she had

anything to do with sending them, or even writing them. I am not quite

sure of that yet.'

'How strange that a woman could bring herself to write those verses!'

'Not at all strange-they are natural outpourings.'

Faith looked critically at the remoter caverns of the fire.

'Why strange?' continued Christopher. 'There is no harm in them.'

'O no-no harm. But I cannot explain to you-unless you see it partly of

your own accord-that to write them she must be rather a fast lady-not a

bad fast lady; a nice fast lady, I mean, of course. There, I have said

it now, and I daresay you are vexed with me, for your interest in her

has deepened to what it originally was, I think. I don't mean any

absolute harm by "fast," Kit.'

'Bold, forward, you mean, I suppose?'

Faith tried to hit upon a better definition which should meet all views;

and, on failing to do so, looked concerned at her brother's somewhat

grieved appearance, and said, helplessly, 'Yes, I suppose I do.'

'My idea of her is quite the reverse. A poetess must intrinsically be

sensitive, or she could never feel: but then, frankness is a rhetorical

necessity even with the most modest, if their inspirations are to do any

good in the world. You will, for certain, not be interested in something

I was going to tell you, which I thought would have pleased you

immensely; but it is not worth mentioning now.'

'If you will not tell me, never mind. But don't be crabbed, Kit! You

know how interested I am in all your affairs.'

'It is only that I have composed an air to one of the prettiest of her

songs, "When tapers tall"-but I am not sure about the power of it. This

is how it begins-I threw it off in a few minutes, after you had gone to

bed.'

He went to the piano and lightly touched over an air, the manuscript

copy of which he placed in front of him, and listened to hear her

opinion, having proved its value frequently; for it was not that of a

woman merely, but impersonally human. Though she was unknown to fame,

this was a great gift in Faith, since to have an unsexed judgment is as

precious as to be an unsexed being is deplorable.

'It is very fair indeed,' said the sister, scarcely moving her lips in

her great attention. 'Now again, and again, and again. How could you do

it in the time!'

Kit knew that she admired his performance: passive assent was her usual

praise, and she seldom insisted vigorously upon any view of his

compositions unless for purposes of emendation.

'I was thinking that, as I cannot very well write to her, I may as well

send her this,' said Christopher, with lightened spirits, voice to

correspond, and eyes likewise; 'there can be no objection to it, for

such things are done continually. Consider while I am gone, Faith. I

shall be out this evening for an hour or two.'

When Christopher left the house shortly after, instead of going into the

town on some errand, as was customary whenever he went from home after

dark, he ascended a back street, passed over the hills behind, and

walked at a brisk pace inland along the road to Rookington Park, where,

as he had learnt, Ethelberta and Lady Petherwin were staying for a time,

the day or two which they spent at Wyndway having formed a short break

in the middle of this visit. The moon was shining to-night, and

Christopher sped onwards over the pallid high-road as readily as he

could have done at noonday. In three-quarters of an hour he reached the

park gates; and entering now upon a tract which he had never before

explored, he went along more cautiously and with some uncertainty as to

the precise direction that the road would take. A frosted expanse of

even grass, on which the shadow of his head appeared with an opal halo

round it, soon allowed the house to be discovered beyond, the other

portions of the park abounding with timber older and finer than that of

any other spot in the neighbourhood. Christopher withdrew into the

shade, and wheeled round to the front of the building that contained his

old love. Here he gazed and idled, as many a man has done before him-

wondering which room the fair poetess occupied, waiting till lights

began to appear in the upper windows-which they did as uncertainly as

glow-worms bHANDlinking up at eventide-and warming with currents of

revived feeling in perhaps the sweetest of all conditions. New love is

brightest, and long love is greatest; but revived love is the tenderest

thing known upon earth.

Occupied thus, Christopher was greatly surprised to see, on casually

glancing to one side, another man standing close to the shadowy trunk of

another tree, in a similar attitude to his own, gazing, with arms

folded, as blankly at the windows of the house as Christopher himself

had been gazing. Not willing to be discovered, Christopher stuck closer

to his tree. While he waited thus, the stranger began murmuring words,

in a slow soft voice. Christopher listened till he heard the following:-

'Pale was the day and rayless, love, That had an eve so dim.'

Two well-known lines from one of Ethelberta's poems.

Jealousy is a familiar kind of heat which disfigures, licks playfully,

clouds, blackens, and boils a man as a fire does a pot; and on

recognizing these pilferings from what he had grown to regard as his own

treasury, Christopher's fingers began to nestle with great vigour in the

palms of his hands. Three or four minutes passed, when the unknown rival

gave a last glance at the windows, and walked away. Christopher did not

like the look of that walk at all-there was grace enough in it to

suggest that his antagonist had no mean chance of finding favour in a

woman's eyes. A sigh, too, seemed to proceed from the stranger's breast;

but as their distance apart was too great for any such sound to be heard

by any possibility, Christopher set down that to imagination, or to the

brushing of the wind over the trees.

The lighted windows went out one by one, and all the house was in

darkness. Julian then walked off himself, with a vigour that was

spasmodic only, and with much less brightness of mind than he had

experienced on his journey hither. The stranger had gone another way,

and Christopher saw no more of him. When he reached Sandbourne, Faith

was still sitting up.

'But I told you I was going to take a long walk,' he said.

'No, Christopher: really you did not. How tired and sad you do look-

though I always know beforehand when you are in that state: one of your

feet has a drag about it as you pass along the pavement outside the

window.'

'Yes, I forgot that I did not tell you.'

He could not begin to describe his pilgrimage: it was too silly a thing

even for her to hear of.

'It does not matter at all about my staying up,' said Faith assuringly;

'that is, if exercise benefits you. Walking up and down the lane, I

suppose?'

'No; not walking up and down the lane.'

'The turnpike-road to Rookington is pleasant.'

'Faith, that is really where I have been. How came you to know?'

'I only guessed. Verses and an accidental meeting produce a special

journey.'

'Ethelberta is a fine woman, physically and mentally, both. I wonder

people do not talk about her twice as much as they do.'

'Then surely you are getting attached to her again. You think you

discover in her more than anybody else does; and love begins with a

sense of superior discernment.'

'No, no. That is only nonsense,' he said hurriedly. 'However, love her

or love her not, I can keep a corner of my heart for you, Faith. There

is another brute after her too, it seems.'

'Of course there is: I expect there are many. Her position in society is

above ours, so that it is an unwise course to go troubling yourself more

about her.'

'No. If a needy man must be so foolish as to fall in love, it is best to

do so where he cannot double his foolishness by marrying the woman.'

'I don't like to hear you talk so slightingly of what poor father did.'

Christopher fixed his attention on the supper. That night, late as it

was, when Faith was in bed and sleeping, he sat before a sheet of music-

paper, neatly copying his composition upon it. The manuscript was

intended as an offering to Ethelberta at the first convenient

opportunity.

'Well, after all my trouble to find out about Ethelberta, here comes the

clue unasked for,' said the musician to his sister a few days later.

She turned and saw that he was reading the Wessex Reflector.

'What is it?' asked Faith.

'The secret of the true authorship of the book is out at last, and it is

Ethelberta of course. I am so glad to have it proved hers.'

'But can we believe-?'

'O yes. Just hear what "Our London Correspondent" says. It is one of the

nicest bits of gossip that he has furnished us with for a long time.'

'Yes: now read it, do.'

'"The author of 'Metres by E.'"' Christopher began, '"a book of which so

much has been said and conjectured, and one, in fact, that has been the

chief talk for several weeks past of the literary circles to which I

belong, is a young lady who was a widow before she reached the age of

eighteen, and is now not far beyond her fourth lustrum. I was

additionally informed by a friend whom I met yesterday on his way to the

House of Lords, that her name is Mrs. Petherwin-Christian name

Ethelberta; and that she resides with her mother-in-law at their house

in Exonbury Crescent. She is, moreover, the daughter of the late Bishop

of Silchester (if report may be believed), whose active benevolence, as

your readers know, left his family in comparatively straitened

circumstances at his death. The marriage was a secret one, and much

against the wish of her husband's friends, who are wealthy people on all

sides. The death of the bridegroom two or three weeks after the wedding

led to a reconciliation; and the young poetess was taken to the home

which she still occupies, devoted to the composition of such brilliant

effusions as those the world has lately been favoured with from her

pen."'

'If you want to send her your music, you can do so now,' said Faith.

'I might have sent it before, but I wanted to deliver it personally.

However, it is all the same now, I suppose, whether I send it or not. I

always knew that our destinies would lie apart, though she was once

temporarily under a cloud. Her momentary inspiration to write that

"Cancelled Words" was the worst possible omen for me. It showed that,

thinking me no longer useful as a practical chance, she would make me

ornamental as a poetical regret. But I'll send the manuscript of the

song.'

'In the way of business, as a composer only; and you must say to

yourself, "Ethelberta, as thou art but woman, I dare; but as widow I

fear thee."'

Notwithstanding Christopher's affected carelessness, that evening saw a

great deal of nicety bestowed upon the operation of wrapping up and

sending off the song. He dropped it into the box and heard it fall, and

with the curious power which he possessed of setting his wisdom to watch

any particular folly in himself that it could not hinder, speculated as

he walked on the result of this first tangible step of return to his old

position as Ethelberta's lover.

9. A LADY'S DRAWING-ROOMS-ETHELBERTA'S DRESSING-ROOM

It was a house on the north side of Hyde Park, between ten and eleven in

the evening, and several intelligent and courteous people had assembled

there to enjoy themselves as far as it was possible to do so in a

neutral way-all carefully keeping every variety of feeling in a state of

solution, in spite of any attempt such feelings made from time to time

to crystallize on interesting subjects in hand.

'Neigh, who is that charming woman with her head built up in a novel way

even for hair architecture-the one with her back towards us?' said a man

whose coat fitted doubtfully to a friend whose coat fitted well.

'Just going to ask for the same information,' said Mr. Neigh,

determining the very longest hair in his beard to an infinitesimal

nicety by drawing its lower portion through his fingers. 'I have quite

forgotten-cannot keep people's names in my head at all; nor could my

father either-nor any of my family-a very odd thing. But my old friend

Mrs. Napper knows for certain.' And he turned to one of a small group of

middle-aged persons near, who, instead of skimming the surface of things

in general, like the rest of the company, were going into the very

depths of them.

'O-that is the celebrated Mrs. Petherwin, the woman who makes rhymes and

prints 'em,' said Mrs. Napper, in a detached sentence, and then

continued talking again to those on the other side of her.

The two loungers went on with their observations of Ethelberta's

headdress, which, though not extraordinary or eccentric, did certainly

convey an idea of indefinable novelty. Observers were sometimes half

inclined to think that her cuts and modes were acquired by some secret

communication with the mysterious clique which orders the livery of the

fashionable world, for-and it affords a parallel to cases in which

clever thinkers in other spheres arrive independently at one and the

same conclusion-Ethelberta's fashion often turned out to be the coming

one.

'O, is that the woman at last?' said Neigh, diminishing his broad

general gaze at the room to a close criticism of Ethelberta.

'"The rhymes," as Mrs. Napper calls them, are not to be despised,' said

his companion. 'They are not quite virginibus puerisque, and the

writer's opinions of life and society differ very materially from mine,

but I cannot help admiring her in the more reflective pieces; the songs

I don't care for. The method in which she handles curious subjects, and

at the same time impresses us with a full conviction of her modesty, is

very adroit, and somewhat blinds us to the fact that no such poems were

demanded of her at all.'

'I have not read them,' said Neigh, secretly wrestling with his jaw, to

prevent a yawn; 'but I suppose I must. The truth is, that I never care

much for reading what one ought to read; I wish I did, but I cannot help

it. And, no doubt, you admire the lady immensely for writing them: I

don't. Everybody is so talented now-a-days that the only people I care

to honour as deserving real distinction are those who remain in

obscurity. I am myself hoping for a corner in some biographical

dictionary when the time comes for those works only to contain lists of

the exceptional individuals of whom nothing is known but that they lived

and died.'

'Ah-listen. They are going to sing one of her songs,' said his friend,

looking towards a bustling movement in the neighbourhood of the piano.

'I believe that song, "When tapers tall," has been set to music by three

or four composers already.'

'Men of any note?' said Neigh, at last beaten by his yawn, which

courtesy nevertheless confined within his person to such an extent that

only a few unimportant symptoms, such as reduced eyes and a certain

rectangular manner of mouth in speaking, were visible.

'Scarcely,' replied the other man. 'Established writers of music do not

expend their energies upon new verse until they find that such verse is

likely to endure; for should the poet be soon forgotten, their labour is

in some degree lost.'

'Artful dogs-who would have thought it?' said Neigh, just as an exercise

in words; and they drew nearer to the piano, less to become listeners to

the singing than to be spectators of the scene in that quarter. But

among some others the interest in the songs seemed to be very great; and

it was unanimously wished that the young lady who had practised the

different pieces of music privately would sing some of them now in the

order of their composers' reputations. The musical persons in the room

unconsciously resolved themselves into a committee of taste.

One and another had been tried, when, at the end of the third, a lady

spoke to Ethelberta.

'Now, Mrs. Petherwin,' she said, gracefully throwing back her face,

'your opinion is by far the most valuable. In which of the cases do you

consider the marriage of verse and tune to have been most successful?'

Ethelberta, finding these and other unexpected calls made upon herself,

came to the front without flinching.

'The sweetest and the best that I like by far,' she said, 'is none of

these. It is one which reached me by post only this morning from a place

in Wessex, and is written by an unheard-of man who lives somewhere down

there-a man who will be, nevertheless, heard a great deal of some day, I

hope-think. I have only practised it this afternoon; but, if one's own

judgment is worth anything, it is the best.'

'Let us have your favourite, by all means,' said another friend of

Ethelberta's who was present-Mrs. Doncastle.

'I am so sorry that I cannot oblige you, since you wish to hear it,'

replied the poetess regretfully; 'but the music is at home. I had not

received it when I lent the others to Miss Belmaine, and it is only in

manuscript like the rest.'

'Could it not be sent for?' suggested an enthusiast who knew that

Ethelberta lived only in the next street, appealing by a look to her,

and then to the mistress of the house.

'Certainly, let us send for it,' said that lady. A footman was at once

quietly despatched with precise directions as to where Christopher's

sweet production might be found.

'What-is there going to be something interesting?' asked a young married

friend of Mrs. Napper, who had returned to her original spot.

'Yes-the best song she has written is to be sung in the best manner to

the best air that has been composed for it. I should not wonder if she

were going to sing it herself.'

'Did you know anything of Mrs. Petherwin until her name leaked out in

connection with these ballads?'

'No; but I think I recollect seeing her once before. She is one of those

people who are known, as one may say, by subscription: everybody knows a

little, till she is astonishingly well known altogether; but nobody

knows her entirely. She was the orphan child of some clergyman, I

believe. Lady Petherwin, her mother-in-law, has been taking her about a

great deal latterly.'

'She has apparently a very good prospect.'

'Yes; and it is through her being of that curious undefined character

which interprets itself to each admirer as whatever he would like to

have it. Old men like her because she is so girlish; youths because she

is womanly; wicked men because she is good in their eyes; good men

because she is wicked in theirs.'

'She must be a very anomalous sort of woman, at that rate.'

'Yes. Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to

her inconsistencies in principle.'

'These poems must have set her up. She appears to be quite the correct

spectacle. Happy Mrs. Petherwin!'

The subject of their dialogue was engaged in a conversation with Mrs.

Belmaine upon the management of households-a theme provoked by a

discussion that was in progress in the pages of some periodical of the

time. Mrs. Belmaine was very full of the argument, and went on from

point to point till she came to servants.

The face of Ethelberta showed caution at once.

'I consider that Lady Plamby pets her servants by far too much,' said

Mrs. Belmaine. 'O, you do not know her? Well, she is a woman with

theories; and she lends her maids and men books of the wrong kind for

their station, and sends them to picture exhibitions which they don't in

the least understand-all for the improvement of their taste, and morals,

and nobody knows what besides. It only makes them dissatisfied.'

The face of Ethelberta showed venturesomeness. 'Yes, and dreadfully

ambitious!' she said.

'Yes, indeed. What a turn the times have taken! People of that sort push

on, and get into business, and get great warehouses, until at last,

without ancestors, or family, or name, or estate-'

'Or the merest scrap of heirloom or family jewel.'

'Or heirlooms, or family jewels, they are thought as much of as if their

forefathers had glided unobtrusively through the peerage-'

'Ever since the first edition.'

'Yes.' Mrs. Belmaine, who really sprang from a good old family, had been

going to say, 'for the last seven hundred years,' but fancying from

Ethelberta's addendum that she might not date back more than a trifling

century or so, adopted the suggestion with her usual well-known

courtesy, and blushed down to her locket at the thought of the mistake

that she might have made. This sensitiveness was a trait in her

character which gave great gratification to her husband, and, indeed, to

all who knew her.

'And have you any theory on the vexed question of servant-government?'

continued Mrs. Belmaine, smiling. 'But no-the subject is of far too

practical a nature for one of your bent, of course.'

'O no-it is not at all too practical. I have thought of the matter

often,' said Ethelberta. 'I think the best plan would be for somebody to

write a pamphlet, "The Shortest Way with the Servants," just as there

was once written a terribly stinging one, "The Shortest Way with the

Dissenters," which had a great effect.'

'I have always understood that that was written by a dissenter as a

satire upon the Church?'

'Ah-so it was: but the example will do to illustrate my meaning.'

'Quite so-I understand-so it will,' said Mrs. Belmaine, with clouded

faculties.

Meanwhile Christopher's music had arrived. An accomplished gentleman who

had every musical talent except that of creation, scanned the notes

carefully from top to bottom, and sat down to accompany the singer.

There was no lady present of sufficient confidence or skill to venture

into a song she had never seen before, and the only one who had seen it

was Ethelberta herself; she did not deny having practised it the greater

part of the afternoon, and was very willing to sing it now if anybody

would derive pleasure from the performance. Then she began, and the

sweetness of her singing was such that even the most unsympathetic

honoured her by looking as if they would be willing to listen to every

note the song contained if it were not quite so much trouble to do so.

Some were so interested that, instead of continuing their conversation,

they remained in silent consideration of how they would continue it when

she had finished; while the particularly civil people arranged their

countenances into every attentive form that the mind could devise. One

emotional gentleman looked at the corner of a chair as if, till that

moment, such an object had never crossed his vision before; the movement

of his finger to the imagined tune was, for a deaf old clergyman, a

perfect mine of interest; whilst a young man from the country was

powerless to put an end to an enchanted gaze at nothing at all in the

exact middle of the room before him. Neigh, and the general phalanx of

cool men and celebrated club yawners, were so much affected that they

raised their chronic look of great objection to things, to an expression

of scarcely any objection at all.

'What makes it so interesting,' said Mrs. Doncastle to Ethelberta, when

the song was over and she had retired from the focus of the company,

'is, that it is played from the composer's own copy, which has never met

the public eye, or any other than his own before to-day. And I see that

he has actually sketched in the lines by hand, instead of having ruled

paper-just as the great old composers used to do. You must have been as

pleased to get it fresh from the stocks like that as he probably was

pleased to get your thanks.'

Ethelberta became reflective. She had not thanked Christopher; moreover,

she had decided, after some consideration, that she ought not to thank

him. What new thoughts were suggested by that remark of Mrs.

Doncastle's, and what new inclination resulted from the public

presentation of his tune and her words as parts of one organic whole,

are best explained by describing her doings at a later hour, when,

having left her friends somewhat early, she had reached home and retired

from public view for that evening.

Ethelberta went to her room, sent away the maid who did double duty for

herself and Lady Petherwin, walked in circles about the carpet till the

fire had grown haggard and cavernous, sighed, took a sheet of paper and

wrote:-

'DEAR MR. JULIAN,-I have said I would not write: I have said it twice;

but discretion, under some circumstances, is only another name for

unkindness. Before thanking you for your sweet gift, let me tell you in

a few words of something which may materially change an aspect of

affairs under which I appear to you to deserve it.

'With regard to my history and origin you are altogether mistaken; and

how can I tell whether your bitterness at my previous silence on those

points may not cause you to withdraw your act of courtesy now? But the

gratification of having at last been honest with you may compensate even

for the loss of your respect.

'The matter is a small one to tell, after all. What will you say on

learning that I am not the trodden-down "lady by birth" that you have

supposed me? That my father is not dead, as you probably imagine; that

he is working for his living as one among a peculiarly stigmatized and

ridiculed multitude?

'Had he been a brawny cottager, carpenter, mason, blacksmith, well-

digger, navvy, tree-feller-any effective and manly trade, in short, a

worker in which can stand up in the face of the noblest and daintiest,

and bare his gnarled arms and say, with a consciousness of superior

power, "Look at a real man!" I should have been able to show you

antecedents which, if not intensely romantic, are not altogether

antagonistic to romance. But the present fashion of associating with

one particular class everything that is ludicrous and bombastic

overpowers me when I think of it in relation to myself and your known

sensitiveness. When the well-born poetess of good report melts into. .

.'

Having got thus far, a faint-hearted look, which had begun to show

itself several sentences earlier, became pronounced. She threw the

writing into the dull fire, poked and stirred it till a red inflammation

crept over the sheet, and then started anew:-

'DEAR MR. JULIAN,-Not knowing your present rank as composer-whether on

the very brink of fame, or as yet a long way off-I cannot decide what

form of expression my earnest acknowledgments should take. Let me

simply say in one short phrase, I thank you infinitely!

'I am no musician, and my opinion on music may not be worth much: yet I

know what I like (as everybody says, but I do not use the words as a

form to cover a hopeless blank on all connected with the subject), and

this sweet air I love. You must have glided like a breeze about me-seen

into a heart not worthy of scrutiny, jotted down words that cannot

justify attention-before you could have apotheosized the song in so

exquisite a manner. My gratitude took the form of wretchedness when, on

hearing the effect of the ballad in public this evening, I thought that

I had not power to withhold a reply which might do us both more harm

than good. Then I said, "Away with all emotion-I wish the world was

drained dry of it-I will take no notice," when a lady whispered at my

elbow to the effect that of course I had expressed my gratification to

you. I ought first to have mentioned that your creation has been played

to-night to full drawing-rooms, and the original tones cooled the

artificial air like a fountain almost.

'I prophesy great things of you. Perhaps, at the time when we are each

but a row of bones in our individual graves, your genius will be

remembered, while my mere cleverness will have been long forgotten.

'But-you must allow a woman of experience to say this-the undoubted

power that you possess will do you socially no good unless you mix with

it the ingredient of ambition-a quality in which I fear you are very

deficient. It is in the hope of stimulating you to a better opinion of

yourself that I write this letter.

'Probably I shall never meet you again. Not that I think circumstances

to be particularly powerful to prevent such a meeting, rather it is that

I shall energetically avoid it. There can be no such thing as strong

friendship between a man and a woman not of one family.

'More than that there must not be, and this is why we will not meet.

You see that I do not mince matters at all; but it is hypocrisy to avoid

touching upon a subject which all men and women in our position

inevitably think of, no matter what they say. Some women might have

written distantly, and wept at the repression of their real feeling; but

it is better to be more frank, and keep a dry eye.-Yours,

ETHELBERTA.'

Her feet felt cold and her heart weak as she directed the letter, and

she was overpowered with weariness. But murmuring, 'If I let it stay

till the morning I shall not send it, and a man may be lost to fame

because of a woman's squeamishness-it shall go,' she partially dressed

herself, wrapped a large cloak around her, descended the stairs, and

went out to the pillar-box at the corner, leaving the door not quite

close. No gust of wind had realized her misgivings that it might be

blown shut on her return, and she re-entered as softly as she had

emerged.

It will be seen that Ethelberta had said nothing about her family after

all.

10. LADY PETHERWIN'S HOUSE

The next day old Lady Petherwin, who had not accompanied Ethelberta the

night before, came into the morning-room, with a newspaper in her hand.

'What does this mean, Ethelberta?' she inquired in tones from which

every shade of human expressiveness was extracted by some awful and

imminent mood that lay behind. She was pointing to a paragraph under the

heading of 'Literary Notes,' which contained in a few words the

announcement of Ethelberta's authorship that had more circumstantially

appeared in the Wessex Reflector.

'It means what it says,' said Ethelberta quietly.

'Then it is true?'

'Yes. I must apologize for having kept it such a secret from you. It was

not done in the spirit that you may imagine: it was merely to avoid

disturbing your mind that I did it so privately.'

'But surely you have not written every one of those ribald verses?'

Ethelberta looked inclined to exclaim most vehemently against this; but

what she actually did say was, '"Ribald"-what do you mean by that? I

don't think that you are aware what "ribald" means.'

'I am not sure that I am. As regards some words as well as some persons,

the less you are acquainted with them the more it is to your credit.'

'I don't quite deserve this, Lady Petherwin.'