PART II

I

FINANCIAL INTELLIGENCE

Four years ago--no very long time, even to those who must count it

by the ruins and ghosts it has made--the light-hearted wayfarer amid

financial pitfalls--_vacuus coram latrone viator_--not more a snob

than an antiquary with a wistful regard for survivals need confess

himself, spared a glance, as he passed along Throgmorton Avenue, for

a big brass plate on the door of the corner building which overlooks

the crouched statue and smoky fig-trees of the "Draper's Garden." For

him the legend it bore called up a vision, unique amid the alien and

masqueradingly Semitic names with which the dreary canyon is plastered,

of other and very different days, fiercer perhaps but at least less

meanly cruel; of hard knocks given and taken in a selfless quarrel;

of blows upon helmet and corselet, thrusts that the buff coat haply

turned; of a fight that raged one whole September afternoon through the

streets of the "ever faithful city."[2]

"BRYAN LUMSDEN, CALVERT & CO.,

Stock and Share Brokers."

[Footnote 2: Worcester]

A stranger to the ephemeral record of London society--if such a one

can be imagined in this day of "open letters" and the ubiquitous

lens--who met the genial head of the firm upon the lawn at Cowes, or

among his yearlings at Stanmore, at the pigeon butts of Pau and Cannes,

or in the thrice-guarded sanctuary of the Turf Club writing-room, or

who, as is likelier far, merely passed him in Austin Friars, silk

hat cocked rakishly, one hand holding the lapel of his coat and the

other laid lightly and characteristically upon the shoulder of some

olive-skinned lord of the market, would probably have carried away

a totally false impression of the man and of his history. Official

text-books--the one, for instance, in which poor Fenella discovered a

romance so enthralling, would not greatly have helped him. He would

have learned from them that Sir Bryan Lumsden was twelfth baronet of

either a very old or a very short-lived dynasty; that he was the son of

Denzil Lumsden, of Coffers Castle, Kincardineshire; that he had served

his country in the Scots Guards, been an aide-de-camp during the Tirah

Campaign (medal and clasps), and had left the service at twenty-five.

No less than three residences housed all this greatness: the castle

aforesaid, "The Chase," Stanmore, and 369 Mount Street. "Clubs: the

Turf, Marlboro, and Royal Yacht. Unmarried." And from the silence

concerning the sphere in which three parts of his life were spent, and

upon whose harvest, presumably, these glories were supported, he would

have conjectured that here was a case common enough in latter-day life:

the scion of an old house, bought in to finance by family money and

connection, gradually acquiring sufficient zest for the game to justify

a predominant interest, and, with position assured, returning blithely

to the life of his younger days, while, under the griffin wings that

hatch so many a clutch of golden eggs, Calvert, imaginable as a rather

vulgar but discreet person, buttoning a black coat high on his chest

and redressing the senior partner's ebullience by Apollinaris and

bulb-culture at Sutton, watched the processes that, by a law of growth

as simple as that which sows the pollen on the wind, make the rich man

daily and hourly richer.

They would have been quite wrong. No titled food-adulterer or gutter

journalist--no drab figure in all the broadclothed gallery with which

Dr. Smiles seeks to fire the imagination of youth--was more literally

the architect of his own fortunes. Twelve years ago, when he was an

attaché at Vienna, with a long night of ruinous play behind him and a

scented but heartless letter under his elbow, Bryan Lumsden had spun

a coin to decide whether he should continue the battle elsewhere and

under less tangled conditions or pass to the completer simplification

which was all his pagan soul conceived of death. He had tossed the

double thaler into the air simply, with no consciousness of pose, and

since it fell for life, had played the game out that way. Returning to

London, he had sent in his papers, paid his debts with what was left

of an attenuated property, and asked for "desk-room" in the office of

the broker through whom the final transactions were conducted--a dark,

secretive man, little susceptible to the appeal of the incongruous or

to the glamour of a barren title.

At the end of a year, upon the quarter per cent. margin allowed to

those outside the house for business they introduce, he was earning

an income in excess of many sworn members of repute, who struggle on

from settlement to settlement with the hammer suspended over their

heads like a sword of Damocles. In three years he was a member of the

house and a partner. Business flowed to him. His gay, casual manners,

his cheery voice, melted the senile heart of Mammon. The baffling blue

eye, behind which a purpose quick and strong as steel was kept bright,

pierced its pompous parade from the outset, and, holding his adversary

at a deflated value, he was never tempted to take himself any the more

seriously for his success. To the last the moves for which the market

watched would be made between a chat with his trainer and a chaffing

and recondite conversation over the telephone with the Tower mess.

History is always repeating itself in unlooked for fashions. A hundred

and sixty years ago the great Marshal Saxe, forming his squadrons for

the charge that was to give Lauffeld to the French, ordered aside their

black-avised brigadier and picked on a subaltern, careless and rosy,

whom he espied laughing in his saddle, to lead the human avalanche. And

in the meaner struggle that seems to have displaced war indefinitely,

it will still happen that a light heart with a constitutional

cheerfulness in taking risks finds all manner of blind forces following

headlong at its heels.

His great chance came when he was just over thirty. For two hours of

a sunny afternoon, and to the clouding of a fair brow at Ranelagh, a

gaunt, hungry-eyed Western American, referred to him in despair by a

friend whose time the stranger had daily and pertinaciously returned

to waste, sat in his private office. The man's story was a fantastic

one. Of a tunnel which he had been excavating under subvention, for

years, and timbering furlong by furlong, sometimes more, sometimes

less, as the rusty ore with which the mountain teemed assayed well or

ill; of a suspicion, dawning on him little by little as he proceeded,

that a wild miner's tale of the district--the legend of the lost lode

of Troublesome Gulch--might not, after all, be a myth; the sudden

discovery of free gold in the rarest and most precious of ores,

"running up through the rock, sir, like a fern"; the theft of the

samples that would have justified him; the sudden withdrawal of his

subvention, and the decision of the railroad to build its connecting

line at a lower level and at an easier gradient; the offers that had

been made him for his property, in all of which his fevered mind saw

only a threat and evidence of conspiracy. The man was no smooth-tongued

exploiter: he spoke roughly, uncouthly, chewing to rags the first dry

cigar he had ever smoked, in an evident sweat of fear lest somehow or

other his secret should be torn from him--straining to be back and on

guard again. His eyes blazed as he talked and his hand shook. He had

been nursing his dreams on aerated bread and coffee.

Lumsden kept his visitor by him--wired to Ranelagh--telephoned to

various quarters. That night in a private room at the Carlton the

company was (unofficially) formed. Within a week from their issue

"Gulches" were the sensation of the market. They started well at

parity, dropped to fifteen shillings and twelve and a half on an

attack of nerves and a truculent attitude on the part of the railroad;

recovered, rose to thirty, soared to forty, to four, to six pounds.

Fresh shares were issued; the public, almost kept out of the first

issue, responded greedily, and the opportunity was seized to unload

more of the old debentures than certain cool heads approved. It might

be another Camp Bird; it might be the most colossal swindle since

Kaffir days; in either case, its proportions inspired respect. There

was a shuffle on the financial checker-board. West Hampstead moved

to Mayfair, Porchester Gate to Park Lane, and was, so to speak,

_crowned_ there, with power to move either way for the future,

in a bull or bear direction, capturing meaner uncrowned pieces _en

route_. Stanwood went back to Sleepy Cat Mountain with the light of

victory in his eye.

Before the snow had melted round the feet of the burros which were

bringing down his six-dollar quartz to the smelter he was a ruined man.

It was everybody's fault and nobody's fault. The necessary delays had

not been discounted; holders were pressed in other directions; finally

a discovery that Lumsden, to fill an order for a thousand shares, was

buying outside and privately at three-fifteen, stampeded the market.

The collapse was complete enough to become a joke. Clerks asked one

another: "Will you take it in half-crowns or in Gulch debentures?"

In the summer Lumsden went out to the States. He found Stanwood, a

baffled but not a beaten man, and his son, a strong silent lad with

steady eyes, "batching" in a log shanty with an earthen roof. Tin

kettles and saucepans were hung on pegs all around the outside walls.

Behind the hut, among whortle bushes, an ice-cold spring bubbled out

of the ground, and all manner of wild mountain flowers--rabbit-ears,

puccoons, and thimble-berries--grew to the threshold. They were seven

thousand feet above sea-level; all around was space and silence--an air

like sparkling wine: his feet, as he ascended the track, crushed sweet

harsh odors out of the barren earth.

In long but not aimless rambles over the boulder-strewn slopes; in elk

hunts up in the timber reserve; in naked male talk by the cedar fire

under the star-bewildered dome of night, the two men grew to learn, to

esteem, and to trust one another. There was cheering news, even before

Lumsden returned East, for the worn woman who was keeping an Omaha

boarding-house for brawling Swedish clerks. He travelled slowly, by way

of Denver, New York, Washington, and Paris, seeing a good many people

in business hours, and, it must be admitted, amusing himself pretty

strenuously out of them. He was back in London by October, and the rest

is financial history. People said: "Oh! but what about the original

shareholders?" Yet it was amazing how few ever came forward. Lumsden

and Lumsden's friends seemed to have gobbled them all up.

There is only one thing more which, in this place, it becomes necessary

to record of Bryan Lumsden. Once a month or so, sometimes oftener,

sometimes less, at the busiest hour of the afternoon, a big closed

motor-car made its way, with many grunts and turns, to the big corner

building in Throgmorton Avenue. Sir Bryan would issue from the swing

doors, throwing instructions over his shoulder as he passed through

the office, sometimes would even dictate a letter to the clerk at his

elbow, with one foot on the step of the coupé. After a single word to

the chauffeur, which the man acknowledged by touching his peaked cap,

he would fling himself back against the cushions of the limousine and

busy himself with a pile of papers which he had brought under his arm.

Occasionally, at some stoppage or temporary eclipse of light, he would

look up from them. It was noticeable then that his face had lost its

pleasant quality, was even hard and cruel.

The car rolled on, slowly and softly, through the congested city

streets, noisily insistent amid heavy van traffic in Clerkenwell,

quickened its speed as it turned into Bloomsbury's drab squares.

Presently Regents Park flashed green or ghostly gray outside the

windows; long brown garden walls and shabby stucco of St. John's Wood

reeled past; the car breasted the hill to Frognal, along a steep avenue

of widely spaced, fantastic red-brick houses, set amid shrubs and old

timber, and with an occasional glimpse, in lichened roof or clustered

chimneys, of an older suburb.

It stopped outside a low wide house which overlooked the heath and

was separated from the road by a clipped hedge. Generally, warned by

the tumult of the car's approach, the door would fly open before he

could reach it from the garden gate; if not, he pulled the wrought

iron bell-handle. If the summons remained unanswered beyond a few

seconds, he felt impatiently in his pocket for a key and admitted

himself. Inside, he looked round the low, wide hall, with the hard air

of proprietorship which a man keeps for the place that is his house

but not his home. He summoned the laggard servants, spoke sharply to

them (in French), pushed open the door of the drawing-room, and waited,

biting his moustache restlessly, and looking out of the window over the

wide heath. A novel, face downward, or a wisp of embroidery generally

decorated the cushions of the window seat.

Presently the door would open behind his back, and a soft rustle of

silk and chink of jewelled ornaments cease of a sudden as a woman stood

at gaze, watching the broad back or clear profile, silhouetted against

the diamond panes of the bow window. With the same undisguised air of

ownership, unutterably hideous now when a human creature endured it,

Lumsden turned and looked--looked at a slave whom his money had bought

and of whom he had tired.

Either one of two things might happen then: She might be peevish,

perverse, and bitter, answering his perfunctory questions as shortly,

with many shrugs of her shoulders and deprecatory motions of her bare

arms; striving with all the advantage her native tongue, the language

of cruel inflection and bitter meanings, could give her, to plant her

own chagrins, like poisoned arrows, in his breast. Or else, abandoning

herself upon his shoulder in an attitude for which everything about

her--her dress, the very fashion of her hair--seemed calculated, she

would force him to a seat, fling her arms around his neck, recall old

tendernesses, never forgetting to mingle her kisses with complaints

of her servants--so insolent; her tradesmen--so pressing; the view

over the heath--so _triste_ in winter. Her eyes would be dilated,

their pupils at a point. Looking down, Lumsden could see little black

dots all over the large white arms. He bore kisses and reproaches with

exactly the same stoicism, still waiting, still keeping his eyes upon

the door.

Suddenly their expression changed. There would be a shrill chatter of

women in the hall--every one in this house seemed to speak and scold in

French--cries of "_Prenez garde! M. Cyrille!_" "_Une marche de

plus!_" "_Voilà!_"--a child's voice asking for "papa! papa!"

Led by a French bonne, though he appeared full five years old, and

struggling in her grasp, a little boy would enter the room with eager

precipitancy. He walked sturdily but somehow clumsily too, holding his

free arm out before him and tossing the fair curls from his forehead

with a curious baffled gesture. Reaching Lumsden's knee or outstretched

hand, he would give a shrill, glad cry, break once for all from the

woman who had guided him, and next moment be clasped and gathered into

his father's long powerful arms.

Fate has a fine unseemliness, now and then, in her dispensations. It

was in a house leased for the service of shame, among brazen foreign

women whose hard black eyes belied the respect of their voices, that

Lumsden was forced from time to time to plumb the depth of tenderness

that lurked in his own heart. He loved his little son as he loved

nothing else in the world. And the boy was stone blind from birth.

II

TWO TELEGRAMS

Sir Bryan sat in his study at Mount Street one dark Saturday afternoon

late in December, sucking happily upon a calcined briar, but with a

watchful eye on the clock, for it was nearly time he began to dress.

He was by now a man of thirty-seven or thirty-eight, with a beautiful

but rather battered face, strikingly like certain portraits of Marshal

Blucher. He had heavy shoulders, straight legs, and lean flanks. His

enemies and men who boxed with him said his arms were disproportionate

even to his height. His hair was fair and longer than most men wear

it to-day: it was thinning over his forehead, and his wavy moustache

was streaked with gray. There are people, like buildings, who, for

all their size and show, we suspect of being hurriedly and cheaply

put together. The paucity or poverty of material shows somewhere: in

a mouth that doesn't quite shut, in ears that protrude--hair badly

planted on the scalp. No better description of Lumsden could be

ventured than that he seemed to have been built slowly and with a

good deal of thought. He was expensive in grain, like the pipe he was

smoking or the tie he was wearing.

He had been golfing all the afternoon, and was dressed, with happy

slouchiness, in a brown flannel suit and a limp shirt-collar. His soft

white waistcoat was a little soiled and lacked a button. The room he

sat in was clear and light, but simply furnished, a refuge in fact from

other splendors. _Estampes galantes_ of Fragonard and the younger

Morean decorated its walls sparsely. There was only one photograph, of

a woman, which stood by itself in a narrow gilt frame on a side table.

It was a large modern chiaroscuro affair. One noted frail emergent

shoulders, a head turned aside, delicate lines of neck and chin, and a

cloud of hair.

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

"Gentleman to see you, sir."

"Who is it, Becket?"

"Mr. Dollfus, sir."

"Oh! show him up!" But with the precipitancy of his race Mr. Dollfus

had shown himself up, and entered hard upon the man's heels.

The baronet hailed him after his cheery wont.

"Hello, Dolly! Another five minutes and I'd have been shaving. Sit down

and make yourself a whiskey and soda. Cigars are over there. How are

the girls kicking?"

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

too."

"Rotten notices the _Motor Girl_ got," said Lumsden, reaching for

a crumpled paper.

"That's all right," answered Dollfus with easy confidence. "We'll pull

it rount. Got a new College Song from America. Came too late to put in.

With a chorus, my boy, a chorus! 'Cher want to hear it?"

"Go ahead!"

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

"Sounds useful."

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

"What is it?"

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

Lumsden's face altered ever so little.

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

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

too. Remember now?"

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

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

"Come to you? What the deuce for?"

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

lead. A 'shance.'"

"And what did you say, Dolly? Took her on your knee--played uncle--told

her that if she was good to her mother you might give her a place in

the back row some day if you thought of it."

Dollfus looked at him keenly for a moment. He had a theory that Lumsden

remembered the girl better than he pretended; that he had, in fact,

spoken to her at La Palèze and been rebuffed.

"Yer on the wrong track, Lumpsden," he said; "she's quite respectable.

Madame de Rudder brought her--voman that useter teach the princesses.

She's vell connected, too."

"What's her name?"

"Fenella Barbour."

Sir Bryan started a little at the name, and his sudden movement did not

escape the Dominion manager.

"I say, Lumpsden," he went on casually; "aintcher a relation of the

Lady Lulford that died this year?"

"A little. Why do you ask?"

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

at Christmas."

"Who were talking?"

"Voman she called her cousin Leslie, that came wit' 'em too. At their

country house. The name's gone outer my head."

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

clock.

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

exactly you want?"

"Vell, I believe the girl's a find, Lumpsden. And natcherally I can't

do anything at the Dominion--wit'out--wit'out----You understand?"

"I understand. You've seen her dance, I suppose? Is it any good? You

know how much of this humbug there's been lately. Is hers something

quite special?"

"Quite," said Mr. Dollfus, briefly. He seemed to weigh his opinion once

more. "Oh quite!" he said again.

"You see a furore, in fact?"

"Maybe a riot," said Joe.

The financial support smiled. "You've made it such a family matter,

Joe, that you won't mind my telling you I don't particularly want riots

about relations of mine."

The manager shrugged his shoulders, but did not revise his opinion.

Lumsden held out his hand.

"I'll telephone you to-morrow, and fix a night after Christmas when we

can talk this over. Meantime, of course, you'll be discreet. Ta-ta,

Dolly. I like your song."

An hour later he re-entered the room and flung a fur coat and crush hat

on a lounge. He was dressed for dinner, was polishing his nails and

appeared thoughtful. Sitting down before a big knee-hole desk, that was

tucked away in a corner underneath a telephone, he switched on a light,

drew a letter-pad toward him and wrote:

"DEAR LESLIE:

"May I usurp your sex's privilege and change my mind about

coming to Freres Lulford for Christmas. I was going to Ponty's,

as you know, but somehow, this year, don't feel keyed up to the

light-hearted crowd they get together at Capelant. I want somewhere

to hide my unrevered head until the Spirit of Christmas is gone out

of the land, and I should like a look at Saleratus. The alternative

is to go to Scotland and turn myself into a sort of Dana Gibson

picture of the sorrows of the rich. You know the sort of thing:

'Where Get-there Lumsden really got to.'

"To tell you the truth, dear Leslie, I should never have refused

your invitation if you hadn't frightened me with our mysterious

newly discovered relative. Even, now, when I've decided to take the

risk, I'll feel nervous. You say 'brilliant.' Suppose it turns out

to be some dreadful little artist or writer person who'll want to

paint me, or use me as 'a type.'..."

When he had got so far he re-read the letter, tore it up, and wrote

out two telegrams. One was addressed to Lady Pontardawe, Capelant,

Flintshire, and its contents are no affair of ours. The other said--

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

His tickled sense of expectancy supported him through a dull

dinner--possessed him, in fact, to the extent of making him rather

a _distrait_ companion. Once he laughed out unaccountably.

Expectation was as rare with him as regret. He probably regarded

them as equivalent weaknesses, but there was no doubt which was the

pleasanter to indulge. Not quite a satyr, he was still less a saint.

Men who knew him well, contented themselves by saying that Bryan

"stayed it well," and the secret of his power to last was probably

that, for him, the life that began when he was called in the morning

ended when he switched the light off from above his pillow. He was not

an imaginative man, but if he had been, his morning bath might justly

have been conceived by him as a wide cool river, reflecting a gray

morning sky, that flowed between him and all follies and fevers of the

night. He took no heed what phantoms waved to him from the other shore,

nor what urgency and significance might be in their gestures.

He got back before twelve, changed his coat for a wadded Indian silk

smoking-jacket, and finished a long black cigar before he turned in. He

felt tranquil, and, for reasons possibly connected with his telegram

to Wales, even virtuous. Lulford, with its cloister terrace, its gray

walled fruit-gardens beneath the "Prior's oriel," and its lilied

carp-wood, girt with bastion and towers of clipped yew, had always

been a favorite house with him, far beyond the wind-tortured barrack

in Scotland that was the cradle of his own grim race, and which all

his money could not make bloom afresh. The glamour of his youth still

invested it. He had spent many a long holiday there, the while his

mother, widowed but no ways desolate, was seeking her own distractions

at Wiesbaden or Lausanne, and to the end of his school days (not

particularly pleasant ones, for he had been in an unfashionable house

and perpetually short of pocket-money) whatever sentiment of eclogue or

pastoral survived the drudgery of construe, always had for its stage

and background the remembered pleasantness of Lulford. Wonderful, not

how little had survived, but how much!

And to-night something else haunted it, something that was real,

that rather appealed to imagination than was evoked by it. Youth,

flushed, timorously daring, beckoned and eluded him down those alleys

and groves. (Eternal illusion, making your own summer wherever your

feet choose to pass!) He was of the age when a man is looking for the

heralds of middle life, and his _empressement_ struck him as one

rather ominous sign. The growing simplification of life was another.

The match-makers were giving Bryan up at last. He remembered a time

when it would not have been so easy to sneak away for two weeks in the

hunting season.

Dollfus had, after all, not been so far astray in his surmise. There

had been an encounter at La Palèze--one of those secrets which the most

transparent of women never seem to feel the need of telling. She had

not appeared frightened nor very much surprised--had let him walk by

her side across the dunes and through the pine woods, even chatted a

little, lightly. But then neither had she made any attempt to keep the

appointment he had so subtly forced upon her for the morrow. He had

never seen her alone again.

Ill at ease among abstractions, his mind turned with relief to the case

in point. Condensed slightly, his reflections ran something after this

fashion:

"I wonder what Leslie's game is. Of course she's stark mad, but it's

funny the others making a mystery about it too. Are they just giving a

hard-worked little relation a holiday, or do they mean to take her up

and bring her out next year. If they do, I'll wager she marries a title

or is ruined inside the year. I know what I'm talking about. All my

sweethearts do well. Things ain't like what they used to be. There's a

sight too much young blood about, and the cubs will be in everywhere. A

girl that can play 'em can land 'em. Good lord! Look at Bewdley! look

at the Colfax good boy! With the Nampore rubies round her blasted neck!

This one's clever, but I don't think she's that kind. But if she isn't,

what the devil was she doing at Palèze? Funny, Dollfus coming to me!

And I believe I'd rather see her on the stage after all, as long as

it's decent. What did he mean by 'a riot'?"

He got up, yawned, and threw his cigar butt into the fire. As he did

so his reflection confronted him, a little flattered by the red-shaded

globe. He pushed his face closer.

"Not much youth there, old man!" he said, referring to the eyes; "but

how many of the young 'uns will be where you are in fifteen years'

time? Money! Money! Gad! I can't spend it if I try."

He frowned at the fire and turned impatiently away. "I'm a fool," he

said. "None of 'em live up to their faces. Besides, you can never

corner that market. A lot is not knowing when to pull out, and idleness

and over-feeding, and seeing too many new faces. Heigho! I wonder what

Stanwood will be doing in the spring."

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

III

IN THE FIRELIGHT

Snow had been drifting again, softly, thickly, and persistently,

since dawn. The angles of the window sills were filled with it, every

square and diamond in the leaded gallery windows was rimmed with the

crystalline fur. The coats of the deer in the home park glowed a rich

rusty red against its intense and sparkling purity; half of every trunk

and branch at the edge of the wood was erased by it like a crayon

drawing by the india rubber of some impatient drawing-room master.

Fenella had spent the short winter afternoon roaming through galleries

and chambers of state, or watching the flakes that tumbled giddily from

the shrouded sky turn blue and green and red as they passed the painted

blazons in the great oriel window--coats fessed and barrelled and

ermined, of Alfords, and Corbets, and Danseys, and Maddocks, whose hale

and temperate blood ran in her own veins.

She was alone for the first time in the home of her forefathers. Her

uncle was away in the old capital of Powysland on some political

business or another; her cousins had driven down to the church an

hour ago, in a governess-cart heaped with ropes and garlands of holly

and fir. There were wreaths and crosses, too, for the woman who was

spending her first Christmas beneath the frozen earth, and Fenella

had shrunk from sharing the pious duty in which her heart could have

so little part. She was glad to be alone, and to muse undisturbed

in the ghostly protracted twilight. After the tempest of her grief

something of weakness and passivity lingered still; her heart felt the

languor of convalescence. Her movements were slower, her poises more

consciously graceful; with the restlessness of childhood the last of

its angles had gone. So imperative is nature, that she can make even a

broken heart subsidiary to her purpose. She had prayed to die, and was

three pounds heavier.

When the twilight glimmer in the long gallery was too ghostly to be

borne she descended to the dining-hall. Under its hooded fireplace

the roaring grate was heaped with blocks of ligneous coal almost as

large as boulders. Freres Lulford is in that borderland 'twixt the old

England and the new where, for a ten-mile walk, one may make choice

between coal-shafts and rolling mills, or ancient timbered hamlets and

the "forest fleece" of Wenlock Edge. She called Perseus, the house-dog,

to her, an eerie, feathery creature with a mouth like a shark, and,

holding his head in her lap with one hand, rested her round cheek,

dusky red from the fire into which she gazed, upon the other. The

flames, as they rose and fell, tossed a distorted shadow of her head

and shoulders, now low along the faded Persian carpets that covered the

polished oak boards, now high up on the diapered wall, across helmet

and cuirass, fringed silken banner, or antlered head, until, reaching

the straddled legs or flowered petticoat of some high-hung ancestor,

it sank again to the carpeted floor. She was dressed in a high-waisted

frock of some soft white material, with short sleeves that left most of

her arms bare, and with a high net collar kept pointed to the ears with

little whalebones, after a senseless momentary fashion that forced her

to carry her chin in the air. It was a very pretty chin, however; and

wherefore does fashion change at all if not to call attention, through

successive exaggerations, to the varied prettinesses of woman.

Was she beginning to taste content again? Was she even resigned?

She could not tell. A broken heart is such a relative term, one

so justly discredited by those who have not the patience or the

knowledge to follow its deadly sequelae that, except as the loosest

of illustration, it is grown to be a useless one as well. But without

flattering her own constancy in the least, Fenella could well perceive

that, but for a providence so despised at the time, it might have

gone very hard with her. Never, she owned it humbly and thankfully,

could power to endure so timely have followed the blow, ministering

angels the draining of the chalice. The worth or tenacity of a love

that death or something else violently disrupts is not to be measured

in an instant. At first, while the soul is nothing save a shocked

protesting mass of severed nerve and impulse, all comfort is welcome,

no matter whence it comes. It is not until the pain has abated that a

perverse relish for it becomes possible, and that its ameliorations

can seem a treachery done to love. So she had judged her own once,

with the indignation of youth for wise restraining laws that will

let no passion, by taking thought, grow beyond a certain stature.

She was wiser now as well as humbler--could bless the diversion even

for the poor perished love's sake. It had saved her from the meaner

vexations that, for the woman, follow the breaking of an engagement,

the unwelcome sympathy and the meaning glance, the loneliness of the

long empty hours, and the perpetual challenge to memory of familiar

scenes and faces. New skies, as the poet sings, may not change the

heart, but this much is certain--nowhere is disappointment borne so

hardly as among those who have been witness to the illusion. She went

from her lover's arms discredited, soiled even, but, at least, to those

who were ignorant of her history, and could not compare her with the

Fenella of old. Meantime, her sorrow lurked somewhere, to wake, she

felt instinctively, the day another man should ask her for love.

Her cousins were kind and natural, so natural that, after three months,

she seemed to have known them all her life. Leslie Barbour was tall,

thin and melancholy, mildly mad, and with the good looks that were

the only unentailed heritage in the Barbour family marred in her case

by ill-health and emaciation. She spoke little, and regarded her

new-found cousin with a purblind stare that it took Fenella a long time

to get used to, but which she was content now to accept as a tribute of

adoring affection. She loved white, waxy flowers with heavy odors, and

was psychically inquisitive.

Nelly was rather afraid of her uncle, a _bruyant_ peer with a

past of which the late Lady Lulford had been a very small part. He had

a fine head and heavy, fleshy face, opulently bearded, that Holbein

would have loved to paint, the face of one of the terrible new lords

of the English Renaissance who hung the abbots and gobbled up the

abbeys. In the country he affected knickerbockers and velvet coats,

and was sophisticated rather than intellectual, with a sophistication

that he had placed a whole life long at the service of his pleasures.

His pursuits being apt to clash with his eldest son's, Basil was at

present in Damaraland shooting big game; but Jack Barbour, the younger

son, a cheery and casual young lancer, fell unreservedly in love with

his pretty cousin, with a fine quality of hopeless adoration in his

homage (he has since married money and freckles) that the girl was

used to by now, and could deal with competently. The two became great

chums. Jack liked to have his well-turned-out little kinswoman for

brisk walks across the Park, or for a saunter down Bond Street at the

hours of resort. He did not mind how many of his comrades-in-arms

caught him in company that did him so much credit. "Where did you find

the pretty lady you were with in Burlington Street, Suds?" "Don't be

an ass, Bogey," Suds would make reply. "She's a little cousin of ours.

I'll introduce you in the spring when we start goin' round again."

Fenella, wearing her own sad colors in her heart, looked forward to the

promised gaieties almost with dismay. Life had become such a serious

thing. She worked hard at her dancing, teaching, and learning while

she taught, and making strides that carried her rapidly beyond Mme. de

Rudder's power to appreciate justly. On the morning of her interview

with Joe Dollfus she thought it well to take her eccentric cousin into

her confidence. The look of hopeless adoration only intensified in the

vacant, troubled face. Leslie put out her hand and touched the girl's

black hair timidly.

"Blame you, child?" she repeated. "Does one blame the butterfly for

seeking the sun? Will you forget me, darling, in your success--for I

see success written on your brow? Will you be only one other sad memory

in my breast--one pearl white head the more along the long rosary of

my regrets?" She sighed luxuriously. "I shall recall you best," she

decided after a moment's consideration, "when I see a creamy-white

rose, half-blown."

Fenella wriggled uneasily. She did not want to be any one else's

regret. Brows and breasts, moreover, had a mortuary flavor. Foreheads

and chests were much cheerfuller everyday matters. They were at lunch,

and she caught her cousin's hand under the table-cloth.

"Don't be gloomy, Les," she pleaded; "you make me feel all

_squiggly_ when you talk that way. Of course I sha'n't forget you.

I want you to come with me and madame this afternoon."

We know now what Mr. Dollfus thought; but his outward recognition of

his opportunity had been temperate, and the three women discussed his

attitude rather ruefully over their tea. Leslie looked at the girl's

flushed, chagrined face a long while in silence.

"Don't be afraid, Cousin Nelly," she said at last. "It's going to be

all right. That man is wild to have you."

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

you know?"

Leslie narrowed her pale eyes and shook her head slowly.

"Never mind how I know," she said cryptically. "These things aren't

withheld from me. They wouldn't be from _you_ if you could empty

your mind of _self_ for even a moment."

No reinforcement to hope is really insignificant. Nelly had glowed

at the eerie assurance. She was recalling it now, and smiling over

poor Les's unearthly manner, when the hairy head under her hand moved

convulsively. Perseus uttered a wild, strangling bark. A man was

standing on the opposite side of the fireplace, looking at the pretty

group of girl and animal--the dog asleep, the girl dreaming.

"Hello!" he said cheerfully.

IV

AN AFFAIR OF OUTPOSTS

He was a big man, and in his long hairy coat he looked a giant. After

the first glance the girl's first wild fear vanished. Burglars and

murderers don't wear fur coats in business hours, nor hold goggles in

their hand. Perseus, too, having given the alarm, had gone over to the

stranger, and was sniffing at him in a way that suggested recognition.

The unknown slapped his lean flank.

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

As he unwound a great woollen scarf from his neck, a fair, pleasant

face, rather damp and weather beaten, emerged. She recognized her

chatty friend of La Palèze immediately.

"I'm sorry if I startled you," he said, "but they told me Miss Barbour

was in the hall, so I walked in. Were they pleasant dreams?"

Even in the red firelight the color on the girl's cheeks deepened

perceptibly. "How can I slip past him?" she said to herself and then

aloud: "If you don't mind waiting, I'll go and see whether my cousins

are back. My uncle is at Shrewsbury."

"Please don't move," the man answered. "I asked. They're all out still.

But perhaps I'd better introduce myself. I'm Bryan Lumsden. I think I'm

expected."

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

morning. Leslie waited luncheon."

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

know."

"Shall I ring for tea?"

"Yes, please. And meantime, let's talk." He took off his coat and flung

it over a high-railed chair. "Shall we?"

She sat back, further into the shadow as she hoped, but the vicious

flame chose that moment to spurt out--a spurt of peculiar brilliance.

"Now, what can we talk about?" he asked pleasantly, when the footman

had gone, carrying the great coat with him.

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

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

Nelly abandoned her treacherous ambush.

"I couldn't help it," she protested, rubbing the arms of her chair

nervously with open palms. "You _would_ talk to me. And it's--it's

so hard to be rude."

"----in return, eh?"

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

"You had your revenge next day, remember!" he said, and stopped

abruptly, as another absurdly big footman, who should have been

breaking the glebe in Canada, entered with the tea-tray.

"Shall I turn on the light, miss?" the man asked, disposing various

silver-covered dishes on the wide hearth.

"No!--oh yes--if you please, Philip. Why do you say 'revenge'?" she

asked, when they were alone again. "I'm not a revengeful person."

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

temptation."

Under his steady gaze, which never left her face, except to scan

her figure, the ministry of the tea-table was a sad ordeal. In the

intervals of discharging her duties she called the hound to her and

fondled him anew. That hid one arm, anyway.

"I waited for you a whole morning."

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

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

"From Leslie? Of course you would."

"No; she only said, unaccountably: 'A cousin,' leaving me to guess

whether it was he, she, or it. I'm thinking of Joe Dollfus."

Suddenly he held his hand up. He had fine senses. "I can hear wheels in

the snow. You haven't told me your name."

"Fenella."

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

"Why not?" faintly.

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

The girl's eyes brimmed. Instead of this face, blonde, confident, and

animal, another one--lean, spiritualized, with far-seeking, visionary

eyes, swam through her tears. "Paul! Paul!" Like any poor maid, beset,

at bay in a robber-haunted forest, her heart called to her true love.

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

No answer.

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

London."

"Why should I say anything at all?"

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

What could she do? He was in no hurry to release her, and had hardly

dropped it when, chilled and dazed but boisterously light-hearted after

their mournful errand, her cousins entered the hall.

V

CICISPEO

The next morning was stirless but bracing. Snow covered the park in

soft mounds and waves, with a little black pit round the roots of

each tree, as though some hibernating animal were breathing beneath.

The laden branches balanced their fairy load daintily, against a sky,

low, buff-colored and heavy with the promise of a further fall toward

afternoon. The atmosphere was so still that the shouts of children

snowballing in the village half a mile beyond the lodge gates, the

rattling of antlers round the feeding-trough, reached the terrace,

swept and sand-strewn already, where Fenella walked before breakfast,

her arms folded under a warm golfing cape that she had found hanging

in the hall. In the morning light, austere, temperate and shadowless,

a good many of the misgivings that had robbed her of sleep were

re-examined and found ludicrously unworthy of the sacrifice. There was

no mistake about it. She had had her hour of unreasoning panic--had

even meditated excuses that should cover a precipitate homeward flight.

But that mood was over now. Women have their own code of bravery in the

only warfare they know--their own perception of the ignominy of flight.

If they act oftener upon their fears than upon the braver impulse, it

is only because, in this warfare, it is their adversary himself who has

set the rules and poisoned the weapons, decreeing that the slightest

wound as well as the mortal shall be held matter for shame.

"I've heard of you--from Dollfus." What did that mean? What could

be said of her yet? Of course, afterward, she was prepared for far

worse. She was going on the stage with her eyes remarkably wide open.

But that women--girls like herself, living at home, protected and

obscure--should be made subject of men's conversation, she felt was an

injustice--a treacherous thrust before the battle was joined. What was

its motive? To rob her of self-respect before her character could be

assailed? To cheapen, degrade her in her own eyes at the outset?

All at once a light dawned upon her--a light that beamed softly through

her eyes, that wreathed her lips with the faintest, saddest little

smile that ever was near neighbor to tears.

"It's all your fault, darling," she murmured. "It's all through you.

You've been and lost me my character, Paul. Oh, my dear, my dear! What

a joke! If the beasts only knew you?"

A foot grated upon the sand behind her. She turned and saw Sir Bryan,

very fresh and smart and youthful in his tweeds and breeches.

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

"I never heard the gong."

"You don't hear it from this side." He came nearer and drew in great

breaths of the cold, pure air. "Feeding's a bore, isn't it, a morning

like this? I like houses where everything's kept hot and you eat any

time; don't you?"

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

She tried to meet his new impersonal tone with perfunctory brightness;

but Bryan knew how a woman looks who hasn't slept.

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

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

"Disrespectful, eh?" Lumsden hazarded. He had that useful sort of tact

in conversation which consists in supplying the word that suits one's

own purpose best.

"We were such strangers, you see," urged Fenella, with gentle reproof.

"That time in France shouldn't have counted at all."

"If it did, the score was on your side," the baronet said quickly. "But

I'm content so long as you don't mark it against me."

"Then you hinted people were talking about me," Nelly went on,

reddening, but gaining confidence. "It was that worried me. It was so

vague."

"We were interrupted just then," Lumsden reminded her. "A word or two

would have explained, but you wouldn't let me get near you the whole

evening."

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

"Oh, isn't it?" said Lumsden. "I'm not a philanthropist, but I assure

you I've done my part bravely in holding lots of shaky reputations

together."

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

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

It was a different voice and another woman. Lumsden leaned over the

parapet and gathered a handful of snow.

"Snow's packing," he said. "We'll have sleighing after lunch. Ever been

on a bob-sleigh?"

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

"fun."

Sir Bryan gave a boyish laugh.

"You've missed half your life," said he, making use of one of a

collection of phrases he had brought from over the Atlantic. "Look

here!" He touched her ever so lightly on the shoulder and pointed

across the park. "From the Belvedere down to the 'ha-ha' there's two

hundred and fifty yards if you know how. We laid it out years ago, and

marked it with stones. It's known all round. Lots of people, probably,

will turn up here this afternoon. You'll let me take you down,

won't you, Miss Barbour? I say; do I have to go on calling you 'Miss

Barbour'?"

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

"For how long?"

She faced him with her hand upon the sash of the long French window. If

it was "just flirting," Fenella was "all there."

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

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

* * * * *

The conversation, however, lasted more than ten minutes, and it was one

Fenella was never to forget. As Bryan had prophesied, the news that the

slide was being banked and made spread rapidly, and a host of people

turned up in the afternoon, in country carts with sledges trailing

and bumping behind, or in motor-cars, with an occasional pair of skis

sticking up in the air. The run had been laid out years ago under

Lumsden's own direction, when "crooked run" tobogganing was a newly

discovered rapture. More than one future hero of the Kloster or Cresta

had taken his first powdery tumble, amid ecstatic laughter from friends

and relations, on the snowy slopes of Freres Lulford, and even now,

after the sophistication had set in that so quickly reduces any English

pastime to a science, with its canting vocabulary and inner circle of

the expert, whenever snow fell thickly enough to stop shooting and

hunting, two or three days' sleighing in Lulford Park was thought

rather "sport" by a society watchfully anxious never to be thrown upon

its intellectual resources by any trick of wind or weather.

Game-keepers and gardeners had been at work all the morning, and

after lunch people began to arrive. Fenella had met a good many of

them before--Lord Warrener, with his fiery whiskered cheeks and grave

little Philadelphia wife; Bill Arkcoll, whose gray face, seamed with

a million tiny wrinkles, was twisted into a permanent grin round a

black-rimmed eyeglass, which he had, moreover, a disconcerting habit

in the evening of letting fall with a sudden crash on his shirt front;

"Snip" Hannaford, the gentleman jockey, who had sacrificed his chest to

the sport of kings; finally Lady Wills-Pechell, alone condescendingly

literary on the strength of half a dozen pottering little garden books:

"Among my Syringas," "The Chatelaine's Year," "Shadow and Sun on

Spurlock Edge." Lady Warrener was of the latest type of trans-Atlantic

heiress, devoted to the peerage from the nursery, and "very carefully

brought up" by an ambitious and circumspect mother. Her opinions

were predigested and all her life nothing really unforeseen had ever

happened her, except twins. She adored her husband and babies, thought

Bryan's occasional Americanisms vulgar, and her favorite comment was,

"_Oh, fahncy!_"

As a class they had for some time ceased to force comparisons upon

Fenella; but this afternoon their low, clear voices, frank, unimpressed

greetings, absence of anxiety, and general air of being all afloat

together upon a stream that might be trusted never to carry them too

far out of one another's reach struck pleasantly upon her senses. A

great coke stove had been lighted in the Belvedere and the curved stone

benches covered with carriage-rugs and cushions. The trampled snow

outside was littered with an assortment of bob-sleighs, "Cheshires"

and frail steel clipper-sleds. The run started practically at the

door, with a nearly sheer fall of twenty feet; ran out a hundred yards

into the straight, turned--at first gently, then more sharply--on a

heaped embankment around the shoulder of the hill, and finished close

to the old carp pond, whose black ramparts and pointed turrets of

yew were roofed and spired to-day with a white thatch of snow. From

the gardens a sort of rough stairway, made of faggots and bundles of

brush-wood, had been made to the top of the hill. A few belated guests

were straggling up it, pulling up their sleds to one side through the

snow. Round the stove the vocabulary of the sport was being briskly

interchanged.

"_Sprawl_ on Battledore, and use your right foot, not your left."

"Never got beyond the duffer's handicap myself." "You'll 'yaw' all

over, Arkcoll, if you use rakes on the straight." "Hands are best."

"No, they're not: 'gouties,' when they get a bit worn, are just as

good." "He was killed because he held on, Warrener. Let go and bunch

yourself, and you can't be more than bruised even there." "Who's going

to start?" "That thing's no good on a snow-run, Barbour."

Jack Barbour was standing on the edge of the descent, a light steel

frame with a cushion held against his chest. He put it down and glanced

at his pretty cousin.

"Shall we show 'em how?"

Fenella caught her breath, but nodded.

"Oh, Jack, take care of her!" reproachfully, from his sister, while

Warrener, in the background, already a little _épris_, expressed

an opinion that it was "damned dangerous."

"Dangerous? Down that thing?" cried Barbour scornfully, pushing the

nose of what is technically known as a "tin-bottom" over the slope.

"What am I to do?" asked Nelly.

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

Fenella bit her lip and suppressed a vulgar inclination to scream.

The toboggan seemed to fall headlong--to rebound--to shoot out with

the evident intention of either burying itself in the embankment or

of leaping it altogether. When its nose was not more than ten yards

away she felt the speed suddenly slacken, the toboggan slewed round

with a twist that nearly overset it, and, steadying, slipped swiftly

and cleanly round a wide curve. Almost before the rapture of the

unaccustomed motion had been realized, it came to a stop, for want of

snow, in the shadow of the prior's garden.

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

sleeve.

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

_glorious_!"

Barbour smiled at her glowing face. "Pooh! You should see the real

thing. Ask Lumsden. He did the Kloster in five-fifteen once."

"Is he very good at it?"

"He's good at everything he takes up," said Jack, unreservedly. "How do

you like him, Flash? I forgot to ask."

Jack Barbour had heard of this old school nickname from a brother

officer who had had a sister at Sharland College and seldom called her

by any other.

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

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

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

Barbour had evidently found the situation ready made, and had never

thought of questioning it.

"I think he and the governor were racing partners once. There are

some of his horses here now: I don't mean hunters. Saleratus is his,

the big bay. We all hope he's going to win some races next year. Snip

Hannaford's going to ride him."

"Is he married, Jack?"

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

much."

"_Jack!_"

"Oh! I'm sorry, coz. It wasn't a very pretty speech to a lady. I mean

he's a bit spoilt. Shall we go up?"

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

"'Cos he's awful rich."

"Heaps of people are rich."

"Well, then, he's got a good deal to do with theatres, and knows that

kind of people. The Dominion really belongs to him. Why, your teeth are

chattering, Flash. Are you cold?"

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

Dominion."

"He is in a way. I don't quite understand these things, but I suppose

Bryan puts up the money."

"I see," said Fenella, with the accent of full comprehension. "Jack,"

she said, after a moment, "do you think it's quite right to have a man

like that meeting--proper women?"

Barbour jerked his head. He was a rather nice lad, singularly

susceptible to the influence of the moment.

"I suppose it isn't, when one thinks of it. We've thrashed this out

before, haven't we, Flash? Same law for both, eh?"

"I think men, and women too, ought to choose what kind of people

they're going to know, and be made _stick_ to that sort. I

don't like _mixings_. Come, let's go up. Here come some others.

Oh, Jack! aren't you glad you're young? I _hate_ men after

twenty-five."

* * * * *

The sport was over, together with the short-lived day, before she stood

in the same place with the older man. Servants carrying tea-baskets

and kettles had made their way up the slope. Lanterns twinkled in the

pergola, and gay chat floated down to them. She had kept out of his way

all the afternoon without difficulty. It was not until she had made the

tantalizingly short descent with one man after another, and finally,

amid much vain dissuasion and subsequent applause, headforemost by

herself on Jack's steel clipper, that he came to her side and asked

her, without a trace of the manner she resented, to take the last run

with him. It was growing dark, and meaning glances were not wanting,

but she had consented without any hesitation. She felt the glances, but

she felt also a strange elation and a consciousness of strength that

made her a very different creature to the nervous tongue-tied little

girl of the night before. She did not quite know why, but, as she

stood, a little breathless from her upward climb, with the first flakes

of the new fall melting on her glowing cheek, life, even shadowed life

such as was hers, seemed something intensely interesting, and something

that, given courage, might be mastered as easily as the sport she was

essaying now. He was the first to speak when they reached the sheltered

gloom below.

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

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

"I can believe that. You've even seemed to me to be keeping out of its

way, or out of mine, which comes to the same thing, all the afternoon."

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

be much gained."

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

know."

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

kind of cousins."

"Is that all he's told you?"

"A little more."

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

of taking?"

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

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

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

"Cousin Fenella, does history bore you?"

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

"A few minutes is enough. Years ago, then, cousin, in certain parts of

Italy, when a bride was starting her new life, besides the usual stuff

about pin-money, settlements, etcetera, the marriage contract contained

another clause that seems to our insular minds intensely shocking.

You'd never guess what it provided for."

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

His mouth twitched. "Baldly, then, one friend--neither more nor less.

A third partner in the terrestrial paradise. Seems rather a scandalous

person, doesn't he?"

"I think so."

Lumsden lit a cigar. "And yet"--_puff! puff!_--"the more one

thinks of him the more reasonable he becomes. Men were so busy in those

days, cousin. Fighting, don't you know--treaty making--in prison for

indefinite periods. Don't you see with how much easier mind the soldier

or diplomatic or captive husband must have laid his head on his lonely

pillow for knowing there was a stout arm, ready blade, keen wit at

home, authorized to keep marauders off. Do you wonder why I'm telling

you all this?"

"To frighten me, perhaps."

"Pshaw! I know better than that. Come! put prejudice aside. Remember,

too, that his name was probably the worst thing about him. Some poor

relative, unrewarded soldier, I always imagine him--generally a cousin,

by the way. Still wondering?"

No answer.

"Cousin Fenella, listen to me! Under ordinary conditions, for a girl

like yourself to dance on the stage would be to risk more unhappiness

and humiliation and treachery than you'd believe if I told you. There's

one place in which a word from me can secure you your peace of mind.

That's the Dominion. Don't turn away from luck."

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

"That the mere hint, in quarters where it's most wanted, that you're

a _protégée_ of mine will rid you once for all of unwelcome

attentions."

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

lose my reputation."

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

The last word was pitched so low that she hardly caught it. But,

whisper as it was, it decided her.

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

"That's right," said the sporting baronet encouragingly. "It's a

bargain then? Dominion or nothing?"

"Yes."

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

Christmas?"

"Yes."

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

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

"The _world_."

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

"_Who?_"

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

"Why are you taking all this trouble then?"

"Good! I like a 'facer' sometimes. Well, it's because I admire pluck.

Because I saw you swim a mile out at Palèze. Oh! I often watched you.

Because you took a header down that slide just now. What'll you be at

next. Shall we go back to the house or will you go up with me and face

the Wills-Pechell eye? It's celebrated, I warn you--got enough pluck

left for that?"

And as she climbed the brushwood path--her hand in this new

friend's--Fenella, all her elation gone, was wondering how much share

after all her will had had in the choice just made, and whether this

dazzling dream-vista of success and applause, out of which, as earnest

of her right to all it promised, a rush of warm-scented air seemed to

meet her through the snow-filled dusk, were not really a decree of

fate, hostile and inexorable to her heart's desire as death would have

seemed three months ago--peace, salty suffocation on the dark, lonely,

foreign beach, clasped in her lover's arms.

And Lumsden, quite possibly, was measuring the moral distance between

the cad who shoots a pheasant on the ground and the sportsman who

flushes it and gives it a fly for its life. Or for better sport--which

is it?--and to take a surer aim.

VI

THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT

Among the minor penalties with which fate, presumably solicitous

for a true balance, hampers excellence in this world, not alone the

acquired excellence, which, being achieved in its teeth, explicably

earns its maleficence, but even the natural advantages which were

its own unsolicited gift, one, we think, has escaped the attention

it deserves. We refer to a certain isolation and lack of touch with

their immediate _entourage_ which those who are marked for the

world's prizes never quite succeed in overcoming, however modestly

they wear or anticipate their honors. They are interesting, and for a

correct view a certain distance, respectful, (though not necessarily

so to them), is judged advisable. Society opens its ranks to receive

them, but never quite closes on them again. None who have studied the

lives of the giants but will have noticed how rarely a friendship

disinterestedly worthy of them came their way, and is not the fatality

of beauty, encountering the spoiler where the friend was imagined, a

proverb? Fenella had not lived her new life a month before she was

aware of a subtle atmosphere which was not treachery and which could

not, without begging the question, have been called disrespect, but

which partook a little of both. One does not feel a thing less keenly

for being unable to exactly define it. Instincts are given women to be

acted on, not to be explored. Its manifestations as yet had been only

vaguely disquieting. Among the men it was apparent rather as a half

jocular reservation of judgment--a determination, in view of possible

developments, not to be committed to any one view of her character

now, and, above all, never to be in the position of having more knowing

brothers administer a rebuke to worldly wisdom. And among the women it

took the shape of a coldness in meeting her advances which contrasted

puzzlingly with the outspoken admiration that invited them. Poor,

warm-hearted, ignorant Fenella! experiencing for the first time the

full benefits of the benefit of the doubt.

It might be inevitable, or it might not, that, as day followed day

of a visit so rapidly losing its charm, the broad-shouldered figure

of the sporting baronet should begin to stand out more and more

sympathetically against this background of veiled disrespect and

thwarting reserve. It is true that the openness of his first advances

had been the thing nearest approaching insult that she could remember,

but, such as it was, it was forgiven now and, womanlike, the fault,

frankly owned, brought him nearer. More womanlike still, perhaps,

she liked him the better because he had been a witness to the old

lost love of the summer. He at least saw her in no half light. She

did not care greatly if he believed the worst--took a perverse joy,

indeed, in believing it was possible he did. She was on her way now

to a life where such things were no handicap, to which, indeed, she

half suspected they were sometimes the initiation. She was content the

knowledge of her own integrity should remain--a secret satisfaction to

herself--content to feel it as a dancer of the fervid south, beneath

her languorous draperies, may feel the chill of the dagger that she

carries thrust through her garter.

He was kind and helpful too, not with the troublesome insistence of

a man anxious to make amends for a former mistake, but as though,

the ground having been cleared once for all of false conceptions,

misunderstanding was no longer likely between them. Mourning and

seclusion, she discovered, were comparative terms among country

neighbors, and amid the men with whom the house intermittently abounded

he showed both a finer creature and a finer gentleman. Once, in the

billiard-room, when Warrener the full-blooded hinted that her cheeks

lacked roses, and made as if to pour out whiskey for her, Lumsden took

the decanter from his hand without a word, and put it back on the

wooden ledge that ran round the room. She had come on a message to him

from Leslie.

"I'd send one of the maids, Flash, when it's as late as this," he said,

simply, as soon as they were in the corridor.

He had adopted Jack's favorite nickname for her when they were alone

once and for all, but it was noticeable he never used it in the hearing

of a third person. The thing had no importance, but it is a type of the

assumptions she was finding it so difficult to resist.

It was he who, after all, taught her to ride. Jack Barbour, to do him

justice, was prepared to redeem an old promise so soon as, to use his

own words, "the bone was gone out of the ground," but frost followed

the snow and held for days after tobogganing had been voted flat, stale

and unprofitable. It wasn't Bryan's way to wait. He had more tan and

straw laid down over the path, bordered with evergreens, that led from

the stable-yard to poor Lady Lulford's steam laundry, and along which

the horses were exercised every day. Fenella's heart fluttered and

there was no lack in her cheeks of the roses whose absence Warrener

deplored as, dressed in a borrowed habit of Leslie's that pinched her

unconfined waist sorely, and with her hair in a pigtail again, she

put her foot in her master's looped hand. Maids and stable-boys were

peeping round the outbuildings.

He flicked the gray mare with his whip, and for more than an hour,

letting the rope he held run out to its full length, pulled the animal

backward and forward in a kind of "eight" figure. He threw away his

cigar, and his voice rang out crisp and decisive as on a barrack square.

"Straight between his ears! Now look down. Can you see the feet? That's

right! Now, then, press down in the stirrup as her fore-leg goes out,

then lift. _Hup! hup!_ Oh, fine! Coz! you're a fraud. You've

learnt before."

"Have I really done so very well?" she asked, when the lesson was over

and they were on their way to the stables. She looked up in his face;

her own tingling with pleasure at his appreciation.

"I've never seen 'em trot so well the first time." He looked her over

critically. "I suppose it's all balance. When we're back in town, I'll

mount you and show you lots of things. We'll have a turn in Richmond

Park."

She caught her breath at the last two words, as at a positive physical

pang. This must be the future, she supposed. Stray ends of pleasure,

caught at and let go, an uneasy sense of something missing that could

have woven them all into happiness, and now and then, when the nerve

was touched, just such a spasm of pain as made her wince now. Lumsden

did not notice her. He was looking at a large bay horse with a bandaged

ankle that a stableman was leading across the paved yard.

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

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

Bryan."

"What does Brodribb say about him?"

"Well, ye know what Mr. Brodribb be, Sir Bryan. 'E wunt 'ave the harse

slung. 'Get the condition right fust,' 'e says."

"Lift up his cloths."

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

animal gloomily.

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

"Yes, Sir Bryan."

"Feed him on corn a day or two, and let him have the boiled water warm.

I'll come down this afternoon and have another look at him. Well,

Flash, what do you think of him? Pretty horse, isn't he?"

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

"Thin?" Bryan looked down banteringly at his little cockney friend in

her borrowed riding-habit. "That's a race-horse. That's Saleratus."

* * * * *

On New Year's Eve the Lulford party dined at Chubley, Lady

Wills-Pechell's new but much photographed and be-paragraphed castle

high up on Spurlock Edge. Despite the roaring log fire, there was quite

a baronial rawness in the air of the dining-room, and most of the women

came to dinner with lace shawls or spangled Egyptian scarves over their

bare shoulders. Toward the end of dinner Lady Wills-Pechell leaned from

her chair for a whispered conversation with her right-hand neighbor.

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

cousin."

Fenella, who was genuinely absorbed in the technicalities of Snip

Hannaford, turned to meet her hostess's unconvincing smile.

"Miss Barbour, a little bird has been very busy lately twittering that

you dance. Aren't we to be shown anything before you go back to town?"

"There are too many little birds in S--shire," Bill Arkcoll remarked in

a penetrating undertone. "Pity the cold hasn't killed some of them."

Fenella reddened and turned pale by turns.

"Oh, I can't!" she said quickly. She flashed a quick appeal across the

table for her cousin's sympathy, but Leslie kept her eyes on her plate.

Leslie's manner had been strange lately.

"Oh, but you _must_--you really must! Talents oughtn't to be hid.

Ought they, Lord Lulford?"

The bearded widower, who had been engaged in demolishing the private

reputation of a Liberal leader, turned from the horrified face of the

great lady he had taken in to dinner.

"What is it?"

"We're asking your niece to dance here some night before she goes

back. She thinks it wouldn't be quite--quite, you know----"

Lulford tugged at his thick beard. "I don't know why you shouldn't,

Fenella. We're almost a family party."

"Don't worry the child," Lady Warrener put in, noticing her distress.

She had forgotten much that was American, but not the tradition that

kindness and consideration are budding womanhood's due.

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

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

Warrener.

"I think," said the chatelaine, "that there's more chance of her being

persuaded here. Won't _you_ try, Sir Bryan?" in her sweetest tone.

"It may be a serious matter," said Lumsden, without looking at any one

in particular. "Perhaps Miss Barbour's in training."

"Yes," said the lady of the Syringas. "But who's the trainer? That's

what we all want to know."

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

A smothered laugh, not only from the men.

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

generations."

There was a crash on a shirt-front, at which every one jumped but

Arkcoll. He would have very much liked to see the box belonging to,

say, generation three.

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

Lady Warrener thought she detected a suppressed ambition in the

restless movement.

"If you really don't mind, I've got volumes of old dance music over

at Captoft. I was going to ask Jack to motor you and Leslie over

to-morrow. Couldn't you rummage then?"

Fenella, hard pressed, looked over to Lumsden, as nearly every one had

intended she should look. There was the strangest, quizzical expression

on his face. It seemed to say:

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

already."

"I'll dance," she said abruptly, amid general applause, headed rather

shrilly from the top of the table; "but please don't trouble about

dresses, Lady Pechell. I'll write to mother to send me my own."

Lumsden came to her side soon after the men entered the drawing-room

with such undisguised intention that Lady Warrener, who had been trying

to interest her in the dawning intelligence of the miraculous twins,

drew away, puzzled and a little shaken in her advocacy.

"Bravo!" Bryan said encouragingly; but the girl did not respond, and he

thought he saw a tear roll down one bare arm. Nelly's tears were still

larger than ordinary.

"You looked across the table to me just now," he said. "I hope you saw

nothing in my face except a wish you should do the best for your own

interests."

"It's settled now," said Fenella coldly, after a gulp which she

hoped he didn't notice. "Lady Warrener had the _Chaconne_ from

_Iphigénie_ and I can do my _Rosetta_ dance to any six-four

time. I'll write for the dresses as soon as we get back to Lulford."

Saying which, she got up, grown stately somehow for all her girlish

short frock, and crossed the room to where the joyful mother of twins

was sitting silently, an expression of diffused and impartial sweetness

on her face. She touched her elbow.

"Lady Warrener, won't you go on and tell me some more about your

babies? I was really interested?"

The woman looked up, noted the mute appeal in voice and eyes, and,

drawing the girl down next her on the couch, took her hand and held it

as she chatted.

"Where had I got to? Oh, yes--Bunter said: 'Mother, there's something

tickling my red lane.' 'Your red lane, Bunter?' 'Oh, mother,' said

Patch, 'he's such a baby. He means his _froat_.' Now wasn't that

_sweet_. Miss Barbour? _Fahncy!_ And only three years old,

both of them. I'm so proud, I simply _bore_ all my friends.

But you love children, don't you, Miss Barbour? How can any one

_not_?"

VII

A DRESS REHEARSAL

Her own interests? Not many days had passed before she had a chance

to value them anew. The evening of the dance came and went. She was

a little surprised at the size of the gathering it called together.

There must have been eighty people in the hall, neighbors mostly,

jovial, temperately enthusiastic, in after-dinner mood, and with the

additional prospect of a first meet to hounds next day after the long

frost. She noticed, however, that Bryan seemed to be introducing a good

many strangers. She had danced amid a buzz of whispers, exclamations,

and frequently a loud "Bravo!" taken up and echoed wherever a white

shirt-front glimmered in the darkened hall. None of them knew how

well it was done, but every one could appreciate a graceful child in

a white satin Watteau dress with a great pointed frill, black sausage

curls falling upon her shoulders under a quaint glazed hat, whose

bones seemed to be of whalebone, whose feet never were still, and

whose face, through all her changing gestures of appeal, hesitancy,

curiosity, disdain, cunning, and weariness never altered from the grave

set expression with which she faced the first round of applause. Or an

odalisque, in a long striped tunic of the thinnest, softest silk and

baggy Turkish trousers that sagged in great wide folds over her bare

slippered feet, who swayed in time to sleepy _traumerei_ music

almost like a top--rousing every now and then with a braying jar of

the little cymbals that were fastened on her hands, to straighten and

poise and twirl herself anew--sinking on the floor with the last faint

chords, a soft limp heap of silk and dishevelled black hair.

Already, as she sat by her bedroom fire in night-dress and wrapper,

her hair plaited on each side of her head, and cuddling her knee, she

was paying for her brief hour of triumph. She had the indefinable

feeling of having "gone too far" that makes one dread the coming day

like the face of an enemy. She thought people had looked strangely at

her when she returned dressed, collected, and a little paler, to the

hall. It was not because here and there she had caught a false note

in the tempest of congratulation that overwhelmed her. It seemed set

altogether in a key that was strange and new; she could judge, for,

after all, it was not the first time she had danced in public. Even the

impulse which had made her at the end of her second dance run forward

and kiss Lady Warrener (at the piano) seemed to be misunderstood. The

gentle peeress, so kind before, had shrunk from her palpably. And yet

it was so natural; for she had never danced to music played like that

before. How she longed for her public, her real public, obtuse and

leather-lunged if you will, but whom a smile can conquer and whose

loyalty, once gained, is gained forever!

Then she had her own private motives for misgiving. Her cousin's manner

had been strange for days. Leslie avoided her plainly, but followed

her with her eyes. When forced to speak she seemed, not harsh, but

confused, shocked, and anxious for escape. Jack had gone back to his

regiment in Ireland the day after the dinner, grumbling, and feeling

the iron of disinheritance in his soul as only the younger son of a

great house can. He would have told her everything. But she must have

an explanation from Leslie to-morrow. On no other prospect could she

face the night.

The fire was burning low. The little Sheraton clock on the mantelpiece

shrilled _two_. She threw off her slippers and wrapper, opened the

window, and, drawing a screen across the sinking fire, crept between

the smooth linen sheets. But, once in bed, her excitement returned on

her. Three o'clock--four o'clock--struck, and she was awake, the pulse

of the music still in her relaxed body, listening to the fire shifting

in the grate, watching the red dusk turn slowly to black.

Suddenly she heard the handle of the door move, very gently and very

steadily. The bed-curtains hid it from view; but she remembered that

she had forgotten to lock it, and when it closed again as gently she

knew that some one was in the room. But there was something else she

had not forgotten. She felt under her pillow and closed her hand

upon it. The very day she saw him last her lover had given her a

little steel repeating pistol. She remembered his words: "I've never

had occasion to use it, Nelly, but I should be giving you a false

impression of the world, as I know it, if I didn't tell you there's ten

times as much chance you'll have to defend your honor some day as there

is I'll ever have to defend my property."

She lay still, her heart beating to suffocation, but she did not quite

close her eyes, and the next moment a fear that was never to be named

went out of her heart. It was only her cousin Leslie. She recognized

her plainly--long and emaciated, with tawny, lifeless hair about her

shoulders. She was carrying a night-light in a cone-shaped glass.

Now that fear was gone she had time to be puzzled. Up to a week ago

a visit from her cousin at the hour of "combing and confidences"

had been a regular affair, but one of the changes noticeable in her

attitude had been the abandonment of the nightly habit. It was a great

opportunity for the clear understanding on which she meant to insist,

but it was very late, she was tired, and, as often happens, felt a

sudden disinclination to put her resolution to the test. She decided to

simulate sleep. She breathed a little heavier and closed her eyes.

Leslie set down her lamp--she heard it distinctly on the little

marble-topped table beside the bed--and bent over her. She felt her

cousin's breath on her cheek. The thin, weak hand began to stroke her

forehead and hair. Nelly was proof against a good many things, but not

against tickling. She laughed and opened her eyes.

Next moment, with a leap as lithe as a panther's, she had jumped out

of bed and, gripping her cousin's wrists, bore her backward on to the

floor. She was strong as well as active, and upon the thick carpet the

struggle was as brief as it was noiseless. Something fell from the

older woman's hand. She tossed it back on the bed and, switching on the

electric current, flooded the room with light. Leslie picked herself

up, crawled to the wall and crouched there, her knees drawn up to her

chin, looking at her cousin through her tawny mane, with eyes wide and

distraught in her white, quivering face.

Fenella gave one look at the little stiletto on the bed, and covered

her face with her hands in a reaction of terror.

"Oh, Leslie! Wicked--wicked woman! What had I done to you? Oh, what a

horror! And under your own roof! Oh, you must be mad!"

"Go on!" said Leslie, thickly. "Ring the bell--wake the house! Have me

put in a mad-house. Father wouldn't care, nor any one else. He's cursed

me and called me a wet blanket heaps of times before people. I'm in

every one's way now mother's gone."

Fenella still looked at her incredulously. She was expecting every

moment to wake from her nightmare. A thing like this couldn't be

real--couldn't be life! Suddenly the wretched woman flung herself at

her feet, weeping and kissing them.

"Oh! my darling, don't look at me like that, as though I were some

poisonous reptile. Oh, my God! what have I done? Do you think I really

meant to harm you? Do you think I'm jealous? But if I am, it's only for

your own good name. It's their fault. Of course you're nothing to them;

they didn't know you when you were a little baby girl. I only wanted

to be sure. And then something said to me that if--that if--Why do you

shrink that way? Do you loathe to have me touch you?"

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

mouth.

"Leslie, be quiet this instant, or I won't answer for what I'll do. And

throw this over you or you'll get a chill. Now, are you quieter? I'm

not going to make a fuss, or even tell a living soul what's happened

to-night. But it's on a condition."

"I know what you mean."

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

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

"Yes. Go on!"

"That you were Bryan Lumsden's mistress in France, and that he's

spending money on bringing you out and paying for your dresses and

lessons, and that he----" She hesitated.

"What? Is there more?"

"Yes. That--oh! that he wasn't the first. That when he--found you, you

were posing as a model to some French artist."

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

Leslie made a despondent and penitent gesture.

"Not now I've seen you. Not now I've told you to your face. But you

can't live in a house like Lulford all your life and not hear--things.

Well, are you going to loathe me forever?"

Fenella seemed thoughtful. "I don't loathe you," she said, "not more

than any one else. Go back to bed now. I'm tired after last night."

"You won't refer to this to-morrow, will you? I shall be hunting all

day, but you won't throw it in my face when we meet at night."

"No. Here, take this thing back to where you got it. No, I'm not

afraid to let you have it. Yes, I'll kiss you good-night. Oh, Leslie,

_go_!" She stamped her bare foot desperately.

As soon as her cousin was out of the room she locked the door and began

to pack her trunks, turning keys and opening drawers as stealthily as a

thief in the night. Her teeth chattered and her heart was filled with

the wild panic instinct of flight. She only cried once, as she folded

the clothes in which she had danced. "They said--his money!" How well

she remembered the day they had been made, the whirring and bumping of

the machine, her mother's perplexed face over the paper patterns, the

very smell of Paul's pipe. "Theatricals," she had told him, and he had

not asked a single question. The poor wounded heart ached for home.

When her trunks were packed she lay down and watched for the dawn.

The house was astir early. There was shouting from room to room,

running hither and thither of ladies' maids and gentlemen's gentlemen,

brushing of habits and knocking out of wooden boot-trees. She

breakfasted in her room, and sent down word that she was getting up

late--that she was over-tired. She had to endure cheerful proposals

to come in and pull her out, cries of "Tally-ho!" and "Gone to

earth!"--even try to answer them in kind. When they had all ridden

away, she got up and dressed herself to her hat and coat and furs, her

hands numb and clumsy from haste and agitation. There was a Bradshaw

in the library, through whose mazes she ran with a finger in which she

could feel the very beat of her disordered pulse, but she could make

little or nothing of it. The house seemed to be empty of men-servants,

but in the stable yard she ran across one of the helpers. He eyed her

strangely and rasped a stubbly chin with a broken finger nail at her

question.

"Lunnon train? Noa, miss, baint no Lunnon train through Lulford 'fore

two-twenty, an' that doant stop fur to take up nor fur to set down,

'cept ye tellygraff down the line. There's a slow to Wolv'r'ampton

at three-thritty, but ye'll have to wait forty minutes f'r yewr

connexshuns. Two trunks, ye say, miss? Now, let me think----"

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

the way.

"Thank'ee kindly, miss. 'Tis a bad marnen, miss, ye see: bein' a

huntin' marnen all oor men be haff th' place. Come twelve o'clock, I'm

taken 'nother harse to Wrogwarden Wood m'self, but if ye don't mind the

bit of a walk to stash'n, I can harness Marvine to th' bailiff's cart,

and tak' yewr trunks to stashun now in a casulty way like, and bid 'em

wait till ye come. Thank'ee, miss."

After a wretched pretence of eating a cold lunch, served in the

solitude of the morning-room by maid-servants who whispered together

outside and even peeped through the crack of the door, Fenella took her

muff and dressing-case and set off to walk to the station. Snow lay

still in recesses and hollows of the trees beneath the drive, and there

were dirty lumps and patches on the slope of the hill where the slide

had been made. She breathed freer when a corner of the drive hid the

gray walls and turrets of the old priory, and more freely still when

she had passed the round white lodge with its one smoking chimney and

was out on the public road. Often, upon her summer holidays, passing

such a lodge with its escutcheoned pillars and long dove-haunted avenue

curving away into a dim and baffling perspective, she had wondered what

sort of life was led beyond its swinging gates. Her lip curled at the

thought that now she knew.

The road she was walking along was sheltered and lonely, but sunken

between high banks. The thawing uplands on either side had drained into

it, and she was forced to pick her way very carefully, her heavy skirts

held up with one hand and the baize-covered dressing-case, which seemed

to grow heavier and which she hated more each moment (it had been one

of mummy's ridiculous ideas), knocking against her knees on the other

side. She had only gone some few hundred yards when, beyond a turn

in the narrow road, she heard the splash of a hard-ridden horse, and

clambered up the clayey bank to be out of its way. At sight of her the

rider pulled up so hard as almost to bring his steed upon its haunches.

She had not time to pull her veil down.

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

lady bountiful on the sly?"

"I'm going home."

Bryan whistled softly. He was wearing a black coat with wide skirts,

a low-crowned silk hat and the palest of pale blue stocks. His white

breeches and boots were covered with mud and his horse's miry flanks

heaved like a bellows.

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

happened?"

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

all."

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

time. Oh, fie!"

No remark from Fenella.

"Any one been rude to you?"

The girl shook her head.

"You won't tell me, eh?"

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

Lumsden swung himself out of the saddle.

"At any rate, you're not going to walk any further in those thin shoes

and sit four hours in a train with wet feet. Come! up you get. The lane

gets worse the farther you go."

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

"That's right! Put your foot here. Steady--Greaser! Don't be afraid.

He's quite blown; going's far too heavy to-day. Now take the bag in

your lap. What's in it, Flash? Diamonds?"

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

"For two two's I'd come up with you to London. Oh, don't look so

frightened. It's only an impulse. I've been fighting impulses every

day for the last fortnight. I don't want to worry you," he went on, as

the horse began to pick his way downhill with stiff, tired legs; "but

you'll have to give some reason for all this. Did you leave any message

behind?"

She shook her head.

"Then we'll have to fake a telegram. You simply can't leave like this,

and that's all there is about it. Hullo! who's this?"

A small boy in corduroys and with a red badge on his arm was drifting

up the lane toward them, examining the hedge-rows first on one side,

then on another, in search of diversion. At Lumsden's call he started

and adopted a more official gait.

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

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

"Miss Fen--Fen----"

Bryan snatched it from his hand.

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

"By George!" said the baronet, looking up, "this is Providence. This

lets us all out."

"Read it, please."

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

Wire._"

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

"Well, it suits us, doesn't it?" with a quick look at the troubled,

indignant face. "You mustn't feel things too much, you know. Fancy Anne

Caslon dying in her bed at last! 'Tattering Annie' they used to call

her in the West Meath. Fate! fate! there's nothing else. Here, boy,"

he said, putting his hand in his breeches pocket, "take this, and cut

away to the station and tell 'em to stop the two-twenty. Shocked at me,

ain't you?" he said, as the boy trotted off after a backward gape at

the strange couple.

"I think it's horrid to talk about fate as if it was meant to do our

little odd lying jobs for us. I'm very much upset at the news."

"No, but isn't it true--I mean my meeting you this way? Confess, now.

You were on your way back to town wounded and indignant, with a firm

resolve never to see any one you'd met at Lulford again, weren't you?"

"Yes, I think so."

"But you're not now?"

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

He seemed quite satisfied with the answer, being used possibly to

oblique affirmations from women.

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

right.

"You'd better get down here. There's a foot-path at the side of the

main road." He flushed deeply as he held her in his arms. Another

checked impulse, no doubt.

In the waiting-room they sat, one on each side of a sullen fire in a

black stove. He smoked a cigar, and steam rose from the drenched skirts

of his coat.

"I'm going to Biarritz almost immediately," he said; "but Dollfus knows

what to do. Call on him as soon as you possibly can. I don't see myself

there's much more training wanted, but you must be fitted in somewhere,

and that takes time."

He might have added that it takes money too--some one's money--but

it was not the moment to enlarge on this. Fenella listened to his

advice respectfully and gave him her address when he asked for it.

She liked him no better, but, at the point they had reached, she felt

it necessary, for her own satisfaction, that she should take the

least complicated view of his helpfulness that was possible. To take

a great deal and to give a little is a prerogative that the nicest

of women think it no shame to use. She bought her own ticket, but

let him order foot-warmers and even literature--_The Tattler_,

_Photo Bits_, and a novel by Charles Garvice, to be brought her at

Wolverhampton. He was back at her side as the train, chafing fussily

at the check to its course, began to move out of the little country

station.

"Don't worry over whatever's happened you down there," he said at the

last, jerking back his head at the hospitable mansion she had just

left. "They're a dull crowd. We'll meet a very different lot later on.

Good-bye! Keep fit and don't grizzle. I'll wire your mother that you're

on your way."

He stood gazing after the tail of the train as the gray distance sucked

it in to a point.

"You were a pretty wench, Bill," he heard a voice say behind him in the

porters' room. The homely comment jarred him, but it also readjusted

a view that had been inclining dangerously toward the romantic. Is

there, I often wonder, some inbred memory of old disaster that makes

Englishmen afraid of romance? Bryan, as he plodded homeward on his

stiff hunter, almost laughed to remember that he had suddenly sickened

of the chase, sickened of everything, and ridden back eight muddy miles

on a beaten horse to see this girl, and--who knows?--perhaps to ask her

to be his wife--if she had insisted upon it.

* * * * *

Shawled and pillowed at Wolverhampton by the guard's care, and quite

tired out, Fenella slept, as warm as a dormouse under the snow, nearly

all the way to Euston. A new ring from the clanging permanent way, more

metallic, more menacing, as the train, sighting its goal afar off, made

up its schedule time, roused her from a dream--ah! how deadly sweet of

sun-steeped dunes, of outspread skies and seas, her poor little "land

of lost content." The carriage pitched and rocked, lights twinkled

together behind the bare trees, suburban pavements, and broadways

blazing in blue-white light flashed past the windows. She put out her

head against the cold, gritty rush of wind, and looked toward a red

glare in the sky. Somewhere in that man-made wilderness of stone and

brick, from whose smouldering discontents reddened smoke seemed to be

ascending to heaven, he lived and moved and had his being who but now,

in the lilied meadows of her dream, had held her against his breast and

kissed away the desolate ache at her heart. Back to him, and he could

not hinder--straight, straight as a homing-bird she was flying. With

every moment that passed the distance that sundered them was being

annihilated. Intense unreasoning joys! triumph almost lyrical of spirit

over matter! God's crowning mercy in affliction!--manna from Heaven,

and portion of the outcast!

VIII

LADY ANNE'S DEPOSITION

We wonder if it has ever happened to any of our readers--being a common

human experience, it probably has--on the very morrow of some change

which they had assayed, light-heartedly, experimentally, and with all

provision made for honorable retreat in case of failure, to find the

retreat, as it were, cut off, the old life put out of their reach once

and for all, and success in the new becomes the condition not of a

pleasanter manner of existence, but of very existence itself.

We know that Fenella's independence of the career she had chosen was

never as complete as appearances seemed to warrant. Even if it had

been so, hers was not the temperament to discover comfort in any such

ignoble security. She had the bright confidence of her youth. Eager

for the contest, she was not afraid of any of the rules. And if the

comfortable thought that, after all, the worst that could happen

her would be a return to domestic conditions with her one ambition

quenched, visited her at all in despondent moods, it was rather

owing to Madame de Rudder's insistence upon the fact, as the great

strategic advantage in a campaign which about this time that lady

began to conduct with Mr. Joseph Dollfus--a campaign carried on so

pertinaciously and with such utter disregard for the Dominion manager's

feelings, that he often wondered whether any inkling of the secret

clause, the Lumsden clause, of the treaty could have reached her. If it

hadn't, her bluff was a masterpiece.