Fabulous Fancies
Author: Maxwell, William Babington
Date: 2015-11-17T06:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Short Stories
Description: Ebook prepared by crutledge@knology.net
Rights: Public Domain

TABLE of CONTENTS

MENTONE MARY

THE SINGING IN HIS HEAD

OLD TIME-ENOUGH

UGLY FACE

THE FOOLISH ACTOR AND SOCIETY

STOLEN KISSES

THE FAIRY HELIOTROPE

THE TAME CAT

“DO LOOK AT ME”

THE TENDER-HEARTED FAMILY

BRUNO, JONAS AND THE CRITICS

THE MASTER MIND

A CHANCE FOR ALL OF US

THE BLUE CARD

SHADOW AND SUNSHINE

THE HOT-TEMPERED WOMAN

THE SAVING HABIT

THE DIVINING ROD

THE BLOOMING OP THE ALOE

PARKER’S FOLLY

THE SPINSTER AUNT

THE CLUB-BORE

IN THE BLACK FOREST COUNTRY

MENTONE MARY

“Why do they call where we live High Park?” she used to ask her nurse. Indeed, it was a long way from the real park. Once, coming home from the Serpentine, she was so tired that she said piteously, If a fairy gave me a wish now, I would choose a cab to go home in.” She had made a similarly devised remark to one of her aunts about a box of chocolates in a shop window—and Auntie had gone in and bought the sweetmeats. But Nana wasn’t taking any” that afternoon, she said. Cabs, of course, being understood by little Mary, who was quick for her years.

The house her parents lived in was not a very grand one when you did get there, but it was the best they could afford, and it had what are termed amenities—for little boys, and, in a lesser degree, for little girls also. It was just where the trains pass beneath the great wall at the back of the gardens, saying, I think I can, I think I can,” as they free their long run westward. They say I thought I could, I thought I could,” as, with steam off, they come home again; and at first Mary loved the situation and them, but gradually, as she grew up, grew weary, and at last became a very discontented young person altogether.

“There” she said petulantly to her friend Kate, “that is my life,” and she pointed downward to an afternoon express “gliding, gliding by; and I ask myself, Where is it going to?’”

“Why, to Bath, of course,” said Kate, simply, “and Exeter.” Kate was very simple.

“It is all very well for you who live at Kingston,” cried Mary, “and play hockey and go to dances, and have your brothers—and their friends—and-”

“But, Mary, you make mock of our suburban society when you come to stay. You were so high and mighty last time that everybody thought you were some tremendous swell from Mayfair—an Honourable Mary at the very least.”

Mary’s eyes flashed and her cheeks flushed. “Did they really, Kate? And that is just what I should like to be—what I feel I could be if I had the chance.” Now, a little time after this conversation, Mary told Kate, “I am going to my aunt at Dulwich for a week. She is a sanctimonious old humbug and as dull as ditchwater, but she gives me a good room; the food is excellent; I have breakfast in bed, and get up when I like.”

“That sounds rather like the pussies,” said her friend, “who are alleged to think more of the house than the people in it. But, be that as it may, I am glad that you are to have this treat.”

“Why should you be glad?” asked Mary.

“Only for this, dear. I had been striving to get Mamma to ask you down for the Bachelors’ Ball, but she made objections.”

“Oh, I will throw Aunt over,” cried Mary with great animation; and she pleaded earnestly with Kate, who seemed embarrassed and put all sorts of difficulties in the way.

“I8 it kind to leave your father—with his cough so bad too?”

“If I could be of the least use to him I would not do so,” urged Mary; “but he hates being fussed over. That was why I was going to Dulwich. It makes me suffer to see him suffer; and he, like all invalids, is touchy, and when he detects that I am suffering that reacts on him and makes him suffer all the more. But you are not making a clean breast of it, Kate. There is something behind all this. You are refusing me the great pleasure of the Kingston Bachelors’ Ball, which I beg and implore of you, for some underhand reason;” and Mary’s eyes filled with tears of mortification. “You have some young man, and you are afraid I shall come and cut you out, whereas I would promise-”

But now Kate was angry. “Pooh!” she cried. “Come and try. Me afraid of you! What next!” Then, partially recovering her composure, “No, Mary,” she said with dignity, “it is the old story of beds and nothing else: as, knowing the size of our house, you might have divined. I suggested that a little bed might be made up for you in the bathroom, which is Papa’s dressing-room, but he said the arrangement was not a nice one-”

“If I don’t mind I don’t see why he should object,” said Mary eagerly. “Besides, if it is any old-fashioned notion of propriety, you shall sleep in the bathroom and I’ll take your room. You can come in there to dress, of course.” ... In a word, Mary would not take No for her answer; and, ere Kate went home, she was compelled to promise that somehow or other her friend should obtain her wish.

Every night now, Papa was coughing and disturbing the house instead of sleeping and letting other people sleep. So one fine day Mary took the good-looking young doctor by the coat-sleeve in the hall, and drew him through the dining-room door, in confidence, without her mother’s knowledge. “This anxiety is wearing me out,” she said breathlessly.

The young man was flustered by Mary’s large eyes and her eager breathless manner, and he blushed and stammered. For the moment he could think of nothing but this:—What an excessively fine-grown young woman was his patient’s confidential daughter! He was not a bit offended, but tried to allay her anxiety; and, going upstairs that morning, feeling that he must now indeed make an effort to cure the cough, he ordered the sick man to go to the Riviera.

“You really must not count on me for that dance of yours/’ That was what Mary wrote immediately to Kingston Kate. “We are flying from foggy depressing London to the south of Prance. There seems quite an exodus from town at this time of year; does not there? I expect we shall run across all the world and his wife tit has.”

Her mamma at first had suggested that Mary should be left at home at Dulwich, but Mary had burst into tears. “Mother” she had cried reproachfully, “do you think I would consent to leave him at such a time?” The young doctor, who seemed every day to take more interest in the case, was now always running his fore-finger up against Mary’s, as together they followed out the perplexing columns of the Continental Bradshaw. At first he apologised when these collisions occurred. But Mary was on fire with excitement at the prospect of getting her father’s cough cured, and appeared to notice nothing odd or derogatory in the doctor’s clumsiness. She was burning to be off; and at last, all being settled, they started on their long journey. The doctor came to the station, and looked as sorry and sad as though he was bidding good-bye to his whole practice, instead of to one patient.

The night before they left, Mary, with a sudden return of discontent, had written again to Kate. “It seems,” she said, “our oaf of a doctor is sending us to the wrong place. I now hear that ail the princes. and indeed everybody who is anybody, go to Cannes or Nice or Beaulieu, or, of course, Monte. Mentone is as dull as ditchwater; given over to invalids and convalescents —the sole attraction of this hole of a place being the milder climate and more sheltered position. Is not this just my luck? For all the fun I shall have, I might as well be at Kingston.”

Now at Mentone the discontent of Mary gathered and fell upon her like an ugly veil, through which even the glorious sun shone dimly, and the sparkle on the tideless sea appeared no more than a dull metallic polish. There were plenty of fine folk in the smart hotels and pretty villas—including princes even—but Mary did not know them, and her parents could not introduce her to them. They drove about by the hour in a one-horse fly; and when Mary saw the humble equipage reflected in the shop windows—Papa with his woollen muffler, Mamma in her last year's bonnet, and herself on the exiguous back 6eat with the coarse tail of the driver's coat scraping her lovely soft hair or the graceful column of her white neck—she realised how sorry a figure they were cutting, and hung her beautiful head in shame. Then perhaps—Fizz, boom, ker-lank, ker-lank, ker-lank!—a splendid motor, with the Prince of Wittenberg and a party of friends, would come sailing by, and the poor girl would bite her lip and look away. What had she ever done that fate should not permit her to ride on the motor? At the fashionable tea-shop Papa made such a fuss about the bill—crying imposition!—that he forgot his respirator, and left it lying on the marble table; and a fashionable and richly clad group of English and Americans were all tittering and whispering when Mary was sent back to fetch it. After this distressing occurrence, Mary trudged home to the cheap and hopelessly second-class hotel, feeling very miserable. Prom her little room, which faced the north, she looked down upon the back garden of the hotel—upon orange trees, eucalyptus, palms, and all sorts of strange flowers and aromatic shrubs. There were paths covered with pebbles, which a gardener in a blue apron was raking noisily; the frogs were beginning to croak as they always did at sunset; and, beneath the stone parapet at the back of the garden, the heavy red and yellow and green and black P.L.M. trains passed to and fro in the direction of G6nes or Paris—saying, as the case might be, “Je crois pouvoir, je crois pouvoir,” when they faced the Italian frontier, or “J’ai cru pouvoir, j’ai cru pouvoir,” when they returned with steam off.

But now a very odd thing happened. In this very H6tel de Paradis et de la Gare, there dwelt (for the winter) an old decayed society fairy of the name of the Honourable Mrs Jones. Understanding, by her fairy arts, the state of mind of poor Mary, she waved her wand; and, in a trice, launched Mary into the inner circle of the highest and most select Mentone Society; and, to her unmitigated surprise, succeeded in launching herself also, as Mary’s chaperon. Space does not permit of a faithful tale of Mary’s triumphs. Suffice it to say that, in the genial atmosphere of' universal homage, Mary expanded and bloomed like a flower which has hitherto been deprived of air and water. She became the belle of Mentone. “If it is not inconvenient, I would prefer to draw my two next quarters’ allowance now,” cried Mary excitedly. It was very inconvenient to Papa; but, as Mamma said, it seemed a pity to baulk her. So with some new French hats and another frock or two, not to speak of new shoes and gloves, Mary fitted herself out for her campaign, and more than held her own with all these “high flyers” and “ tip-toppers” as poor dear Pa termed them. You will understand that the fairy did not attempt to launch Papa and Mamma; and Mary did not urge her to try, because she realised that it would be impossible. But they stood by open mouthed; blankly wondering at a daughter so changed by fairy arts that they could hardly recognise her. A fashionable young lady, with all the latest fashionable tricks and smart slip-slop chatter, snubbing other girls regardless of the handles to their names, consorting with potentates from all climes, leading the cotillon with the great French dandy, the Due de Fris£, bringing in for the final figure a flower-laden ass (another one!) and what not else fantastic and fashionable; and finally riding on the motor car of His Serene Highness the Prince of Wittenberg, and travelling so fast too that she could not recognise them! The unmannerly cocker showed his white teeth and blew a kiss to Mary flashing by as to a valued long lost friend; but Mary had her head down. “Gomic!” said H.S.H. turning round again to look back at the shabby one horse fly and the old couple waving their hands; but Mary had not raised her eyes, so could not know what queer sight had ruffled His Serenity into laughter.

Soon, all too soon for Mary, the Mentone season waned; Papa was cured of his cough; and the little party turned homeward. As the train carried them along the sunny southern shore, whisking them through warm gardens into cold tunnels and out again on to tiny white beaches, where the blue sea danced in the strong light and a fringe of sparkling foam smiled and chattered for a moment ere the darkness swallowed them again, Mary re-read the long unanswered letter which she had received in the dawn of her high holiday. She laughed to herself. What are doctors? Are they received, don't you know? She had been received, courted, as she had always known she would be if the chance came. “I thought I could, I thought I could, I thought I could," she and the train were both saying all the way —even under a full head of steam, as they climbed the slopes of pine-fragrant hills and left the laughing sea behind them.

Walking with Honourable Mrs Jones in the Park that first Sunday, the first acquaintance she recognised was Kingston Kate. Kate was sitting, with a red-faced young man, in quite the wrong part: out of fashion's beat, “How de do?" said Mary, but did not stop. She was in a fever to get among the tip-toppers once again. Kate stared and wondered. Mary's Mentone voice, walk, manner, struck her dumb with amazement. The Park was very full of people, but Mentone was poorly represented. At last 6he came upon the Lady Stilton. Her ladyship looked puzzled. One of her daughters said, “Oh yes, of course, Mamma, Miss—Miss—Miss-" but could not recall the name. She was one of those with handles who had been snubbed til has. Mary felt as in a nightmare. At first she would not believe that human nature could be so base, but she soon was forced to comprehend that Mentone of the sunny south and London of the frigid north were two very different places. Feeling that in these latitudes the old fairy was played out and worse than useless, she quickly gave her the slip; and lonely and forlorn, left the gay and heartless throng and went back to Kate.

“I want to introduce my—er—that is—er—Castle-dormer," Kate stammered shyly, and blushed.

“How de do, Mister Castledormer,” said Mary, recovering her spirits and addressing the poor vulgar red-faced young man in her best Mentone manner. “Any relation of dear old Lady Castledormer—bald Eliza as we call her, don’t you know? But quite an old dear.”

The young man had grown redder and redder, “She is my mother,” he said.

“We are engaged, you know,” said Kate, very red also—to turn the conversation.

Mary really spluttered. She was the reddest of the three. He was not a Mister at all; he was a Lord, and Kate had marked him and brought him down—at Kingston. She felt that she would never get over. it.

That same afternoon, when the doctor paid a visit of politeness, Mary took him out into the back garden. A mist was rising; it all looked bare and mean and sad; trains passed to and fro beneath the blank wall in spite of its being Sunday. “Referring to that letter,” said Mary in a low voice, “you asked me a question, if I could ever-” a train gliding westward drowned the low voice. “Well,” she whispered when it had passed, “I think I can. I think I can.”

“Stop,” cried the young doctor in confusion. “I was deeply in earnest. No appetite—losing weight —I thought I could not support existence. But then —your silence . Met Miss . partner’s daughter—of my monde . . .”

The homeward-bound Cornish express made it difficult to hear him. “Then I thought I could—I thought I could-”

Mary dismissed him with hauteur, shedding bitter tears of mortification afterwards. But we must not pity her. She was a snob.

THE SINGING IN HIS HEAD

He was a young poet who could not write his poetry. He could only think it. When people spoke of Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, he seemed lost in thought. “Good!” he would say. “Yes, good. But crude, compared with . listened to beside ...”

“Beside what?”

“The singing in my head,” he would reply, absently, after a long pause, passing his hand across his forehead with a vacillating, troubled gesture.

The girl thought him mad; and for that reason, and no other, was exceedingly gentle with him. With what sweetness the summer air wafted the music of the church bells across the perfumed fields I The pink of the wild roses would spring from the hedge-sides into her soft cheeks, and her eyes would shine like the little forget-me-nots when the sun finds them bathed in dew, as she listened while they walked, and caught the well-known octave of joy. Somebody going to be married I The joyful music to-day. But—“Stop, Mouse-ear,” he would say, hearing it also and halting on the path, which would have led them to the church. “Plague upon it—it drowns—it drowns—. . . the singing in my head.”

She was really sorry for him, but, of course, had to find somebody else to go down that particular path with her, and, in due season, married a stock-broker. The poet sent the bride a bangle with a star-like flower in precious stones—Myosotis alpestris—turquoise, yellow diamond, and pearl; and the bridegroom gave the bridesmaids very chaste " merrythought” brooches.

On such an occasion, some couplets—a few little verses, ringing clear and tripping lightly as water in a brook, with pretty fancies flashing through them like a rainbow on a garden fountain—would have been extremely appropriate. But these, you will understand, it was not in his power to send. It was all inside him—he was quite sure of that—but for the life of him he could not get it out.

It is a dreadful thing to be tongue-tied when you have something to say which is really worth hearing—to feel that you have been entrusted with a message almost of life and death, and to know that you are going to fail to deliver it. Pain broods in the thought of these dilemmas, and the unhappy sect of mental flagellants torture themselves wilfully by inventing such grievous cases. Imagine the general in his high place watching over the battle-field, and looking round upon his humble orderlies to pick a likely man for his need—to carry his sudden, inspiring orders to those in difficulties below. See the miserable wretch speeding, spurring. “Well—what is it? Por God’s sake, man, spit it out. Give over your orders." But a fit of the stammers locks up the key to safety and success. He sits on his panting horse mouthing, stuttering, speechless; and for his life, for the lives of ten thousand brave men, he cannot get it out.

The burden of all his unwritten, unwritable poetry, weighed sorely upon the dumb poet. His unbroken Pegasus became a night-mare to him. No one could help him; no one could understand him, even. He was powerless to explain, or even describe, the character of the horrible gag which kept him silent; and, what was worse, when he came to speak of the bottled-up verse itself, a cork seemed to go into his prose vent also. “The mere technique of our trade is so exceedingly simple," other poets told him, “that you really could not be stopped by that. You would soon know how to say it if you had anything to say. I put it to you as a man of the world—for poets must be men of the world nowadays—don’t you think you are a little like the people who have not sufficient ear to whistle the tune they heard at the music hall, and yet think-"

But he would press his thin fingers to his throbbing temples, feeling that his head was going to burst. He only wished that it were true, and that he could feel himself free to take life—this mercilessly short, little life—easily and calmly, and think no more about his trouble. But what was the good of saying there was nothing inside him when, even while they spoke, here was the singing in his head louder than ever?

As time passed and he grew moodier and more absent in manner every year, his dinner invitations dropped off, and. his company was little sought even at tea-parties. So he took to wandering, far and wide. In a splendid northern city he found the lips of the marble fountains frozen, and the thread of drinking water solid ice. That is like me and my song,” he said, and turned south. He was quite alone, with no travelling companion. In a mean street, in an old town on the Rhine, he came upon a master in a fury with his stupid or knavish servant, who had lost or stolen or hidden a piece of gold with which he had been sent to market. Myself!” he thought; then, He is not to blame,” he said; settled the wrangle for twenty marks, and went south again. In the gallery of a palace at Mayence he stood before a dusky old picture. It was early Italian, allegorical, with two figures, a man and a woman, stooping over a clumsy ponderous casket. But Love found the key,” the picture was called. Of all the thousands of tourists who have looked at it, I suppose I am the only one who really grasped the painter's meaning!” he said to himself. He was thinking of me when he painted it,” and he struck boldly southwards.

But love may find the key,” he was saying to himself, while the train darted from the sleet storm into the shelter of its wonderful hole in the Alps, and then came coiling and writhing down the southern slope, glittering like a snake in the glow of the southern sun. Words failed him, of course, to give intelligible form to the gentle soothing impression made by Italy’s first radiant smile. He knew that Nature's northern landscapes are sepia sketches, and that she only uses her colour-box in the south; but he was not aware that the men and women he had met hitherto were merely charcoal studies, or, at best, drawings in tinted chalk, and he had not under stood that sun in the veins is as necessary to real life as blood in them. Down through the rich woods and the flowery groves by grey old towns perched high on bare rocks; down through the long bountiful valleys; down through peach orchards and vineyards, while the yellow gourds and the purple berries leapt and sprung, where the train slid down, from terrace to terrace, leapt and laughed at the frowning cliffs and the brooding olives and the sombre pointing cypress; down, and still down, dancing and leaping in the golden light, till they sank suddenly to rest by the silver plains of water.

“And here I shall be at rest, too,” said the poet.

The mountain walls which shut in the star-shaped lake had buttresses 8000 feet high—some of them; and the true floor of the lake itself was as far down beneath the sham floor which carried the cloud shadows, the moonbeams, and the peasants’ boats with their magic lanterns and carolling fishermen, as the coping stones of the walls stood high above it. A wonderful, peaceful, lake prison the old walls made of it! The poet felt most peaceful and contented as he walked to the hotel along the lake-cloister which is formed by the hanging hills and the stretching trees. Happy, foolish lizards flashed and twisted aimlessly on the blank wall of the vineyard-like innocent thoughts in a vacant mind; and a small, black-eyed girl crept from under the trailing vines, lay flat on the banked-up ground, and leant down towards the white road with a bunch of grapes in her brown little hand. “For the poet,” she whispered. “Present for the poet I”

“And how did you find that out, you field mouse?” said the poet. “Ah, one must come to Italy to meet people who understand you at a glance!” and he stamped into the hall of the big hotel, feeling as proud and happy as an emperor.

It was in the hotel garden, immediately after table d’hote, that he made the acquaintance of the Grass Widow and her little boy James.

She was an attractive woman. The poet thought she understood him, could read his unspoken thoughts, could hear each tender, never articulated word of wooing: so there came a moonless night, when the velvet sky was close down, sleeping on the top of the flat plane trees; when, having thus silently paved the way, he took her rather brusquely in his arms and was about to kiss her; and when, with great brusqueness, she gave him a box on the ears.

Oh, the singing in his head!

“That is what get!” said the little boy, James, discreetly slinking away in the darkness of the plane-walk.

She was trembling with indignation. She had not in the least understood; and she flounced away, rushed upstairs, banged her door, locked it noisily —and no doubt shed tears.

Now the man was quite resigned to let the matter rest there, but the woman kept harking back on the subject, “What were you going to say to me,” she would ask, “the other night when I interrupted you somewhat rudely?”

" What? When?” the poet would answer absently. “Oh, I suppose I thought you were going to give me the key.”

“What key?” she cried, indignantly.

“I forget. No, now I remember. I was only going to ask you to run away with me.,” he said, simply.

“But is it fair? Is it manly—to ask me?”

“I am not asking you now.”

“No,” she said. “But you imply it. You don’t permit the subject to be dropped. Your manner perpetually re-opens it. My love of my child is nothing to you. I can read it in your face. Your whole expression is cutting and wounding and grossly insulting me at this moment by its cynical bravado —by its covert threat that you don’t mean to take No for an answer.”

Of a morning the Italian sun used to steal through the Italian blinds of her room, send its fire into her veins, and bounce her out of bed and make her dress feverishly, and drive her hurrying down the marble staircase to be in time to take her coffee in company with the taciturn poet.

“Is it quite fair?” she used to ask at breakfast. “Oh, you needn’t speak. I can interpret your thoughts and do—and I ask—is it fair? Is not what you are subjecting me to very like cowardly persecution?”

“There!” she said at the luncheon table, ostentatiously placing the little boy James between them. “He divides us. But we can talk over his head,” and, proceeding to do so—“An inexorable barrier I And that is why, if you went on silently repeating that request of yours for a thousand years, the answer would still be No.”

At afternoon tea or table d’hote dinner, she said, “Let us go on the lake this evening. I warn you, your manner is becoming so pointed that I live in dread of others understanding it as clearly as I do. The impediment must come too—or people would talk.”

It was a still, oppressive, dark night. Numbers of the peasants’ boats laden with fruit and flowers and other votive offerings for a Pesta on the morrow, were ploughing their slow way across the lake. Holiday makers and hotel guests were afloat too—coloured lantern, twanged guitar, and snatch of song, marking their passage. There was only a pale twinkle in the few stars that were visible. The poet rowed towards the silence and darkness midway between the shores; but, soon tiring, left the sculls in the rowlocks and let the boat drift while he went and sat by the Grass Widow.

The boy was crouched in the bows, dabbling his hands in the water, staring down into the black mysterious vault and half mesmerising himself by his strained scrutiny of the reflected stars—at their immeasurable depth below. The day’s sun had left its fire in the air, in the soil, in the water—and in Mamma.

“Can you see us, my darling?” she asked. Then repeated her question more loudly, and the boy said No. They were swallowed by the tent of the boat. “Can you hear me now?” she asked drily. “You must talk louder than that—a lot—if you want me to hear what you are saying,” said the child.

“See,” she said to the poet, without perceptibly raising her voice, “I want to take out my finger marks. ... I am kissing the place to make it well. . . No, don’t speak. I know what you would say.

So I stop your lips—like this—like this—Listen!

. . . If it wasn’t for him—poor lamb—I might—who knows?—But for him-”

A soft flame seemed to run through him; a gentle soothing flame, melting the ice about his heart, thawing and breaking the bonds of his tongue; lighting the shadowy chambers of his brain with a flicker of glorious hope. The fable was true! Love could find the key.

The broad boat lurched and then rocked wildly. The passenger in the bows had lost self control as well as the passenger in the stern. The mesmeric stars had drawn the little boy James overboard.

The poet dived—without thinking. He certainly did not pause to think, or he would have remembered that he could not swim. As the black water closed over him, he was conscious of nothing except the abnormally strong singing in his head. The music sounded as he had never heard it before. It was like the crash of a grand orchestra on the overture of a grand opera. Submerged in its marvellous melody he had clutched the boy, risen, and gone under again. The boats, called by the woman’s shrieks, were all round them. Strong hands had taken the boy from his hands ere he sank once more.

Oh, the glorious singing in his head!

He writes now—the poetry of a long life—far more than Tennyson—more even than Browning, easily, smoothly, fluently; with a liquid pen on a watery page, as be goes down to the sound of that immortal song: down, down, through the fifteen hundred fathoms of undying melody, to where the clinging arms and the whispering voices meet him.

“Come to us, O dumb one,' the voices will whisper as he sinks to rest in the clinging arms, “It has all been published in heaven—every note of it—and the angels are beating their wings to the time of your heavenly tune."

OLD TIME-ENOUGH

They called him " Time-Enough,” because that was what he was always saying. About getting his hair cut; putting his sandwich case away when hounds began to whimper; going upstairs to dress for dinner; everything—“oh, time enough!" he would say. He was never in a hurry, and could not understand why anyone else should be. Sometimes at country houses, when the great omnibus was at the door and all the nice girls were in the hall, throbbing and glowing beneath their thick brocades and lace mufflers and stamping their satin shoes in a frenzy of impatience, because the roads were slippery and the night was moonless and they could hear the scrape of the fiddles calling them to the Corn Exchange or White Hart ten miles away, where Captain Prancer in a red coat with white facings, and the hunt button in frosted silver, was waiting, waiting for them and tearing his gloves in a torment of doubt—he, if you please, would be missing. At last somebody would find him, still in the diningroom, sitting over his wine with the old fogeys who were not going to the ball. Through the diningroom door, floating along the oak panelled corridor, making little waves in the air between the marble floor and the big hall lantern, would come the sound of his surprised grunt and startled cry, “Eh, what? Time enough!” Then there would be a peal of girlish laughter. But it was annoying all the same, and perhaps red lips were bitten by small pearl teeth at the thought of an enervated captain prancing in despair with somebody else. They should not have troubled—one of the soft long cloaks said boldly—but ought to have punished him by leaving him behind. And so they ought, could they have been quite sure that he would have felt the punishment sufficiently.

That catch-word of his often proved a miss-word where trains were concerned, but what upsets most people so dreadfully never seemed to worry him. Having lost the Express, he just came on by the Par-li-a-ment-ar-y. He would take his corner with his back to the engine (not in the least caring to look ahead and see where he was going); pull up his fur collar; wrap the rug round his legs, and hide the foot-warmer with it so that no other passenger would know it was there; and soon go to sleep—after murmuring' drowsily, “get there by bed-time—Time enough—Time enough.” It is a very great pity that he never missed the last train on a Saturday night, on one of those out-of-the-way branch lines which do not keep open on Sundays. The week-end visit to the Signalman’s Arms, Blackmoor Road, would have been such a change, after the Saturday to Mondays to which he was accustomed, that it might have done him a lot of good.

Of course he said it about marrying. Hector and Patrick, his club mates, who were at school with him, used to say “why don’t you?” We know what his answer would be. They had not thought so, but had done it in a desperate hurry, as though to win a wager. They were both servants of the King. Hector was one of bis soldiers and Patrick was in one of his big offices—a really civil servant, as even the newspapers admitted when they called to ask a question. “You lucky dog,” they would say, “why don’t you? When your uncle dies and you come into Helby Court and all the property, you’ll find you must have one.” Then he would say, “Time enough for all that. He’s not dead yet. Meanwhile—you know the proverb?—” and he would chuckle and look roguish, drawing his chair in and pulling at the arms of theirs, and tell them a tale; or perhaps bring a photograph out of his pocket—“Eh?” Hector and Pat would look at the picture in the oddest way. “ Monstrous fine woman!” they confessed. “And, so say I—and what I don’t know about the sex is not worth learning—Eh what?” Perhaps, at that moment, one of the club porters had come into the smoking-room with his hat in his hand and was whispering—“Lady outside, sir, in four-wheeler, waiting.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Patrick one day to Hector, “old Time-Bnough’8 getting selfish.” This was sheer nonsense. As completely so, as though he had said, Hector, you are getting bald.” The Colonel, you must know, was bald—as one of the benzoline balls upstairs. “He does himself too well. It was he who made the Wine Committee buy all the imperial pints, and now he never drinks them-”

“I have lost the thread of your argument,” said Hector.

He finds he can’t do with less than a bottle,” said Pat.

You see they put that horrid little adjective before his name now. He was not really old, but, as the proverb says, the hands go on marking the hour when the watch is under the pillow. He kept his watch always under his pillow. Been gettin’ a pram at the stores for my kiddie,” Patrick would say. Warn the nurse not to let him fall out of it,” old Time-Enough would say. Don’t you know she’s a girl,” said Hector testily. “Mine is a boy. What d’ye think the young beggar asked me for this morning? A gun and a sword.” Then, next day; it was My little Eileen’s got to go to school: her poor mother can’t manage her.” And the day after, apparently, my lad’s home from Harrow with measles,” and, on the morrow, “that boy of mine has had a bad time of it, but thank goodness he is on his legs again-”

“Ah,” said old Time-Enough, desiring to show friendly interest; Shaken off the measles and back at Harrow? Good I”

“No, sir,” said Hector, with a splutter of ire; “recovered from enteric at Boosterfontein and back at the front fighting for his country.” They confused him—between them—so completely that he had to look at his watch, and he found that he was nearly forty years old.

He could not believe it. But he weighed himself and the steel-yard said the same thing.

At last, the Demon Influenza carried off his uncle; and Jane, Lady Baldaquin, the great lady of the neighbourhood, wrote, saying, “Be quick now and get a nice little wife and come and live at Helby. We all expect it of you.” It was interference, but gratifying—as coming from a Countess. He liked those two letters —We: although he did not quite understand whether old Jane was speaking of all the other countesses, or of the parson, the butcher, the baker at Helby village.

Now, when he had first seen Pat's daughter, the little Eileen, her hair was like a bay pony's tail going to the fair in a heliotrope ribbon. She had understood what people meant when they wished her happy returns on fifteen occasions quite well, and once rather vaguely. She had just come back from school with so perfect a French accent that when she said Boulogne no one on this side of the Channel (except perhaps the ticket collector at Folkestone) knew what she had been talking about. He said to her father immediately, “Has she seen the pantomime? No!

Well take her to it!” Eileen drew in her breath and her eyes sparkled. Well, young lady,” he said, next time he saw her, you haven’t thanked me for that treat yet.” No,” she said, with a pretty puzzled air. I thanked Papa.” Good girl I” he said, In a sense Pa gave the treat. But I got it for you. It was my idea, he would never have thought of it.” Then I do thank you now,” she said, Plustot tard que jamais,” and she put out her white warm plump little hand, which he fondled affably. The latter half of her sentence was of course unintelligible; he rather thought it was that silly A-fus B-fus-gig language; but her frank candid smile was English—-or, to be correct, Irish—and he fancied he understood that. After this, they were the best of friends. She laughed at his stories—and in the right place; and often said, Do tell it me again.” He showed her many little acts of kindness, jogging Pa’s memory or what not; and when she had done up her hair, she invited him often to her tea-parties. I do like to make that girl of yours laugh,” he said to Pat. Do you, old boy?” said Patrick.

The things which he particularly liked in tall and slender Eileen were her long thin nose, the delicate curve of her chin, her figure and her hair, the length of her dark eyelashes, her laugh when amused, and the sparkle in her soft grey eyes and the manner in which her pupils dilated when she was excited by pleasant anticipations. Well then, one morning, after dreaming about her all night, he determined to set her eyes sparkling as they had never sparkled before.

“My best clothes!” he said to his man. A wedding, sir?" said the valet. Old Time-Enough chuckled. “My pointed-toed patents!” He chuckled no more when they were on. “My slate Vicuna trousers!” But the top buttons seemed absolutely afraid of their holes; he strained to bring them together, and turned angrily. “Blockhead,” he cried, “you have put my Vicunas away damp from the rain, and they have shrunk. Give me my light grey Cheviots. . . Now, go out and get a button-hole.” “A buttonhook?” said the man. I have one in the next room, sir.” No, a flower, booby!” roared his master. For a lady, sir?” For me” yelled old Time-Enough.

At Eileen’s house he left his hat in the hall, laying it on its side like a careful old bachelor; not dumping it down and throwing his gloves into it as is done by married men. He would not take it upstairs, because he wanted his hands to be free. The sunlight was pouring into the room; the canaries were singing; a horrid musical box was tinkling; her dog was barking. You were almost blinded and could not hear yourself speak. But Eileen pulled down the persiennes, put the Morning Post over the birds, turned the dog out, stopped the cylinder in the box, and then dropped a curtsey. Is there anything else you would like me to do, sir?” she said, smiling. Yes,” said old Time-Enough, taking her hand and looking into her eyes attentively to observe the dilation, I would like you to be my wife.”

Eileen turned abruptly and stooped over the azaleas in the fireplace; and there came a sound of giggling and gurgling. It was like clear spring water coming out of a cut glass bottle—a bubble and burst of baby merriment—and it annoyed him excessively. What are you laughing at, Miss?” he said severely. Y-y-you—” she said, looking round at last. Old Time-Enough turned as red as a turkey cock, and spluttered out in his anger that he would tell her father about her rudeness, want of respect due, schoolgirl impudence, levity, or madness; and banged the front door behind him.

At the club he complained to Patrick in the presence of Hector, but obtained no consolation. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” said Hector. Don’t you know she’s engaged to Hector’s lad?” said Patrick. I’m glad you only made her laugh; you might have frightened her.”

Now old Time-Enough was beside himself with rage. Withdraw that word,” he bellowed.

Oh, go to hel . . . by Court,” cried Pat, and stay there.”

And that is exactly what he did do. Finding that his two old friends had turned against him in this cruel way, he deserted the metropolis and went to live at his ancestral home. But he did not like it much. He was heavy and slow with hounds, and shooting gave him gun-headaches. Perhaps he gave the birds gun-headaches also; but he did not harm them much otherwise. He regarded the neighbours as a nuisance, including Jane, Lady Baldaquin. The men smelt of the fields, and none of the local girls said “Tell it me again.” Riding back, when he had lost the hounds (which generally happened about midday), across his own wide lands towards the opal-tinted smoke rising in the cold glitter of the spring sunlight from the great kitchener at home, what do you think he thought about? This. “I wonder what Damper will have devised for dinner?”

Mrs Damper was a good professed cookey. No one could call her a plain cook. Big-eyed, bold and buxom—a bonny brown-haired lassie of thirty-five at most—she would come into the library where he sat brooding before the fire, menu in hand. “III tempt you to pick at something to-night if I burn my eyes out a’doing of it. “That would be a pity,’ he said, and observed with surprise that they were dilating. “III tempt you,” she murmured to herself, returning to the kitchen. “ I’ll tempt you before I’ve done with you.”

He sat in the library more and more. She certainly was not a fairy, but she seemed by degrees to be casting a spell over him. . . .

They were married very quietly in March. She left off cooking, which surprised him much; and when the dinner was bad she said, “It’s to take or leave/ which surprised him more; and she made him get Jane, Lady Baldaquin, to present her at Court, which surprised him most. She instructed the servants to address her as Madam, and she compelled the coachman and footman to remove their hats and hold them in their hands while she got into the barouche of an afternoon. She could not take a hint, and was a brick wall to any innuendo. So he was very sad, realising that, had he from the first wanted to marry a cook and turn her into a lady, he ought to have begun years ago. For now there really was not time enough.

UGLY FACE

There are things which a wise man should be very careful indeed about choosing: his tailor, his club, his tobacco, his boots, etc., etc. But there are two things which he should not choose at all—his wife and his dog. He should let them choose him.

Well—as the Shah said after all his aphorisms—Major Flint was forty-three years of age when, one foggy afternoon, at Liverpool Street Railway Station, his dog chose him by nipping into his cab unobserved of human eye. The soldier was a hard, unloved man of forbidding aspect and most ungenial manner; and he almost immediately opened the little trap-door in the roof and said to the driver, “What the-d’you mean by keeping a dog in your cab? I think I am going to kick the damn thing out into the road-”

“Not"my dog,” came the voice of the driver, sounding vague and ghostly above the roar of the traffic, as it might have been from a phantom speaking in a telephone. “Prob’ly bTongs gent in train. If don’t bite yer, ’ave mercy on im. I’ll take ’im back. ProbTy pick up a dollar from owner.”

Then the cab nearly crashed into an omnibus and the stem fare commanded the driver to hold his tongue and look where he was going.

The man kept the dog. In size it resembled a large terrier; in colour, a mangy cat or jaundiced monkey; in countenance, heaven knows what—anything, from a Notre Dame gargoyle to an early New Zealand symbolical cliff-picture.

“The ugliest dog I ever see!” said the landlady of the London lodgings.

Of course nobody would claim such a dog. Nevertheless the man advertised in the newspapers. This was a waste of money; but he found that there was something in the Queen’s regulations directing him to pursue this course before, as an officer and a gentleman, he could claim property in the brute. Then he christened it Hansom—which brought the poor beast needless obloquy by offering the facile jest to feeble wits—and said to his landlady, “This dog is my dog. Be good enough to keep your criticisms to polish the boots with.”

“Thank you,” said the dog. “You are a master after my own heart. What I suggest is this. I will sleep on the mat outside your door—-on sentry-go. Never mind the draught under the door. I’m rough haired. Then, if a burglar comes prowling, I’ll pin him by the fat of the calf while you drive a slug through his impudent guts. That will be rare sport for both of us. Have I caught your humour? I thought so. We shall get on together. No sentimental nonsense about either of us. I had all that knocked out of me early enough in life’s march. I've no soapy relatives, no soapy friends; but I’m hard as nails and don’t miss ’em. I’m not attractive, nobody cares a damn for me; and I don’t care a damn for anybody.”

“Yes, old ugly-face, and you are not the only person that description fits,” said the master. He would not tell the dog he was thinking of himself, lest the brute should take liberties and begin to encroach.

Then, next day and the day after, the dog seemed to be saying, “Observe I have had the mat placed inside the door. I think it would be just as well to lull any bounder of a burglar into a sense of false security—eh? Let him come right in! Of course, if you don’t like the notion, we’ll put the mat outside again.”—Next night, it was—“Ah! Listen, please, to my tail wagging in this deprecating manner. While you were at the music hall, it occurred to me to leave the floor which I dote upon for the seat of this chair which I have guarded faithfully during the weary hours of your long absence.” On the morrow —“I suppose I may take it that you wish me to use the chair regularly. All right. Be it so. That fauteuil in the sitting-room is certainly less exiguous and snugger, but I must not suggest having that carted in here. . No, no. Quite so. But it's plaguey cold while you are away gadding. That old -of a landlady lets the fire out and prigs the coals to warm her own hind-quarters. But it’s you I miss more than any blasting furnace of a bedroom fire.

. . And one night, when he came in later than usual—“Oh what a funk you’ve given me. Strike me rheumatic, I thought something had happened to you. Oh! I can’t keep it up any longer. You’ve broken down my affected cynicism, you’ve pierced my armour of stoical reserve. Oh, false flint; oh, mock marble, why so puttily soft to me? Oh, unloved and most unlovely man, by what strange art have you made me love you so? There—there—you’ve made a fool of me and I’m thoroughly ashamed of myself. I never thought to fawn and roll, to lick hands and face in such a paroxysm of affection as that which now I show. To-night, and henceforward, the bed—crouching against your dear ungainly carcass—is the place for me.”

The landlady and other outsiders saw the situation as in a concave glass—inverted, and said, “That hideous dog has made a fool of the man.”

“He has brought me luck!” thought the naturally modest Major when he got a job at the War Office, which he had honestly earned by duty ably performed. “Luck again,” when he was told that he was doing his work well and had given satisfaction; “More luck,” when war broke out, “Now there will be a chance for all of us;” and “Bravo! luck-pig,” when he was given his regiment.

“I think I shall be wanted in furrin parts,” he told the dog; “but, meantime, you and I must be off to Colchester to bite and worry ’em into shape. Oh, ugly-face—oh, ugly-face, I shall have a sick heart under my tunic the day I sail and leave you behind,” The dog’s head was on his knee while he talked in this foolish manner, and he was pulling its rough ears on each side of its lamentably plain countenance. He was looking down into the steadfast eyes, through the brown liquid surface; and he seemed to see the soul shining out upon him—glorifying, obliterating. “ Hansom is as hansom does, eh, old chap? It’s the clock, not the clock case; the man inside ’em, not the fine feathers, gold lace and scarlet, and all the rest of the pretty fripperies.”

But before his appointment was gazetted the dog fell ill. The Colonel summoned the world-famous Dog-Doctor. “This dog puzzles me,” said the Doctor. “Dangerous case? Won’t get over it? What? Spit it out! I’m not an old spinster with a tortoise-shell cat,” said the Colonel sternly. “Oh, no, no,” said the Doctor, " I will cure him; I was only thinking-”

He did not give the owner his thoughts, which were merely this sort of thing, “Fairly baffled by breed; mongrel is a colourless phrase; Darwen, Huxley, Owen: all gone. Pity; they might have traced pedigree. Beyond me! Thought I had seen ugly dogs before, but was wrong.” Aloud, he said, “I’ll take him to my Home. . . . Yes. If you want to do what’s best for the dog. If you prefer to please yourself, keep him here. Oh, yes; I know what I’m talking about.”

So the Doctor took the patient away with him; and the Colonel went to his club, fell foul of the waiters, and backed his bill with a few dignified words of direct complaint to the Committee. He slept badly that night and the night after; and, on the following morning, went to Liverpool Street Station—of which he hated the sight—and thence to Colchester to take up his command. All day long telegrams seemed to be arriving for the new Colonel. He opened them eagerly, and everybody thought they were simply “Wolverhampton, 3 o’clock, Redbreast, Sly Maria, Mustard Pot,” and that sort of thing. “And he is backing sloths all the time,” said the Adjutant to himself. “ Sloth after sloth, and it is keeping him awake at night. His bloodshot eyes, haggard face, and jerky manner tell me that.” It was not so. The despatches were from the Dog Sanatorium, and the Colonel's sleep was being broken by illusions, which he knew to be illusions and disliked: because they drove a burning knife through his side, and bounced him up into a sitting posture as though he had been pulled by the rough hair of his unusually hard head. A weak little thrust on his arm, something feebly dragging at his sleeve, two liquid brown eyes looking at him through his own closed eyelids—turning glassy, dimming, clouding, fading. Illusions I

But at last, one morning on parade, a despatch came, saying, “Danger past. Dog now cured.” Then, suddenly, the strong man was overwhelmed.

The commanding officer lost command of himself. With a motion of his gloved hand (or whatever signal may be customary on these occasions) he indicated that the parade should be dismissed. So far as he was concerned, the regiment had dismissed itself: had disappeared, together with gravel square, grass patches, flower boxes of officers’ mess windows, blank walls, and clock tower—lost in a warm haze of tears.

On the morrow the dog returned, escorted by his master, who had given himself leave to fetch him.

Then the famous Dog-Doctor sent his bill, and the strong man was overwhelmed again. It was as bad, nearly, as a total change of uniform.

I must not think of taking him along with me” said the Colonel tentatively. This was a year later. The battalion had been at last ordered to the front; and he was once more talking to the Dog-Doctor.

“Canicide to do so. No other word for it,’ said the Doctor; and Yes, you may leave him with me at the Home.”

But will he not fret or pine—I do not know much about dogs?” said the Colonel. Miss me, I mean, and thereby suffer in health—perhaps die?”

No, no, no,” said the Doctor with a wonderfully kind smile, for all the world as if he had been talking about a human being; he will fret at first—two, three days. After that—I don’t say he will forget you, but he will be reconciled.” The Colonel winced. “ See,” said the Doctor, “I do know something about dogs. He’ll be all right, and glad to see you again when you come back a Field-Marshal or what not.”

The departing soldier was shopping a week after this—hurriedly selecting all sorts of martial odds and ends and war-like knick-knacks at the Army and Navy Stores—when his servant came seeking and questing through the great building with an envelope marked Urgent. Colonel Flint read the note, and left his man to finish the shopping. “Here,” he roared, “I give him authority to sign my name for deposit account,” and he rushed away.

“Canicide to leave him,” said the Doctor, at the County Home. “No other word for it. Better take him and let him stand his chance with the rest. I confess he has baffled us.”

“It will be arduous,” said the Colonel. “How old is he?”

“Sixty-two or sixty-three—if he were a man; but he is hard—good constitution.”

“Older men than he have gone,” said the Colonel, “and come back. Old Barker, for one; and Stern- chase, sixty-seven; Grabbit, nearly seventy-”

“I’ll be there to meet you both,” said the Dog-Doctor; “to welcome you home, and assist you about the quarantine and all that. Good-luck to you both. No, sir; nothing to pay this time.”

The dog had found the campaign arduous—there is no other word for it. He had done some grand marches; been in some hot things; had played in the great'game for death or glory, and won the respect of all. No shirker, he had footed it when he might have ridden. The Colonel and his brave men had done well, very well, it was thought out there, although they had long since vanished from the public eye at home, lost in the yellow waves of the still flowing tide of battle. “A man who has done a lot of hammering and taken a lot of hammering,” they thought out there; “he will not be forgotten.”

But no rest yet. Plenty of work to be done still. So, after a year, the gaunt commander and the seasoned remnant of his war-spent command were still marching, marching, marching; over the rolling veldt, under the hot sun, under the cold stars.

A poor ghost of a dog pattering by a skeleton horse, watching, guarding still, but suffering—who could doubt it? larynx affected certainly, lungs probably, voice gone; consumed by a feverish thirst; making a man’s heart ache to see him stumble down into any little crease or fold in the ground and scratch for the water which was never there. At the last halt—within sight of the strewn rocks and the low ridge—the Colonel knelt over him as he lay panting, and moistened his lips and washed the dust from his face. There were no waggons on this little move—only two guns. . .

It would have been worse, but for the dog. He gave the alarm, twice—two husky whispers, not barks, as, with ears cocked, he hurried on and then stood rigid. The brown rocks crackled into white flame; the ridge spat death. The dog was killed at once—trampled out of life by the retreating teams. They would have lost the guns, but for the dog. The Colonel was grievously wounded: hit once, thrice, and thrice. It was his first “mishap,” and even the fat men at home in the club arm-chairs owned that it might have been worse. The silly fools had extricated themselves from the mess they had made of it, and had left nothing but corpses for the hidden foe to come out and crow over.

They called her Nurse Venus, of the Field Hospital at Flower-Springs. She was really Nurse Diana, but the other Sisters of Mercy had .most wittily rechristened her. You had but to look at her face to catch the point of the joke. Her worst case was bed No. 2. Three nasty holes in him and continued delirium—chatter, chatter, night and day. In the sunlight and the bustle of day it did not trouble anybody: but at night, when nearly all slept, she had to listen.

And this was what he used to say—over and over again.

“Have you a heart of gold? Are you braver than any man, more tender than any woman? Oh, ugly-face, oh my poor ugly-face! Ugly to all but me. . . . My darling. Let them laugh, let them mock. Handsome is as handsome does. To me, you are an angel. I see your soul shining through—glorifying, obliterating.”

“Are you going to break down and fail me too?” said the Man-Doctor petulantly, of a morning, observing the red eyes, pallid, drawn face of his best nurse. “Spare yourself over this—Goner! Colonel Goner is his name."

“No. That’s not his name," she said puzzled, looking at the card above the bed, and seeing Colonel Flint, etc. etc.

“Isn't it?" said the Doctor, smiling. “Then mine isn’t Snooks," and he hurried away.

But the nurse did not spare herself, although in the black night and the grey dawn she suffered most intolerable torments from the light-headed badinage of Bed No. 2, she watched and guarded, crouched in the shadow by his ungainly carcass. He would stroke the rough serge of her cloak and whisper, “My love, my ugly old sweetheart, oh my poor ugly-face "; and then perhaps when the cold light first crept in, would clutch her sleeve with both his burning hands and drag down the rough, hairy serge on each side of her arm, with his glassy eyes so intently fixed upon her that it seemed impossible that he did not really see her, and she would shrink from him and the light into the retiring shadows. “Do you understand. Let them say what they like. Never ugly to me, my darling. You and I were made for each other. My true heart, my sweetheart.” It was excessively difficult to remember that delirium still held sway.

“Confound it all,” cried the Man-Doctor, “I told you not to waste your time over this. . . . What? . . . Well, I am not so sure this morning. . He’ll have to thank you, if he does.”

Thus the Red Cross fought with Death and beat him: snatched his mauled prey when he had dragged it half way through the dark portal.

At last he came to himself; and really saw his nurse. She was so infernally ugly that she reminded him of his dog, and he turned his head away with an effort which made him perspire. He was so extremely weak. But after a bit, as the plain face became familiar, he seemed to see the soul shining through. So, in due course, he married her; brought her home; and was prouder of her than of the cross and star which they had given him to hang upon his seamed breast.

You see the dog had taught him that.

THE FOOLISH ACTOR AND SOCIETY

“God bless you, my little lad/’ his father, the tragedian, had said one night, “and make a good actor of you.”

“Oh, sure I” said his faded mother, the excolumbine, stooping to pick the steak out of the fender, and placing it beside the pot of porter. “Sure, it’s in the blood.”

“No, wife,” said Papa in booming tones; “it is in the brain and in the heart,” and he tapped his forehead and placed his hand upon his chest with a grand gesture. That is where good acting comes from—the heart to feel, the brain to understand. . . . And I attribute a large measure of my success in life” (this was long ago, before the newspapers had become as fascinating as fairy-tale books, and when poor artistes had to interview themselves) “to always coming straight home to supper. I shall never forget the words of an old fairy—my first panto, at Hartlepool—to me, a poor little shivering gnome, but crammed full of ambition as an egg with meat, I Beware of Society. Society is slow poison to our art.’ I made my rigid rule then, a comely stripling, and have adhered to it till brown locks are silvered. . . . There is very good society in this town. The landlord of the Bull—a highly cultivated gentleman—has wooed me to his little informal gatherings—charming re-unions, I make no doubt. But No has been his answer. I am host, not guest. I entertain, or so endeavour, every evening from 7 p.m. I I do not care to be entertained—when my party breaks up. My friends, if I have any, can always see me—by paying at the door—half-price at nine o’clock I . . . But to your pillow, young flibbertygibbet.”

Now, a troupe of theatrical fairies, flying over the obscure midland town that very night, came down the chimney of the humble lodging-house, and left for the sleeping child all their richest gifts. They gave him a fine voice, keen observation, sympathy, and intuition. They gave him the gift of laughter and the gift of tears; and then flew off without waking him.

He grew up, became a good actor, and soon began to draw “big money.” “The Dad’s” voice had ceased to boom, and “Mums” had danced her last dance—with Death for harlequin. But now professional tracasseries arose. He had discovered that the public preferred him in very long parts to those of medium length; and, as he said of himself very modestly, he was not yet strong enough to run counter to the public wish. But the thing caused worry. He would be rehearsing a new part of Prince in a play about a King and his heir, when, all at once, he would say, “I see a light here. I will be King also. I will double those parts.” “You can’t,” the manager would say. “One is an old dodderer, the other is a bouncing boy. They are not a bit alike, and they are always on together.” “I see more light,” he would say. “Malfe them twin brothers instead of father and son.” “Look here,” cried an author in a pet, “if you want pieces rewritten ten days before production, you ought to have a theatre of your own.” i He was quick to take the hint—and a theatre. As he said himself, in confidence to a journalistic friend, he very soon could not keep the money out. The same pettish author came, hat in hand, saying, “I have an idea; what say you to this? Study of a temperament! Doctor, scientist, philanthropist, keeper of vast hospital for deaf and dumb, new treatment of own invention, bring light to their awful darkness. He talks; they cannot answer. Oh this silence! my own voice, my own voice; it is killing me; will no one break the-” But the actor- manager had taken fire. “Say no more.” He was filling in a cheque. “Write your play. It is mine. I buy it now and thus. Sign this receipt.”

Then he only wanted a leading lady—in his theatre and in his life also—for all to be well: someone to act the Adventuress in the spangled eel-skin frock on the boards, when she was working; and to play the wife in the sac peignoir at home, when she was resting. He was only aware that he wanted her behind the footlights. There were some capable actresses to be found on the front at Brighton or Nice, with nothing to do; but they did not seem to see themselves in a sequence of deaf mutes, pointing ghosts, veiled nuns, or what not. Still he prospered, and accepted their advertised thanks for kind offer in the spirit in which they were tendered.

He had not long been famous ere he found himself seated, one Sunday night, at a glittering board which was surrounded by lords and ladies and honourable misses and misters (as, in his darkness concerning such matters, he inwardly called them). Their faces glowed like the dull gold plate on the sideboard; their eyes shone like the cut-glass; but their conversation did not sparkle like the effervescing wine. They were waiting for him —to amuse them. “Affable party of deadheads as ever I’ve met!” he said to himself, and was sombre and morose—till the saddle of mutton. Then he began to tell an anecdote to the lady by his side, and the whole room fell more silent and agog; hanging on his words. The voice which the fairies had given him had tones of the grave double-bass and the laughing bassoon, and rang clear and true like a fine old bell, setting the Bohemian Ihock glasses tinkling in sympathy as he related how the fuddled old supe said, “ Stand back and let the parson cough!” How that anecdote went! It was impossible not to be pleased. The butlers all hid their faces; one footman stood paralysed, with the Brussels sprouts protruded between a Countess and a Cabinet Minister; another forgot the beans, and a third carried the tomatoes out into the lobby and frankly exploded with them.

That’s what we term a merowski,” he said, beaming; and then to carry his triumph off lightly, Waiter, my glass, please!”

They chirruped like happy birds. After his trained bull-bellow, their weak bleatings struck chill on the ear, and the glasses ceased to throb. Rippin’! I shall die of laughin’ I What was it? Didn’t quite catch the point, but the delicious mimicry!” and so forth. One very old lord asked behind a shaky hand, What’s M’rowsky?” Polish actor, I think,” whispered a Dowager. But they were all enraptured. A beautiful Viscountess clapped her hands when he said Waiter,” and beat upon the white damask with her fan because she thought he had started off again. See,” said his hostess archly,I hide my free for shame. It is too bad to trespass on your good nature, but the Duke forces me to crave that you will—er—go on?”

Well, well,” he said, searching his memory.

Ever heard the wheeze of the-?”... and with a strong arm he shook the chestnut tree that first night in Mayfair. The ladies refused to go to the drawing-room until they had compelled him to give the Parson’s cough just once more. Privilege,” said the old lord, offering his shaky hand, to meet a great artist thus,” and the poor old chap meant it. Toppin’ fella!” said the young lords to one another; and to him, “Care come Arquebusiers’ mess palace t’mora—oh, no, actin’ I Then day after? Wouldn’t like send on ’nother feUa and dine with my Aunt—ter—meet ther-?” etc., etc.

On the following night he went from his theatre to hear a little music in Grosvenor Square; and when, in the small hours, he reached his diggings, he gave his supper to the landlord’s cat.

Now at the Cannibal Club the old Barbarians saw at a glance that the man was poisoned. The poison came out in his talk. He was full of it. “Purge yourself of it,” they cried; “do not have truck with them.” “Business, dear boy, business I” he cried knowingly. “Bad business,” said the savages. “Just off to a ducal house I” he said to a poor writer. “Oh, do notice things and tell me,” said the writer. “What do you want to know?” he asked pompously. “First, the togs of the groom in the chambers. Is it boots and all, same as an ordinary groom?” “Oh, pooh,” he said. “And more important I find if servants do knock at sitting-room doors or do not. My new play hangs on it!” “Do you want them to knock or no?” he asked sympathetically. “To I” cried the author excitedly. “If not, my best situation’s got a leak in it.” “Lay your scene in the country, then,” he said gravely. “The rule is simple enough. In London, No; out of it, why Yes, of course.” For, you see, as yet he only knew fashionable life in town. ...

“Since the smart set have taken you up/’ said a stupid old cow of a dowager, “one hardly dares hope you will still come to us/’ The phrase rankled. They all used it behind his back, but to his face, it was “prevailed upon.” Taken up, forsooth! Was he not just as good, just the same as they? Or, if not, he soon would be. He bought white waistcoats; ceased to quote Shakespeare; practised bleating before a microphone; shooks hands just under his chin; wiped Bayswater off his map; studied the Red Book instead of the Bra; and ceased to show rage and horror when told that Lord Augustus was the best living Pygmalion; and said, “Dear lady, remember I have only fifty-two Sundays. I cannot cut myself in pieces!” Heaven knows where he had got “dear lady” from; but he always used it now.

You must know that the fairies meanwhile had visited the theatre and become so displeased that they were taking their gifts away. For give a thing and take a thing is good fairies’ plaything. “This fellow,” they cried, “is simply slouching through his part. He is not acting at all. The only true acting he does is outside. He saves himself for that and comes here dog-tired and cat-careless.” And they followed him, grumbling in the air by night—“Up another staircase—it is too much!” And by day, “What’s this? Royal Enclosure? Oh, faugh!” So then they took away his observation (that was why he shook hands so high), then his intuition, and then something else, until they had resumed nearly all their gifts. He never noticed the loss; and no more did the public.

Now-a-days at dinner parties his anecdotes were of Archie Archibald of the Ist Life and Hughie Hughieson of the 2nd—or sinister little traits of character in upstarts who wanted to become one of us. “You must know that since my new soubrette has been taken up by poor dear old Lady Harridan she has aspirations. Oh, distinctly! She has been plaguing me to get her asked to Cronstadt House.” But the strain was terrible when you were racking your brain to remember who was who's Uncle, or whether the Lord opposite was the Marquess or only the mere Baron of the same name without the B, and one did not observe that the butlers were yawning. “What the dooce is he cackling about my nephew?” growled the most honourable (without the B). “Has he bought Cronstadt House?” inquired a relative of that social fortress. They did not like his society tales of keeping people out and letting them in. They felt like a lot of International goalkeepers being taught their business unasked, by a club forward. “Pella—wants—kickin’ I” the young lords chirruped. “Pay to see him?” twittered the young ladies, alluding to his theatre, “I see too much of him—at every evening party. One can’t escape him. I’d pay not to see him!” And, at last, “My cousin Berty Bertyng (of the Blues) was dinin’ at the Cannibals, and the actors there—the real actors, don’t you know—told him in confidence, that he is a rotter. I believe that is a theatrical term.”

That was the end. The public missed the gifts. A frosty wind of disaster blew through the theatre; sending all the complimentary tickets eddying and swirling out of the box office, round and round the empty auditorium until they settled down in the lap of the Receiver in Bankruptcy, who was sitting in the Manager’s sanctum and watching the expert as he valued the frames of all the Duchesses’ signed photographs. “Back you? No, old Cockywax,” said the young lords, “If I want a flutter, I like a bit on a horse. I say this to you without reticence, because I look on you as one of us. It’s what I should say to Archie or Hughie, if they were in a fix and asked me to help ’em.” But the Dowagers, who were the original takers-up, did not drop him. “Now that he is no longer a professional artist, one does feel that he is—to a certain extent—one of us I” They helped him; they wished to help him. But, as with everything else that they did, they made a fuss about it. When Lady Augusta played Galatea and Lord Augustus Pygmalion, they had him down for the week: paying him—“as we were only too glad to do, but treating him exactly like the rest of our guests.” (Indeed even the butlers could not now discern that he was in any wise different from a broken-down swell.) “He is so wretchedly poor that it made my heart ache to see his gluttony at dinner. It told such a tale, don’t you know. One thing I have been compelled to do—for his own sake—I told Richardson not to fill his glass every time it was emptied.”

It was while rehearsiug the amateurs that the last of the fairies took away the last of the gifts—the gift of laughter and tears. “Augustus, old Cockywax/’ he said immediately, “I’ve often heard it, but now I know you are the best Pygmalion living.”

“He’s dam familiar,” said Augustus, quoting these words, “but he does know what he’s talkin’ about.”

STOLEN KISSES

He had stolen the kisses which, in the eye of the law, in the eye of the church, were the property of that other man. He had been a thief. He had taken them by stealth, but greedily: more and more, until it seemed a miracle that they were not missed. The years rolled by; and at last, after many years, what he thought was the flute-like inner voice of the soul made itself heard above the drummings of the blood and the brain. “Thief, thief, thief!” piped the inner voice. “Is it not time to reform—to turn over a new leaf and be an honest man?” “Quite,” drummed the brain ... in reply.

But she said, in mellow tones, “Be easy in your conscience. You are a thief no longer. They are freely given,” with a full-blown smile. “You are robbing nobody. You may have as many as you like. They are to spare. He has told me so,” she added with ripe, over-ripe humour. “Have some now.”

The old thief edged away. Honestly, he did not wish for any more. They were in the train, going down to see her boy at Eton, who was soon to leave for Sandhurst. They had the compartment to themselves. His eyes roved round, admiring the morocco leather, the charming photographs in the glass frames, the lofty roof with its noble clerestory, and he thought, “When the Great Western has introduced its new corridor vestibule coaches throughout its vast system, it will be the most sumptuous line in Europe!” He wanted to fly from the temptation. In his tardy repentance and longing to feel an honest man once more, he would have flown head first through the window had he dared.

“It' does seem so despicably mean to him, don't you know,” he muttered, “to go on taking them like this?”

“Oh, my hero, my saint, my king,” she cried, with ineffable tenderness, “was there ever a man like this? Oh, true heart; oh, faithful, unwavering lamp of my life. More unselfish than the angels! Don’t waste such exquisite flowers of white seraphic thought on such a foolish chimera.”

Words are impotent to convey his depth of repentant feeling when she talked like that.

“See now,” she cried, with expansive playfulness, “I rejoice every minute of the day that after all these years my dear old thief is as wickedly intent on stealing them as ever he was. The temptation is as strong—to him, at any rate, if not to others. . . But I must confess I can’t leave my carriage, take a peep into a shop-window, without encountering would-be .thieves. The rogues like a fine woman. Blise, my maid, says, Miss Marjorie will never be such a fine woman as you, ma’am.’ And it is true. Unless she fills out surprising,’ says Elise. Why, one of your dresses would fairly swamp Mrs Wherry; and I call her a fine woman, too. . . Oh, I’m glad I’m so plump and comely still, with a May-pole of a daughter to present next year. I’m glad, I’m glad. But, oh thief, if you will thus term yourself, I have been chattering on so that you haven’t pilfered one since we flashed through Baling. Idle thief—attend to business.”

Oh, how he yearned to recover his lost honesty, and feel that he had put aside larceny for ever t You have heard of the whisky cure for whisky bibbers. The sufferer is shown into his comfortable room in the Home, and notices that it smells of the stimulant for which he has exhibited a fatal partiality. Illusion? He pours out water to wash. There is whisky in it. Not sufficient, of course, to make it a possible beverage; only enough to taint it. There is whisky in his sponge and his soap; his dress shirt has it starched into the white surface; his necktie tickles his nostrils with a faint aroma. His dinner roll has been delicately sodden, his soup flavoured, with it. It is in all his meat and drink. His pillows and the sheets of his bed are impregnated with it. The fire breathes whisky at him. In a word, he is ingeniously, systematically, with merciless persistence (kind cruelty, of course) haunted by whisky, while powerless to clutch and clasp the mocking spirit. What he suffers from this haunting ghost of a dead debauch only the doctors can understand. It must be terrible. His very soul sickens under the torture, his gorge rises, his entrails recoil at the thought of whisky—and he is cured.

Arguing by analogy, one may perhaps grasp some idea of what our conscience-stricken thief suffered ere he succeeded in obtaining his discharge.

But a thief is never safe. He reforms and relapses. The old kleptomaniacal, magpie, mischievous force of habit trips him up and lays him by the heels when he least expects it.

“See now,” says the eminent employer to his clerk, the Reformed character, “step into my private dressing-room and wash your hands and brush your hair, and then we'll go out and have a bit of lunch together. I’ll be waiting for you in the counting-house.” Flattered and fluttered, the poor wretch passes through the trap-door, thinking, “I have long deserved his confidence, and now, praise be to Providence, I have won it and more—his friendship as well. 4 am a made man I” At the same moment he sees the bait: glittering on the mantelpiece, a quantity of gold coins, with a bunch of keys added to make it look natural. “How rich he must be, then, this master of mine, to thus leave his sovereigns about —fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one of them—lying about where any rogue might help himself! Such carelessness tells its own story. He has so many that he has more than he wants. He could support a five per cent, tax without feeling it. He does not want this odd one!”

Heaven knows the clerk does not really want it either, because by honest labour his circumstances are now quite easy; and yet, there it has glided, as though by witchcraft, into his right-hand watch-pocket as he passed by to fetch a towel to dry his trembling hands. It was not a poor little twentyshilling bit which he saw, but a glittering magnet drawing his fingers as though they were nothing but nails with no flesh or blood to hold them back; not a beaten fragment of yellow dirt, but the symbolical object of a semi-insane desire. A smouldering spark of that baleful old fire flashed into fierce flame, and he was consumed by the crackling, maddening craving, as a blade of grass is consumed under the gust of a forest conflagration: because once a thief always a thief. Of course the coin was marked. Policemen in the counting-house, prompt identification. “As I dreaded,” from the merchant; and the malefactor is marched off to the Penitentiary.

Now this is precisely how our thief was caught—with a marked kiss.

They were an interesting family, consisting of a daughter, her mamma, a number of uncles in the British army and navy, and a brother, who, having experienced the misfortune of killing a man in a street row, had gone to an Eastern clime and taken service in the famous fire-eating Bashi of the Emperor. The family were not ashamed of the brother, because the misfortune was a pure accident, and he had never cost them a penny piece since it occurred; and they were inordinately proud of the sister.

“Oh, handsome is not the word,” the mother would say to the uncles in the presence of our friend, talking perhaps to them but at him, as the phrase goes. “Attractive, alluring! She made it herself. She is so clever with her needle. Clever is not the word. But I check her industry. The needle has made little holes in her fingers, and I do not wish that right shoulder permanently enlarged. ... I call her Sunshine in a House;” and the mother would run on about her child’s charms as only a mother can. . “Horse exercise? Oh yes, a poem on a horse. If one could afford it, certainly; because she is lethargic by temperament, and it is so good for the liver; but since she has increased so much in weight the expense becomes prohibitive. But if not equitation, then I say medicine—now and again. Those little red spots on her neck and cheek and the wee volcano on the lip are not blemishes, but the hot young blood which needs cooling. However, you can’t expect wise old heads on graceful young shoulders, and she will not brook my remedies. . . . Did I mention what her brother said on receipt of her last phofo? 4 Do not let Moonie ever come out here, for they would just pop her into the Sultan’s seraglio.

They would not let a mere subject retain such a beauty.’”

Thus would the doting parent run on. You will understand that she was trying to paint an attractive picture; but not being an artist in words, she did not know when a touch told for or against her scheme. She did her best, but neglected the advice of the dead singer of the soft south seas—to omit, to omit, to omit.

But the old dame was cunning, with a sound notion of plot, though lacking technique for description. So, one fine day, when madam was not visible and the house seemed free of uncles, the visitor heard that he would find Miss in the garden.

“All alone in the sunlight. You look like a sunbeam yourself,” he said politely—out of sheer politeness—gliding nearer and nearer. And then—heaven knows he did not want it! pricked into imbecile, automatic action by the force of the cursed old habit—he stole the marked kiss.

“Oh, thief, thief, thief!” rang out a chorus of accusing voices. It was as though every shrub and flowering bush had burst into a clamorous protest—“Oh, thief!” A Commodore here, a Colonel there, uncle after uncle, sprang into view: a post-Captain behind the greenhouse door, a brevet-Major on the sunk steps, a rear-Admiral by the back wall, and Mamma with eyes of deadly precision levelled upon him from the potting shed! In his surprise and terror as the family surged about him he quite thought that the brother and all his Bashi-Bazouks had been in ambush too. They did not appear; but he found the British forces, without allies, too many for him. “ What do you mean?” he stammered. “I have not been near her.” But his face was white, his breath came short, his knees shook. He looked Guilt personified. “Oh, liar as well as thief,” they yelled, “to the Penitentiary with him.”

His private Penitentiary is called No. 9Ib Pagoda Court Mansions, S.W. The Matron of the establishment is his wife, but the Governor is his mother-in-law. The Governor at first only paid regular visits of inspection, but now resides within the walls, and discipline is never relaxed. The culprit suffers most, perhaps, from his own troubled thoughts and odd baseless fears which break his sleep. He lives in dread of being robbed, and is always dreaming of burglars, larcenous tricksters, and sneak-thieves assailing his property. A thief thinks that every one else must be a thief.

“Why?” say his old friends at the club. “No danger, eh?” and they chuckle. “I would insure him against theft and stand the risk myself—think it a soft thing,” and they spill cigar ash on their fat chests and splutter their grog, swayed by a storm of vulgar mirth.

THE FAIRY HELIOTROPE

As a child he always wanted to get out of his proper place. “Would you like a ride in a train?” an uncle might ask. “Oh, yes, if I may go on the engine.”

At first it was amusing. As, for instance, when Grandmamma was about to take him out for a drive in the barouche. “May I sit on the box?” No, my pet.” “Why?” “Because I say so,” says the old lady—to point a moral. Then, relenting, “Also, because Frederick wants the box seat.”

The little dear would toddle out before his relative was ready, for a chat with the fat coachman and the tall footman; and then it would be, “G’amma, I can go on the box after all. Fe’dick will sit inside with you. He does not mind, just for this once I”

But it became boring as he grew older. It shocked and worried his mother—who was what is termed strait-laced—to find that he preferred the butler’s pantry to her boudoir; that he considered shove-halfpenny with the grooms in the harness-room after dinner more entertaining than a game of billiards with the noblemen and gentlemen, her guests; that, while slighting the advances and underrating the companionable qualities of the son of the Lord Lieutenant of the County, he wooed, in a manner almost sycophantic, the society and friendship of the only child of the most notorious poacher in the neighbourhood. When the local constabulary, raiding the Bell Inn at twenty minutes to eleven o’clock at night, found him among the laggards in the Bell parlour so flagrantly long after closing hours, it was time—quite time—to send him to a crammer’s. It is a fact that, in spite of his advancing years, he travelled to London and thence on again—in the guard’s van.

The cramming establishment was near Smoketown in the north; and among the pupils was the son of the manager of the Smoketown Grand Theatre. To know such a man was a rare honour and privilege. The Grand Christmas Pantomime, after a stupendously successful run, was now positively approaching its last nights and matinees when our young friend was first permitted to witness its performance spellbound from overture to fall of the green curtain. It was not until he had sat under the long drawn-out spell on several occasions that his host called his attention to an entrancingly ingenious little door in the wall, situated immediately behind Box C on the prompt side of the house. It was the door through which one passed from one’s proper place, the auditorium, to where one had no business at all, behind the scenes.

It need hardly be said that, like a rabbit bolting into its burrow, with the unobtrusive celerity of a bone-guilty dog leaving the dining-room, he nipped through that door.

He loved the cellars best of all of that enchanting place. He was more thoroughly and satisfyingly in the way here, among the sinks and pits and curious beams and intricate ropes, blundering upon and jostled by grimy workmen, than when leaning against gas handles in the prompt corner or blocking entrances or aimlessly obtruding himself in the flies, the painting room, the property shop, the crowded scene docks. The orderly confusion, the controlled bedlam, the wild hurry and fierce rush and racket of the grand Christmas pantomime when taken unawares in the rear and considered from the side which should be jealously guarded from public view, filled him with rapturous content. Strong as had been the spell which the right side of the show exercised, it was weak and breakable compared with the overpowering fascination of the wrong side.

But the cellars! To stand in those dimly lit mysterious vaults, lulled by the muflled strains of the band leaking to one through invisible passages, above one’s head the stage itself—a dull grumble of the demons in Scene One—the Haunt of the Gnome King—with flashes of limelight filtering down through the wonderful boards! To think, as he did, that this was the true home and haunt of the demons—a more convincing cave of mystery and awe than the scene overhead! He would draw in his breath greedily, luxuriously. He would throw back his head, deeply inhaling the atmosphere of these lowermost regions —gaseous fumes, superheated vitiated air, a dancing pungent dust and a faint, very faint, odour of drains—finding it more delicious than moorland breezes, sweeter than flower-scented gales. He loved the cellars best; and it was here, in a dark recess, a little innermost bin or private cellar formed by huge wooden baulks and beams and buttresses, that he suddenly came face to face with the Fairy Heliotrope.

A thrill of ecstasy ran through and through him; he felt hot and cold; he was dazzled, entranced, hopelessly, irretrievably spell-bound by one flash of the fairy’s eyes as she turned them full upon him.

She seemed at the moment like a beautiful bird caught in a trap, or a gentle innocent sprite fallen into the gross hands of the two ogres who, as he guessed at once, would presently hoist her up through the boards—to bounce out among the hideous gnomes assembled above. Up she would go, with a bang on the drum and a clash of the cymbals, while a broad shaft of limelight came down to meet her, and the evil spirits would cower with monstrous exaggeration and quail in pantomime terror as the radiant intruder delivered the lines which already he knew by heart.

“I am this infant's Godmatnma, so please Attend to my directions—which are these.”

Then, while the wicked gnomes continued to quail, she would recite, in the form of an incantation, this impressive stanza:—

“In the sunlight, with no shadow,
Please to guide her baby tread;
While our fury wings make music,
Flying o’er her baby head.
Smooth her path, and free from worry,
Free from flurry, free from fuss,
For we fairies are her guardians,
And have made her one of us.'

The mechanism of the trap was explained by the ogres themselves. Ropes, counterweights, etc., it all seemed simple enough, “you see, sir, we have to take care, make the ropes run smooth and even like. It would be an easy thing to do her a mischief, you’ll understand, whereas with care, we just runs her up so as she don’t know she’s gone.”

“Not always,” says the fairy, with large, reproachful eyes.

“Sorry to hear you say that, miss. Shook you up a bit Saturday night? I remember now, you mentioned it. The ropes wasn’t properly greased, perhaps.” Then, turning to the intensely interested visitor, in a confidential tone, “That’s the whole secret, you’ll understand, sir, to keep them ropes thoroughly well greased, and with the right stuff.”

“What is the right stuff to grease them with?”

“Beer, sir. Nothing else. . Stand by, Bill. Ready? Steady now—go!”

The floor above her lovely head opened; through the square gap demoniac chatter, the music of the orchestra and a flood of light descended. Then she rose, closing the gap with the little platform on which she had been standing, and he was left gaping in the blank darkness beside the empty trap. After fumbling in his pockets, he gave the ogres money—sufficient money to lay in a really ample supply of the lubricant. He did not wish them to do her a mischief if he could prevent them. Indeed, his heart turned sick and his hand trembled as he thought of harm coming to her.

“Ah!” said the fairy Heliotrope next time he met her, “come to keep me company, till I’m wanted? That’s right. I do hate trap work, and I fairly loathe this cellar.”

Her condescension, her friendly, affable tone, rendered him speechless by surprise and pleasure.

“It makes me shiver, this cellar. There’s something about it that makes my flesh creep—as though it was haunted. I shouldn’t wonder if it is,” and the fairy turned her graceful neck to one side and the other as she glanced about fearfully.

He was keenly anxious to tell her that the cellar had impressed him also as mysterious, awe-inspiring, weird and wonderful; but the glory and honour of the interview still deprived him of speech.

“Perhaps the big drum or the double bass committed suicide down here; or,” dropping her voice to a whisper, “some of those brutes broke a poor girl’s back in the traps, and her ghost walks.” Then, observing that the successors to the brutes of her imagination were well out of earshot, she added: “It was nice of you to tip them like you did. I thought it very nice, and I thank you.”

He could tingle and blush with embarrassed gratification, but he could not find his tongue.

“What’s your name?” asked the fairy Heliotrope.

“Richard.”

“Oh, I mustn’t call you that, you know.”

“Then call me Dick.”

“Very well,” said the fairy, showing her white teeth and flashing her bright eyes in an overwhelmingly fairy-like smile. Never did poor peasant meet so free and easy a fairy!

“I think I had better call, you Dicky; you are rather like a bird—a parrot,” and she smiled again. “You don’t talk much, but you think all the more.”

It was surprisingly true. He felt that by her fairy arts she saw through and through him and could read his thoughts better than he could read them himself. “Well, good-bye, dicky-bird,” she whispered, just before the ropes were pulled. The public claimed her and he was left in the darkness again.

“How old are you, I wonder?” said the fairy Heliotrope. “Is it true that you are still at school?”

“No,” he cried, “it is a dastardly lie,” finding a full volume of voice and a flow of strong words in his fierce indignation. “Who has dared to slander me so?”

She explained that it was the Knave of Hearts, the low, the very low comedian, and implored him not to be so angry. He, on his side, glibly quoting the lines about the blackest of all lies which is half a truth, explained the gulf, the sea, the wide ocean of difference that rolls between a school and a crammer's.

“Oh!” said Heliotrope.

“One is slavery, the other is absolute freedom,” he urged hotly. “Should I be allowed to be here now, if I were—well, at what he ventured to allege?”

“Is it true, what they say, about your park and the handle to your mother’s name and all the land and the money which you are going to have?” asked Heliotrope.

“Yes,” he said, with the candid pride of youth, “every word of it.”

“And how old are you, really and truly?” the fairy asked thoughtfully.

“Eighteen,” he answered, blushing deeply, and wishing that he could have bartered all the land up to the park rails throwing in the maternal title, in exchange for another ten years.

“Oh lor! And I am twenty-three. Old enough to be your aunt—almost.”

“No,” he said, inwardly surprised at the ease with which his tongue wagged this evening, “old enough to be my fairy godmother, if you like.”

“Yes,” said Heliotrope, as she took his hand in hers. They were alone together in the dark recess of an upper entrance, O. P. side. “That’s what I’ll be, dear. I can’t be anything else, so I’ll be that.”

He hated the Knave of Hearts and regretted that he had ever laughed at his knavish vulgar buffoonery. He was a low comedian, he now thought, if ever there was one. It tortured him to observe the lack of deference in the knave’s manner when addressing the fairy; and there was a hard lump in his throat which almost choked him when he became aware that the fairy did not appear to miss the respect which was certainly her due.

“What’s that?” she asked of the knave, who was raising his ugly painted face from an ugly pewter mug in the wings.

“Nectar! Ever tasted it? Try some!” and he offered the pewter and she delicately sipped out of it.

“What nonsense,” she said, wiping her red lips, “It’s stout.”

“Guinness’s, the same thing as what I said,” said the low comedian leering and grimacing as though he had made a joke.

It was after this distressing episode, so derogatory to a fairy, that he began to feed her himself: superintending her meals whenever possible and thereby making sure that no base-born rogue shared platter or glass with her. In the interval between the morning and evening performances he used to take her to the finest restaurant in Smoketown. She never caused him trouble by indulging in fairy-like fancies, asking for soup made of the hearts of black roses, followed by the three smallest of the gold fishes swimming about the fountain in the Municipal Park boiled in a debutante’s first tears of delight at the beauty of her new frock, or anything ridiculous of that sort, but contented herself with plain solid matter of fact nourishment—a chop—well done, please, and a termarter if you have such a thing, etc. Before accepting his hospitality she asked permission of her mother (her mortal parent) which was at once accorded. In the long passage outside the stage door he saw the quiet unobtrusive old lady and thought he heard her reply—

“Most certainly, of course, yes indeed, why not?” He used to sit looking at her across the restaurant table, trying and trying and trying to see her—seeing her so clearly and yet seeing her not at all. She was tall and slim; her hair was brown; her eyes were large; her complexion was of a pale dull ivory tint—the carnation of the blood killed by the use of liquid rouge, the satin white of the skin turned to calico yellow by the stain of all the grease and vaseline. He looked harder and harder, but really he could not see her—because he loved her so.

She seemed to speak—whatever trivial everyday matter she spoke of—in measured cadences. She moved in music; and she laughed in limelight. Her black straw hat, her brown retriever dog-skin jacket, her dull serge dress and two brilliant paste trinkets used to disappear while he looked; and, in a glorious flash, she had resumed her fairy form. Prom the unpromising materials before him, he reconstructed her, reinstated her in her stage splendour, even in handing her a roll on a fork or re-filling her wineglass, and she took life again—the marvellous, entrancing, supernatural life of the fairy Heliotrope. And it was in that character that he loved her so intensely—so completely and in so satisfying a manner that when he left her and walked the muddy pavement of the smoke-mantled town, a soft diffused violet light at dusk made the very chimneys of the factories beautiful in his eyes; while, as shadows deepened, a rainbow radiance issued from each street lamp, forming prismatic-toned circles on the black night; and into each circle, to a wild throb of sweet music, as of fiddles playing on his heart-strings, while the blood in his veins drummed with a bang and his expectant yearning thought clashed against his natural common sense with a clash of cymbals, there leapt the fairy Heliotrope. He knew, while she thus came and went and came again, glowing and fading inside him, outside him, everywhere, that love of this excessive order can only be inspired once in a life-time, once in a million lives, and then only by a fairy.

“I wonder whatever you take me for,” she used to say with a note of sadness in her sweet voice; “what you think I am, when you go on staring and thinking like you do.”

A fairy,” he used to answer.

Well, you are wrong, dear. Pm not. I wish you’d get that out of your silly head—you make me almost wish I was, and half ashamed of myself for not being one.”

Her very human parent used to nudge him, when they met, with her elbow. She used to smile—a terrible, worn-out, wicked old burlesque of Heliotrope’s smile—and then very lightly dig him in the ribs. The vuglar phrase exactly fitted her friendly, playful action; which she would supplement with kindly little phrases—a tolerant proverb, a good-humoured quotation from the folk-lore of our islands. Boys will be boys—Handsome is as handsome does—anything soothing or encouraging, without any particular application or obvious meaning.

He liked her naturally. He recognised that she was unconventional, of a different world to that of his own mamma; but he found no fault with her unconventionality. He liked the frank bonhomie of her words and gestures, and thought that she was, in her own original way, quite grande dame. In imagination he placed her, during a visit, on a particular sofa in the music gallery at home, on the occasion of a big dinner party, and was proud of her as a guest. But when, in this vivid mental picture, she began to nudge the fat wife of the Lord Lieutenant with one elbow and her hostess with the other, both these great ladies rose from the sofa with a constrained air and went across to the piano, and she was left nodding and smiling alone.

People who live all their lives in the country are so narrow-minded and prejudiced—he thought. Even the best of them!

She was not, however, altogether contented with him. “I am not unreasonable,” she used to say, in confidential moments to other mothers and chaperons —to the faded aunt of the bouncing principal boy, to the dame de compagnie of the pretty princess. “But I am her mother. I have never swallowed chaff for grain, nor put up with nonsense, and I ain’t going to begin now. I won’t have her trifled with —would you, in my place? . . . What I say is—Let him say plainly what he can do and what he can't do. Let him make some definite proposition.”

At night she would angrily ask her weary pale-faced fairy if he had formulated his proposition; and poor tired Heliotrope would compress her lips and shake her head in a sign of negation.

" Well, you may give him my complimins, and say, straight from me, that I don’t intend to be fobbed off with choc’let creams and bookays much longer.”

Poor fairy! She loved chocolates and flowers so much, and disliked to see anyone crush even the most modest of nosegays and trample it under foot in anger.

Fairies are quite above ordinary rules of conduct and must not be criticised by mere mortals, or condemned if, in their fairy wisdom, they tell occasional fibs. It was certainly not true that he made no proposition. He made it again and again, in the most definite and least ambiguous form; but her answer was always the same.

“No, and No, and No. Not this year, nor next year, nor sometime, nor ever. Thanks all the same. I like you for asking me. I like you, my silent, thinking, dicky-bird. I like you more and more, and it is because I like you that I know it isn’t to be thought of. . . . Now tell me about that park of yours—and the deer and the river and the old bridges. And how long is it that you say you can ride a-cock-horse before you are off your own land?”

If her mamma had heard him as in imagination he beat the bounds of the family property, with the proud candour of youth making the best rather than the worst of it all, and then had heard him most definitely pleading that her child would come and reign as Fairy Queen over those broad domains, she would certainly have nudged him off his chair in her maternal gratification. .

Heliotrope was shivering now in the warm restaurant as well as in the cold cellar.

“I don’t know what you have done to me,” she said reproachfully. “It’s all since I knew you. You’ve been giving me too many sweets. I’m not accustomed to them, and they’ve upset me. I never felt like this before. I could hardly get through this afternoon,” and she shivered again.

“Peel my hand,” she said. It was cold as ice. “Now put your hand on my forehead.” It was hot as fire. “And I don’t seem to taste my food,” she said, pushing her plate away. “ Let’s sit by the fire and talk.” In this no man’s hour of meal-time, between ordinary people’s tea and dinner, they had the room to themselves.

“Don’t look so sad-like,” said Heliotrope, stretching her hand towards the fire, while the flicker of the flame came and went on her pale face. “It isn’t your fault, my dear, that I feel so bad. . See, it’s that cellar. I do honestly believe it’s haunted, and that the ghost has had a clutch at me: held me round the throat without my noticing it.”

He put more coals on the fire. There was frost in the outer air, and the flames sprang upward with violet arms and crimson bodies, throwing her proper colour, as the heralds would say, upon the white face of Heliotrope. “I’ve had a hard life of it, Dicky,” she said. “I’ve been through a good deal in my time . and yet, after all, come to think of it, I am not old. Not so much older than you, am I? Only twenty-three, all said and done. Don’t be sad-like. Why am I looking backward instead of forward? How odd you do put things. Well, because the strips went on the bills to-day, Last night,’ you know. All over a-Saturday week.

“ Good-bye, indulgent friends, and may, I hope,

You won’t forget the fairy Heliotrope.’”

These were her final interjectional lines, just before the gorgeous, glittering transformation scene.

“There, there,” she said, rising. “Care killed a cat. Help me on with my jacket.”

She was still shivering while he wrapped the brown dogskin about her slender shoulders, but she laughed her tinkling silver laugh now. Then, taking the lapels of his coat in her hands, she gently pulled him round as they stood upon the hearth until the violet-coloured flame lit up his face, and hers—for a change—was in shadow.

“Once more, you silly, silly dicky-bird,” she said, laughing even while she spoke, “what do you really and truly think I am?”

“A fairy,” he answered.

“I’m not,” and the laugh changed to a sob, and for a moment she dropped her forehead on his breast “I’m not, but I do so wish I was.” . .

“Come,” she said, laughing again, “I shall be late.”

He knew now, pacing the frosty pavement beneath the windows of the darkened room where Heliotrope lay fading, all about the ghost of the Grand Theatre. He understood, at last, the secret of those dimly lit vaults. He had correctly supposed that the mysterious basement was a fitter, more convincing setting for the powers of evil than that painted scene above. The horrible cellar, as many an old mime knew, was in truth the dread haunt and home of the Demon Typhoid.

Her lodgings were over a baker’s shop, and in these days the baker abandoned the bakehouse and left counter and cart to take care of themselves, finding more profit in running his messages, carrying bulletins and collecting goods from his purveyors than could be fished from the channels of regular trade. He was not sleeping, nor eating, nor thinking; only fighting, without thought, as one in a dream, fighting day and night with the demon.

The electric sparks flashed southwards down the frosty, glistening copper threads; his messengers flew hither and thither beneath the dark smoke clouds which hung all day above the town. A train of straw waggons came grating and groaning over the frostbitten stones. He made a silence in a place of noise. Even the city police stepped delicately on their midnight beat when they came upon him pacing to and fro in the cold moonlight beneath the windows, or laid finger on lip when they found him whispering in doorways with his sombre-cloaked ministers, the hospital nurses. There are moments when more may be reaped for a sympathetic look than you will ever harvest from stopping a runaway cab, thought the cadgers and loafers and the permanently unemployed. Rich men must have their fancy, thought the people at the bank, at the post-office, and the railway station. “He has passed completely out of my control,’ wrote the tutor on a reply-paid form.

Greybeards and Snowypolls came from London and went back to London, and others came in their place.

Then, as what they had termed the crisis drew near, the electric sparks flew thick and fast down the ice-fringed wires; and out from beneath the black arch of the big glass roof would come creeping in the dead middle of the night, drowsy, unduly disturbed engines, with only a saloon and a guard’s van to check their nocturnal, specially arranged race up the sleeping map. “Speed, speed, speed,” had come the insistent voice out of the far-away smoky darkness, and Sir George Whitehair and Sir John Greybeard, beneath their rugs on the two sofas of the flying coach, grumbled a little ere they dozed, but agreed that abnormally wealthy lads must be humoured in their whims, even by aged baronets torn from their beds in the small cold hours of a winter’s night.

It was an uphill, hopeless, foredoomed battle; and it was all over a-Saturday week.”

Those ten years for which he once sighed had come and gone, and in their train another ten Smoothly, easily, slipping faster year by year, the second decade trod on the heels of the first and the shadow of the swiftly following years lay forward on the track of Time, keeping the sunlight from Time's footsteps.

He had been a great traveller and explorer and had been widely known as a hardy hunter of strange beasts, a climber of inaccessible peaks, a pioneer and wanderer in unknown countries on the wrong side of the equator where white men had never passed before. Then he had attained a certain reputation at home in the world of politics. With a safe seat for a northern constituency, he had been able to interest himself in independent domestic legislation without thought of party measures or party obligations. He was an authority on mining, dockyards, railway management, ship canals, and submarine tunnelling, while his thoughtful treatises on “Factory Control, an Inside View,” and “Our Workshops from behind the Scenes,” had become text-books among all serious students of modern labour problems. He was a thoughtful, silent man, widely known and widely respected. Only in his proper place—the highest society of the land, in which by reason of his birth and fortune he should have shone—he was hardly known at all, because no one ever found him there.

He had married, twelve months ago, wisely and well, the lady upon whom the choice of his dead mother had long since fallen. Now he was a father.

As he sat before a pile of papers at the big library table in his London house, while the buzz of feminine voices turned to a shrill excited chorus in discussion of the little girl’s names, the little girl's christening robes, the little girl’s sponsors, etc., etc., he was looking down at a faded portrait which lay in a small drawer on his right hand. It was an old, faded photograph. Indeed, it had begun to fade twenty years ago, when the light died out of the living face and had been fading ever since.

“Why not Alexandra to begin with?” They were the voice of mamma and mamma’s nearest relatives. “And Victoria, out of respect for the old regime. Edith, she must be, of course, after you. And Sarah, after your aunt. But don’t you think you ought to call her Augusta as well. I do honestly think the Duchess would be flattered and gratified.”

“Richard,” said his wife, presently, laying a hand on his shoulder, “Don’t you take any interest?”—with gentle reproach. “We have come to this room especially to consult you. Don’t you mind what your daughter is called?”

“Yes, yes,” he said, looking up. “I have thought of all that. She shall be called Heliotrope.”

“Oh, I don’t like that. It’s the name of a flower.” “It is the name of a fairy.”»

“But what else, besides—if we really fix on that?”

Nothing else/'

The voices rose higher and higher. “Oh, not to be dreamed of. Absurd, ridiculous. Your aunt would be furious. The Duchess will be huffed. Besides, that's the sort of name the people in Brixton give their girls—those fantastic names, are quite out of fashion. It isn’t a name at all. It would scandalise the Bishop, and honestly, I doubt if he would accept it.”

But when they came to him and surrounded him in a moving circle of loud protest, he seemed hardly to hear them. He had taken up his pen and was making an extract from a blue book.

Yes, yes,” he said, looking up at last, looking through and over them, and speaking as though in answer to his own thought rather than to their agitated questions—Heliotrope.”

Her family were annoyed, her friends protested, the Bishop seemed put out, if not scandalised. It was a very grand christening.

Name this child,” said the Bishop.

“Heliotrope,” said the father, firmly.

Again,” said his lordship in a stern whisper, with puckered brows, as though incredulous and rather angry.

Heliotrope,” he repeated. But this time he spoke in a whisper. He was looking over and through the group of figures gathered round the font; the pupils of his eyes had contracted until they were only dark points no bigger than the head of a pin; and he seemed to be looking through the wall of the church.

Then, as the Bishop dipped his hand in the water and began to speak, there really was a cause for scandal. Members of her family raised their hands in horror, guests in the nearer pews tittered faintly, some uninvited attendants in the gallery broke into a strident laugh. In strong, ringing tones, drowning the voice of the Bishop, the father recited these monstrously unorthodox words:—

“In the sunlight, with no shadow,
Please to guide her baby tread;
While our fairy wings make music,
Flying o’er her baby head.
Smooth her path, and free from worry,
Free from flurry, free from hiss,
For we fairies are her guardians,
And have made her one of us.”

THE TAME CAT

People designated him, slangily, a tame cat. And really, if you saw him licking the butter off a muffin at a tea-party, squeezed in to the table between two richly clad dowagers, he truly looked not unlike a sleek, comfortable pussie. He was rich, and well connected, as the snob’s pet phrase runs, and he was always handsomely dressed. He parted his smooth brown hair down the middle, and it curled quite naturally into two small peaks or points above his ears; his eyes were greyish, or greenish, in colour; and his moustache opened out towards the ends so that single hairs showed against the light, and, it must be confessed, reminded one of a well brushed tabby’s whiskers. He was intensely popular—with the ladies.

“I don’t know what we should do without Tommy,” said the ladies, especially those who were fond of giving tea-parties. “He is so truly kind and obliging,” one matron would say. “ Invaluable!” another would cry. “So delightfully different from the ordinary brusque, and inherently brutal young man of the present day!” (The matrons spoke of Tommy as a young man, to show their love, although he was thirty-five.) “He is what I call thoroughly nice” a third would declare. “So sympathetic, so staunch and loyal, and, in a word, so safe.” This was a dame with grown-up daughters; and all the careful, fullblown mammas shook their still graceful heads in approval, indicating the general thought—If you want a thing put in a nutshell I have always said dear Lady Tabitha is the one to do it. “And ah! Here is Tommy himself; we knew you would not play truant. Vera, darling, the bell—a fresh pot for Tommy!” “Looking for a seat? Come and sit by me, Tommy.” “Or me.” “Or between us.” Bright young eyes glowed, the cruel lines of time seemed to be smoothed out, when the tame cat joined the delighted feminine circle. He had a word, a smile for each; sidling round, gliding between chair and chair, gently pressing soft little hands, bowing over and pretending to kiss the bony knuckles of very great ladies, until he subsided purring into his snug corner with his saucer before him.

“Now tell us, Tommy. Freezin' still? Did you get your feet wet? Hope the horrid snow hasn't hurt your fur? You wore your lovely big coat, of course. He is still very delicate and positively reckless—about himself.”

“It is uncommonly cold,” Tommy would reply. You will understand that he did not fascinate them by his conversation, but by his tameness.

“I have the greatest contempt for that fellow,” said Captain F. Catus of the 9th Dragoon Guards.

But this was probably pure jealousy. The great blundering dragoon had sent a three-tier cake table head over heels in attempting to get to the drawingroom door before Tommy, to open it for a smart young married woman, and was nettled by his calamitous failure. You could not get before Tommy in opening doors, buttoning people’s gloves, helping them to put on their cloaks or jackets, or in any other of the little matters which he had made his own province. Supposing the impossible, and you had succeeded, you would have been promptly cashiered. “So many thanks, but, if you don't mind, Tommy dear, please.” When the big sleeves were worn it was a positive pleasure to observe Tommy stowing away the balloon shoulders in the outer coat. He never wasat fault with the dagger pins or streamers of hats; and, if you couldn’t do it yourself, he could even twist your veil neat and taut under your lovely white chin, never, never, never once making the tip of your nose show white and horrid even for a moment from too strong a drag of the gauze. “Thank you, Tommy,” Beauty would lisp with a grateful flash and a satisfied titter. “You ought to have been a lady’s-maid.”

“Don’t mention it,” Tommy would reply, “always pleased to help a pal in trouble,” or something equally tame and trite; never “I wish I was,” or “Take my name and address in case you ever want one,” or any other foolish attempt to be spirituel, as is so prevalent with the pert young men of the present day, too frequently resulting in a tone and manner far from what the matrons call nice, and often very nearly objectionable. But Tommy would smile and look amiable, and the fair sex never appeared to miss or desire the bons mots and witty repartees for which they had made what is termed an opening. Indeed they failed to catch the point of other people’s good things by being so completely absorbed in their favourite.

“I have a total contempt for that fellow,” said Colonel Ounce, of the War Office. But this was pique, probably, from having coruscated without attracting attention.

The girls and the young married women were almost as fond of the tame cat as were the matrons. They had—so many of them—grown up with Tommy. Playing with him when they were mischievous little imps, pulling his hair, but never making him angry, always finding him kind and soft and gentle, they now treated him as an old and valued pet. The beautiful young debutantes told him of their love affairs; the handsome young wives confided their house-keeping worries. (The only worries they could have, for, being married, their love affairs were naturally over and done with); and he often offered shrewd and friendly advice. “He is so thoroughly nice,” thought the dowagers, that they observed that the belle of the county ball had fallen asleep coming home in the omnibus, with her head nestling on Tommy’s shoulder, or heard of that hysterical, fly-away creature,

Mrs -, falling into his arms in hysterics after the terrible scene with her husband, without emotion or surprise. “A heart of gold,” said Lady Carabas. “One knows he may be trusted not to take advantage. That is so very essential.”

“Oh, I daresay he is harmless,” said Sir Charles Civet, with a grunt of disapproval. “But I never meet the fellow without experiencing a sensation of utter contempt.” No doubt he thought he had a better shoulder to make a pillow, and grunted from envy.

“And I will tell you to what I attribute his thorough niceness,” continued the Marchioness, impressively. “To the early training of his mother, poor dear Lady Angora-one of the sweetest souls I ever knew. Most sickly from birth, she reared him by hand—only weighed thirty pounds at the age of five, and henceforward needing unremitting care, all thought of the army or diplomacy or anything else out of the question, she kept him absolutely under her control until she passed away. And he acts on her wise precepts —taking care for others, and for himself. Living abstemiously, but well—fruit and fish, and that sort of thing—almost a vegetarian—keeping early hours when possible, rarely if ever out late at night. Why, in large country house parties, he and I will often exchange a sly little smile about I0.30 and slip off unobserved to get our beauty sleep together before the others, . . what are you laughing at? Where’s the fun? Let me tell you, my beau sabreur, that early hours wouldn’t do you any harm, and that bridge and baccarat till morning haven’t improved your looks.”

When any slight distemper befell Tommy, you may imagine the distress which his fair friends suffered; and the quantity of cards and notes of inquiry, jellies, hothouse grapes, and other delicacies which poured into his rooms behind King Street, St James’s. It is a fact that the tender-hearted old Duchess de la Chati&re (English-born), became so anxious on one of these occasions, that she carried her own doctor in her own carriage, and, out of it, up the stairs, into the bedroom, to the very bedside. “I am an old woman,” madame gasped, rather out of breath, and sinking into an arm-chair, “Have no mauvaise honte, my dear Tommy, but tell this good man exactly how you feel.”

The white-haired doctor glanced at the debris of velvety grapes on the Dresden platter, the half-nibbled biscuits, the nearly finished milk, and made the patient sit up in his beautiful silken pyjama jacket; and tactfully, skilfully elicited the life history of this highly interesting case. “Roll back your sleeve,” said the doctor, running his hand along the arm. “What are you doing?” cried the Duchess. “'Peelin’ the pulse under the biceps?” “No,” said the doctor, “only admiring our friend’s muscles.

Open the jacket—wide.” “Is it the chest you fear is affected?” cried Madame. “Lungs gone, or what?” “No,” said the doctor, “they are there all right, though remarkably well covered, and so is the collar-bone, though I can’t see it; and the ribs, too. Oh, he is all there. Don’t be frightened.”

“Originally defective in vitality—poorly charged with the current of life, shall we say?” The doctor continued addressing Tommy, “You have been storing energy in all these quiescent years you describe. The treatment has succeeded in a most remarkable degree. You are now—speaking figuratively—a perfectly sound machine, vibrating and pulsing with a current of quite abnormal force. Medically speaking, you surprise me. Speaking physiologically —and I will add psychologically—you are only on the threshold of maturity. Speaking literally, you are thirty-five (it seems incredible!); but speaking comparatively, proportionately—you follow me ?—you are now only nineteen years of age. Good morning. I can teach you nothing. I might almost say, you have given me a lesson.” .

“We must wear masks and dominoes, and have a box to retire to, of course,” said the tame cat. “I would not be seen at it for a thousand pounds.” A charming countess, wanting materials for her next new novel, was getting up a party for the noisy, vulgar, fancy - dress ball, and insisted in taking Tommy as her particular chaperon. He had never experienced rowdy fun of that description, and hated the notion; but he could not refuse any little act of kindness to a lady, so he had to go.

It really was vulgar fun, and very far from nice. All sorts of grotesque figures surrounded them at once. A bold, brazen-voiced soubrette, attired in the hideous costume of a low street-vendor, pulled at his domino and threatened to unmask him. “Will you buy, will you buy? ” and the soubrette gave off some horrible street cry, which she had learned for the occasion. “ Meat, meat, meat! Puss, puss, puss! Will you buy? will you buy? will you buy?” In the confusion the Countess almost immediately lost touch with her chaperon, and never saw him again that night. .

When Tom got home to his rooms and looked in the glass, he hardly recognised himself. His moustache was rough and sticking up, the peaks of hair above his ears were rumpled; he had mislaid his white cravat; and his eyes looked bloodshot and fierce. Next morning the post brought him a note from a dowager with the day’s instructions. He was to chaperon her married daughter down to Brighton, to interview a governess. “There are reasons,” said the note. “I rely on you.” “Confound it,” said Tom. Now that was a thing which Master Tom had never said before when the call of duty sounded. But he knew the young lady really wanted looking after on a journey, being extremely attractive and greatly admired, so he began to dress at once.

It was odd but he almost emptied the cosmetic tube and then could not keep his moustaches down. They would stick up. And so would those two peaks of hair over his ears. He brushed and brushed, harder, harder, and, all at once, he had the illusion of electric sparks beginning to fly—out of his hair, or, more impossible still, out of the tips of his ears. His valet saw no sparks, but brought a collar which Tom could only get round his neck with the utmost difficulty; and yet when they looked, it was sixteen and a half, Tom’s size all right.

He was extraordinarily thirsty and hungry, and he hurried through his breakfast—lapping down cup after cup of strong tea, devouring a big bloater from head to tail, and crunching the slender bones in his strong white teeth. Then he dashed off in a cab to Victoria. The young lady was on the platform talking to a friend who was ordered to South Africa. “Run and buy the Lady’s Pic,” she said to Tom, “and read it in the carriage,” and she pointed imperiously but with a sad smile. Tom sprang along the platform with long strides, pounced on a paper, and came springing back. “I have half a mind to pitch him under the train,” he was thinking wrath-fully, while utterly astounded by the queer sensations with which he felt himself vibrating. She ignored her chaperon; talked to her friend, squeezing his hand through the window when the guard compelled her to enter the compartment; and stood fluttering out her lace handkerchief till the end of the platform vanished. Then she turned. They were in the half light, under those roofs and bridges, and his eyes shone and glittered; the stud of his collar had burst from the hole; in the semi-darkness he looked strange and different—for all the world like a wild, fierce, cruel, wicked cat and not a tame one at all.

“Now!” said Tom.

“Not at home. No explanations. You understand,” said all the dowagers, instructing all their butlers. And to each other: “It is too dreadful, I never have been so deceived. . . You have heard of this latest fearful esclandre at the Carabas’s. He broke up the week-end party by his behaviour. Lord Warrener says he will shoot him. The Lopears have taken their girl to Sandicombe to be out of his way. Dolly Bunnyfleld has been sent to Schevingenem.” And, with up-turned eyes, the Mayfair and Belgravian dowagers went to bed; and trembled therein when they heard the melancholy miaulings of nocturnal patterers on the tiles. Por they realized, as only a dowager can, the terror of the case; and, in their quaking hearts, knew that they were bitterly to blame. Por years they had been training him, pumping into him esoteric feminine knowledge and subtle lore and secret arts and now, naturally—beginning to take advantage—he was deadly and fatal. “ Oh, if Warrener does shoot, may he hold straight!” This was the dowagers’ pious prayer, estimating the extent of the disaster as only dowagers can.

“I have the greatest dread of that fellow,” said Colonel Lynx who had two charming grown-up daughters. “Yes, yes—I thought so too. But he’s not. He’s dam-dangerous. I tell you he pounced on little Adelaide Burrow and the whole family could not save her. You don’t know where he may pounce next.”

Well, the task of the butlers was easy. He never called in these days; but he pounced—now here, now there. With stealthy approach and unexpected spring, he pounced and pounced and pounced. Throughout the season the dowagers quake.d, until, just before Goodwood, he pounced upon the beautiful, fabulously wealthy widow—at the very moment when Captain P. Catus thought he was going to lead her to the altar—and married her before the nearest registrar, so that, during Cowes week when the news had leaked out, the dowagers slept sound ashore and afloat.

And now comes the queer part of the tale—this October rumour, this whisper from Switzerland that somebody saw him at the big hotel by the wood-fringed lake, in the hall at night, playing patience with two delighted old ladies, while she sat yawning over a novel. Is he tame again ?

“DO LOOK AT ME”

“Oh, do look at me!”

That is what he used to say when he was quite a little fellow. His sisters and his cousins would perhaps be sliding on the ice in the park. “How well Master Tom do slide, to be sure!” the rival nurses would be saying. “And Master Dick tool Lor’ and Miss Mabel I Don’t she do it graceful-like, so free?” “No more than Miss Edith as I can make out!”

Then Master Jack would almost scream in order to attract attention. “But do look at me. Oh, please do look at me.” And very likely, when they did give him a tardy glance, they were too late, and he had just sat down, or was just getting up and rubbing himself.

As time passed, he ceased to say it, but he thought it more than ever—whispering the words to himself instead of blurting them out loud. This was a pity: because nurses and playmates and tutors and candid friends of course could not answer a silent thought and he lost all those admonitions—“Pride will have a fall—” and that sort of thing—which might have served to check a very foolish habit of mind.

It was not that Jack was in truth a conceited boy, lad, or full-grown young man. In his advance from the short petticoat and bare legs of the nursery to the handsome kilt and check stockings of his Highland regiment, he had lost any childish illusions that he was singularly gifted by nature and able to do things better than the rest of the world. Not a bit. But, when by great good fortune he happened to be doing something with exceptional brilliancy, he did honestly desire that the gratifying fact might be widely observed.

Growing as he grew, the foolish habit waxed stronger and stronger; until the pleasant things of life were only pleasant to him if he could see them reflected in the mirror of other people’s minds. It became nothing to him to be alone with the flying hounds, with a fashionable beauty, a cabinet minister; while, if there were spectators, Do-look-at-me was his one, absorbing, tormenting thought. And nobody, as it seemed, ever would look. Indeed, the world seemed on such occasions to have been struck blind, deaf, and dumb, or himself invisible. He was left out of lists; his name was omitted in the newspapers among those present, or swallowed in the obliterating phrase, “and many others”; even at the hatter’s, where the hat-boxes were neatly ranged on shelves all round the shop with the style or title of the customer painted in large black letters on each, his hat-box was kept hidden away under the counter or in the cellar, where nobody could see it.

He was on the committee of his club; but, by a stupid mistake of the printer, the old committee instead of the new committee had been inserted in the book of members, so that the rank and file of the club probably did not know that he was one of their rulers. At committee meetings the secretary, before reading the minutes, would hurriedly recite: “Present at last meeting, Sir John Slack, Colonel Rules, General Ballott, Lord Pillingall, etc. etc.” One moment,” he would say, you have not got me down. I was also present.” Tut, tut,” the secretary would reply. Stupid of me! Of course you were.” Then having rattled through the minutes, “And now let me see who is here to-day,” and blinking behind his glasses and pointing with his pencil, would make a small circle in the air, corresponding with the larger circle at the big table. “Excuse me,” Mr Jack would be compelled to interpolate, “you have overlooked me again. You have jumped me with your pencil. Something seemed to distract your attention when you came to me, and you made a leap from Mr Snooker to Mr Bridge, between whom, if you will be good enough to look, you will see that I am sitting.”

“You here? you quite startled me,” ladies used to say at dinner parties—late in the evening. “You don't tell me that you dined here? I never saw you downstairs. You must have been exactly opposite on the other side of that huge epergne.” People could not, or would not, see him. He was familiar with, and thoroughly disliked, all those stereotyped turns of speech: Where do you spring from? Where have you been hiding? etc. He never hid. It was they who would not seek. He hated going to make his bow to his sovereign, because he was so completely weary of those little official corrections in the public press: “To the list of those attending the Lev6e should be added the name of Lieut. John- of the 30th Highland Infantry.'

It was not illusion. They looked another way.

He was sure of it. Some mischievous demon followed him about, and drew away the eyes of his friends and of the public to look at anything—a dog with a bangle—a girl with a preposterous hat—an old dame with a wart on her nose—anything trivial and commonplace—no matter how prominent and interesting a figure he at the moment might be cutting. He had no doubt that a demon was working against him. After the military races at Aldershot, he felt certain.

“Why, Jock, laddie 1" cried a brother officer from north of Tweed, Ha' ye droppit fra the cloods? Whaur, oh whaur, ha ye bin while a’ the bonnie horses were rinnin'? " (or words to that effect, with just sufficient accent to indicate the breezy land of his birth).

Well," said Mr Jock,I rode the. winner in the last race. My own horse—haven’t you a card? "

Prodeegious!" cried the gallant Scot, referring to his card in amazement,I must ha’ read without kenning. And ’tis e'en spellit correctly. But ah, now I mind me, when the bonnie beasts were starting, I was just speering after the Sappers’ balloon as it came sailing fra the north camp—like a braw bubble of soap in the bonnie blue sky.”

Could anything be more annoying than that?

Well, at last, one night, he was at a ball in a big country house, at which, as is proper but not always possible at balls, there was an undoubted belle. She was a most radiantly beautiful and quite unassuming young lady, who carried off her triumph as easily and lightly as she bore the white round pearls on her round white neck or the large feathered fan in her small gloved hand; and it seemed to Mr Jack that she showed for his society that which the chaperons term “an unduly marked preference.” Mr Jack, of course, did not think it undue; and as he glanced to and fro at the gay company, he did not think that it was half enough marked.

“Do look at me,” he said to himself, as he took the belle into supper. But she found a little table in a remote corner of a sort of cupboard at the back of one of the supper rooms, where, as she said, they would be out of everybody’s way and nobody would be able to see how long they lingered over their dainty meal.

“Do look at me,” he said to himself, as he marched her out from supper, threading his way through the crowded tables. But a paper shade had caught fire and was flaming; somebody was putting it out; and all eyes were intently watching this exciting performance.

“Do look at me,” he said to himself, as, while sauntering through the lofty hall and by the doors of the dancing saloon, the belle showed no particular anxiety to be taken back and handed over to her parents and guardians. But a maladroit dancer had just put his foot through a young lady’s gossamer gown and gone tripping and pirouetting away with it, leaving her in her bodice and petticoats in a sitting posture on the polished floor; and everybody—the young, the old, the middle-aged—had filled the doorways to see the end of this sad contretemps and were turning their slim, broad, and medium - sized backs upon the belle and her cavalier.

“Do look iat me,” he said to himself, as his fair partner consented to ascend the noble old staircase and to wander down the spacious corridor in seach of a comfortable sitting-out place. The corridor was a pleasant promenade, but not useful if you really were tired and wanted to sit down, because the hostess had refrained from putting any seats there, in fear lest it should in any way prove a counter attraction to the band and the waxed floor below. They were all alone in the corridor. Only above them, in an upper bend of the big staircase, his quick eye detected a cluster of maids and a valet or two shyly peeping over the round balustrade and peering down with keenly watchful interest to see all that could be seen from so respectful a distance. Of course he thought the news that his companion was the acknowledged belle of the ball must long ere this have reached them by the backstairs. Well, now they were in luck, and could see her, and also the fortunate fellow who was with her.

She really was the simplest, least conceited and most entrancing belle that a ball ever had. When he put his arm about her slender waist, she really thought that he had stretched forth his hand as a sort of guard-rail, that he meant to protect her, in a mistaken notion that she had lurched and might slip down the grand staircase, and she flashed an amused glance of gratitude; but, when she understood what he did indeed mean to do, she gave forth a horrified fluttering little cry, and quick as lightning beat down his meaning with that fan of hers, giving him the feathers to fight with, so that all he got for his pains —as the saying is—was the disagreeable dream-like sensation that he had tried to catch a beautiful innocent bird which had just flapped its wings in his face and flown away.

“Oh, do not look at me,” he said to himself for the first time in all his life. “Oh, I do hope you were not looking at me,” he said to himself, thinking of those base prying eyes: not daring to look up, but honestly hoping that what he had just heard was a squeak of fiddles below and not a squeak of laughter above.

No words could well be too severe in condemnation of Mr Jack, and indeed the unspoken words which he now addressed to himself were most bitter and scornful. He was shocked and horror-stricken. The episode caused him a violent revulsion of feeling: changed him, sobered him, aged him. In a moment, as it seemed, he had awakened to his folly; and, as though something had snapped in his brain, which for long had caused an obstruction to the brain’s efficient working, or as though a film had been torn from his mental vision, he now saw clearly the enormous idiocy of that old thought of his. He hated and scorned himself now for ever having harboured it. By it, he realised now that he had been lured over the edge of propriety and plunged into the abyss of gross indecorum: that he, an officer of a gallant regiment at an evening party, had behaved as badly as a cheap tripper at a promenade concert on a sea-side pier.

When, in the terrible torment of his self reproaches, there came to him the wicked thought that perhaps other eyes quite as quick and far brighter than his own had detected the presence of lurking witnesses and that, perhaps after all, things might have gone differently at the other end of the corridor, he trampled down the thought as though it had been a serpent.

He really was so upset mentally that his bodily health was, in sympathy, seriously affected; and going out hunting in the pouring rain, he caught a chill which settled on the liver, and, refusing to be dislodged, brought on a sharp attack of jaundice. “Don’t look at me,” he said, seeing his yellow face in the glass. Then he crept back to bed, feeling that he never wanted to get out of it again.

That was his new thought, which, replacing the old one, was, as it were, taking root and growing stronger and stronger every hour.

“Don’t look at me,” he said to himself as, weak and shaky on the legs after his illness, he crawled down St James’s Street in the bright sunlight on his way to make an inquiry at the War Office, and most sincerely wished that there were more clouds in the sky and fewer smartly dressed people on the pavement. “Don’t look at me,” he said at the military tailors, while ordering the new and far from pretty clothes which he required for active service.

“What a shy reserved sort of beggar he is,” said all the other soldiers on the transport. “Do you think he is all right in the upper story?” “Oh yes,” said the ship’s doctor. “It's a touch of morbid depression—simple typical case—A B C to me—I am giving him a tonic and the sea air is giving him one too. We’ll make him hold up his head all right by the time he has to look the enemy in the face.”

But the new thought held its ground, driving its roots deeper and deeper, spreading its branches like a tree; but unlike a tree, not affording a pleasant shade to sit under and almost hide oneself. All eyes now seemed to be perpetually upon him and his one object in life seemed to be to escape their scrutiny.

“Don’t look at me,” he said to himself as, wounded and helpless, he lay behind the rocks while the enemy came hunting over the ground which unluckily they had won from us in his first engagement. “Don’t look at me,” he said to himself, stumbling back under cover of the darkness, at last gaining the safety of the entrenchments round the beleaguered town.

“Don’t look at us,” he said to himself, creeping on hands and knees at the head of the devoted band, as they scaled the wall of the little hill to silence that troublesome gun which the enemy were now daily using with more and more deadly precision.

"Don’t look at me,” he said again, when, having volunteered for a perilous, well-nigh impossible task, he was starting on his desperate ride through the enemy’s lines. " Don’t look now—or now—or now—” he thought, leading his horse in the river bed, scrambling up the bank, and mounting and galloping on again with perhaps the worst of the danger behind him. “ Don’t look now,” he thought,“for the sake of all those to whom the tidings I bear mean life or death and fame or disgrace,” while he won his way on his nearly hopeless errand. “ Don’t look at me,” he said, when his goal was reached—“or at my dangling, shattered arm, and blood-stained, blistering face, but look at this—the despatch which I have brought for you,”

“Don’t look at me,” he said to newspaper correspondents and sympathetic strangers at the Cape, while waiting for the ship to bring him home. “But look at the graves of all the brave fellows up there. I have only given a limb. They have given their lives.”

But people would look, both ashore and afloat, at dinner and on deck. It might almost be supposed that they had never seen a one-armed man before, they looked so intently. Had they all lost their manners? The ladies were as bad as the men; and one of the girls was the worst offender on board. She was always looking. She was the acknowledged belle of the ship; and she was so attractive that, as she lolled in her deck chair and read her novel through the long warm hours, he was often inclined to look at her. But whenever he stole a glance, he had the misfortune to be at once detected and to meet her eyes, when of course he at once looked at something else and she went on with her reading.

“Did not you ride Gadfly in the Ladies’ Cup one year at Aldershot?” she asked, as soon as somebody introduced him to her. “And didn’t I see you with your regiment at Edinburgh in the following'winter? And in London again? At the Browns’ picnic, and once at the Jones’ theatricals, and I sat opposite to you at a dinner party at the Robinsons!”

She seemed to have been always looking at him; and he felt thoroughly ashamed of himself for not remembering. There must have been a veil over his eyes. He certainly could not have used them properly.

She really was as charming, candid, and unaffected a belle as a ship ever had. During the long warm hours, her innocent conversation was as soothing as the gentle motion of the vessel, and yet as bracing as the pure sea-air. She used to put a mark in her book as soon as he came up. With all the ship’s passengers to choose from, she seemed always pleased to talk to the man with one arm.

“See I” she would say, “I told you I would show you your portrait—these are those newspapers I spoke of. Look at this, and this, and this. Now do you believe? Now will you deny that they have made you a popular hero? Really and truly, when I came away on my visit to Papa England was ringing with your name.”

To cover his bashful confusion, he would ask for further information about Papa.

Papa was in command of his own dear regiment, and was coming home directly to hang up his laurels in the pretty furnished house which Mamma had just taken for him in the country. Papa had really done surprisingly well. He had surprised himself and all his friends by his success. He had not perhaps surprised the enemy; but, on the other hand, he had never permitted them to surprise him.

“I don’t mean to say that he has done anything splendid and grand as you have. But he really has done well/'

To cover his confusion he inquired the whereabouts of the furnished house.

Westerbourne. . . . What made you start?”

It is my own village. It is where I am going.”

Oh, how nice,” she cried, letting her book fall. You can look after me to the end of the journey.”

At the small railway station there was a dense crowd. He saw with horror that his native village and all the neighbourhood had turned out in force to meet him. As the train stopped, he was at once aware of flags and banners flying, and a horrible band beginning to play the one tune which he did not desire to hear.

He offered her his remaining arm, and with difficulty forced his way along the platform, through the friendly pressing throng. There was cheering and waving of hats on all sides, and the horrible braying band to add to his confusion. Oh, don’t look at me,” he kept saying, don’t look at me. Please now, do find something better to look at than me.”

But the people said, in effect, Don't talk like that. We will look at you. We can’t help it, because we all feel so fond of you and all feel so proud of you.”

And that is just how I feel too,” she whispered, when at last they had reached the shelter of a carriage, and had escaped with the horses still in the traces; “just exactly how I feel.”

Now this was the sort of sly little hint which a really nice girl may be permitted to give—to a man who has lost his arm. And it is precisely the sort of hint which is quickly taken by a man who has not only lost his arm, but his heart also.

THE TENDER-HEARTED FAMILY

The tender-hearted family and their guest had just sat down to dinner.

“Upon my word/’ said the old bachelor guest, “I congratulate you. So near London; close to the station; and yet, in the midst of these fragrant pine woods, one might be—one might be—in Fairyland. An ideal summer retreat I call it-”

But his hostess was not attending, and he might have called it anything rude or objectionable that came into his head—Hades instead of Fairyland. She was looking round the big table to make quite sure that all the family were in their places, and giving a tender smile to each as she checked them off. Amabel, Grace—and Grace’s lover, already counted as one of the family—Dulce, Felix, Philip; Dada, of course, beaming over the soup tureen, Master Gregory, and last—but oh, far, far from least in her tender thoughts—the little Frank.

“So well furnished too!” said the guest, politely. “Not at all the class of house which is usually let “Eat your soup, my pet,” said the hostess, with a smile of ineffable tenderness, to Frankie.

“Who do you think I met at the club to-day?” said the guest after sf pause, addressing his host. “Of all men in the world, old-”

“Frankie! Why don't you eat your soup?” said the host. “Look, my dear. There’s something wrong with the little fellow. He is uneasy. Philip, you have not been so heartless as to give him a pinch, I hope.”

But ere Philip could indignantly repudiate this suggestion, the little Frank pushed his plate away and burst into a flood of tears.

The family had begun their meal in the midst of a fine family chorus of laughter and chatter—innocent little incomprehensible family jokes and quaint mirth-provoking family allusions flying hither and thither above the soup plates from one happy member of the family to another—but now all were silent, waiting in hushed anxiety to fathom the cause of Frankie's grief.

The poor little lad seemed inconsolable, sobbing as though his heart would break, even now when moved from his seat and pressed to his mother's bosom, and glancing round with troubled, fearful eyes.

“The boy looks as one who is haunted” said the father in an agitated whisper. “I hope none of the servants have ventured to tell him ghost stories!” and he glared at the quite innocent attendants.

“Bilious, maybe,” said the guest sympathetically, but, perhaps not unluckily, nobody heard him.

At last, after infinite patience and endless endearments, the cause of Frankie’s trouble was elicited.

It appeared that this afternoon the little fellow had made a bold, solitary ramble through the grounds and on along the pretty path under the fir trees; and here, at a considerable distance from the house, he had seen a beetle—a big beetle. The beetle was lying on its back in the path, with its feet kicking in the air; and Frank had meant to rescue it from its predicament by carefully turning it over, but something distracted his attention. A squirrel glanced from bough to bough, or a dragon-fly flashed in the sunlight, and he had hurried on, and completely forgotten the poor beetle, which, as he well understood, was as helpless to right itself as an overturned go-cart or an upside down clockwork engine. And now remorse was racking little Frank.

“Go back to your seat, my boy,” said the father gently. “Its sufferings are over by now.”

“Rather fine that,” said the guest cordially. “Upon my word! Sins of omission, sins of omission! They give us all a stab now and then. Master Frank is confronted with the full horror of the irreparable. Good boy. You teach us all a lesson, Master Frank.”

“Yes,” said the father, sadly but proudly. “He has realised the bitter after-taste. The lost chance, the missed opportunity! But the wheel of Time rolls on and we must not look back—we dare not look back. The present brings its new duties. Don’t let us neglect them. ... It was hours ago, wasn’t it, Prank? Yes. Well dismiss it from your mind.” “That is exactly what he cannot do,” said the hostess confidentially. “Poor pet, he is not like ordinary children. Too sensitive! He can visualize it all. He is visualizing it now. He sees the un-happy creature struggling in its despair, he sees the horrible, long-drawn-out agony. Oh, it is dreadful!” “Now you are visualizing it, my dear madam.” Gradually the whole family began to visualize it. “The birds pecking at it,” whispered Amabel. “Oh!”

“Pield-mice attack it, breaking its poor legs with their sharp teeth. Oh, it is horrible!” gasped Dulce.

“The torment of Prometheus!” said Felix, the sturdy school-boy, in a husky voice. “Poor beggar!” “At the mercy of the slimy toads, bringing the bats down to see. Oh! No fish, thanks,” Philip said with a groan.

Bach added a touch of horror to the picture. Appetites faded; the knives and forks had ceased to work.

“And feels,” said Grace’s lover, trying to find something appropriate to the occasion, “and feels as great a pang as when a giant dies.”

“It does not, sir,” roared his future father-in-law. “You wretch to have said that!” cried Grace, turning away from him and moving back her chair. “The very lines I have been struggling to forget.”

“It does not suffer. It has not suffered in the way you imagine,” said the host, loudly at first, and then rather lamely. “And if it didt have you, sir, so little heart that you must needs remind-”

But just then, the roast mutton having come in, he was compelled to go on with the carving.

There was silence while the head of the house cut several slices; but then he began to fume and to mutter, and, all at once, he flung down the carving knife with an exclamation of anger.

“Underdone!” he cried. “Disgracefully underdone. It would bear another twenty minutes in the oven at the very least. Take it away,” he shouted to the servants. “Take it away and cook it properly,” and he rose from his chair. “I will go outside—to fill in the time. Come, Frankie.”

The hostess sprang to her feet.

“You are going to turn over the beetle!”

He did not deny it.

“I will come too-”

“And I, and I, and I,” they all cried together, tumbling their chairs over, and springing round the table.

I can’t wait. I can’t wait,” he cried from the outer hall. “Follow if you like. Lanterns! Bring me a lantern, I say,” and his voice came from the stable yard.

In another minute monstrous black shadows were dancing on the gravel paths, while the flames in two lanterns flickered faintly beneath the evening breeze, and, with grooms and attendants and the whole noisy agitated family at their heels, the little Prank and his father were hurrying towards the dark depths of the rustling fir trees.

Then the mystery of the summer night wrapped them round and hid them in its folds; the dark cave of the fir wood swallowed them, voices and all; and only the wind murmured, and, far or near, nothing else seemed to move, except the railway trains rushing by in the deep cutting—rushing by on their destined road to their pre-ordained goal—not to be stopped by signal, either to pick up or to set down; only to be caught at the proper stations at the proper scheduled time; missed, if you missed them, irretrievably.

They came back quarrelling, wrangling. One of the grooms had received notice to look out for another situation; two of the young ladies were under sentence of bed; Grace’s face was hard and white, her lover’s flushed and working; there was no longer an engaged couple in the party; and “ There,” said the father, in the porch, to the still sobbing boy,

" there is what you have been asking for all the evening.”

“Well?” said the guest, gruffly. He had a cigar in his mouth, and he was pulling on his light summer overcoat. “Well, how’s the beetle?”

“Prank inadvertently trod on it,’ said the father, curtly. “You aren’t going?”

“It was not in the same place,” said Dulce, with shrill distress.

“We think the wind must have blown it over. It was certainly walking away when-”

“I told you, miss, to go to bed without saying one other word.”

“No, thank you, I must be off,” said the guest very gruffly. “While you were making the beetle comfortable, you forgot me. You didn’t make me comfortable.”

But he came back to the hall door: he was a good-tempered old fellow.

“I must really be off. Appointment I’d forgotten. But look here, don’t go and get thinking about me and then all come up to London to-morrow morning to apologise and make me comfortable. Good-night.”

BRUNO, JONAS AND THE CRITICS

Bruno and Jonas were two young authors. They were sitting in their garret of a summer’s evening, looking down upon the tops of the plane trees, the common people strolling on the pavement, the well-to-do folk rolling by in their cabs and broughams—looking down upon everything and everybody that was not like themselves an author. Only with the young plane trees did they feel any strong sympathy. They were reaching their arms skywards, straining after higher things than the traffic of the street, the business of the shops, keeping their heads as Car above the ground as they possibly could. They too could see without envy young lords dash by in a hurry for their fashionable dinner parties, or watch without desire young apprentices and shop girls look in each other’s eyes and find the love-torch slowly kindling. They could afford to nod their heads in lofty disdain and whisper: “My friends, when you and your loves and your dinners have passed away, we shall be greater and higher than ever.’

You will understand that Bruno and Jonas sincerely believed that there is nothing so fine and so grand, either on this side of the grave or on the other, as an author in the fulness of his fame. They felt that they were born magicians, with pens for their wands. When they waved their wands—and they waved them most assiduously, hour after hour, feu into the night, with aching heads and empty stomachs till magicians cramp brought them up short at a full stop—they seemed to be able to lift the roofs off the houses; roll up the front wall of the hovel and the palace, as though it had been a bedroom blind pulled down in modesty for decency’s sake; peer into locked rooms, through windows, into maidens thoughts and stern men’s hearts. The odd and interesting things which the two excited young magicians saw inside the hearts and the houses, etc., they wished to tell the world at large; but, as yet, the public did not wish to hear. They honestly thought they possessed the wonderful power of making the sun shine clearer, the clouds hang less gloomily; that they could soften the dark frown of sorrow and give an added radiance to the bright smile of Hope. But the very people for whom they wished to practise this divine art of theirs, instead of crowning them with laurels, appeared to be carelessly running the risk of letting them starve for want of bread.

“I begin to wish that I had already arrived,” Bruno was saying. He was the impatient one of the two.

“So do I, sometimes,” said Jonas, “yet there must be sadness in looking backward instead of forward.”

Then they both went to bed.

“Jonas,” said Bruno, after a time, from his pallet in the darkness, “do you think going without your dinner makes one light-headed?”

“I am sure of it,” said Jonas.

“I have been looking at the stars for ever so long, and they seem coming nearer and nearer and nearer.” “Perhaps you are getting nearer to them, old fellow,” said Jonas.

“That was my thought, but I did not like to say it,” said Bruno—then after a pause:

“Jonas, when you are writing, are you conscious of any effort, or does it all slip from your pen ready made?”

“All ready-made,” said Jonas. “Like clothes or boots. I sometimes think it would be better if it were made to order—from a particular pattern.”

“No,” said Bruno, “they are fairy garments—to fit all the world; in the fashion of all time. . . . But, Jonas, when you are writing, do you ever think with regret that there is so much inside you that you will never have time to get it all out? Do you ever find your pen suddenly stopped by the thought of the shortness of life.”

“It is soon set going again by the thought of the length of immortality.”

“Ah,” said Bruno, “that’s a good thought. ... I could believe that one star was a lamp on the roof opposite.” .

“Jonas.”

“Yes”

“When I am writing I feel that I am merely transcribing. It is all written here—I am touching my forehead—was all written ages ago, when the stars were younger and brighter—but not nearer, perhaps —and stored away here—behind my forehead, you know. Yes, it is written, I could not alter it if I wanted to.” . . .

“Stored in the casket of our brain as in a strong box?” said Jonas, “I feel like that too-”

“We can turn it over, ransacking the brain—picking and choosing what we will take out; but we cannot alter it. . . . Is it not so, Jonas?”

But to the inquiry, the only reply of Jonas was a snore.

Now in the very middle of that brief summer night, there came with a loud flump on the attic floor—a fairy.

She herself could have slid softly down a ray of starlight and landed on the bare boards as silently as a moonbeam, but the noise which woke the two starving authors was caused by the fairy’s heavy, unwieldy luggage. She had brought two massive, cumbrous boxes, and it really was a wonder how she had contrived to carry them without assistance. “From the fairies,” she cried cheerfully, “a box for each. Choose for yourselves.”

Bruno and Jonas were on the floor beside the strange trunks, like little children examining their presents; the fairy was standing over them with the indulgent smile of a. kind grown-up. It was impossible not to observe that the smile of the fairy lingered on Bruno rather than on Jonas. “Happy babies,” she murmured indulgently. “Now choose. But which is to have first choice?”

“Bruno shall,” said Jonas.

“Are you sure you don't mind?” said Bruno.

“Lucky Bruno!” said the fairy, more indulgently than ever.

Then Bruno chose his box. In outward appearance they were identical. But on one, a glittering flounce of the fairy’s fanciful robe lay, trailing over the lid, and that was the one which Bruno chose.

“O happy Bruno,” cried the fairy, her smile rippling into a merry laugh. “The prize is yours. You have always been the favourite of the fairies and I believe some of them have slipped on their invisible coats and followed me to whisper in your ear. Open the boxes.”

Bach strong casket was crammed full with printer’s copy—neatly folded, docketed, endorsed packets of typewritten copy.

“See, they are all in order. Carefully numbered in their due sequence. You have but to take them out. . . But, oh Bruno, most fortunate of mortals, you have there such a box as the fairies have not sent out for centuries!

“As to you, my poor unselfish Jonas, your box contains poor stuff, I fear, compared with his. It is but one of our average assortments, but we endeavour to avoid despatching anything really bad. There is no padding or bumping out. It is all solid and I don’t doubt there is a good thing or two before you get to the bottom of it.” Then the fairy vanished.

Mr Bruno had published his first book. It was a novel, a light satirical thing, all fire and fancy, but yet with a glow of truth in the live heart of it, and it was a roaring success. In the very first review the critic welcomed Bruno as something quite out of.the common run of novelists, aptly saying that he himself felt like some watcher of the skies at last rewarded for his watching. The second reviewer said he greeted Bruno as a new planet swimming into his ken. The third critic said Bruno and his book had produced sensations in his breast similar to those which, on widely different occasions, had been experienced by stout Cortez and slender Keats. But by this time the fortunate author was becoming accustomed to his success and growing tired of the quotation.

Indeed the little work deserved praise and was good enough to tickle the palate even of a professional book-taster. To readers it really seemed to roll up the front walls of what are snobbishly termed the best houses, and to introduce them to the best society. And it never permitted them to lose their self-respect, but rather fostered it; patting them on their backs and craving a little pity as well as admiration, pointing out that aching brows may be found under a diamond tiara, and that a bitter sediment may lie at the bottom of a champagne cup, reminding them that a sick heart in Belgravia is as leaden a burden as a sick heart at Brixton.

It is not of course to be supposed that, having thus flung wide the portals of Mayfair and invited half the suburbs to step inside and make themselves at home, the doors were shut in his own face. On the contrary, his company was eagerly sought and there was a flattering smile and a well-intentioned compliment awaiting the successful young author at the brilliant fetes of some of the . highest in the land.

“Ah, Mr Bruno," said a beautiful duchess on a marble staircase, “if you had come two minutes earlier, you should have taken me down to supper."

Mr Bruno blushed for pleasure.

“I have been reading your book. I could not put it down—positively couldn’t—not till I had finished that first chapter." Her grace was now talking over her shoulder. “I’m going on with it at the very first opportunity. I am on page nine—half way down page nine. You see I remember the very place."

“I have longed for this," said the wife of a cabinet minister. “We are all on the qui trive—in a fever of expectation. Do tell me—what, oh what, Mr Bruno, are you going to give us next?”

“What would you like?” he asked, with a pleasant mock deference. “Something in the same vein or a shade more serious?”

“Oh, I’ve not yet read your book,” said the lady. “But I’m told it’s too wonderful. I’m saving it up to give zest to my summer holiday, and I really am on tenter-hooks for the holiday to begin.”

With his magical art—what the papers called his insight, his clarity of perception—he had divined the truth. These party-giving nobles all seemed unconsciously to put a something bitter in the frothy cup. That night he went to the strong box in which his unpublished work lay stored, and took out No. 2, his next venture. It was a light satirical thing—a novel. He read it thoughtfully. There was a great similarity between No. 2 and No. I in method, manner, and treatment. One might even say it was the same story told from another point of view. Such an effort could not greatly enhance his reputation although it would no doubt help to maintain it.

No. 3 was a collection of essays; No. 4 consisted of three long short stories; but No. 5 was a lengthy, solid, and immensely powerful novel. He was swept into laughter, he was hurried into tears while' he turned the type-written pages. Through the small hours of the night he throbbed and glowed in sympathy with the pulsating life of the thing. And early next morning he took No. 5 to the publishers.

Mr Bruno’s long novel appeared in the autumn, and achieved a colossal success—with the critics. “In literature,” said the first reviewer, “ce n'est que le deuxibne pas qui coute. It is not often that a promising first attempt is followed by a masterpiece. It has been reserved for Mr Bruno to leap at once from the kindergarten to the professor's chair, to bridge the gulf between the plain of Thessaly and the summit of Olympus at one clean, elastic, bouncing bound.”

“There are some quotable bits in that,” said the publisher.

All the other reviewers declared themselves equally satisfied. Society was so impressed that it began to ask him to dinner as well as to hear music in the evening, and it was somewhat of a surprise to Bruno, after three or four months, when the account of sales arrived, to find that the total was a few thousands less than the record of No. I for the similar period.

It was soon after Christmas that Bruno married and took a flat at the West Bnd of the town.

Meantime, Jonas had been to his box four times, and had attained that sort of reputation which makes an author pretty confident about bread and cheese, but leaves him still in doubt as to biscuits and celery.

“My dear old boy,” he said to Bruno, in the dainty library of the flat, “your No. 2 is simply a stunner.”

Bruno winced—because in truth it was not No. 2 but No. 5, and he had an uncomfortable feeling that in forestalling fortune he had stolen a march on his friend.

“Oh, do not speak of me,” Jonas cried in reply to polite inquiries. “Look here, this is where I am,” and he stooped and placed his open hand a few inches above the rich Persian rug. “ Down here, while you are up there,” and he waved his hand towards the ceiling. But I do not envy you, dear old fellow. I knew the divine gift was yours—from the first.”

Then he continued exultantly. But I am tasting some small sweets of success. This has made me very happy,” and he drew out an invitation card. The Women Writers“Reception at the Albert Hall, I do think it uncommonly kind of them to ask me. It is recognition. You will be there, of course, on the dais with the Lady President.

No,” said Bruno. It unluckily clashes with the Academy banquet. By reason of the principal guest, that, I take it, is tantamount to a command.”

Oh, undoubtedly,” said Jonas, and he bade Bruno good-bye.

“Jonas,” said Bruno, calling after him.

Yes, old boy.”

How many thousands did you run to last time in the first quarter?”

Jonas called out the number from the pretty lobby.

Bruno sat biting his lip. Could it be possible?

No. 6 in Bruno's box was another novel; No. 7 was a packet containing nothing but letters to the newspapers; No. 8 was a collection of essays. Somehow or other in the reading they left Bruno cold. But Nos. 9 and I0 set him on fire. The first was an allegory, a stately fable in modern dress, a splendid antique figure stalking through the mean ways and narrow turnings of everyday thought, a head and shoulders above the base throng. The second was a dialogue; voices interwoven as the band parts in a grand opera; then voices rising clearer and stronger, higher and sweeter, like the song of larks on an April day, lifting one’s heart towards heaven in sympathy; then one voice alone sounding a trumpet-blast, a call to duty, loud and strong enough to wake the dead. In quick succession, Bruno gave No. 9 and No. I0 to the public.

Comparatively speaking, they were rank failures.

It is possible that had Mr Bruno reserved his teaching for another twenty years it would have been received with patience if not with pleasure. This was the substance of what the most indulgent critics said. “There is a fitness of things. Every season has its appropriate habit: the blossom in the spring, the garnered fruit in autumn. It savours of impertinence for one who has been invited to amuse to insist on instructing.”

Of the dialogue, the critics all said the same thing. “Too clever by half-ness is the prevailing blunder of the age. If Mr Bruno had had me at his elbow to advise him in his own best interests, instead of giving this book to the publisher he would have burnt it.”

“Oh, my dear,” said his fond wife, “so that I have you with me what do I care for eligible situation, electric light and fine furniture.” They were leaving the flat and moving into humbler quarters.

“See, old chap,” cried Jonas, his honest face shining with happiness. “I have been at it four years, and this is the first quotable bit they have ever given me.” And he read the passage, rolling his head in time to the pleasant beat of the words:—““There is always a plain, matter-of-fact public to reward a writer who is not too proud to give it plain matter-of-fact work. Mr Jonas has long been known as an honest tradesman, and in the consignment of goods which he has just turned out he attains to a rare excellence-’ There, I stop there—attains to a rare excellence. That’s the bit!”

“Curse them,” cried Bruno, angrily, “why do you listen to them? Why do you read them? I don’t. What do they know? what can they know?—swine set to estimate the market value of pearls.”

“That’s true too, when you come to think of it,” said Jonas. “But nevertheless I am going to marry on that review. My publisher says I am justified in buying the ring and ordering the cake on the credit of that one quotable bit.”

“My own,” said Mrs Bruno. “Don't talk to me of smart frocks and smart society. What do I want with either while I have you. . . No, no, it is not that indeed. Here stands the reason why they have left off asking you to their parties. They would still love to have you if you would leave me at home. They never have room for Mrs Celebrity.”

Things were going badly, with Mr Bruno. He was still being interviewed and paragraphed. He could not take Mrs Bruno to Broadstairs to escape the Bank holiday without finding the fact chronicled in the halfpenny papers. But he was not selling.

“I begin to think he was a flash in the pan,” said the publishers in conclave at their dub. “ He’ll never come anigh his number one. . . And he’s such an unsociable touchy beggar to deal with. If you hint a fault or hesitate dislike, he just puts on his hat and walks across to your rival over the way. His head’s still in the clouds from all the praise he got at first. He won’t alter a sentence of his stuff; won’t delete a word. To hear him talk you’d think the fairies had written it, and he daren’t correct it for fear of breaking the spell.”

“Ah,” said another publisher, “that fellow Jonas is the man for my money. No nonsense about him.

Look here. He and his missis were down at my little box last week end; and before he left I had the agreement signed “contracts for three consecutive novels, and guarantees under penalties that in all essentials they shall be exactly similar to the one just out/ ... Do you want to know numbers? Well, I printed-

“Prodigious!” they all cried on hearing the figures. I wouldn’t have believed it unless you yourself had told me.”

Things were going from bad to worse with Mr Bruno. He was a disappointed, impecunious man. In his rage and mortification he was ransacking his box, turning it upside down, bringing forth his work without order or sequence.

“Curse them!” he used to rave. A novelist can’t write a play. Can’t he? Idiots! I’ll show them whether he can’t.” And, with considerable difficulty he got a play, No. 2I, upon the stage. It was off the stage again before the public were given time to find it had ever been there.

Call that poetry,” he stormed. Ye gods. Blasphemous impostors! Shall I show them the real thing? Yes, I will.” And he persuaded the publisher against his judgment to issue No. 27, a volume of poems.

It is a trite observation,” said the critics, that no clever man attains the age of fifty without having at some time or other scribbled verses.

But if he is wise as well as clever he does not publish them/'

“Oh, my darling,” said the poor wife, “why do you read what they say since it upsets you so dreadfully? You know what the doctor said after your illness—you were to keep calm/’

“The dogs,” he snarled, “the dirty, garbage-hunting dogs! They turn from the dainty dish to grub for offal in the gutter. Listen! You heard what they said of me. Mark this fulsome slavish praise of another.” And he recited the first paragraph of the succeeding review.

“Oh, but that is about Jonas’s new book,” said the poor wife, soothingly. “You are glad they praise him at any rate.”

But he was not glad. The praise of others had become poison to him. A chance word of admiration of one of his inferiors, though that one was the friend of his bosom, was like the bite of a serpent’s tooth. The horrible virus of spite and envy ran through his veins to his heart, to his brain.

“It is quite extraordinary what a hold that chap Jonas has obtained on his public. And it is such a wide public. I am just back from the States, and he is as much read there as here.”

“And I come from Australia. It is just the same there,” etc.

Bruno, in kindly feeling, had refrained from reading his friend’s books. He dreaded to be asked to say what he thought of their merit, which he knew would be nothing. But now, after all these years, he read the last of them, and was surprised and mortified to discover that there was something in it.

“Look here,” said Bruno’s publisher, “this is final. I’m a family man and I’m not going to speculate with my little ones’ early dinner. If you care to do something in the style of that first thing of yours—I forget its name, it’s so long ago—but the thing you made the hit with, I’ll bring it out. But anything else, no.”

Then it was that he brought out of his box and published his No. 2. It was a disastrous production. To a man, the critics slated it.

“There is every excuse for a young writer who repeats himself,” said the critics. “There is even an amiable modesty in so doing. In effect, he says to his readers: Delighted that I have been able to please you in my small way, I try to please you again as before. But when an established author after a lapse of years recooks and hashes up the stale old fare which once was found palatable, when he carelessly, and in the most slovenly fashion, furbishes up an early work and offers it as something new, something very like a literary fraud is attempted. We should be doing something less than our duty if we did not warn the public, etc., etc.” “Prom such a broken promise one turns with a feeling akin to rapture to the ripe performance of Mr Jonas. Here, clarity of vision, intuitive perception,” etc., etc.

“Traitors!” he screamed. The very words, the very words they once employed for me.”

“Jonas.”

Why, Bruno, my dear old fellow. You, of all people in the world—at such an hour of the night.” Shabby and gaunt and haggard, Bruno stood before his host in the magnificent library in the popular author’s new Kensington mansion.

Jonas, I see the world has used you well—while I have gone near starving. . No, don’t speak. I want to ask you a question. As man to man, tell me what you think of my work-”

Bruno,” said Jonas, people call me a tradesman, but I call myself an artist. When I compare my work with yours—well look here”—and he placed his hand on the parquetry floor. I am still down here and you—” and he waved his hand above his bald head and pointed to the painted ceiling. You are still up there.”

You think that and yet this winter when I was ill, in want-”

My dear boy, I was deeply distressed to hear about it.”

No matter,” said Bruno, while my oldest friend held aloof, succour came from a nameless stranger.”

So that it came, it doesn’t matter where it came from,” said Jonas.

Ah, I don’t think that. It was the praise as much as the gold that brought me back to life. Hundreds of pounds, Jonas, an assured income, if I care to take it—and why should I scruple?—from an anonymous admirer. “To save the honour of the State I offer to one of the greatest of her sons,’ and so on. It came from the solicitors of this princely reader, and so will come—every quarter.”

Jonas was hiding his eyes with his hand. The pompous, vain-glorious tone of poor Bruno was pain ful to hear. Perhaps too it pained him to think of his friend as being dependent on the bounty of any individual.

“I tell you this,” said Bruno—and now he also concealed his eyes dropping them to the ground—“to let you see that I am now pecuniarily at ease. I have —you will therefore understand—in what I now propose, no other motive than the desire to—to do an act of tardy justice-”

The eyes of Jonas sought the eyes of Bruno in vain.

« Do you remember, Jonas, how, years and years ago, there came into our possession two strong boxes!”

“Yes, Bruno.”

“I had the better of the two. I had no right to it but by your generosity. In a manner, I robbed you of it Well, now I offer to exchange with you. Jonas, you shall have my box if you will give me yours.”

“I can’t do that,” said Jonas. “Dear old boy, I can’t do that-”

It was the first night of a new play at a popular theatre. There had been rain in the crowded street and Bruno had craved admittance chiefly to obtain shelter. As a man with a name which had once been well-known, he was accommodated with standing room behind the upper circle. In this shabby backwater of the fashionable stream of playgoers, he drifted to and fro aimlessly, with other jetsam and flotsam—wreckage from the treacherous sea of Literature and Art.

Bre the curtain rose, there came an uproar from pit and gallery, a salvo of applause, a running fire of cheering. The curious asked of each other eagerly, “What is it? What is it?” For a moment, it was thought that the King had entered the theatre. But Bruno knew that a reception so indecorous in its noise would not be offered to its sovereign by the most loyal of mobs. Then somebody said that the latest idol of the people—a general from the War—had just taken his seat in one of the boxes. Then somebody else said it was not the famous soldier but the famous writer.

It was Jonas.

The cheering continued. Nothing would silence it, nothing would pacify the excited populace but Jonas himself—Jonas standing in the front of his box, baldheaded, beaming, bowing—bowing like Punch in his box—again and again.

“It is truly astounding the hold which that quite mediocre man possesses on the-”

But Bruno did not stay to listen. As one whipped with scorpions, he fled from the theatre. Outside, the rain lashed the pavements, the storm flogged the wavering gas lamps. He hurried on, without thought, without aim, without respite. Thunders of applause seemed to burst and to mock him from the angry sky; the shouts of drivers and the cries of street boys sounded like an echo of the cheers for his brother author.

In the sick-room, where Bruno lay dying, the windows were thrown wide to let in the fragrance of the summer night. There was starlight on the wet sands; there was starlight on the wide sea. Only in the room itself all was dark, except for the little circle thrown by the shaded lamp beside which the poor wife sat writing her letter. “Thanks to your continued munificence,” she wrote, “he wants for nothing.” She was writing to Jonas. “But, indeed, he is gravely ill. He contracted a cold by imprudently wandering about the streets in the rain one night, and the cold turned to pneumonia-”

“Wife,” said Bruno in a low voice, " do you think illness makes one light-headed?”

“I am sure of it, dear.”

“Prom where I lie, I have been watching the stars for ever so long, and they seem to be coming nearer and nearer. .

Mrs Bruno arranged his pillows, resumed her seat, and blotted her letter with a tear.

Now that night, when the wife and the nurse and all in the house were sleeping—in the dead middle of the brief summer’s night—Bruno was talking to the fairy. He was pleading with the fairy. He was praying to the fairy.

“Oh most ungrateful of mortals,” said the fairy, “to whom our best gifts were given, how have you squandered your fairy treasure!”

“I know, I know,” Bruno pleaded, “But help me again. I could not wait for the reward.”

Then the fairy, with sad face and the voice kind nurses use to fretful children:

“My poor Bruno, I had best put you to sleep to wait for the rewards which your folly has postponed —but which must surely come: the statues, the monuments, the tablets at street corners, your name on men’s houses, your name on men’s lips, the anniversary fetes, and the memorial essays.”

Then the fairy stooped over Bruno, and, kissing him, put him to sleep to wait for the rewards.

THE MASTER MIND

It was in the country, in the spring, in the afternoon. The mistress of the grand old house was out with her friends in the carriage; the master was in—alone with his books in the library. The mistress had taken with her the dominant, rather violent spirit which ruled the large establishment: the sharp tongue, the ready reproof, the quick temper, and the prompt punishment which formed the basis of her domestic government; and, in her absence, the servants no more minded their master than they minded the deer browzing in the park, the doves cooing in the garden, the grey old pike swimming in the ornamental water.

Every now and again, noisy voices, a shrill scream of laughter, a snatch of song in loud and vulgar baritone would penetrate from the servants’ quarters even to the farthest recess in the long library. Outside the stone windows, through the latticed glass, he could see the stretching grassland, the far-off downs, and the sleepy river sluggishly meandering in the afternoon sunlight. Nearer to the buttressed walls of his house, the beeches gently stirred the emerald sleeves on their graceful arms; and now and again a lime tree on the terrafce lazily flicked at the glass panes, tapping them idly with the tasselled fringe of its new green gown. Now and again too, the old student left his easy chair and rang the bell.

He was an amateur of literature: one of those men of letters and leisure to whom the pen is as the brush to the painter who is not a painter by profession, the needle to the needle-woman who makes stitches for pleasure not for bread. He scribbled for the love of scribbling, by fits and starts; writing articles for heavy reviews that were often rejected, serious poetry which the magazines rarely accepted; and now and then, anonymously, secretly, as though wishing to keep the joke to himself, a little humorous, whimsical,' satirical piece of fun for the lighter periodicals. Sometimes the editors of such publications permitted him to keep the joke to himself; sometimes they invited the public to share in it.

He was pleasantly absorbed in his scribbling now; but still he wanted his tea. Beneath the cloud of his thronging fancies, weaving itself into the thread of his theme, insinuating itself in gaps in the logical sequence of his ideas, there was the worrying thought that tea-time was gliding by unheeded. Thus, whenever his pen halted or hesitated, he left his desk and rang the library bell.

At last he laid down his pen altogether, shuffled away from the easy chair, took his panama and shuffled out of the room—shuffled away by broad corridors and panelled stair-cases, through oak doors and through baize doors, until he was among the flagged passages, stone steps, deal joinery of that large half of the great house which belonged to the servants.

A decent-looking old gentleman was the master—as even the kitchen-maids admitted: grey of hair, grey of garb, with antiquated air of old-world courtesy, refined, intelligent face, delicate features, ivory tone, like the choice cameo ring which he wore round his necktie. Hat in hand, he stood on the threshold of a minor pantry, where two little apple-cheeked maids of the lowest rank sprawled reading their novels. The wide halls, snug rooms and pleasant parlours seemed totally deserted: maids had wandered to the cool shrubbery; men were smoking in the yards, or sleeping on benches; quite near, grooms were merrily playing of quoits, and such dignitaries as head coachman and butler were not disdaining to watch the simple sport.

“May I come in?” he said, knocking at the door although it was wide open.

“Cert’nly, sir," said one of the little maids languidly but with a kind smile, as she dog-eared her book and put it down on a dresser.

What is your name, my dear?” he asked.

“Ad’laide,” she said, smiling; and the other maid yawned and looked up for the first time.

Well, Ad’laide,” he said, and how goes it with you all? Have you all had your tea?”

Oh yes, sir.”

That’s right. Is there anything I can do for you —to make you all comfortable? ”

No, sir.”

Then, if you don’t object, I will leave off ringing the library bell for a little while. You don’t think they will miss the cheerful sound? It won’t make them melancholy—the silence? Thank you. Then, with your permission, I am going off duty—only down to the Brook Inn—to get a cup of tea. Tell Mr Wilkinson and Mr Frederick aud Mr Thomas and the others. In case I should be wanted by any of you, you’ll know where to find me.”

And he shuffled away.

Who was that?” asked a footman, coming out of the yard in his shirt-sleeves, hurriedly.

Master.”

Oh, o'ny him. It scared me. I thought it was a tramp. What d’e say t’you?”

Then the little maid reported the conversation exactly.

Here, Tom!” shouted the footman through the window, Come ’ere a minute. Get up off of his knee, Kate, and let him come. Come in, too—all of you.”

Gradually they gathered together, coming singly and two or three at a time, in an ascending scale of domestic rank. The sleepers awoke, pipes were let out, even the game of quoits languished and finally stopped, as all indoor patronage was withdrawn from it. They clustered round her, an attentive knot, an interested group, an excited crowd—debating, trying to understand Again and again she was made to repeat her tale. As a witness she proved solid as the dresser, unshakable as the sink. Her tale never varied by a word. The second wench corroborated.

“Oh, I suppose if he wants to go to the pub he may,” said one.

“But what the dickens was all that about the bell?” said another.

They could not understand; and as an unsolvable problem it weighed upon them, worried them, haunted them.

At supper in the servants’ hall that night a sense of oppression hung over the company—a burden of mystery, a paralysing dread of the inexplicable marred the feast. “Bothered if ’e ain’t spoilt my appetite, confound it all,” cried Mr Frederick, pushing his plate away, and passing his hand across his forehead with a troubled gesture. At supper in the servants’ parlour, had a ghost been waiting at table the repast would not have been more awe-stricken. “It’ll have to be cleared up somehow,” said Mr Wilkinson in a low, grave voice. “I can’t stand much more of this suspense.” At supper in the housekeeper’s own room, the savoury dishes were declined in a whisper, as though the sword of Damocles dangled from the ceiling by a fibrous string that was slowly shredding and surely rending even as one watched “No sleep for me this night,” whispered Mrs Housekeeper, “and to-morrow I get to the bottom of it, cost what it may,” and she looked round the room that she loved; and her fat face was wan and white, and her hands trembled from emotion.

“I beg leave to report, ma’am,” said the housekeeper next morning, having explained that she demanded audience as fully accredited ambassadress of all her realm. “I have to state that during your absence yesterday something unpleasant occurred. The master had occasion to speak to us, and thought proper to speak in a way which we have never been spoke to before. . . Don’t mind none of us how you bully and bait us—saving your presence, ma’am. But with this way of master’s no respectable-minded servant can put up. I am the mouthpiece of all—to say'we know we have good places; if we have done wrong we regret it—deeply regret it; and humbly desire to be given a chance of retrieving it, if the master so will; but support again the manner in which yesterday he spoke we cannot and will not do, holding self-respect more precious than the best of situations.”

“How in the name of reason have you upset them so?” cried the mistress to the master. She was at once furious and panic-stricken. “I don’t know whether I am on my head or my heels; whether I have succeeded in [pacifying them, or whether they mean to go after all. What have you done to them? What can you have said to them? I go for an hour’s drive, and when I come back I find you have turned the house upside down, converted it into a raving Bedlam.”

“Oh, nonsense!” said her husband, looking up from his desk. “I simply tried them with satire—the very commonest, tritest, cheapest satire, dear: not the sort I put into the articles which the reviews send back to me, but the sort I should employ if—if I was writing legend-lines for a halfpenny comic paper. But they, you see—like the rest of the world—nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand —don’t understand, don’t enjoy satire. But I am the odd one who does,”—and he rubbed his hands together and gently chuckled—“who does most thoroughly enjoy it.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she cried angrily. “Instead of answering you talk like a fool.”

“Never mind, dear. Nothing odd about you, my love.”

And with a sly smile, the old fellow'took up his pen, and went on scribbling.

A CHANCE FOR ALL OF US

I

The farmer’s ugly daughter was looking out of the window to watch the love-making.

Some big bold flowers in the little patch of garden had turned their faces to the sun, and the sun was warmly embracing them; the shy apple-trees in the small orchard had been crouching their heads before the pursuit of the prevailing west wind, but the wind had found and caught them and now they were languorously swaying in a shiver of submission to the pertinaceous caress; farther away, across the swelling bosoms of the drowsy hills, the smiling sea was wooing the hard rocks themselves and even the frowning cliffs seemed to stretch their arms out to meet the advance of the irresistible tide. The love-making seemed in progress wherever she turned her eyes.

In the long grass of the orchard, some of the farmer’s poultry were busy hunting for insects. One poor, shabby, little speckled hen was pecking about all by herself. She was lame—when a chick her left foot had been crushed by a wheelbarrow; she was moulting and her plumage was of so dull and scant a type that she could not afford to moult; she was abject in demeanour, and as, solitary and forlorn, she plied her beak, she seemed to feel that she was the outcast of the whole poultry run. But, all at once, a great masterful over-bearing cock, who was bustling about as though he had lost his seraglio, came upon her by accident. She hardly looked up from her worm-quest till he tapped her on the neck, and then, in a moment, the love-making began.

“Then there is a chance for me,” said the farmer’s plain daughter.

She was a girl who had always been fond of her book, who had attended evening school from the first night on which it was opened until the time when the authorities plainly told her she had become a nuisance by knowing so much more than they did themselves; she had run through the fine new smatter of secondary education which Squire and Parson and State all putting their heads together, had introduced into the neighbourhood; she had taken herself in hand since then and in default of a better teacher, had taught herself; and now there could be no doubt that, when she looked out of the window, she was able to see a great deal more than would have been seen by her neighbours. Par across the western ocean she could see another hemisphere. She could see the home and the outgoing path of this south-west wind that rattled the latticed panes of her father’s house on nearly three hundred days of the year; she could see the warm, wide mouth out of which poured the Gulf Stream—that wonderful hot water apparatus of Nature which warmed the air along her native coast, keeping up the temperature even in mid-winter, and enabling her to grow the cluster of bamboos by the stone wall; she could see the whole journey of those strange logs and uprooted trees which came bobbing up upon the beach; and, close sealed and kept dry in lumps of earth in the roots of the trees, she could see the capsuled seeds of strange, South American plants, sent across the thousands of miles of wild waves to be sought and carried by English birds, and then deposited bird fashion upon this alien soil to burst into life after undergoing such incredible hazards, and, finally, to be casually described by the parson and others as "self-sown”

When she looked out of the window and saw the three clumps of the self-sown American lilies, she thought this bridge of life, thrown by blind chance from one side of the earth to the other, was more astounding than wireless telegraphy or the linotype printing machine.

She could see that, all along the flower border, beneath the grey old stones of the garden wall, the love-making was in full swing. Among the American lilies only one man-lily was in bloom, while already nearly all the lady-lilies were in full beauty, standing in a group together and looking their very best, but perhaps too far off for the male plant to pay them any attention. But she could see a large bee, a busy go-between bumble bee, all unconsciously occupied in making a match of it.

She could see the pollen-mass on his back as he buzzed into the air and flew away from the man-lily. But, as he rose, a puff of air from the sea caught him, and immediately drove him out of his course. She could see his wings working violently while he drifted helpless. She could see how he stretched his hairy legs in frantic efforts to steer himself out of the air current. Like a navigable balloon on its trial trip, the bee floated away at the mercy of the breeze, past lily after lily, until it seemed a certainty that he would be blown out of the garden altogether and away to the gorse-brake on the hill, when suddenly the puff of air died out, or there came a flaw and a back current, and he just succeeded in landing on the last of the lilies—the lily farthest removed from the single male —the most unlikely lily in all the border. She could see him, greatly exhausted by his flight, grapple and hang to the cup of the flower, then haul himself over the brim and, tripping on a ridge, roll head over heels; and thus she knew that this amazing marriage was consummated.

“Then there is a chance for me,’ she said again, and she left the window.

II

“Stuff,” said her father, in response to her appeal. “Stuff and stuff again. Why, what said his Lordship to me in the nine-acre field by the old culvert?”

His Lordship was the owner of all the land for miles, the landlord of her father and of everybody else; and if he had only said a wise word for every one of his acres, his conversation might have been worth treasuring.

“And what said I to his Lordship?”

Poor Emily knew so very well, she had heard it so very often, but of course she had to hear it again.

““To the devil with all this education,’ said I to his Lordship. “Education has wrought more hurt in this country than ever it has wrought good. And “shake hands on that,” said his Lordship to me, you’m be the first sensible man I’ve met this year.’”

The appeal of poor Emily had been that her father would allow her to go up to London and live with her married sister, for the purpose of further improving her mind by a course of serious study.

But the old farmer considered that the reverse of improvement would be achieved, and was strongly of opinion that she had already filled her head with a load of useless nonsense, under which the splendid common-sense that she had received by birthright as his daughter lay crushed and buried.

“It isn’t as though I were of any real help to you here,” Emily had pleaded.

“Of course you are,” said her father. “Who’d there be to make the cream?”

“Oh, any fool could do all that,” said Emily.

“May be, but you’re the one I want to do it,” said her father. “No, your place is here; and in your place you’ll bide, until the time comes for some good man to take you out of it for his wife.”

“Oh, that time may never come,” said Emily.

“Now, don’t you talk like that,” said the old farmer, severely and yet not unkindly. “Beauty is but skin deep. ’Tisn’t because you’re not so well favoured as your sister Kate that you’re to hold yourself cheap, or think you are not many a man’s money”; and he looked at her critically, but affectionately. “There’s nothing about you to frighten the lads away, my lass.”

But for his old-fashioned white tie, nobody meeting the rector of the parish would have guessed the sacred character of his profession. He wore pepper and salt clothes and loved to talk about the news in the daily paper; but just as in his costume there was the one little priestly detail, so, in his conversation, there ran a thin thread of clerical matter which made it slightly different from the gossip of men [of the world. Emily was fond of the rector, but could not really respect him: because there was, or so it seemed to her, an absence of thought, or at any rate any personal thought, in more than half the remarks that came out of the rector’s mouth either on week-days or on Sundays.

She respected the rector’s daughter for the general soundness, and sometimes almost surprising depth, of her thoughts; but, on the other hand, she was not very fond of her.

“No, my dear,” said the rector, “I unhesitatingly endorse your father’s decision, I don’t believe in the young birds leaving the nest until they have found their mates.”

For anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of natural history, such an observation—given as though a clincher—could be only irritating.

“Besides, it would be very wrong to leave your widowed father. You should think of your mother looking down upon you, filling her place.”

“She may well look down upon me, for I fill it very badly,” said Emily.

The rector frowned.

“If you do, it’s your own fault,” he said solemnly. “To be a good daughter is the best training for being a good wife, and, in the fulness of time, a good mother. And let me tell you, my child, that in worthily fulfilling those latter duties you will accomplish the best, the highest part of a woman’s destiny.”

Let him tell her indeed! As if she—and his spinster daughter for the matter of that—did not know it a hundred times, a thousand, a million million times better than he.

“Meantime, trample down discontent as though it was an adder which had stung you. (Stung! what next?) Be satisfied with the simple round, the daily task. And be grateful for what you have, instead of hankering after what you haven’t. Be grateful that your father has been given good land and weather-tight barns, solid outbuildings and a comfortable house.”

“His Lordship doesn’t exactly give them,” said Emily, “he gets a fairly high rent as times go.”

“I was not speaking of his Lordship, as you ought to know,” said the rector.

“Oh, I beg pardon,” said Emily.

On one of her long walks, the farmer’s daughter made a little informal census of her own and found that, within easy walking distance, there were forty-three maidens ripe for wedlock—over-ripe and going sleepy, some of them—and nineteen marriageable men. There were also nine widows, and one divorced wife.

“That argues badly for my chance!” said Emily, the far from beautiful daughter of th^ farmer.

In a deep-set lane—where the banks of the rich, red earth wore a mask of granite in front of their soft faces, and where the hart’s-tongues chattered their secrets to the iords-and-ladies when the wind stirred them into restlessness, while the modest violets and the primroses peeped out with watery eyes, as though really not wishing to know what was going on all round them—she met the rector’s spinster daughter.

The two could not of course be real friends: because one lived in a farm-house, and one in a rectory, because one dined early and the other late; but condescending patronage and dignified reserve there could be—and there was. Nevertheless, in spite of the difference of station, the two were accustomed to exchange, together with formal courtesies, a considerable amount of confidences on all general matters which might be termed food for intelligent reflection.

I have been dreadfully upset by hearing a lot more about that girl Sarah,” said the rector’s daughter; since she went to the Red Lion, she seems to be little better than a public flirt.”

“How dreadful!” said Emily; and the primroses hung their heads, the violets closed their eyes, but the hart’s-tongues whispered wildly and the lords-and-ladies stretched their necks to listen.

She was always trying to flirt when she was in service with us,” continued the rector’s daughter; with the postman, the butcher, the man who came with the pig-tub, anybody. That was why I got rid of her. I thought dismissing her without a character might be the best thing for her in the long-run—I mean, give her a lesson while there was still time;” and she drew in her breath and, with the iron ferrule of her umbrella, prodded into a cluster of forget-me-nots.

“It seems they don’t require a character for the situation of barmaid,” said Emily, reflectively.

This Sarah was a pretty, foolish, feather-headed orphan, with no parents and guardians to whom one could go and address complaints. Her nearest relative, the widow of a coast-guard, had publicly washed her hands of her niece when she lost her place at the rectory. Then Sarah had privately washed her hands of her aunt; and, shaking the red dust of jier native village from her clumped heels, had fared forth into the wide world. Pour miles over the moor, to the little town in the hollow of the hills, had been the limit of the first stage of her adventurous journey. Here, at the Red Lion Hotel, the old coaching inn by the market - place, she had found shelter and congenial employment—a milieu wherein that habit of promiscuous flirtation which had hitherto been her bane met with encouragement instead of censure.

“You know,” said the rector’s daughter, “she is drawing our young men over the hill as though she were a witch—I almost wish she could be burnt like one—when I think of the harm she is doing and will do—in the market-place as an example. It is first one, then another. They all fall under her spell.'

“It is very wrong of her,” said Emily, “but really I don’t know that it concerns us.”

“Not concern us?” cried the rector’s daughter. “Then the happiness of half the girls in the parish doesn’t concern us. Can’t you see how monstrously unfair it is to them? Don't you understand that a public flirt, like this, is disastrous to all their chances —that the men are completely unsettled by it, and that they can’t be expected to buy the ring and put up the banns while they can go over the hill and flirt —as they are all doing.”

Now this was a fair instance of the immensely deep thoughts of the rector’s daughter. Emily had not thought of this. With all her acquired erudition and native shrewdness, she had failed to realise what had at once occurred to the rector’s daughter.

“Sarah must have a column to herself in my census paper,” thought Emily. “Or I will set her down under widows, as another nine. She is quite as bad for everybody’s chance as nine widows at the very least.”

They had passed through the lane, leaving the ferns and the flowers behind them, and had come out on to the windy downland above the sea. As they breasted the hill, side by side, the rector's daughter dropped the subject of Sarah and picked up that of last Sunday’s sermon.

" How did the sermon strike you?”

“Not very hard,” said Emily.

The sermon had been preached by the new curate, and it had been all about free will and pre-destination.

“No,” said the rector’s daughter, “nor me. It left me very cold,” and she shut her lips tight and drew in her breath and looked far out to sea.

Emily looked at her thoughtfully.

She was wont to take anything but a cold interest in her father’s new curates and their first sermons. Although the rector liked to wear a pepper and salt shooting jacket with big side pockets, he always kept a curate in a fine black coat and a waistcoat without front buttons. The last curate, in whom perhaps more interest had been taken than in any of the others, had a Roman nose and wore a .Roman collar and was extremely Romish in his views and his manner. The rector’s daughter seemed quite willing to follow him submissively all the way to Rome, and even further. She was never tired of confessing things to him, but it seemed to Emily that she had either confessed too much or too little: for the curate had closed the door of his confessional and locked it in the face of all the parish, and had gone over the hill, like a travelling shepherd in search of a situation with a larger flock.

As Emily looked at her—while she looked at the sea—Emily thought she saw about her all the signs of a marked, though typical, case of a maiden ripe and over-ripe for wedlock who was fast going sleepy. She was thinner, perceptibly thinner; she was getting to look tall and gaunt; her fine eyes were dimmer, losing their old fire; there was a pinched, hard look about her well-formed mouth; and her complexion, in spite of the south-west wind and all the rain, was becoming dull, as incipient anaemia began to get the better of open-air and roast mutton. She seemed to Emily, on further consideration, less like a fruit allowed to hang on the wall too long, than a caged bird who had recently been suffering all the torments of its thwarted migratory instinct—or, as the rector would have it, a bird who had waited too long in the parental nest for the coming of a mate to set it free. Yes, thought Emily, there had been much beating of prisoned wings, tearing of breast, and lacerating of feathers; much sick frenzy of yearning for the mate who never came.

But what Emily was especially wondering was this. Had the flight over the hill of that last, beaky, cock-blackbird caused a revulsion of feeling against the whole black-feathered genus? Had she lost faith and hope at the same moment? Had she fallen back upon cold scientific speculation after the hot fit of religious fervour? And were the rector and the rector’s daughter now as remotely separated on matters of spiritual belief as on matters of natural history?

Emily’s thoughts were suddenly answered by the young lady herself.

“I’ll tell you what the sermon sounded like to me,” she said, standing by the old Rocket tower on the cliff top. “Like a man blowing the church organ when there is no player at the key-board—like the beaten out stalks rustling down the boarded trough of a thrashing machine—like a dead man speaking in a dead tongue—like a mummy in a museum getting out of its case after thousands of years, and trying to teach the Bank Holiday visitors how to dance an Egyptian hornpipe—or to sing an Assyrian comic «ong.”

“Dear me!” said Emily.

“You know what I mean,” cried the rector’s daughter, suddenly waving her arms and gesticulating, pointing far out to sea and then upward to the soft clouds and downward to the iron rocks, while the boisterous south-west wind played with her hair and her veil, or roughly plastered-her skirts about her long legs in rough, rude sculptury.

“You don’t believe there is anything behind it all —no guiding hand, no guarding, watching influences? You know there’s nothing. Nothing at all but chance. That I may pitch myself over the cliff, or go home to tea—and that the guiding hand will no more push me back or pull me over than the cockles down there, or the muffins in the oven at home. You don’t believe it, do you? ”

“Well/’ said Emily, “since you ask it so directly,

I can’t say that I do.”

Then they turned and began to walk homeward—to resume their divergent stations in life—to the farm-house and the rectory.

“I said in the oven,” the young lady continued,

II because you cannot get servants to do anything before the fire nowadays—not even a muffin.

“It was the one redeeming feature in that girl Sarah,” she added. “She was a good toaster.”

The years passed, with their troublesome seasons —enervating summer, depressing autumn, numbing winter, and then the most troublesome season of all —spring. Thus the years dragged by for Emily, still biding in her place and not given the smallest opportunity for further improving her mind.

It was a glitteringly bright, but troublesome, spring day and, as the farmer’s daughter climbed the hillside, she could almost hear the sap rising in the stunted oaks on top of the stone-faced banks. A north-east wind was blowing. In the spring-tide of the years, when all was change and growth and progress, the prevailing south-west gales had to give way and wait their opportunity for reasserting their predominance. On the empty hill-top, she found a dry ditch, and lay down in it to think over her troubles.

The north-easter whistled shrilly across the top of the stone bank, but it was warm and snug where she lay. There was wool of sheep, and one little tuft of lamb’s wool hanging to the barbed wire on the bank top; mosses and young plants were pushing their way vigorously through the loose packing of stones. There was a lark in the sky, a chatter of rooks, and the swoop of swallows arrived to-day. There was a gate close by, and through its five bars she could see the bright spring green of the grass slopes down to the hidden cliffs, yellow sand in a rocky bay, white surf and blue water.

Out of a cleft in the stones there came a diminutive spider. She glanced at the little creature and recognised it immediately as a male of the family of the Theraphosida Atypus sulzeri probably.

He seemed a hurrying, furtive little fellow. Then, after a few moments, the female 6pider appeared. She was immensely bigger than the male, a dozen times his size almost, a big, bold, bustling young person. But the little man-spider, as Emily saw, was wooing now in a resolute, purposeful way, sternly chasing the great shy truant of his choice. Emily watched until he had caught her, and then she turned her head away.

The spiders had set her thinking of her good-, looking sister and her feeble, little London husband. He was a shopman, the manager of a department in a stifling, gas-flaring, London linen draper’s, and he had come to this sleepy hollow of North Cornwall in his holiday time. He had found his way thus to the land’s end almost, by chance; guided by the hazard of dropped words in railway carriages, drifting in a current of advice freely poured out by strangers on coaches and at inn tables, until he had found the farm-house and the wife inside it waiting for him. He took bad photographs and made worse sketches of the wild coast scenery; he was a feeble, lungless, shrivelled townsman, with pointed toes to his thin-soled boots; the velvet sward was not a carpet soft enough for the corns of which he was always talking; he could not get half way up the hill to the old rocket tower without stopping to put his hand to his side and to cough; and Emily had never been able to decide if he dropped his h’s from asthma or from ignorance.

But sister Kate had taken a kind of proprietorial interest in him from the first. She used to chide if anyone took him out and got him wet or tired, crying, “It is too bad. You ought to be ashamed of yourself to bring him back in such a state,” exactly as though he had been her umbrella or her dog. And he was hers quite as completely—from the very first. She seemed to understand that by instinct.

And now, after a few years of childless union, she had been compelled to own in her last letter that the poor little wretch was dying. The gas and the long hours in the foul 6hop air had done their work. Nature’s inexorable laws of destruction and preservation of coarse hold good behind the shop windows as in the forest or on the moor. So many to be destroyed; so few to be preserved.

Then, in a moment Emily’s thought passed from the tear stains on the handsome face of her sister Kate, to the red cheeks of the coastguard’s wife and the strong limbs of her young brood of children. They were, in truth, sturdy little rogues, coming so fast into the world that already the narrow strip of garden behind the white palings seemed full of them. The coastguard had chosen a red-haired wife: a deep-chested, broad-hipped, strong-thighed wench with no more pretensions to beauty than Emily herself. “Rather like me, I daresay,” thought Emily, looking through the bars of the field gate.

Blue water, white surf, yellow sand; streamers of fleecy clouds, and a white-hulled, white-sailed ship beating up against the whistling wind. A Norwegian barque, thought Emily, making for the Bristol Channel.; and with a dead beat before her unless the wind dies out or is drawn down into the west with the sun.

“Oh, blow wind,” said Emily out loud. There was nobody to hear her or to see her. “Blow, blow, blow,” she cried passionately. “Blow up such a storm as this coast has never seen! Blow down our house to-night and bury me beneath it, if you can’t blow me what I am longing for.”

And she flung wide her arms and then folded them close on her breast, in her longing for a mate.

Ill

Everybody was on the beach that night watching the doomed ship.

The north-east wind had seemed to be drawn down by the sun; and, as the pale yellow disk sank behind the purple ridge of the waves, the south-west wind arose in fury to reassert its predominance. It blew, and blew, and blew, in its recovered mastery, shrieking to the iron rocks to sharpen their teeth and wait for the prey that was being beaten in to them. Early in the evening people had begun to make their way to the cliff and to the beach—as soon as they had heard, by its voice, that the sou’-wester was at its devil’s work, and that there was a large Norwegian barque in difficulties not two miles out. Since then it had all been like a play for the huddled, dripping spectators—a long drawn out, theatrical representation, slowly but surely developing and breathlessly leading up to its tragic conclusion. The piece could only end in one way all knew. Hours passed, and the final scene came nearer and nearer. No one could alter the plot. Everybody knew it, but nobody would go home to bed until the green curtain hid the performers and all was over.

The flare lights burned by the old towers showing the doomed ship, driving now in the black trough of the sea nearer and nearer to the iron teeth waiting for their prey. The rockets flew out, and the line shot true to its mark; but no response came from the ship. The poor wretches had lashed themselves to the broken masts, people said, and were already more dead than alive.

Better so, perhaps.

Through such a hell-broth of a sea, seething in the iron cauldron which the rocks made for it, there would be small mercy in dragging live men to shore.

Then at last, in the red glow from the magnesium light, the play came to an end. A sob ran through the audience, women covered their frees in their wet shawls, men turned their heads towards the land, as the curtain hid the performers.

Emily was the first to see him. Out of the wet jaws of death one came forth alive. Unaided by line or cradle, working a miracle on his own behalf, fighting with his own strong arms through the hell-broth of the seething cauldron, to be finally hurled down insensible, almost at her feet! Thus the storm spat forth at her one huge Swede, with sparks of life still in him.

It was Emily who brought the life back. All admitted it. Understanding exactly what to do when all were in doubt, knowing precisely what was wanted, she set to work in a quiet, methodical, business-like way; restored, animation; gave first aid (he was terribly cut and battered); administered stimulant; sent for the doctor (who had only gone home twenty minutes before his services were required); ordered a cart; obtained rugs and clothing; and drove him home and put him to bed in the spare room at her father’s house.

It was not until he was pronounced to be out of all immediate danger that the disparaging remarks about his personal appearance began to be made.

“My word, but j’ever see such a red ogre in all your days?” said one.

“Tis a fat ugly girt Swede as I ever saw in Plymouth town or Bristol docks,” said another.

“Let me creap back and have another look at ’un—such a figure of fun as he looks wrapped up in the bed, with his girt feet stuck out on a chair-back! I never see such an ugly one.”

“If that’s what you think, all the better chance for me,” said Emily to herself, while she cleared the house of intruders and quietly resumed her duties as sick-nurse.

Three times a day she used to lay bare his great chest and dress the worst of the horrible wounds, where the cruel rocks had torn him.

“Do I hurt you?” she used to say, dabbing with her cotton wool, squeezing with her sponge.

He would open his eyes then, the red lashes would lift and the light blue eyes laugh at her; and his strong, white teeth would gleam as the firm lips smiled behind the red beard.

“Your fingers are made of feathers,” he used to say—“feathers from an angel’s wing, I think.”

“My fingers are made of thumbs,” Emily used to say modestly.

“Your voice is like wine—like the wine of the royal cellars at Stockholm. Give me some more of the sweet wine.”

“Where did you learn English?” Emily asked.

' In the school—where else? Where did you learn Swedish?”

“I can’t speak a word of it.”

“Then I must teach you.”

“I wish you would,” said Emily, always anxious to improve herself. “But oh, I hurt you then.”

The great red Swede laughed loud.

“You tickled me. You could not hurt me if you tried. Put the poker in the fire and make it red hot; then brand me on the breast—mark me, so that you will know me again. Burn a cross or a heart, or your own initials. How does your father brand his cattle? You will not hurt me. I shall laugh at you for trying. That is because you are you. I don’t say if you give the branding iron to Papa or one of your house-maidens, but I will cry thunder and lightning.”

“I always understood that you Scandinavians had a silly way of talking/’ said Emily, putting on bandages and buttoning his shirt about his neck. " Do you think I don’t see this?” And she wiped the tell-tale beads of perspiration from his broad forehead.

Of course she had hurt him, but he was a child of the fierce, wild North, too proud to make a fuss about a little pain, inflicted with kindly intent. In this respect he differed from those two children of the South, her father and the father of the rector’s daughter. The farmer in the operating room of the Exeter dentist, and the parson nursing a gouty leg by his own fireside, formed two swift mental illustrations, and sprang from memory’s page unbidden while she pondered.

Most certainly she did not find this huge piece of storm-jetsam ungainly or hideous. Perhaps, because of her superior education, she could look at him with more understanding eyes than those of anybody else. If there was much to forgive, she understood so much that to forgive was easy. Perhaps only because the sea had thrown him at her wet feet, and not at the wet feet of anybody else, she made the best of him, taking an odd kind of proprietorial interest in what she had found on the shore in front of her parent’s house.

“He is a Northman, a Norseman,” she used to say to herself. “A sea-king, a Viking.”

But he was a Viking who was about to retire from business, he explained. He had taken a dislike to the waves, and frankly confessed that, except when on dry land, he never wished to hear the winds blow again.

“But I thought it was in your blood to fight the seas,” said Emily, with a shade of regret at hearing a decision of which the wisdom, she admitted, was incontrovertible.

“And I have fought it,” he said simply—“sufficiently. It is also in our blood to know when we have had enough, and of the sea I have had sufficient.”

Then he told her that this last voyage of his was the winding up of a small timber venture in which he and some partners had for a year engaged themselves. It was a final trip—a natural conclusion of the enterprise when they unloaded a week ago at Plymouth. The ship was coming round in ballast to Bristol, where she was to take up her new cargo, and he had really been only a passenger on board.

“For me she carried nothing to lose since Plymouth but my own life. But that is also sufficient.” Henceforth, as he had always planned, he would be a landsman. He would tend his own flock, and till his own land, in his own island home. “For though for years from a boy I have followed the sea for my love of it, I am no sea-tram per, but a man of means,” he added. “When the letters shall arrive from my Consul, they shall tell your father that Henrik Hisengen of Kungshog-Hagen by Gdteborg is no vagabond."

“As soon as I am well to move—I have much to do," he said; “both for myself and my partners and for those who have gone to Blaa-Kullen—I mean David’s locker, I think you call it, and the widows and orphans left to weep in Prederikshald and by Strom-stad."

He was exceedingly anxious to exhibit his credentials to his host, the farmer, and to Bmily almost boastful now and then in reciting the solidity and comparative splendour of his financial position at home in Sweden. It made Bmily blush once when he seemed to dwell with unnecessary weight on this aspect of his private affairs. And then it seemed that the red Swede himself turned, if possible, of a redder hue as he continued—

“What I mean," he said, “is only so much that for what I take I am glad to be able to pay. When I stay, if your father lets me stay, then also I must pay—and the doctor also, and for all I have taken since the beginning. In Sweden it is ever so arranged-”

Bmily was adjusting the medicine bottles, and stooping over her task in a preoccupied manner.

“But for all that which no man can pay, we in Sweden are ever proud to owe. And the greater our debt the greater our pride in it"

And as he lay in bed, propped up by many pillows, be took Emily’s hand from among the bottles, and raised it to his bearded lips and kissed it; really, all things being considered, with a quite kingly gesture.

“All that my burden of debt to you,” said the red Swede, “I cannot make lighter, and, therefore, am proud to show that I can carry it.”

“Let him stay,” said her father at once. “And let him pay,” he added, after a slight pause.

Thus the ship-wrecked foreigner remained at the farm, a paying guest—as it is termed—until such time as Emily and the doctor should together be able to put him on his legs and send him about his business again. The fame and wonder of his visit ran over hill and dale, filling cottage chimney corners and ale house parlours with gossip and conjecture; reaching to the rector’s daughter in her quiet boudoir, and even to flirting Sarah in the racket of town life on the other side of the moor. “A nobleman in disguise,” said the rector’s daughter, puckering her brows with incredulous wrinkles. “Stuff and nonsense!”

“Plenty of splosh, has he?” cried vulgar Sarah, tossing her head behind her bar in brazen coquetry. “Wonder if he's fond of the ladies.”

“I don’t say but what he’s a fine built man,” said the old farmer, “though too heavy for my mind; but he is a figure of fun. There’s no two ways about that.”

This was after the stranger had come downstairs and even adventured into the spring sunshine leaning on Emily’s shoulder.

“I’m glad he’s here,” added the farmer sadly; “he’ll serve to amuse your sister Kate. Poor lass, anything to distract her mind will be welcome now.”

Kate was coming back to them in a few days, as a week-old widow.

She was all in black; her thin white face looked out upon a world nearly always blurred by tears, and hideous streamers of crape hung down from her head, hiding her fine brown hair. Her blue eyes seemed sunken in their red circles, and a dozen times a day her handkerchief would fly up to make the circles redder by dabbing at the fountain of her tears, which had been started playing by a sudden thought, a chance word.

She looked wretchedly ill; the London shop and the long nursing of the poor little London shopman had together almost ruined her health. She was a feeble hysterical ghost of her past self, but, in spite of crape and cough and sobbings and dabbings, something there was—an indescribable something of glamour or spell which flashed from her now and again—to tell one that she was still sister Kate the admired, Kate the desirable, and Kate the desired.

Her first smile was torn from her by the personal appearance of the paying guest. She looked and smiled; and then the handkerchief rose with a vacillating movement as though in doubt whether its intended goal might be eyes or lips, and the black figure passed from the room to have out her cry or her laugh in solitude upstairs.

Henrik stood hat in hand by the door, a sympathetic giant bowing his head before the woe of the stranger, as in Sweden men stand uncovered on the footpath, remaining motionless until the funeral procession has passed.

“Have you never seen a foreigner before?” Emily asked of her sister in a hard, dry voice.

“Oh, plenty,” said Kate, in hysterical mirth, “but never one like that “You don’t care for the look of him?”

“Oh, my I he’s like the ogre out of a pantomime. How my poor dear would have taken him off I ” And then the fountain began to play once more.

Emily soothed her tenderly, but her eyes were dancing, and a gentle, peaceful smile for a moment lit up her broad face, while she patted the poor black widow on the back and stroked her thin white hand as it clasped the damp handkerchief convulsively.

“It seems, then, that you can’t bear the sight of him.”

“Who could?” said Kate.

“So much the better,” said Emily to herself, walking out of the house with head thrown back and light, strong footsteps. “I’m glad—I’m glad you’re of the same mind as the rest. So much, much, much the better for me,” and, buoyed up, wafted, floated along in the strong, bright current of these new happy thoughts of hers, she made for the hill-top without once looking behind her. The happy thoughts were all the companionship which she wanted this afternoon. She wished to be quite alone with them.

There was a chatter of birds and a wild swoop of swallows in the glorious, moving air; unseen larks were pouring out their songs of joy; the hart’s-tongues were stirring and whispering on the stone bank; the white surf dragged at the pebbles of the beach with the sound of merry, rattling laughter. Nothing seemed silent as Emily lay in her dry ditch on the hill-top and murmured over and over again, “My Northman, my Norseman, my sea-king, my Viking I”

Over her head the clean sweet wind whistled its brave spring tune; no longer a troublesome, weary air, but a melodious march of triumph, with a prevailing, overbearing swing in it to draw all happy thoughts in the path of its lark-like shrillness.

“Oh, wise-prevailing, steady-aiming south - west wind, now I know your secret at last I” said Emily. “How long have I listened to your hurrying march without guessing the reason of so much haste? Speed on, good wind, to your north-east goal, to your northeast home, I will follow you when I may. See you have blown my head right round on my shoulders, like a weather-cock or a mill-tail. I have turned my back on this pigmy slope, on these mean little dwarfs which call themselves cliffs, on this dull, sordid prison of my birthland, and, like you, I am speeding home to the free North-Bast/

And as Emily chattered to the wind in this strange fashion, she did indeed rise and turn, and, sitting on the margin of the ditch with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, she began to stare at the stone bank, which, being just in front of her eyes, prevented her in truth from seeing the path of the whistling breeze even so far as across the nearest field.

“Let me see his home,” said Emily to herself in a whisper, “he has told me so much that I can surely see it if I want to. Yes—out of the waves it is rising now, higher and clearer, the sea-washed shore of his island home. The hills are on the mainland. This, with the deep blue sound sweeping between, is Kunshog-hagen. That is Solberga—a grey heap of rocks and stone, castle and cliff—the sea-wolves lair of Solberga. How many miles away from Runs hog? Twenty? Then how clear your air, my King! Farther away than Lundy—which only showed like a ghost in our dull mists. The stone pier, the wall, the steps cut in the rock, I see them. Now the wood; ash and birch and larch, even to the water’s edge—as you said—under the boughs there is a carpet of flowers just now—blue hepatica, yellow and white anemones, sweet violets and wood sorrel and—and Majblotnme—you see I am fast learning your sprak—and when we walk in it, you and I, by moonlight, the young leaves of the birches will fling wide their wonderful jasmine perfume, and the Naktergals will sing round us in circles of song, to frighten away the trolles and the sprites, who are the freeholders of the island and from whom you hold as man-tenant only. ... Ah I there is the little church with its wooden tower and its night-cap roof of green copper tiles—how the vane flashes in your Northern sunlight! Here are the stone barns—here at last, is the wide verandah, the emerald green shutters, the bright red and dazzling white of roof and walls in your smart new-built house! ”

She certainly saw a good deal more than her neighbours would have seen had they been attempting to stare through a stone wall.

“It was the home of your sea-king fathers, the fierce Viking land from which you used to come forth —you sea-wolves—you sea-dragons, with your dragon prows to your dragon ships. You made the sea red with blood, you blackened the land with fire. Wherever your keels grounded, red, rending Death sprang to land; and you spread like the flames of hell let loose—devouring, consuming.

“Nothing could withstand your conquering fury. Nothing was sacred in the red glare of your terrible eyes. The brazen crosses of the priests sank and melted beneath the heat of your feet, the banners of the saints shrivelled, and the martyrs’ fanes went up in smoke. Your gods were the lightning, the thunder, and the wild winds, and you and your gods prevailed. For centuries we quailed and fled at the mere sound of your name. Even here in Cornwall, which I don’t think you ever reached—never having heard of it no doubt—we used to go over the moor and hide in the forests for a week or two, if anyone whispered a hint of your being on the move.”

Emily had turned round again and her breath came short and fast, her face glowed and her eyes danced, while she chattered away to herself and the inattentive swallows.

“The worst of you was that you continued your sea-raids long after peaces were proclaimed and tributes had been paid. Private bands of you, pirate gangs, limited companies still prowled upon the ocean and burst upon the land. You were women-stealers! That was your favourite wickedness.

“Men just like you, my red king, would break through the surf on yellow sands and carry us off. You would pinion our poor bare legs round knees and ankles, and run away with us, splashing back to your boats, while we bit and screeched and writhed in your giant arms, tore at your red locks and your red beards, while you laughed at us for trying to hurt you. Down in the bottom of your boats you cast us—to struggle and twist and turn like caught flsh or snared fowl—while you bent your great backs to the oars and bounded away to the Dragonhead, which was standing on and off, in waiting outside the breakers. How long used we to struggle and moan in those old days, I wonder? How long was it ere we twisted ourselves on to our rope-bound knees, to kiss the backs of your rough hands as sign of submission, and to say: Loose our limbs now. You have pinioned our hearts, you men of the wild North-East/

“You were men. At your worst, you were men. And I think you were kind to us. You were never wolves to us. And we made good wives. We rubbed the blood-rust from the axe, we kept your spears bright, we burnt your meat to your liking, we saved the skins and cured them, and we bore you litters of fierce sea cubs to prowl the seas in their turn. We have always been good wives to you, my Henrik.

“That is what I shall tell you when you speak about it," said Emily, showing her teeth and smiling.

“I think if you had come with me this afternoon you would have spoken your mind. And now I have had time to collect the words, I am ready to answer you. You are the mate for me and I am the mate for you: because I am I, and because you are you. I am yours and you are mine. The wild sea gave you to me. The wild gods answered my prayer; the Thunder, Lightning and the Storm, the staunch, strong gods of your fathers had mercy on me in my great want, and flung you at my feet. No need to brand you, my own, with cross or initial; the gods have marked you enough in the hour when they made you mine."

Then, as though she had caught the trick from her sister, Emily began to dab her eyes with her pocket-handkerchief; and, looking at her watch through her tears, was some little while ere she realized that it was already what the children call half-past tea-time.

Hastening downward, with head thrown back and with light, springing footsteps, she was soon in the path above the farm. As she unlatched the gate and looked down into the sunlit garden, she saw the great Swede sitting in the sunlight. His straw hat lay at his feet, his head was bare; he had put down a book in order to fill and light his huge briar pipe—to solace himself in his loneliness. Then a thin, black shadow fell across the sunlight.

Sister Kate had brought her tear-stained eyes and black streamers out into the garden; and, perhaps stung with remorse after her rude speeches, or merely wanting to be polite to the visitor in the absence of his hostess, she crept across to the garden bench, and sat down. _ Evidently she was trying to make amends; for, in a few moments, when the pipe was filled, Emily saw that Kate had herself struck the match and was guarding the flame with her almost transparent hands.

IV

The clear air was bringing a fitful rose-colour to Kate’s white face; the good food and the good sleep were apparently filling out her hollow cheeks. Kate was slowly growing more like her old self. The handkerchief had less work to do. The fountain of tears played at longer and longer intervals.

Meantime, Emily was going about her housework again, her sick nursing at an end. Henrik, strong on his wrenched ankles, free from twinges of his strained back, healed of all his wounds, losing the last discolorations of all his bruises, was able to go about his business. To Bristol often, to London once or twice, to Plymouth went Henrik attending to his affairs, winding up the enterprise of his partners; but back to Sweden Henrik did not go. The farm drew and held him still. The moment the object of each journey was attained, he hurried back to the farm to resume his life as the paying-guest.

The evenings at the farm-house when Henrik returned—in a new suit of clothes once or twice— with newspapers and magazines and boxes of sweets for the ladies and cigars for the host—were now quite lively. Kate was still rude to the guest: cracking her little Cockney jests at his expense, mocking him with the shop-floor humour which she had inherited from her dead shopman —“taking off,” as she would have called it, his gestures, his singing voice and his pronunciation. “You are easily amused,” Emily said once. “To you who cannot speak a word of any language but your own,

I should have thought a foreigner talking perfect English would have been a surprise—something for admiration rather than sneers.’

“Oh, my dear I” cried smiling Kate, “it’s only my fun. He doesn’t mind it, so why should you?”

And indeed he did not seem to mind it.

Are you going to sing us the Wafe to-night?” Kate would say.

“Do you wish the Wafe again?” Henrik would ask, with obvious gratification.

“Oh, I shall never be tired of the Wafe,” Kate would reply. “It is so lively. It cheers up Father too—doesn’t it, Dad?”

Then, throwing back his head and staring at the ceiling reflectively, the guest would, after a pause, in stentorian tones, sing them his continental ditty—an English version of the famous song of the Wave.

“A wafe is our life,
It svells for a day,
In trouble and strife,
In bupples and sbray;
Bot night will restore
Sweet rest to the zeas,
And then t’vards the shore
The Wafe sinks in eaze,” etc., etc.

“Oh, oh, oh I” Kate would cry, rocking herself in laughter which she made no effort to control. “You really are too killing. Betfer than a play, isn’t he, Dad? You’d make your fortune at a music-hall. Dan Leno isn’t in it with you.”

The old father, after rubbing his knees and chuckling, would applaud boisterously. A good Briton—the old fellow might have explained—it always tickled him to see a foreigner make an ass of himself; and anything which amused his poor woe-begone lass and kept the white handkerchief out of sight was welcome. But Emily, engrossed by her book, neither laughed nor applauded. “I don’t think it is really a comic song,” she said once, glancing up from her page.

No,” said Henrik. “In Sweden it ever makes to cry.

“And it has made me cry,” said Kate, wiping her eyes. I never supposed it was intentionally comical. That’s what makes it so killing, but don't mind me.”

He did not mind her rudeness in the least.

Will you have it once more?” he would ask of Kate. Shall I make you laugh again?” he would ask, greedy to obtain an encore.

You see,” said Kate to Emily, after one of these musical evenings, my nonsense appears to suit him. He seems to like my rudeness, as you call it, for he always comes back for more.”

Emily went about the house-work with slow, heavy footfall and downcast, brooding face. Of an evening she would sit by the window in her own room till the tardy darkness drove her down to the lamplight and the gaiety of the parlour. Here she would mind her book in a corner, and contribute little to the merriment of the party. Now and again she would appeal to the guest for a moment’s aid in a difficulty or a doubt. She continued to work at her Swedish grammar and dictionary, making a dogged, steady progress, although in truth she had lost interest in her task since her viva voce lessons with Henrik had come to an end. But English sprak and Swedish sprak are one sprak, as Henrik had said, quoting the old proverb of Ethelred’s Court; so it was easy work, and it passed the time.

“How can you go churning over such crackjaw stuff?” Kate asked unsympathetically. “What can be the use of it?”

“Use of it?” said the old farmer, taking up a favourite cue. “Use of it? Ask her an easier one, my girl. Why, year in, year out, she goes on cramming and stuffing her silly head with such rubbish as crazes me to look at the outside of. Improving her mind! And yet, what said his Lordship to me in the nine-acre field?”

And then Kate perhaps regretted that she had thus drawn her father into the conversation.

Of hot oppressive afternoons Emily took her brooding thoughts with her for a resolute tramp along the lanes, or on the coach road over the moor. She never took them up to the tower or along the cliff top. She often met the rector’s daughter, and the pair would stand talking together for a few minutes, and after a little questioning and answering, would touch on any general matters which might be termed food for reflection.

" Then your visitor will be soon leaving you?”

“In about a fortnight, I believe,” Emily replied.

“And it was all nonsense what people said about his being a nobleman in disguise?”

“Oh, utter nonsense,” said Emily.

“He made no mystery himself, I suppose? It was only village talk? He didn’t pretend to be better than he was; made his position clear from the first?”

“Oh, quite from the first,” said Emily.

“I’m so glad,” said the rector’s daughter. “It is so horrid to be deceived by anybody. But he speaks good English, doesn’t he? He had no difficulty in making himself understood?”

“Oh, not in the least,” said Emily. “If anybody had misunderstood him, it would have been their fault, not his.”

“Exactly,” said the rector’s daughter. Then having reached the end of her questions—“By the way, have you ever considered theosophic Buddhism—considered it seriously, I mean?”

“No,” said Emily.

“I am taking it up. I begin to think there’s something in it. It does really seem to offer something solid—something to lean upon.”

“Really?” said Emily.

“When I was in London two months ago, I took up Christian science. My hostess was a staunch believer. But I found there was nothing in that—simply nothing at all.”

“So I have been led to suppose,” said Emily.

“It is odd,” said the rector’s daughter. “But I conjecture that it is a human need—not to be evaded, I mean—the craving for some sort of religious belief. Of course that’s at the bottom of it all—all creeds, all superstitions—the longing for something to lean upon. Now Buddha-”

But Emily, excusing herself, turned and plodded onward with her brooding thoughts.

Then suddenly she turned again, and calling after the rector’s daughter, said in a strong, hard voice—

“Take my advice. Don’t lean on any of them—the new gods, or the old gods. They are all the same. If you lean on them they’ll let you down.”

And with a laugh which startled the rector’s daughter, so loud and harsh and unlike her usual subdued tones was it, Emily plodded on.

Emily was making the clotted cream, alone with her thoughts, in the dark, cool dairy, when Kate, the widow, came and began to sob on Emily’s shoulder, and to cling with her thin, weak arms about Emily’s neck.

“Oh, oh, oh! Do you think he will mind—my poor dear up in heaven? Do you think he’ll think it’s too soon? Think I have forgotten him?”

Emily kissed the thin, white cheeks, stroked the long, black streamers gently, and patted the thin, weak arms soothingly, caressingly.

“I don’t think he will know. I don’t think he will mind,” said Emily.

“Once he told me he would never wish me to remain a widow; but that was long ago, before he guessed that he was really going to go. . . Oh, oh, oh! I don’t know what to do. Emily, dear, you are so strong and so good, do help me, do be kind to me.”

“I am, dear—as kind as I know how.”

“What shall I do, then? I’m all alone in the world, I haven’t the health to go back to my work in town, and I don’t want to be a drag for ever on you and Dad . . and, really, this great fellow seems as though he won’t take No for an answer.”

And through the tears a misty, but coquettish smile lit up the weak, vain, hollow-cheeked face of Kate the desirable—Kate, the still desired.

There were, of course, no bridesmaids, and veil and orange blossom could not be worn; but the wedding, although so quiet, as the phrase goes, attracted considerable interest. The rector himself officiated, and the church was nearly full, the congregation being almost entirely composed of the softer sex. The rector’s daughter honoured the ceremony by her presence, and, in a red Gainsborough hat and a white muslin frock, looked exceedingly dignified and graceful as she stood quite alone and by herself in the right-hand front pew. Sarah, the flirt, drawn over the hill by uncontrollable curiosity and an overwhelming love at all seasons of that which she herself called “gape-seed,’ was not in good looks, and attracted many stern glances as she sat gaping in a side aisle.

The happy pair left the farm early in the afternoon, crossing the moor in a hired landau on their way to the north of Europe.

“And there,” said Emily, standing in the porch, listening to the lessening noise of the carriage wheels —“there,” said Emily—“there goes my last chance.”

V.

Every year in early spring, from Morvenstowe to the Land’s End, there is a fight between the southwest and the north-east winds. The north-easter comes blustering down from the icefields, sweeps due south over Finland and Russia, and, as the limitless steppes spin faster and faster beneath its feet, it staggers in its march, takes its easting, and with uncertain lurch falls upon its waiting foe. The sou’wester has waited high above the spinning ocean, and it swoops down strong on the wing and steady of aim to fight its annual duel, to do battle on the land which it has made its own, and slowly, perhaps, but very surely, to drive back the blustering intruder. The duel may be long or short, but the south-west wind prevails from Saltash to the Lizard.

Two such contests had occurred since the wind had wafted Kate away along its well-worn path, and now, when Emily’s name was mentioned, the rector’s daughter was tapping her freckled forehead with her forefinger.

“She cannot, she really cannot be all there,” said the rector’s daughter. “She cuts me—dead. She affected to take umbrage at some remark of mine—a mere pleasantry. And now, I assure you, she looks at me with a lack-lustre eye as though, positively, she did not see one.”

“You surprise me,” said the new curate. “We get our cream and milk from the farm, and my dear wife has been impressed by her as a most capable woman. She has even given advice, of the soundest, about the treatment of our chicks. In sickness my dear, tender-hearted helpmate is quick to take alarm about her darlings.”

“Nevertheless, she is not right. She cannot be quite right,” said the rector’s daughter, authoritatively. “Her conduct with regard to that girl, Sarah, was the conduct of a mad woman—reprehensible is a feeble word I”

“Ah, yes. All that was before my time,” said the new curate.

Buddha was also before his time. But Buddha had been laid on the shelf since his arrival, and his rector’s daughter was once more taking an interest in the established faith, and lending a helping hand in church and parish work.

He was a married man with a bustling little wife and a large family. He was heavy and rather bald; his black waistcoat bulged wide above his kneed and shiny trousers, but he was, it had been found, a true saint, a whole-hearted soul, a strong, clear lamp of intellect—in a word, something undoubtedly solid to lean upon.

“I will certainly take occasion to speak a few words to the father, since you desire it,” said the curate.

“Change of air? Change of fiddlesticks I” said the old farmer, testily, when the curate had performed his office of practical, as well as ghostly, counsellor. “Where be un to find better air than th’ air of hereabouts? Ask Rector or his Lordship.”

“Nevertheless change is sometimes salutary-”

Her place is here, and in her place she’ll bide,” said the old man, stoutly. . Company, friends? She’s got me, and that little maid of hers to chatter to. She’s improving her mind now,” and the old fellow chuckled. I’ll take care she don’t improve mine.”

Then he said gravely, as the curate lingered.

“I thank you kindly, sir, but my good girl is all right in her health. ’Tis her sister that was the weak one from the first. We’ve but sad accounts of her, poor lass. ’Tis a cruel climate up there—cruel cold winters. She makes the best of it. She’s made her bed and she must lie on it. But my Emily, as is natural, frets to think of her sister ailing and alone among foreigners whose tongue she can’t speak. She isn’t to be expected to have a laughing face for strangers when her own flesh and blood-”

“Why don’t you send her, just for the change, to be with her sister?”

“Why don’t you mind your own business?” roared the farmer, unexpectedly, adding other remarks which occasioned a coldness betweeo the curate and himself, and precluded all idea of further visits.

Emily was a little wild in her talk on occasions, with a grim humour of which the point was not always easy to detect,'and she asked questions of her little maid which were troublesome to answer. But this was only when she was quite alone with Sarah. To her father, and to everybody else, she was the subdued, sensible, plodding Emily of old days, and nobody but the rector’s daughter could possibly have supposed that her mental balance was in the slightest degree unhinged; but with Sarah, when nobody was by, she did go on in a way which Sarah found difficult to follow.

In the dairy, for instance, she would talk to Sarah in Swedish throughout a long summer morning, although well knowing that Sarah was an ignoramus who could not by any possibility understand.

“Oh, miss. How you do run onl” poor Sarah would say piteously. In spite of her gratitude she found such one-sided conversations wearisome.

She had good cause for gratitude; and she was indeed grateful.

When her careless, flirting career had been checked and the Red Lion, following the example set by her aunt, had cast her adrift, things went very badly with Sarah. So badly that, under the dark cloud of local disfavour and the difficulty of obtaining a comfortable domestic situation, she had made a feeble, half-hearted attempt to hang herself in her undarned stockings. But the stockings bursting all down the seam, from the ribbing to the heel, she tumbled somehow into the strong arms of Emily who, to the great scandal of the neighbourhood, persuaded the farmer to find room at the farm both for Sarah—and her little niece.

“Sarah,” Emily would say suddenly, “would I do for a barmaid?”

“Oh no, miss. The men would be afeard of you—that is, until they found out your good heart, miss.”

“Ah I Sarah I did you enjoy flirting?”

“Oh yes, miss. That is, until I got too much of it.”

“Of course,” said Emily. “We all feel that Enough is as good as a feast. Sarah, there ought to be a big cheval glass behind the stove, so that we could see ourselves.”

“Yes, miss.”

You admire my beautiful red hair, don't you, Sarah?”

“Yes, miss. It’s not so much the colour as I like, but you have such a plenty of it.”

If you don’t fancy me as a barmaid, Sarah, how do you think I should be as a princess?”

Oh, miss-”

A princess, I said. Don’t grin. Didn’t you know I was descended from one. . . Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years ago, an ancestress of mine dwelt in this very spot as princess of all the land. She was exceedingly beautiful, but very haughty and wilful. Oh, so dreadfully hard to please when the time came to find her a suitable mate She had the same brilliant red hair as mine, and was of my build: statuesque, don’t you know. It has always been said in our family that I am very like what she must have been. Well, attracted by rumours of her beauty, suitors came from far and near; dark princes, fair princes; princes from every point of the compass—in a tearing hurry to woo and win her—one, because the winds were contrary and his fleet dared not put to sea, swam here; crawled to land at her feet, like a dolphin or a walrus, while she strolled on the sea-shore taking the evening air. But she was too haughty and wilful —none pleased her. She was too hard to please.” “Oh, miss, how you do go on.”

“Do I?” Emily would say, passing her hand across her broad sunburnt brow. “Why don’t you go on too? Go on with your work I say. Don’t stand gaping at me.”

VI

It was an enervating summer. There was very little air from off the water by day, or from off the land by night; and during the dragging months everybody in this corner of North Cornwall seemed to be trying to wriggle away, at any cost to get from under the oppressive burden of the hot cloudless skies. It seemed as though Emily and her father would soon be left quite alone among strange faces.

First, the coastguardsman and his wife and brood of sturdy youngsters went—to another station miles away; then Sarah left, to get married, if you please, to the postman who had gone before to Bodmin (Sarah always loved town life!) to prepare the bridal nest—the snug little home for his young wife and his adopted daughter. Then the new curate went, after very great unpleasantness, as the gossips said, quite unexpectedly, without giving his new address, and leaving his wife and family behind him.

Then the rector's daughter left, in order to pay a long visit to some blood relations or connections by marriage. Her hosts, said the gossips, were probably rolling stones, because she did not appear to have given any explicit directions as to letters or parcels, and it seemed to worry her father when you tackled him on the subject. “The Rectory, to be forwarded," the gossips said, would no doubt be the safest superscription for the present.

What with so many people going and the new railway coming, there was plenty to talk about that summer, said the gossips.

The season of depressing autumn brought no break in the extreme heat. There was really no air to breathe in the lanes, and very little on the moor. One was almost driven to the cliff top in one’s struggle to fill one’s lungs.

It was three years since Emily had climbed the grass slope and stood beneath the rocket tower or walked along the ridge where the stone bank and the dry ditch marked the division between the close-cropped pasture and the rich ploughlands, and to-day she had taken the old path almost unconsciously. It was about half past tea-time as the children say, and on the cliff top there were neither children nor grown-ups. The swallows and swifts and martins, who keep no regular hours for their meals but take a snack whenever they, can, were busy hawking high and low. Emily, crouching down in her old lair, rested her head upon her arms, stretched forward on the parched ground, and idly listened to the shrill voices of the insects and the low, dull grumble of the earth itself, crackling and bursting from the heat in wonderful microscopic eruptions, landslips and earthquakes.

Through the five bars of the field gate, she saw, almost without seeing, the burnt umber of the parched grass slopes down to the hidden cliffs, yellow sands in a rocky bay, and the silent sea showing a vitreous glitter through a copper gauze of mist. So she lay without stirring, so long that the swallows swooped close to her hands, and then with the rush of their wings, the swifts began to fan her face.

Then, of a sudden, there rose above the grass slope, a round red disk. It was like a great pumpkin rolled up by an unseen arm; but Emily knew at once that it was'a man's head. Almost immediately, shoulders and chest rose above the sky line. It was a big man in a blue suit, carrying his hat in his hand. It was Henrik.

He was sitting by her side and talking, but his strong voice was pitched low: his words ran into each other, forming a deep continuous whisper as of distant waves whose beat upon a distant shore mingled with the murmur of a far-off storm. She was hardly trying to listen to the words themselves.

She was thinking of all kinds of things, fancies, facts, and far-away memories, while with her chin in her hands she stared into the stone-faced bank; and yet she understood. Her voice answered his; her lips formed and uttered questions unbidden by her brain.

“She pined for her home ... in spite of all you could do? Yes, I know, I know-”

Again, as once before, the rocky slope rose from the waters. Steps cut deep, a wooden guard rail, stunted oaks, and ragged pines among the boulders on the shore. For a moment she saw her clearly; poor, frail, fading prisoner in her island prison; childless, fretting, miserable; stretching transparent hands with feeble, yearning gestures—poor child of our narrow land, adopted daughter of lamplit streets and the gay shop windows, longing in sick nostalgic despair for the crude joys, the vacant jests, the shallow thoughts, the tawdry glitter and the tinsel glow, of the London pavements—thinking your eternal sleep welcome, if only you might be soothed to rest in the arms of your foster-mother!

“But she did not suffer at the last? You are sure of that?” asked Emily’s voice.

“She wished you to have these.”

He had been untying a parcel: methodically, carefully, he had unwound the two long pieces of string with which, in neat, trim, sailor fashion, he had fastened the wrapper about the little box.

“Her trinkets. Those which she had before. Those which I gave after: and this for you to wear as she did always next her skin, if so you cared—for memory of her—and not as a symbol or a sign. . She said that. It was from her first husband."

A tiny gold cross on a thin gold chain. Poor Kate!

In a flash of memory the little shrivelled shopman stood chattering and grimacing before her. Cracker of cheap jokes, bubbling over with shop-floor cynicism, yet at heart a thrall to a worn-out superstition; capering, grinning, counter-jumping cockney sceptic, but saying his h-less prayers and pouring out his soul in a broad vowelled, twangy transport of secretly guarded faith. What a revelation!

“I want you to understand," he was saying. He had been talking for a long time—“It was a mistake. I am sorry."

Emily was playing with the two bits of twine and staring at the stones. He was .speaking in Swedish now.

“When I was a little fellow wanting a little boat to sail, my uncle gave me money to buy it and sent me in the steamer to Ooteborg, to the great bazaar. There was the boat I longed for. It was the first thing I saw when I came in through the door—the little toy-boat of all my dreams. But I did not buy it . . . Listen .—I wish you to listen. I wish you to understand.

“There was a butterfly-toy—a butterfly-toy which the woman wound up—and it fluttered like a live thing up and up to the glass roof of the shop. So I bought that instead. At home I flew it once or twice into the air and then it broke. That is your lesson/ said my uncle.”

Emily was crouching down, playing with one of the pieces of string.

“It was my lesson. But it was not sufficient. I have learned my lesson once more. It is sufficient. Do you believe?”

But Emily did not answer. She was playing with the other piece of string.

“You will come now as I pray—you will not punish me. Because you are you, you will forgive. If you understand, you can pardon. Listen,” said the red Swede in strong, clear tones, “I have come to fetch you home to marry me in Ktinshog Church on St Luke’s day.

“But it would not be a real marriage,” Emily faltered. “I should not be truly your wife—your dead wife’s sister.”

“In Sweden yes,—by Swedish law. It is only here that your stupid laws would keep us apart.”

Now this was one of the things which Emily did not know.

“You will come!” cried the red Swede. “Ah! What have you done? . . Silly! You have tied the string about your ankles so tight it will hurt you.

And round your knees too, till your dress will be torn. How silly I” And he drew out his big clasp knife. “Such a tangle of landsmanvs knots I cannot undo without cutting-”

“That’s right,” said Emily, struggling on to her knees in a clumsy fashion, and taking his unoccupied hand to steady herself. “Unloose my bonds. Unloose my bonds, you man of the wild North-East.”

VII

Emily was sitting on a ledge of basalt by the water’s edge in her island home. The rocks were bright with golden lichen; tufts of wild pansy, ragged-robin, and weeping fern hung and trailed amidst the loose stones at her feet; through the wind-wrenched branches of the low oaks and scraggy pines the sloping sun sent amber rays; and over the rocks and under the trees, flitting from sunlight into shadow, hiding and seeking, and laughing and shouting, her brood of sturdy yodhgsters sported to and fro by the margin of the waves.

“Hark!” cried Henrik, the eldest of the boys, a stout and almost truculent urchin. “The whistle of the Goteborg boat! Pather is on his way. And hark again—the bells for evening service! ”

The summons of the bells, beginning to swing in the wooden tower of the little church, floated above their heads.

Mamma is thinking/’ said Emily, the eldest of the sisters. She does not hear the bells. It would be wrong to disturb her. And perhaps she does not wish us to go to church this evening.”

Then the children went on with their game.

She was deep in her peaceful, contented thoughts. For the moment she did not hear their strong young voices, or see their sturdy little forms as they leapt and flitted from the tree shadows to the sunlit rocks. She was thinking—and as she thought she smiled—of the winds and the waves; of the warm gulf stream; of the great equatorial air currents, sucked down from the poles and rising and soaring and then swooping on their way home to the vast icefields where they were born; of drifting logs, with seeds of plants in envelopes of clay, crossing half the globe to find a new home to live in. She was thinking, and smiling when she thought, of the incredible hazards, the waves, the winds, the rocks; deadly gas in overheated and draughty London shops; long hours, late hours, rare food, poor food, etc.—the work of destruction, the work of preservation, the infinitely complex series of wonderful chances that had culminated in her own most happy union.

And behind—guiding the blown seed, the drifting, helpless, human hearts on the doomed ship—surely something? . . Nothing?,

The sound of the Sunday bells had ceased, the music of the harmonium was floating overhead; then came the voices beginning to sing the evening hymn.

“You little rogues!” cried Emily, angrily, as she sprang to her feet and began to drive her rather shamefaced brood. “Be off. To your prayers. Henrik! Emily! what do you mean by it? You must have heard the bells.”

THE BLUE CARD

Mrs Grbbk-Lory was a widow, and a rich one to boot. Being quite free, she ought to have been as happy as any bright-plumaged bird on a sunny, sea-guarded southern isle; content to fly and flaunt her fine feathers, to ruffle and strut and soar and swoop from hour to hour; without fear of the cage, without care for the fowler. When she looked at herself in one of her pretty, costly, old Dresden china mirrors, she was pleased to observe that the description of the choice piece of furniture in the sale catalogue really might have been written about herself. It fitted her so exactly. Most chaste and elegant; marvellously well-preserved specimen; positively shows no sign of coarse or careless usage; and obviously has passed from the loving hands of one collector into those of another, until it became the property of the late- A rare opportunity which should not be missed, etc. etc. She liked to look at herself in the glass, and she liked to see herself in the newspapers. “Mrs Partridge was driving, Mrs Peacock was walking, and Mrs Green-Lory was perched upon the box seat of Lord P. Tircelet’s drag,” and that sort of thing.

She was reading the fashionable intelligence in her paper now, all about some people who were going to give a party, and who seemed extremely anxious that guests should make no mistake about the address, the time when their company was craved, and the precise hour at which their room would prove more valuable. “It should be carefully noted that the blue card is to be retained to the last moment, and then handed to the fat policeman stationed for that purpose immediately to the east or west side of the north or south' garden gate, as the case may be,” said the newspaper in conclusion.

“The blue card will not trouble me,” she said to herself, with a smile. “For this year it seems I have received a hint to stay away, instead of my hitherto usual invitation.” Then she went out to pay a round of visits.

“This blue card is an innovation, I fancy,” said her first hostess. “I know someone will hide mine, and I sha’n’t be able to find it at the last moment, and will be turned away from the door by the corpulent custodian. Do be careful of your blue card.” I

“I have not been honoured by a card of any colour this time,” she said lightly.

Oh, but how odd! How very extraordinary! Oh!” cried the hostess volubly, it is simply some stupid mistake—or yours is to come later—you are on some second-thought list or some queer arrangement like that. Meantime, if you have any curiosity to see the card itself, it is over there—on the piano.”

“I have not the least curiosity,” she replied, with a laugh, and continued her round.

“You do not happen to have this new-fangled blue card in your pocket, do you?” said the second hostess. Because I should like to put yours beside mine and see if they tally exactly. I am puzzled by the little scriggly bit of advice in one of the corners. But my careless servants appear to have hidden mine already. Oh no, there it is leaning against the face of the clock on the mantel-piece.” Then she explained again.

Oh, I know I am a Tory,” said the third hostess, and I do hate all changes, all breaking up of old associations: something different, don’t you know, to what one has grown accustomed to through a long course of years. This new blue card, for instance! Didn’t it make you a wee bit sad when you received yours—looking almost purposely different? But where has the thing hidden itself? I do think invitation cards and railway tickets sometimes are bewitched. They disappear—no, I see it now—in the middle of the gilt frame I”

Then once more she explained matters.

Wherever she went she saw blue cards. She was haunted by them all through the pleasant summer afternoon. They had drifted into the strangest and most out-of-the-way places in that process of hiding themselves, which appeared to be universally dreaded. They had hidden in the hall, on the marble slab meant for hats and gloves; on the top tier of cake tables; as markers for the beautiful passage in the new book from the library, to which your critical attention was drawn. But, though the languid eyes of their owners could not discern them, she saw them at once, quite plainly.

She laughed long and almost shrilly at the advice which several friends together tendered at tea-time. “What? Ask to be asked to a party because one is not invited? What a truly comic notion! That would be something new indeed.” You see, her friends would not drop the subject; canvassing it among themselves, in the exuberance of their friendship; telling new-comers who happened also to be friends of her; and even seeking sympathy from strangers, in their friendly indignation. They were thoroughly indignant, whereas she did not mind a bit. They simply could not support the notion, while she was merely amused. You could divine that, from the sparkle in her eyes and her rippling, slightly shrill laughter.

“But I do say she ought to make some move, take some step, bring some pressure to bear,” one said. Exactly I” cried another. Not submit in silence to a mistake which might be construed into an affront.” I envy you your philosophy—not to be upset; just to laugh and not care a bit. For I frankly confess I could not brook it. It would keep me awake at night. That is, I think it would. I cannot say for certain, for the simple reason that it has never happened to me. ... It is not as though they were giving a concert, or a ball; where space is, after all, limited—but a garden party. Great heaven I a garden of such gigantic proportions—room and to spare for everybody who is anybody I Not to be included in such an omnium gatherum is nothing short of insulting—a rebuff—an outrage.”

That was how it struck all these fine ladies—her old friends.

“What is the topic, fair lady?” said an old fellow—the only man present—drawing his chair so close that his bony old knees touched and pressed upon her muslin skirts. Then she explained again—lightly, easily:

“Oh, the old order changes—Autre temps, autre moeurs I I always was asked—till now.” There was, perhaps, the faintest touch of seriousness in her musical, but shrill whisper. This leering, gaudy, unduly confidential, old buck was old Sir Nicholas Pangote—a famous old cavalry general, a well-known old dandy; one who could, as it happened, from his acquaintance with the party-givers and those about them, put the matter right—with a word. He was one of her admirers—a rather too loudly expressed admirer. He had a tuft on his chin, and slits of eyes which had a trick of looking their greedy, gluttonous altogether excessive, admiration of female loveliness, from under their heavy, puffy lids, which now and then caused displeasure—in debutantes. She was not a debutante, but she recoiled a very little from the baleful fire which came through the narrow slits.

“I can only say, if it was my party,” he whispered, “I’d as soon think of leaving out the—the band, or the ices, or the luscious, delicious, intoxicating, tipsy cakes,” and he leered in horrible delight at having said something, as he fancied, very pretty.

Then she drove away, with a fixed smile on her lips, in her small emerald green and yellow brougham. With the high-stepping greys, brass harness, orange and claret liveries, and the small white panels on the doors, one always knew her brougham. Without being in the least outré it was just sufficiently noticeable for that. She drove away, and, as it chanced, all along the nice straight road by the side of the long—the immensely long—wall of the very garden they had been talking about. The wall frowned upon her forbiddingly, throwing its cold shadow upon her, and swamping all the sparkle and glitter of her gay little equipage. There were cruel spikes on top of the great, unseeing, blankly staring wall. “My goodness! Do they think Til try to climb over?” she said to herself, with really a scream of merriment. The majestic trees in the garden seemed to nod their heads, and to beckon with their gnarled but still leafy old fingers. The windows in the white forehead of the house itself, as it just showed above the wall, shone like friendly glowing eyes in the light of the slanting sun. Mentally, she had already leapt the wall, and memory had filled the garden, as for one of the parties to which she had been bidden in the past, by the late tenant, before the new people had taken possession. “How de do! how de do I how de do I Here we all are again!” Yes. There was the grenadier band, there the other band, there the carpet and the tent. And here is the lake, not run dry yet! and here, those sweet, quaint dears of watermen in their red, with their badge. And here-

“Hush! Don't you see? "—where the well-dressed mob is elbowing and shoving so frantically. Here, at last, comes slowly driving, slowly crunching the gravel, with thrilling, never-to-be-forgotten sound of wheels, our gracious, kind old hostess. .

With another shrill scream —certainly not of merriment this time—the lady in the brougham began to beat upon the glass behind the tall footman, to tear and pull at the leather window band, to drum upon the rug with her high heels, to writhe and twist in her tight corsets, to splutter and to gasp, and to catch her breath in a fit of hysterical tears. “Home, home,” she contrived to shriek, through the open window to the footman. “No, the other way. Don’t let him turn. Not by the wall again.”

She was haunted by day and by night. She saw the thing, or fancied that she saw it everywhere; blue-bound books in shop windows, blue flowers in baskets on the pavement, blue patches of sky through the branches of trees; a great trellis screen in Park Lane, with squares of the very size, making hundreds and hundreds of the blue cards, set diagonally, and seeming more precious than any other diamonds. She could not eat, she could not sleep; she suffered torments, and the music of her laughter was becoming like the cadence of fifes or the swealing of the pibroch. Then at last one afternoon, Herbert, the taller of her two footmen, came crawling with a large official-looking envelope on a salver. No stamp, but red ink in corner! Paid,” or something! Positively she could not see, as, with trembling Angers, she tore open the packet, and the cards which she had been pining for seemed to fall out upon her lap. The thick white card—the invitation itself—slid to the floor unheeded, with a smaller pink card. It was the blue card at which she clutched spasmodically, and yet could not see with clearness. She wiped her eyes with her little, perfumed, damp lace handkerchief, and prepared to read the words which already by much quotation were burnt into all the sensitive membranes of her feverish brain.

Oh torment of Tantalus! Oh mocking phantom from the infernal regions of baulked desires and thwarted hopes! What was this?

Tea ticket. Half-a-crown. BAZAAR. Cripples —only the eighth part of a sovereign. Spare this sum for the incurably infirm, and enjoy a cup of tea flavoured by Mercy and Charity.”

The counterfeit cards referred to the big bazaar at the Albert Hall.

All the servants were frightened. The maid upstairs ran to fetch the confidential old dame—housekeeper and watchdog—who had been her nurse years ago, and had ever since followed her fortunes.

The good old soul patted the twitching shoulders of her mistress, as she lay sprawling face downwards on the bed, writhing and sobbing and catching her breath, and tried to calm, to soothe her.

“There, there, there now, my poppet, my pet. What a silly, what a ninny, to take on so—about nothing! . No, no, no. Stuff! The work of years ain’t undone. . . Nonsense! You ain’t kicked down to the bottom of the ladder, with all to climb over again. Fiddle-de-dee! Gammon and spinach! Moonshine and marmalade. . What is it, after all, nowadays, when Tom, Dick and Harry is a’going? Why all the ’ooknoses goes regular. And even shop-keepers! Why, old Dips as owns the new company, I’m sure ain’t any more a real gentleman than your poor dear Pa was. God rest his soul!

“I don’t say, if it was to drop in friendly like, to pick a bit of luncheon, or ’ave a cup of tea. But to make one in a nerd like that. Where’s the compliment? If somebody was to come calling in his little brome, same as he done to No. I0 acrost the crescent—I don’t say. But this? No, no.”

That is how it struck this vulgar comforter—her old nurse. “There. Come, I shall get the doctor if you go on like this.”

But she knew the doctor could do her no good. He might give her a blue pill; he could not give her a blue card.

She recovered sufficiently to eat a little dinner t&te-H-tSte with her old guardian, who said, “You’ve got to stay quiet at home with them red eyes;” and who prattled of old days, snap dragon, blind man’s buff and nursery dancings, to divert her thoughts; who left her in the pretty boudoir, when she waddled off to bed, poor old soul! quite calm and almost cheerful.

But very late, near midnight, she broke down again, in her solitude—utterly, completely—worse than ever.

“Oh, oh, oh,” she howled. “It’s no good her talking and scolding. I’d sell my soul to old Nick to go there. ... Ah! what’s that?”

A sharp scream of the front-door electric bell was ringing through the silent house.

She stood motionless, staring wildly at the white panelled doors. Footsteps! Footsteps! Silence again. Then the footsteps, on the stone of the hall, on the carpet of the stairs, on the wood of the landing. The doors are flung open and the sleepy servant announces in an awe-struck whisper, “Sir Nicholas Pangote.”

“I have been entrusted with—at this late hour—permitted privilege—to bring you—these.

“Oh, oh, oh!” She is clinging to him, sobbing and panting on his bony old shoulder, in her complete loss of self-control. You old dear You old dear. You old dear!”

Ecstasy of relief. After all, she had got her wish without having lost her soul. Relief, and no ransom to pay! But no again. Not quite so fast.

“There, there, there, my precious, my pet,” says old Nick, as though he had caught the soothing trick from our now snoring Nana. “No such contretemps possible—if you place yourself in my hands entirely —such things as a matter of course—then. Concert, ball, all in due season—and dinner-party too—perhaps, I say perhaps dinner-party. Almost certainly dinner-party. . There, there! I think she has made a good bargain. One she will never regret.”

But she did regret that second marriage most bitterly. “Only once,” said Nana, “and that will be always,” although she tried to make the best of it. “Starves your soul, my poppet? Of course he does. But he don’t mean any unkindness by that. You see, he don’t believe you’ve got a soul—not you, nor nobody else—and I’m precious sure he ain’t got one hisself.”

SHADOW AND SUNSHINE

There was a shadow on the house.

Beneath the cloud of anxiety, familiar objects had a strange, ungenial aspect; there was no rest in easy-chairs; cosy corners looked bleak and cheerless; home was not home. The pleasures of the table had turned to pains, and the small talk of the dinner hour grew smaller and smaller, till silence fell upon the company—in presence of the empty chair.

By night, Dread Pear lay listening in dressing-gowns behind the bedroom doors; or slippered Panic shuffled down the dark corridors, and sister looked at sister, brother at brother, friend at friend, husband at wife to see, as in a glass, the terror in her own white face reflected. The only relief, the only relaxation of the strain was when the doctor paid his visit. There was Hope in the touch of his strong hand; Peace in the sound of his firm voice; Rest in the echo of his even footfall. They were riding out the gale after all. The doctor was their anchor; their cable was his skill. They were clustered helpless in the darkness of night on a storm-beaten coast; their loved one was at the mercy of the waves, in the breaking wreck. But the doctor was the cliff and the tower; the rocket and the line were his rescuing science, his succouring art.

They plucked at his coat, they caught at his sleeve, they clung to his arm, they hung upon his shoulder. The women sobbed their gratitude with streaming eyes; the men growled their trust in tones rendered rough by sternly repressed tears—“Ah, Doctor,forgive us. . . . You doctors are the priests of modern life. Your broughams are confessionals on wheels, and your stethescopes sound the lungs of the patient—but the hearts of the watchers round the bed.”

The flame in the lamp of Hope burnt bright when fed by the doctor’s presence, but it flickered when his broad back was turned. It waned and wavered on the smouldering wick of their brooding thoughts, till it nearly died out altogether in his long, long absence. .At night, when they sat with unread books in the cheerless rooms struggling to maintain conversation while they listened to the rain on the pavement, Pear crept to the hearth, and Panic lurked without, waiting for admission.

In whispers they wrestled with the silence of the house, scrupulously answering questions, carefully contributing isolated remarks. “Did you speak? No. Oddi I thought I heard someone whispering my name. How that clock ticks I I don’t know what you mean. See—the clock has stopped. Then it is your watch. I hear it now, distinctly. But I tell you I am not wearing my watch. I left it upstairs. . Then it must be one of those insects in the woodwork, I forget what they are called. . Hark I Footsteps overhead! They are moving about, something has gone wrong. . . . Oh, for mercy’s sake—Fetch the doctor I”

Once, thus summoned very late, he was in evening dress. He had hurried away from the scrape of the fiddle, the swing of the waltz, in answer to their call and was among them surprisingly quicker than they dared anticipate. “Oh, Doctor, forgive us!” He silenced their apologies with a grave and gentle gesture. Then, when he came down from the sickroom, he said, in effect—“Sleep, sleep soundly, hope, hope freely—The shadow is passing, slowly but surely, slowly, surely, as certainly and truly, as I am now passing down these stairs?”

They broke down then indeed. In the ecstasy of relief they became each a patient. He told one to take a pill, another a draught, a third a capsule. Even the nerves of the servants played them false under the good news, and hysteria reigned in the basement as well as in the boudoir. He was a round ten minutes with the cook, before he was at last free to return to the dance.

There was sunlight in the house.

The empty chair was filled—had been filled for many months by its proper occupant—and round the board the tongues wagged loud and fast. It was a family council: each spoke in turn; then all spoke together. The head of the house, at the head of the board, presided—with the doctor’s bill before him.

“Imposition! No other word for it. It is not the loss of the money, but the principle of the thing to which I object. Scandalous! I never would have believed it. . . .”

“It is not as if I had been in any danger. I never felt ill, all the time. I never looked it. Did I?

“There could have been no difficulty in such a case. It was all routine work—plain sailing. Just to look in for a moment and go about his business. Came late one or two nights? Yes, I remember now. Disgracefully late. I regarded it as an impertinence. In a rumpled shirt, with his necktie under his ears. Prom a masonic dinner, I think he said: seeing my stare of surprise. . . . Oh, my dear, it’s no good glozing it over. He was fuddled, uncertain in speech and walk. ... I hope he has not had the effrontery to charge for a hint he gave me—Or me, or me, or me. But if he hasn’t, how can he have ventured to arrive at so monstrous a total?”

“I shall not go to law,” said the president, closing the debate, “I shall pay him; but, mark my words, it shall cost him dear, also, in the long run. I am not a man to be trifled with, as he shall find; and I charge you all to spread through the town the circumstances of the lesson which we have received, as a warning to others.”

Then they all went out into the cheerful sunshine to do his bidding.

THE HOT-TEMPERED WOMAN

The fat man obviously admired the tall girl; and yet, when introduced, he seemed to have nothing to say for himself. As to Maudie, she appeared to be very shy or very reserved—a girl perhaps imperceptibly restrained; held back by an invisible leash. Then all at once, after the hostess had been whispering over the brim of a tea-cup, Mamma with a quick movement of her strong eyebrows slipped Maudie, and immediately she chattered volubly to the fat man.

“This has been a rare treat to my daughter,” said Mamma graciously. “She is full of imagination, enthusiasm; and she does so adore meeting anyone who fills a page in the history of our times; be it the history of war, of politics, or of—er—trade. She does indeed.”

“Does she now?” said the fat man.

“Yes, enthusiasm and tact, if one wanted to sum her up. Tact she has always possessed in a quite extraordinary degree.”

“Has she now?”

"Wasted, you may say, in a girl; if a boy, we should just have pushed her into diplomacy, and by now I verily believe she would have been Minister Plenipotentiary at the very least.”

“I don’t know where she gets it from,” added Mamma, smiling pleasantly. Not from me certainly. I should never have done for an ambassador. With spun-out pour-parlers—negotiations dragging on indefinitely—I should have broken it all off short, by flying out in silly tantrums don’t you know, and that would never do. . . . But she would have been saved that danger by her tact and self-possession.” Would she now?” said the fat man.

He was incredibly rich—in all but conversation.

She is one of those who can look nice on nothing per annum,” said Mamma in a burst of confidence, on another occasion. Makes nearly everything herself—spending her dress allowance on presents, little surprises for those she loves. Her father, who worships her, says if her husband should chance to possess ample means he will be a lucky fellow; for he will certainly be able to run his stable with what she will save on the dressmaker’s bill. But she will nearly break her father’s heart when she does leave the nest.”

Will she now?”

Then, at a subsequent meeting—

I confess I am worried,” said Mamma. My poor pale pet is not eating, and I don’t believe sleeping either. A wee bit mysterious to me, but she is somehow ailing.”

Is she now?”

I have a suspicion, but I don’t think I will tell you—yes I will, though. I fear—I rather fear that, with all her imagination—enthusiasm, she is thinking too much about you''

“Is she now?”

“Oh, you lump! You stupid oaf, with nothing but your money to recommend you,” cried Mamma, having suddenly and irretrievably lost her temper. “She doesn’t! She hasn’t! She won’t! She isn’t! So there! But for your money she’d never have dreamt of such a thing; for, you fat fool, she hates the sight of you.”

“Oh! . . Does she now?”

Pat, he certainly was; but perhaps not such a fool as he looked.

Now after this untimely explosion had wrecked all her hopes with regard to the stout millionaire, she was crestfallen and apologetic in presence of graceful, good-looking Maudie.

“I was very wrong, dear. I do fly out when goaded, blaming myself afterwards. But as you and your dear father know, the storm bursts and passes. Soon over, isn’t it? And I never sulk—I bear no malice. . You don’t answer. Why, even the servants would admit that”—and Mamma gulped. " Now, don’t fret about this, my darling,” she continued, after a pause. “Remember, there’s as good fish in the sea as ever-”

“Well, Mamma,” her daughter interrupted, “I’m not quite sure. There’s certainly more delicate, palatable fish in the sea, but whether there’s any as big as the one you tried to gaff in so clumsy a fashion, just when I was playing him with-”

“Oh, you rude minx I” cried her mother, having lost her temper again. “Talk to me like that—the mother that bore you, when I swallowed my pride to ask pardon—almost.”

It was by such violent outbursts that she rendered home unendurable to good-looking Maudie, and caused her to let herself out of the nice warm house into the dark cold world one foggy evening, never to return. She would make bonnets, said Maud; she would teach little girls the piano; she would carry trays and scrub floors; she would do anything which dear Papa advised and thought best—except come home again.”

She went about the house in tears, so that all the servants pitied her. The empty room upstairs seemed like a gaping hole in her own heart. She would not admit that the hole was to be permanent. She ordered new chintz covers for the chairs in the tenantless room, and bought fresh flowers for the vases every time the old flowers faded. “I want things to look bright and cheerful when Miss Maud comes back,” she told the maids, and then hurried away with her handkerchief before her eyes.

“Did you tell her, my dear, that I am changed?” she asked her husband, after the last of his fruitless missions.

The old fellow shook his head sadly.

“Did you tell her how this bitter lesson has aged me? See! Grey hairs! Every morning more of them. . . . Well, my punishment will not last as long as she thinks perhaps, for I doubt if I have vitality to bear it much longer; though God knows, if I sink it shall be meekly and without a murmur.”

“There, there,” said the old fellow. “No good crying over spilt milk. And spilt it is I fear. What Maudie can’t get over is not so much your attacks themselves, but the manner of them, or so I gathered. The vulgarity of it,’ she said. I give you her own words so that you may understand where the shoe pinches. The vulgar abuse seemed to rankle, don’t you know. I assure you,’ she said, “on the last occasion poor dear Mamma looked like a perfect virago, and went on exactly like a tipsy cook at a lodging-house.’”

“And you bring that back to me—wife of your bosom—you heartless cur,” she cried in a towering passion. For it appeared, after all, that she had a store of vitality left; and by drawing on it unexpectedly from time to time, and expending it with ever-increasing lavishness, she soon drove her husband to the definite conclusion that a quiet grave all to himself would be preferable to a home shared with such a partner.

“She has sunk in the social scale,” the boarders used to say, speaking of the landlady of the sea-side boarding house. Her husband was a man of good family but left her ill-provided for.”

“A lady to her finger tips!” said the boarder who had the private sitting-room. And such good company. A really desirable companion—for a drive, or a stroll on the pier I”

“Yes. But a word in your ear. She has a temper.”

“I have not observed it,” said the old colonel. I confess I have found her uniformly charming—and most moderate.”

So that’s the way the wind blows,” thought the other boarders. She’s in luck! Private means too, as well as his pension.”

And, indeed, the colonel and the landlady seemed about to make a match of it—as the phrase goes. But, ere the day was named, the gallant old boy fell ill. A mere nothing! Only, for the moment, my dear madam, no more of your generous menus” said the polite sea-side doctor. Just a simple, light repast in his own room.”

Now, out of her affectionate solicitude, she cooked the sweetbread with her own hands.

But he, in ignorance, with a sick man’s querulousness, complained. In complete ignorance, he fatally found fault.

I wish I had been standing,” grumbled the rough soldier, “behind the lady who cooked this. I’d have been tempted to fetch her such a spank-”

“Oh, you would, would you, you foul-mouthed rascal,” screamed the landlady, first wounded in her tender feelings, and then stung to fury by the unseasonable criticism. “You ungrateful, unmannerly, unmanly, etc., etc,” pouring out the fierce fire of her hitherto undetected artillery.

“Stop!” at last cried the horror-stricken colonel, pointing with a shaking forefinger. “ Stop. Or you will certainly break a blood vessel by your violence.”

She had sunk lower in the social scale, and, with a hospital ticket in her hand, was waiting to obtain a physician’s opinion on the state of her health. The doctor, arranging his papers on his desk without raising his eyes, kept her waiting so long that she became slightly nettled, so that, after drumming upon the floor with the heel of her boot, she said sharply, “Well, have you lost your tongue, or your manners, or both?”

The doctor looked up, scrutinizing her gravely.

“I see already that you are suffering from one incurable disease.”

“And what’s that?” she gasped, her voice made low by a spasm of fear.

“A very bad temper,” said the doctor.

“Oh, you insolent hound!” yelled the patient, re- covering the full volume of her voice. You—you—you-”

Things had gone well with Maudie—at last. After many vicissitudes and much weary waiting, fate had given her a kind and rich husband. Quite a romance!” people had said at the wedding. And now, while the good man was shooting his grouse on his Scotch moor, Maudie and her invalid mamma were travelling by easy stages to the Bngadine.

With the advice of the great London physicians, with deck cabins and sleeping berths and best bedrooms and adjoining saloons, with a courier and two maids, Maudie was pouring out her new-found wealth in order to make matters comfortable for poor Mamma. Very touching!” fellow-travellers said, observing the daughter’s tender case; and Quite pathetic,” when they rightly interpreted the mother’s gratitude. For indeed Mamma’s heart was full of gratitude to the daughter whom she had never ceased to love and to yearn after.

Thus by the easiest of stages, all the way impressing strangers by their affluence and amiability, they came at last to the little town of Thusis, sitting on the hillside in the burning sun, with its hot feet in the running Rhine. Here the railway ended, and here they were to spend the night. Next morning they were to start on their two days’ drive over the Julier Pass in the fine carriage and four which the courier had already secured for their accommodation.

But that afternoon, while Maud was sleeping off a heat headache, while the maids were telling their chance acquaintance how the old lady had been found a month ago in the infirmary of a London work-house, and how the young lady served in a mantle shop and caught the master through the glass while dressing the window, with other maid-slanders, and while the sun was beginning to throw long shadows of ruined castles and rugged hill tops right across the valley, Mamma went for a walk along the white road that winds beneath the woods towards the Via Mala.

Along the dusty road she sauntered, now in sunlight, now in shadow. Behind each footfall the white dust rose, making something like coloured flame in the light, and like a puff of white smoke in the shade. There were faint sounds of bells, of far-off voices, and now and then strange echoes from the mountain walls above her head; and as she sauntered the strangeness and the wildness of the scene filled her with sudden sadness.

Turning and leaning on the stone parapet, she looked back down the valley towards Chur. Par off, the valley smiled broad and fair in the full sunshine; but it narrowed and grew fiercer of aspect—with ruined castles, forbidding cliffs and sombre, blackened rocks—as it came towards the gorge in which she stood. And as she looked down the valley, from the shadows to the light, she thought of her own life.

Below the parapet, at the bottom of the ravine the river flowed merrily. It ran smoothly and easily, brightly and joyously, until something came in its way. But where the rocks impeded its course, or tried to hinder and guide, it foamed and lashed itself to fury; burst into a white rage and roared at the chance obstruction to its impetuous will. And as she looked down at the Hinter Rhein, she thought of her own cursed temper.

She thought of how love, friendship, regard and esteem had all been scorched to cinders by the heat of that dreadful temper of hers; and, as she thought, the tears came to her eyes. It had driven her child away; it had killed her husband; it had left her alone in all the wide world. And yet how small a thing to wreak such ruin. A flash of flame; a puff of smoke; a few sharp words, and then remorse! She had struggled to restrain herself always; but the powers of evil had put this Are of anger inside her, just as explosive matter is placed by Nature inside volcanoes, and when the time became ripe for an explosion she was as powerless to check it as Etna or Vesuvius.

Gradually, her tears of regret soothed and calmed her, and the peace that is always to be found among lofty things—pine trees, church towers, mountains—crept into her heart. The daughter still loved her; had come to her rescue in her need; had vowed that she would never leave her again. Henceforward, nothing could ruffle the serenity of the peaceful evening of her life. And with the fragment of a prayer upon her moving lips, she walked on towards the deeper shadows of the narrowing ravine.

Suddenly a haggard, grimy man stood before her in the empty road.

He had sprung down from a rock, and now he barred her path, stepping from side to side in her way when she tried to pass and talking to her in Romaunsch. High up among the pine trees, dark figures flitted to and fro and disappeared, a rough voice was answered by a distant holloa—“ Brigands!” she thought, drawing in her breath.

“Let me pass I say. You will get nothing by threatening me” she said, swelling with indignation.

But he only danced from side to side, pouring out his unintelligible Romaunsch, and once or twice pushed her with his blackened hand.

Wild with rage, she struck at the hand with her parasol.

“You blue-bloused blackguard. Do you dare, you smutty-mouthed-”

She had sprung round him; and, screaming in her fury, she ran up the empty road.

The haggard man ran after her, shouting in his Romaunsch, for a dozen paces; then stopped, threw up his arms with a queer gesture of despair; paused for otie moment irresolute; then turned, ran back, and crouching beneath the rocks, watched her with haggard eyes as she slackened her pace and walked on a hundred yards away.

A flash of coloured flame, a puff of white smoke, and then a roar from the hillside above her head, while the rent rocks burst and the stones and earth flew in a horrible cloud and hid the road from view.

People had been blasting above the roadway, they were told at the hotel, towards the Via Mala, and Madame the English lady had come by an accident—struck on head and shoulder—fatally struck.

But there was a smile upon her face. She seemed to bear no malice towards death. No horror, only a smile, as though in her last adversary she had recognised a kindred temper—hot, strong, dreadfully violent, but soon over.

THE SAVING HABIT

An author of style and distinction, but with scanty invention, was writing a letter when he put upon the paper a very neatly turned sentence—with a thought in it. At the moment he did not observe this; but, on re-reading the letter, he observed it. “Odd,” he thought, “how one hits a bull’s-eye, unawares! But it will not be wasted. She will enjoy it—and show it to friends. There is nothing in the letter to preclude that. It would be a pity to waste it.”

It was certainly not a love letter, although it was addressed to the girl who was to be his wife. There was no nonsense in it. He glanced through it again to make quite sure of this. But still, when a girl is engaged, if she is a really nice girl—and there never was a nicer or he would not have chosen her—she does not allow the world—even her little world—to read the letters sent her by her future husband. No, the plums in that pudding are for her own eating; and the sweeter the plum—more especially if there is only one plum—the more jealously, greedily, gluttonously does she keep it to herself.

He tore up the letter.

It would, he thought, be the greatest pity to waste it. Out of that pretty thought—the one contained in the musical, rhythmically flowing, little sentence—he would make an article. With a little more of the same melody, by continuing the rhythmic beat, he would make a very brilliant, not too short essay; or better still, a short story—a fairly long, short story. No, he would make a short book of it: there is no properly remunerative market for short stories—or for short—very short—books either, if you come to that. It would be a thousand pities to waste it. He would make what may be termed either a long short book or a short long book. But then, all at once, he decided that he would make a long book of it: a really long, a thundering long book—dramatizing the romance for copyright purposes. And so he did.

But that one which he had hit unawares was the only bull’s-eye in all the immensely long volume; and he lost all the credit for it because the weary readers had, as it were, given up marking, and none registered the author’s lucky shot when it came.

And he lost the girl also.

“I thought so too at first,” she told all her friends, while imploring them not to call her by that odious name of Jilt—“But you would have done just the same, when you found out how dull he really was, and how vain and'selfish into the bargain. Here are all his love letters. Wade through them, as I have done, and if you find one single pretty thing in them, instead of burning them, as I mean to, I’ll eat them. But you won't. If he has a thought for anything beyond his dinner, he puts it in his books.”

THE DIVINING ROD

High up above the lake of Thun, shut off and apart from all the world, hidden by the mountain mist, some men were busy in a little sloping meadow. Hundreds and hundreds of feet below them, the summer sun was shining on the smooth face of the lake; thousands and thousands of feet above them, the sun was shining on the rocky hood and beetling brows of the Monk, and on the white forehead of the Maiden; but over the sweet-smelling grass and the coloured crocuses of the meadow, the Maiden had thrown a fold of the white wrapper which she always wears of a morning—to hide the men’s foolishness no doubt—and the sun only now and again could take a peep at them.

To and fro, hither and thither, the man with the divining rod went busily seeking. He was old and pale and feeble, but monstrously full of self-importance; taking fitful life from the excitement of the moment, finding sprightly steps and a jaunty demeanour for the brief hour of his vain-glorious triumph. He was as sure that he would find the water as the Biirgermeister was sure that he wouldn’t. Solid and stolid, a sunburnt, wind-dried old peasant, the Biirgermeister followed in the diviner’s wake; and following the Burgermeister came the three strange workmen who had brought the steel rods, the iron shank, the cross-bar and the poles; and after them came the villagers, half a dozen of the leading citizens. The village wanted a new well; the Burgermeister couldn’t find one; and the old braggart from Lauter Brunnen had been given his chance, much as in the family circle a child is offered the knot to unravel in the pause during which Papa goes to fetch a knife to cut the string. “When the cow-doctor says the cow must die, you may open the door for the fairies to come in and cure her,” remarked the Burgermeister.

While the little procession was being led such a childish dance through the wet grass and the dewdropping crocuses, the young travelling student was smoking his pipe and leaning on his alpenstock, watching and grinning. His pockets were stuffed with . scribbled note-books, which he never showed to anybody; and his head was stuffed with all sorts of fantastical nonsense which he kept to himself most jealously. The white mist rolled fold after fold about the meadow, and when the sun took a rare peep the wet blades of the grass flashed like knives made of emeralds, and the dew-covered flowers seemed to spread a rainbow on the ground for the Burgermeister to walk upon. Then, until the shaft of prismatic sunlight had faded, the student thought the little field looked just like a handful of very choice gems which a jeweller has laid upon an immense sheet of cotton wool in order to show them off to the greatest advantage; or.rather like a-

“Here!” cried the old dowser, in a shrill,vainglorious scream. “Here, under my feet, is good, clear water.”

Just before he gave the scream, he had been furiously trampling the gay, frail life out of the pretty crocuses—dancing as a man dances when he has been stung by a hornet, while the Bfirgermeister and the citizens fell away from his twitching face, his waving arms, and the forked rod, which, like a live snake, was darting its head as though it wanted to bite somebody. Now, while the sceptical but startled peasants stood gaping in a circle, the old fellow let the writhing snake fall, as though it had bitten him, and it lay at his feet a dead twig once more.

“To work! Here, under my feet,” said the dowser; and he mopped his bare head, from which the perspiration was pouring. Then he watched the skilled workmen at their work and waited in self-satisfied patience for the result.

With shank and cross-bar and hollow screw, the skilled workmen were soon at their work, while their unskilled employers heartily impeded them with their well-meant but unskilled aid. It was slow work and hot work. “Boring work!” said the idle tourist to himself, grinning at his own little joke and turning away to look at something else.

He had been knocking out his pipe on a wooden rail when beneath his eyes the curtain of mist suddenly opened, and showed him, in a flash of sunshine, a marvellous, fairy-like view. The town of Interlaken, a sparkling, glittering toy; the two lakes, two silver mirrors; green little woods, bare rocky slopes; tiny threads of crystal which were roaring water-falls when one reached them, distant valleys, covered by one leaf of the beech-tree above his head, villages which he could blot out with the tip of an outstretched Anger—wonderland! For a moment, while the ashes fell from his pipe, he stood breathless with the wonder of it. Because, as he gazed, the fairies toys seemed to change, and he was looking at cities instead of villages, whole countries in place of the fields—the wide world spread out at his feet; the universe in all its overwhelming immensity woven into a rainbow carpet by the magic of the prismatic sunbeams, as they struck down through the rent in the cloud-curtain—a vision of wonder and delight. Then, ere the ashes from his pipe had reached the ground, the white mist rolled over, and all had vanished.

“Ha, ha!” cried the dowser. “What did I tell you?”

With the sound of a gigantic bottle just uncorked, a gush of liquid had burst from the drilled hole. Pebbles and rocky debris, a fountain of rubbish, and then a stream of dirty water, tumbled about the hollow screw. Thick as soup, yellow and earthy, the water came gurgling; and the perspiring workmen went down upon their knees to scoop it into their palms and drink it.

Don’t do that,” said the triumphant dowser. “Don’t drink that dirty stuff; wait.”

But the thirsty wretches would not wait.

“It is all right, master,” they said, lapping it down greedily. “It quenches the thirst.”

The dirty stuff gushed forth in a strong, full stream, then gradually slackened and grew cleaner. Then finally, a very thin trickle of diamonds, a slender jet of absolutely pure water came limpidly bubbling, gave a gurgling sigh, and ceased to flow.

“That is the end,” said the dowser, with unabated vain-glory. Precisely as I said. A good clear spring; only there was not much of it.”

The famous author was being “interviewed” for the most enterprising of all the daily papers.

No, I shall write no more. Go into Parliament? Possibly. But I am not as young as I used to be,’ and a boyish smile lit up the fine, lined, white-hairframed face which belied the words. “Yes, I have written an immense lot; but I should like to be judged by my last three books. That was the best work I have done.’

“But the others have been astoundingly popular with the public,” we ventured to demur.

“ Ah! the public are always thirsty for amusement.

They quenched the thirst, I suppose-

“Rules, precepts? Don’t you think all that sort of thing has been rather overdone of late ? I mean that you gentlemen of the press have beguiled us poor artists into talking too much about how we do it, when we do it, and why we do it? ’

“Encouraged by the twinkle of the boyish smile, we once more demurred, urging the intense interest of the public in a favourite whose future literary output was threatened with a self-imposed embargo.

“Well, then, you can safely say that I learnt my lesson, all that I have ever known of my art, many years ago—half a century ago—in a little field in Switzerland, above the lake Of Thun. ’”

THE BLOOMING OP THE ALOE

HE had never been able to write a good letter, and the inability to do so had wrecked his life; had gradually ruined him, and made him at last bankrupt of hope and ready to file his own petition of despair.

“I had your hamper,” he used to write home to his mother from school, “and I eat it.” His poor little heart was brimming over with love and gratitude as he scrawled the ill-devised words, but it was fatally beyond his powers to put his true feelings into the home-going envelope. " Ate the hamper I” cried the father in a rage. “It is disgraceful that after all I have paid for his schooling, he should, at his age, write so ungrammatically.” “I don’t mind the grammar,” said the mother; “it is the casual tone which I can’t get over. He writes to me exactly as he would to a tradesman, acknowledging the receipt of goods.”

Then the mother turned from the bad letter of one child to the good letter of another—“My darling mater, you are a brick, etc.”—and as her eyes turned, her heart turned also.

“The best advice I can give you,” said the father, when the time came for the young man to go out into the world, “is to buy a Polite Letter-Writer and master its contents. Or better still, give up writing letters altogether, because I suspect your faults are incorrigible. If you ever want a job, go and ask for it. If the man isn’t at home, or won’t see you, call again. Go on calling until you do see him. For if you apply for the post or place or job by letter, you won’t get it.”

It was sound advice and he, well knowing his deficiency, scrupulously followed it whenever possible. But it was not always possible.

He proved himself a capable man of business in all respects except this: he could not write an appropriately worded letter. When personal interviews were out of the question, when the telephone was not working and he was forced to take up his pen to clinch matters, trouble was sure to ensue; and nine times out of ten he clinched the matter the wrong way. Superior employes, his principals, and later, his partners bore with his blunders because of his personal merits—energy, integrity, dogged perseverance and all that sort of thing—but, sooner or later, they came to the end of their patience, and, turning their eyes from his atrociously bad letters to somebody else’s fairly good letters, their hearts turned also and they cast him adrift.

“I note your dismissal of me for the reasons contained therein,” he would write on such occasions, striving to show that all his letters were not bad letters, “and will act on the same as desired above.”

Such books of reference as the Polite Letter-writer —and he had bought them all and worked hard at each—only confused him. “Dear Lord -,” he wrote, when manager of a big business house, to a very great nobleman, “it will give me the greatest pleasure to do what you ask. You may count on getting all you wish as soon as I can do so.” “Offended and withdrawn his custom I How can that be possible?” he exclaimed, when his employers told him the consequence of his enormities. “What was wrong with my note?” “Everything,” they shouted. Then slowly he understood that the books had tripped him up; that he had been working from the wrong end of the volume, the social, instead of the business end. He would have done better without the books. They only confused him and he determined henceforth to use them no more.

Once he seemed to hold within his grasp a really desirable appointment, a post that he felt would just suit him. His credentials, testimonials, personal appearance, and manner and conversation during several interviews, had all passed muster and the post was practically given to him when the genial, kindly, white-haired chairman of the Board said, “Stop. One moment. We haven’t seen what sort of letter you can write. Sit down there. Take up your pen and write a letter on my instructions.”

As he took up the new, clean quill his fingers trembled and panic seized him. For a moment, while he waited, the richly furnished board-room swung round and round; mahogany and red morocco, the 8tam(ed leather wall-paper and the oil paintings blended into a gyrating maelstrom, in which he felt himself struggling powerless and being drawn down, down to perdition.

“Here,” said someone, “answer this —in the negative—briefly, courteously, but definitively.”

He read the long-winded application and then, dashing on to meet his fate, wrote, “re what you request regret we cannot do so either now or ever, etc.”

“But this is a joke,” said the chairman, taking off his spectacles. “This unpunctuated gibberish is a somewhat ill-timed pleasantry, eh?”

But it was deadly earnest he was forced to confess.

Then, in the midst of his troubles, had come the one great love of his life. Yet even in love he was not lucky, because he began to love too late. She was not free, but with the courage of her sex, which sometimes enables a woman to say the things which men only think, she told him that her freedom could not be very far distant. “Will you wait for me till he is gone? It cannot be very long now. The bottle-fiend has claimed him, as you know, and the bottle-fiend will come and fetch him before we are very much older.” Yes, he would wait, he said, outside in the darkness, until she could admit him to the light of her love. What else could he say, since all the world seemed dark to him outside the circle of his great love? “Meantime/ she said,

“we will meet whenever we can, but you must consent not to write to me. I should like you to write to me every day, to pour out your love for me on reams and reams of paper, to send me love-letters by every post. But it would certainly lead to discovery. I am closely watched. Besides, I know it is through the letters that these things are always found out. So promise, no matter how great the deprivation may be to you, that you will never write.”

And he promised most sincerely. In all the long bondage which he served, in all the weariness of the weary waiting for his heart’s desire, this was the one consolation—he was not called upon to write a single letter.

The cruel bottle-fiend was in no hurry for his prey. He played with the doomed wretch as cats play with mice: laid him low, then allowed him to get to his feet and stagger back along the path towards health as though he had been forgotten; then, when he was nearly at liberty, bowled him over again and drew bim back with a fierce clutch, but not with clutch fierce enough to put him out of his misery altogether. It was a cruel, slow game of play for the cat inside the house to watch, month after month, year after year.

But at last freedom came, a happy release for both parties, as the phrase runs.

She was free at last, and at last his pen was free too, she told him. He could not write too often or too much. Immediately after the funeral she had gone abroad with her two children to spend the winter with a wealthy aunt in the south of Prance. It was a bitter, numbing winter in England, when brain and hand seemed frozen; and all through it he wrote to her—wrote from the black North to the bright South; wrote from the cold and cheerless room in which he sat shivering and beating his frozen forehead for inspiration, to her lolling in sunny gardens among the myrtles and the orange trees; and all the time, as he wrote and blew on his fingers and racked his frozen brain, he knew that she was slipping further and further away from him. He read it with growing clearness in her replies to his letters. She was turning her eyes away from his dreadful love-letters, and as she turned her eyes her heart was beginning to turn away also.

She came home in the early spring with the children and the aunt. She arrived on a Thursday, and wrote on Friday to say that she could not see him on Saturday, but that there would be a chance on Sunday. He was to come to the aunt’s house at half-past five and wait outside. It would be quite dark by then, she said, and she would come out and talk to him, walk up and down the street with him, and no one would observe them. Precaution was necessary. Auntie was suspicious and didn’t like visitors.

He waited a long time in the darkness of the street. The house was bright and the street was cheerless; but when she came out the warm light would fade out of all the windows, and it would be the house which would be dark and cheerless, while the street would be most gloriously illuminated. A man drove up to the house and went in. “Now she will come,” he said. “The visitor for Auntie will set her free. In a minute I shall be talking to her, talking instead of writing, drawing her eyes back to mine, drawing her heart back to mine; with every spoken word undoing the harm of the written words.” But she did not come, and gradually, as he paced .to and fro in the dark street, the light in the house tempted and lured him. If the man might go in, why might not he? The man was enjoying the light. Surely this meant some alteration of her plans? She could not be so cruel as to keep him outside in the dark for ever? He waited a long time, but at last he rang the bell, was admitted, and shown upstairs.

But it seemed that she was more cruel than he could ever have guessed. She was very cruel, stabbing him to his frozen heart with her angry eyes, melting his frozen brain with the fire of her angry words as she stooped over the tea-pot and helped him to milk and sugar, while the man who had paid such a long call looked languidly around for his hat and gloves.

“You have disobeyed me, and I will never forgive you/’ she whispered across the tea-cups. “ If you want to explain you must write, for I will never see you again—never I”

She supplemented this next day with a formal dismissal, in which she plainly spoke her mind, stating her plans for the future without reserve. He had no place in the plans, of course. Certainly he had never guessed how cruel women can be, especially the women who don’t mind saying the things which men only think.

At first, in the bankruptcy of all his hopes, he thought that he would not write to her. It would not be worth troubling her with another letter unless he could write a good letter. But then, all at once, he changed his mind. Sitting alone in his cheerless room, the thought suddenly came to him. With these new materials which he had bought could he not contrive to write one really good letter? Yes. He could. The frozen hand had relaxed its numbing grip on his brain; the thoughts came thronging clearly and brightly. The new materials seemed to have endowed him with a strange new clairvoyance. In a flash of strange, new light, he could see her as she was; himself, his true self; all the world as the world really is, but as he had never seen it before.

He could see her now while the other man wooed her, in that sunny southern garden where she sat amongst the roses, beneath the feathery palms and the fluttering mimosa, the only ugly thing in all the pretty garden. As she sat and lured and listened she had turned her back to the big ungainly plant with the broad plain arms and the forbidding spikes The aloe! yes, that was the name of the plant which blossomed so rarely. And what became of the aloe after it had flowered ?

He had poured the clean white water into his glass, and emptied the small bottle into the water; and now he was looking into the faintly clouded contents of the glass, much as a professional clairvoyant looks into his crystal, persuading himself that he can see eternity if he looks long enough.

Then he took up his pen and, without the least effort, easily, fluently, he wrote his good letter.

He told her plainly, concisely, neatly, so that a child might follow the drift of his thought, what she was, what he was, what the world was in reality. In a few flowing, compact sentences, he explained why he had misunderstood and disobeyed her. “But you will certainly see me again,’ he concluded. “Por now I am going out into the darkness to wait for you —until the Day of Judgment, when I mean to call you to account for the great wrong which you have done me.”

Then he addressed and sealed the letter, put away his blotting book, and drank off his new writing materials to the last drop.

It really was a good letter. Perhaps it would have been nothing much from a practised hand which had been penning good letters for a life-time. But all things considered, coming from him, from a man who in all his troubled life had never been able to express himself upon paper otherwise than abominably badly, it really was something wonderful, something like the blooming of the aloe.

PARKER’S FOLLY

Everybody who knows Barcombe, quaintest and prettiest of South Devon watering-places, knows that curious house on the hillside which the natives have christened Parker’s Folly.” Many neighbourhoods possess these strange monuments, products of rich men’s fancies run riot in bricks and mortar, but among all the follies” of England, Parker’s is believed by Southern Devonshire to remain unrivalled.

So far as one can judge from the nearest point on the high road, where the coaches and char-k-bancs stop for the summer tourists to admire and condemn, the house is an immense bungalow. The grounds are large and well-wooded, and a high stone wall encloses them; but from the top of a coach, or standing on the seat of his fly, the tourist can see stretches of low roofs, interminable verandahs or connecting passages between the different blocks of building, which must cover an acre and half of land. Then, from the midst of these low erections, with one or two higher sheds about its massive base, there shoots upwards into the summer sky the colossal evidence of Parker’s Folly. It is truly a gigantic tower. Slender and needle-like, its granite sides glitter in the sunlight, and the sea birds wheeling about its long, narrow windows not half-way to the summit, are black spots which may be birds or may be only the illusive vision of eyes unduly strained upward.

I

Closing time was approaching, and throughout the huge building the tired attendants were beginning to put things in order for the night. In ten minutes the Universal Metropolitan Stores would drive its crowd of purchasers out of doors into the foggy night; and for the rest of the evening the small shops of the neighbourhood would be free from the overwhelming competition of their gigantic enemy.

At the staircase end of the glove department, on the third floor, an iron curtain had fallen, leaving only a small wicket open to the stream of bargain hunters; and Mr Dickinson, the superintendent with the fierce black eyebrows and the red rosette of his official rank, had just reprimanded one of his young ladies for daring to “undress” her six feet of counter without permission. The heat was intense; the exhausted air of the lower floors floated upwards, and with it an indescribable murmur of moving feet and raised voices Beneath the white glare of the lamps the serving girls looked wan and drooping as they struggled with the mob of ladies who still besieged one end of the long counter devoted to cheap gloves and handkerchiefs. “One-and-one and one-and-flve,” a serving-girl was saying mechanically. “A very good wearing colour indeed, madam.”

She was a slim, auburn-haired girl, with a pretty, delicate face and sad grey eyes, which were fixed on the brass gates behind which the lift would presently stop. The Kft shaft was empty; a black vault, which told her that the lift itself was down below. Had it been above, the shiny, noiseless column would have been in view. Suddenly, above all other sounds, she caught the tones of the liftman’s voice, far off, but clear and bell-like, announcing the departments on the floor below.

“Well, madam,” she continued, “the more expensive are better quality, but the cheaper are very strong. One-and-one. Yes, madam. The one-and-flve? Yes, madam, you will find they are well worth the extra fourpence.”

Then the lift appeared—a brilliantly illuminated little room, like a small waiting-room of a well-upholstered club—and the tall young liftman snapped open the brass gates and made his declaration.

“Drapery—antimacassars—rugs—linen—indoor—night-wear—garments,” called out the liftman in a strong, firm voice, and the serving girl’s pale face was uffused with a sudden blush, while she stooped lower over the glove-tray to conceal the gratified smile on her parted lips.

“He calls me “darling/” she murmured to herself. “He can see I have a headache and he wants to comfort me, else he would never have dared to say it. How handsome he looks, but I wish he wasn’t so rash.”

The gates shut again with a sharp click and the lift began to soar upwards to floors she had never seen. She watched his legs, in the close-fitting black trousers and the broad gold stripes, until they disappeared, and wondered if the guardsman-viscount of the novel she was now reading had a more attractive uniform.

“Can I show madam anything else?” she inquired.

I have asked you to fetch me some reindeers three times, and now I shall not wait,” said the customer, bristling with indignation. I am not accustomed-”

I am so sorry, madam. Pray let me-”

Mr Dickinson was hurrying forward, followed by two ladies, in search of a disengaged server.

Miss Thompson!” he called peremptorily.

Attending, sir,” replied the girl.

That is precisely what you are not doing,” said Miss Thompson’s offended lady. If you were attending, you would have heard my request. However, one must make excuses. You have had a long day, no doubt.”

I am a little tired, madam,” confessed the girl.

II

Life had seemed almost insupportable to poor, grey-eyed Edith Thompson during her first month’s work at the Metropolitan Stores. From the drowsy peace of a dark, little, sea-side shop, to the unceasing tumult of the huge London Emporium was a transition so violent that it stunned her. The inexorable routine of each endless day, the long descent down the stone staircase to miserable meals in the black cellars, the toiling up again, breathless and panting, to resume the slave-like task, crushed her into the spiritless submission of the convict condemned for life.

In the midst of the continual crowd she was friendless and alone, for it was a part of the iron discipline of the Metropolitan Society to discourage friendships among its employes, and countless regulations were enforced to further this policy.

Then, gradually, a flower began to blossom in the barren track of her existence; a touch of romance began to colour the dead monotony of the heavy hours. Stationed exactly opposite to the brass gates, seeing him pass and pass again, time after time, how could she help thinking about him? Everything concerning him was beautiful, poetical, enthralling. There was a window in the shaft which she could just see by stooping, and, through it, a patch of sky across which the clouds raced with dizzying speed when a high wind was blowing. When he came rumbling up from the bowels of the earth and began to soar past, towards the blue sky, darkness literally fell behind him, for the lift blocked out the light from the window. And so he was to her the coming and going light which made the darkness endurable to her.

To other girls he was doubtless nothing more than a handsome, well-dressed man. Tall and elegant, with pale blue eyes and blonde moustache, he must have been admired anywhere. The other girls could see the gold-laced forage cap, frogged and braided frock coat and yellow striped trousers, the natural air of command as he paced his narrow floor, that indescribable air which the possession or control of immense power always implants. They could see the deference paid him by the public, and could look up to him as one moving easily and gracefully on higher planes; descending to admit some beautiful, dilatory lady, or gravely declining the company of the stateliest old gentleman when the number of his passengers was made up. Such things as this the other girls could see. But Edith could see the soul of the man beneath the mask of official dignity.

He loved her! How sweet was the discovery! With what rapture she first realized that he was making the confession of his love!

His duty was to call out the chief departments on each floor, as he reached it, so that travellers might alight at their proper station. But, virtually, he was expected to know the resting-place of every article for sale in the whole building, in order to be able to direct the people who questioned him en route exactly where to go. Edith, listening to his varied cries, marvelled at the extent of his memory, while her ears drank in the musical tones of his voice.

There was one cry which was constantly recurring, “Ladies’ Outfits, Vests, Etcetera.” It was generally when the lift was nearly empty that he uttered these words. He would say them distinctly, but rather softly, and then one or two ladies would step out, while the softness of his voice and his softer eyes, resting on her for a moment, would thrill her with vague contentment.

Then there was another cry of the liftman’s which was rather frequent and which he rattled off almost defiantly at times. “Indian Lace, Ottoman Velvet, Bastern Yarns, Oriental Umbrellas.”

This list comprised nearly the entire contents of the little long room which led out of the large, woollen goods department, and it surprised her to hear how frequently the liftman’s whole crew had devoted themselves to this one room. Then she remarked that the passengers did not always proceed to the Oriental Department. Some went into the “Hats”; others would dive into the “Waterproofs and Mackintoshs” under the big clock. Once or twice nobody at nil turned towards the velvets and Bastern yarns, so it was evident that the liftman had not been announcing their destination according to his wont. What did it mean? What did he mean?

“Indian Lace,” she used to invariably repeat, imitating his manner of leaning, as it were, on the first letters of his words. Last time he said “Indian Lace ’ he looked at me, and this time he looked again.” There was no customer at her part of the counter and Mr Dickinson was at the other end of the department, as she thoughtfully watched the great, shiny column imperceptibly creeping upward. Then she scribbled the liftman’s cry on a blank form from her black book. “Indian Lace, Ottoman Velvet, Eastern.” She blushed and turned pale, as she noticed what the initials of the liftman’s words spelt. “I love.” yarns, Oriental t/mbrellas—“ You."

She trembled at the thought that there might be a subtly sweet message in the apparently meaningless departure from the liftman’s customary declaration. What was the other cry, the soft-toned one whose sounds were like a spiritual caress? Hastily she jotted it down with her grating pencil, Ladies’ Outfits, Vests, Etcetera!” Love! It was his whisper of passion to prepare her for his definite confession; and although she had not fathomed its intention, something of its character had mysteriously moved her.

She was reprimanded by Mr Dickinson for care- lessness and stupidity during the course of that afternoon; for her mind was in a rapturous whirl and she was serving as though in a dream. She could only wait and long for the coming of the lift as it rose and fell, with its steady, pulse-like sounds, so out of unison with the wild throbbings of her own heart.

“Sponges, Waterproofs, Elastic Expanders, Tents.” He had plunged into the india-rubber goods to call her “sweet.” “Suspenders, Wrappers, Elastic Expanders, Tents, Erasers, Swimming-belts, Towels.” He had ransacked the department to call her “Sweetest.”

But towards closing time, in the heat and flurry of the last hour, a sense of her folly and presumption calmed her excitement. He was certainly making messages, there could be no doubt of that, but what right had she to suppose that the messages were addressed to her, when there were fifty girls on that floor within hearing of his clarion tones? Or, indeed, why should she imagine that his burning words were addressed to anything but the vitiated air? In the monotony of his upward and downward flight, what more natural than that he should amuse himself by a fanciful play upon the words in the society’s bloated index? He would feel secure from detection; and, if he knew that a foolish girl had penetrated his Sphinx-like riddle, he would simply laugh at her for misinterpreting it.

Yet, he looked at her so often. His blue eyes rested on her, not on space or on other girls, and his eyes were gentle and kind.

In the weeks that followed, she suffered from the violent alternations of doubt and delight. She acquired an extraordinary rapidity in reading his communications. Sometimes he would not speak for days; and then, suddenly would make a sweet, abrupt remark and relapse into incoherence. Suppose he was losing heart under the conviction that he had failed to make himself intelligible I This last doubt was dreadful, but it was laid at rest on the afternoon which made her happiness secure.

As he opened the gates he looked straight at her, with an expression of anxious inquiry in his face, and said slowly—there happened to be none but ladies in the lift at the moment—“ Underwear—Novelties—Dyeless Elastic Eamswool Shirts, TYouserettes, And Night Dresses.”—Understand?

He was asking her if she understood. She bowed her head in assent, but still he did not seem satisfied. Then, leaning over her glove boxes, she said firmly, “Yes, I understand you perfectly.”

“Not so loud, Miss Thompson,” said Mr Dickinson, angrily. “You know very well that no conversation is permitted.”

He thought she had spoken to the girl who served next to her. If he had only guessed the truth I She risked everything by glancing towards the lift again. He had heard her. His divine smile told her that he had heard as he soared upward.

Ill

“My name is George Parker,” said the liftman, shyly. What is yours, miss?”

“My name is Edith Thompson,” and she blushed and gently withdrew her small gloved hand from the liftman’s.

It was Saturday afternoon and they had met, by appointment, on the embankment. Two days before, during Mr Dickinson’s luncheon hour, the liftman, after discharging his passengers, had walked over to Edith’s counter and deposited a small card-board box before her.

Don’t open it till you get home,” he whispered, and then returned to his lift, with a splendid affectation of solemn composure. In the box was a letter—a lovely letter, beginning with the assurance of his love, and concluding with an invitation to spend Saturday afternoon in his company.

How good of you to come,” he said. When you nodded, of course I knew that you meant to, but I have been so afraid that something would prevent it. Where shall we go? Would you care to go down to Richmond?”

Oh, that would be lovely! It is such a treat to get out of London.”

He was not dressed in his uniform. For the last forty-eight hours she had been wondering if he would meet her in uniform or in private clothes. Nothing could have been more elegant or suitable than his attire, and he carried himself so beautifully in his silk hat, black overcoat, and dark trousers, that she knew that everybody could see he was an officer of some sort! And he was well content with her appearance. From the brown Matador hat, with the new veil, to her neat little black shoes, each carefully studied item of her toilette satisfied him. She was instinctively aware of this as his shy, sidelong glance fell upon her. It was odd, but the liftman was certainly shy, and the conversation, as they walked over Westminster Bridge, seemed difficult to sustain.

Presently, however, they fell to discussing the management of the Metropolitan Society, and, with this inexhaustible subject in hand, the restraint be tween them soon began to wear away.

“Can you believe that I did not dare try to discover your name,” he said. To wait for you outside would have meant either your being moved to the other end of the building or one of us being dismissed the service. Was there ever such tyranny?”

Why do they do it? It’s cruel! I mayn’t even sit at meals next the girls from my counter, though five of them dine the same time as me.”

It’s their system,” explained the liftman. They live in dread of being robbed, and no doubt they are robbed right and left, for their accountant office has never been worth anything. They won’t keep the necessary staff to overlook things properly, and they think if none of the employes are allowed to be friends, that will prevent counter frauds and packing conspiracies.”

“It is a shame!” said Edith. “But you and I couldn’t conspire if we wanted to ever so much.”

“Ah!” said the liftman. “But there’s the horrible difference of rank. You know their class divisions, of course, don’t you?” and then the liftman, with much delicacy, explained the Society’s regulations with regard to the status of the different orders of its staff. Desk clerks were of lower rank than office clerks, superintendents and show-women were on a level with department clerks, and so on, and so forth.

“If there was a procession, or a great banquet—which I needn’t say is never likely to happen—I suppose I should go in immediately after the head fireman andjust before the chief commissionaire,” said the liftman, apologetically, but with perhaps a suspicion of pride in his voice.

“I don’t blame them for maintaining discipline,” he continued, “but why should they try to interfere with our private lives? Of course, for instance, it would not do for me to carry superintendents, as is often suggested, or for anyone, no matter how high he stood, to have the right to stop me in transit. I am responsible, like the captain of a ship, so it is only fair I should be given the same absolute command as a captain has.”

Edith was humiliated to think of the immeasurable drop from his position to hers, but there was nothing in the least snobbish in the liftman’s manner of stating the case, and the sweet thought that love had bridged the gulf between them reassured her.

Then he talked of his occupation—the grand feeling of power as he pulled the wire rope; the wild upward swing of a nearly empty lift, with the hydraulic pressure at its strongest; the sudden drop from the top floor under a heavy cargo, when half the ladies and all the children on board gave little frightened screams; the continual change of society; the succession of pleasant company, never staying long enough to bore one, and the jokes, odd sayings and queer out-of-the-way bits of information always being picked up from the fragmentary conversations.

“It is a grand life!” said the girl simply. “I seem to imagine it, though I have never ridden in one yet.”

“Oh, if I could only take you for your first ride I” said the liftman. “You would never want to walk upstairs again. I pity you so, every day, thinking of you climbing up those awful stairs. Do you know that regular lift work—and I have been at it two years; eighteen months at the Mammoth Plats and six here—utterly unfits you for stairs. There are only two flights where I live, but I have to stop three or four times, and I often arrive with the perspiration pouring off me and my heart beating fit to break.”

At Richmond there were crowds of people going to football matches, but they turned their backs on the sight-seers, and sauntered up the hill to the terrace and the park. Here, in the dull twilight, with the grey mists rising from the valley, where the winding stream glowed red in the dying sunlight, and the naked and blackened trees threw long shadows on the sodden turf, the liftman began to talk of his love. They had exchanged narratives of their uneventful histories, and seemed now to have known each other for years. He was by birth a Devonshire man, and, like her, an orphan; only he had no relatives that he was aware of, and she had one aunt, the owner of the little shop at Bournemouth where she had learnt her business.

“When did I first feel like that?” he asked. “Why, from the first day I saw you. There had been a red-haired Scotch girl in your place, and I don’t know why she was dismissed, only one day I noticed she was gone. Then, late in the afternoon, I saw your face, so beautiful and so gentle—Mr Dickinson was lecturing you—and from that moment I was your slave.”

Edith was looking straight before her over the indistinct landscape, in which shore and river were now veiled by the moisture in her eyes, as well as by the curtain of mist. Was it not too beautiful to be true? What was the condescension of the viscounts in her novels compared with his? How poor was their love, and how mean their haw-haw mode of expressing it compared with the sweet reality!

“I knew that you were my Pate,” he continued. “If I could not win you, life would not be worth living. But you don’t know how shy and diffident I am by nature. How could I let you know what my feelings were? How should I find out if you cared for me—one little bit? Other men would have been bolder, suffering what I did—would have risked dismissal to learn the truth. But it would have meant dismissal for you as well as me, and that helped to keep me back. And all the time I was buoyed up by the hope that you did care for me. Is that very conceited? No, it was some mysterious link between us. Providence meant us for one another. It must have, or how would you have read my meaning when at last I had hit on a way of addressing you? Not one girl in a million would have understood me.”

They lingered long over a sumptuous meal of tea and cakes at a pastry-cook’s in the town, and then wandered back to the station, where he purchased an evening paper for them to read together by the light of one of those delightful little electric lamps in the train.

“I don’t look at a paper from week’s end to week’s end,” he said, as they unfolded the latest edition on their knees, “for, of course, I hear of everything that’s doing in the lift”

I don’t care for papers either,” said Edith, except it’s the agony column. That’s better than a book sometimes. Let’s look at this one. “Bob. All will be forgiven—Kate.’ How silly! “Lost’ I never read the ‘Losts’ till the last. Oh! How extraordinary! “George Parrott Parker! ’”

The liftman was startled.

How did you know my name was Parrott?” he asked. I never told you that.”

It’s here. I am reading from the paper. “George Parrott Parker, who was christened at St Jude’s,

Barcombe, Devonshire, in the year-, and is known to have left that place for London about three years ago, will hear of something greatly to his advantage if he will communicate with Messrs Brown & Jones of I0 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Or anyone giving information which will lead to the discovery of his present whereabouts will be handsomely rewarded.’ Oh! Didn’t you know this was in the paper?”

Parrott is a Devonshire name,” said the liftman, thoughtfully reading the advertisement. I was christened after one of my poor mother’s family. Do you know the reading of this has given me a turn. I feel as if I had run up both flights to my room. What can it mean?”

That evening, when Edith returned to her meanly-furnished room in the big barrack where she and 'dozens of other toilers like herself lodged, there was a letter waiting for her. It was an official-looking document, from the Universal Metropolitan Stores Society, and her heart sank as she unfolded it.

She was dismissed from her employment on account of a breach of Rule 45, which forbade servers to take parcels of any kind whatsoever from clerks, packers, managers, commissionaires, firemen or liftmen, under any circumstances! That was the substance of the communication. She had received her wages on Priday night, and a postal order was now enclosed for her half day’s work on Saturday. She was reminded, in a printed postscript, of the duly signed covenants of her engagement which, as she knew, gave the Society power to get rid of her at a moment’s notice.

The agreement—clauses and sub-clauses—under which the Society engaged its poor employes, was monstrous, iniquitous, and possibly bad in law, but what hope for redress from Courts of Justice could be entertained by a penniless, friendless girl, against a wealthy, all-powerful corporation like the Universal?

IV

A year had gone by since Edith Thompson’s dismissal—a weary length of time, in which she had worked for two hard task-masters before she had obtained her present engagement in an over-grown draper’s shop in North London.

Twelve long months and never a word, never a sign from the man she had worshipped—the man who had said he worshipped her. He had been dismissed at the same time, for the same fault. She discovered so much from one of the girls of her department, whom she had waited for in the street. Why was he not waiting in the street also? He did not know her address, and the Society would not send on letters to discarded serving girls; but why was he making no effort to communicate with her? The sickness of deferred hope fell on her as the weeks slipped by, and then at last she understood the reason of his desertion.

He had come into an immense fortune. That advertisement in the paper meant that wealth beyond the dreams of everything but avarice was waiting for him to claim it. The liftman was a millionaire, and all at once the newspapers seemed full of this surprising windfall, making very merry over the delicious idea of his being summarily dismissed at the moment of hearing his good luck. How could a millionaire be expected to remember vows sworn to a shop-girl? How could she be angry at his desertion now? He had soared upwards to planes on which she had never trod—as in the old days at the Stores—and the shadow of a life-long regret fell behind him.

There were very few customers in the big shop, and one of the girls was furtively reading a newspaper beneath the counter, while Edith was vacantly watching the tops of the omnibuses and vans as they passed the windows.

She was thinner and more delicate-looking than of old. The pinched features and deadly pallor told their tale of weary days and sleepless nights, and her grey eyes looked larger and sadder than when they used to follow the shiny column in its imperceptible progress.

Presently the girl began to snigger over her newspaper.

“Miss Thompson!” she whispered, “just ’ave a look at this advertisement about a baby!”

Edith took a step sideways and looked down into the drawer where the ink-stained finger pointed to the newspaper. The girl was pointing to the agony advertisements, and Edith shivered as she thought of what one of those advertisements had robbed her.

She read the first advertisement about the baby mechanically, and remained staring at the second advertisement, which was merely a number of incongruous and unpunctuated words—“Indian lace ottoman velvet Eastern yarns etc. etc. etc.”

“Oh, don’t read that gibberish,” said the girl. “That sort of thing has been in every day for the last year.”

But Edith had read what was gibberish to all the world except herself, and with a gasping sob, and a wild wave of arms, had fallen behind the counter in a dead faint.

V

Mr and Mrs Parker had been married for more than a year and a half. Looking back on those happy eighteen months, Edith could see nothing but unruffled love, and sunshine unbroken by the shadow of a cloud. From the moment that she had seen his agony advertisement the darkness had been lifted and the glorious sun had begun to shine.

They had met again on the dear old embankment. The advertisement had told her that he would be waiting, where he had waited every day during the year of their separation, on the spot where they had first clasped hands. His emotion and delight had been so great when she appeared that he could not speak. He had handed her into his splendid carriage, the tall footman had jumped up by the fat coachman’s side, and the big horses had whirled them through Eaton Square, on their way to Richmond, before he could find voice to tell her of his rapture.

He was one of the richest, and he had been one of the most miserable men in England, he told her. He had used every effort to trace her, poured out his new money in wild devices to discover her, and all without avail. His living treasure had disappeared in the immensity of London, and, in his despair of recovering it, he had come absolutely to hate the sordid dross which fate had given him in exchange.

“I hated my old cousin for piling up such a mountain of worthless gold,” he told her, as they lingered over their luncheon in the grand Richmond hotel. “But now I bless him. Now that I have you to share it with me, I revel in the thought of our wealth. What shall we do with it, darling ? Think of something wonderful and out of the way. There is nothing that we are not rich enough to do.”

They would travel, of course. They would first see all the beauties of strange lands and far-off seas. They would probably buy an ocean-going steamer or charter it as a yacht. Then they would build a lovely house somewhere in the country, and would settle down.

“It shall be a palace,” said the liftman, fondly. “Would you like it to be an exact model of Windsor Castle or Hampton Court? Don’t ask for an ordinary house. Think of something startling.”

“I know, dear,” said Edith, after thinking deeply. “A bungalow! As big as you like, but only one floor. You know what you told me of not being able to go upstairs, and I hate staircases too, since those awful stone ones at the Universal. Well, we won’t have a single step or stair in our house.”

The liftman was entranced.

They were surprised to find how slow a business the building of a house can be, and yet there was so much pleasure in the work that they were not inclined to quarrel with their architect and contractors. After looking at half the estates in England, they had purchased the side of a hill at Barcombe, his native place. They travelled away for a month or two at a time, and then returning to superintend operations, and, on each return, they found more and more work for them to do. Slowly, but surely, the long low. house, with its stone bays and tessellated verandatfs, stretched itself this way and that way. Gradually, an army of navvies and masons built up terrace upon terrace, high walls to shut them in from the prying outside world, granite fish ponds and carved fountains.

Then the gardeners came upon the scene, and full-grown trees crept, as if by magic, from their old woods, to take up stations in the formal divisions of their new home. The making of the garden delighted husband and wife more than anything else. To be able to create a well-grown paradise in this barren spot, without waiting for flowers, shrubs and trees until they were an old man and woman, was, perhaps, the first thing that gave them a sense of the power of wealth.

At last, after eighteen months of continued labour, the house was finished. Workmen of every class, upholsterers, painters, decorators, etc., still hovered about the premises, adding finishing touches, but, for all that, the house was finished and they were living in it.

VI

And now Edith began to learn the vainness of human plans, and to realise that unbroken happiness is not, in the order of nature, continued for ever. They had longed for the time when they should be living under their own roofs, and now her husband was not happy in his new home. Frofe the first day of their tenancy, Edith noticed a change in him. He was not happy, and he was not well, though he tried hard to hide this from the loving wife who watched him so anxiously. He was restless, and subject to fits of depression. He walked about the long passages with head down and dejected carriage, or paused, staring at the low carved ceilings, in fits of melancholy abstraction. Then, he would rouse himself with a violent effort, and hurry out into the garden, or for long rambles over the hills, as if struggling to free himself from his depression by violent and unusual exercise.

His rest at night, after those solitary walks, was broken and troubled.

“I assure you I am perfectly well,” he said, when his wife questioned him. “I would go to a doctor in London willingly, if there was anything the matter with me, but there is not. Of course now that the place is finished our occupation is, in a manner, gone and I miss it a little.'

But such assurances did not quiet Edith in view of the fact that his sleeplessness and nervousness seemed increasing and the depression of his spirits becoming more and more marked. To oblige her, but much against his will, he consented to call in a Barcombe doctor.

The Barcombe doctor declared that there was nothing wrong with Mr Parker's health, but strongly advised change of air, and gaye the name of a London physician, on whom they might call, if a second opinion would give them any satisfaction. The second opinion was the same as the first. There was nothing the matter with Mr Parker but he would do well to try a temporary change of surroundings.

A rapid tour in Scotland quickly proved the soundness of the medical advice.

Mr Parker returned to Barcombe in the highest of spirits and full of schemes for the future enjoyment of his home. Unfortunately, however, the return to Barcombe meant the return of the former and disquieting symptoms. Gradually and imperceptibly, the old depression and abstraction reappeared, and settled with a stronger hold on their victim than before.

Listless and weary, Mr Parker would wander disconsolately about his wonderful house and its beautiful grounds, dragging himself up the granite steps from terrace to terrace, or leaning on the balustrades to look with lack-lustre eyes on the waving branches below. Then, after a day or two, Edith would carry him off to London to seek fresh advice.

What was the matter with Mr Parker? He only knew that he was ill, that a strange depression weighed him down, that, in spite of his love for his wife, he found his existence a burden. The doctors explained this morbid condition in a dozen different ways, and prescribed as many different methods of treatment to get rid of it. But it was love and not science which found a cure.

“My dear lady, I am puzzled, I confess.' It was the first of the great London physicians who had made such a confession, and he was talking to Edith alone after the consultation, while her husband waited, listless and inert, in another room. “Your husband is the victim of a strange nostalgia. You tell me he has not been born and bred on mountains, and is not now living in a plain, or vice versd. He has not been a sailor, an African traveller, an Alpine climber or an aeronaut. Had he bfeen, I should have said send him back to the sea or up into the clouds again. Let him have his old occupation again for a brief space I”

That very night, while her husband lay gnashing his teeth and muttering in the restless sleep which came to him now so fitfully, Edith dreamt a strange dream.

She dreamt that she was at Barcombe, and architects, contractors and workmen came to her, as they had come in the past, and said, “It is finished. See for yourself how well we have obeyed you.” Then they pointed to the bungalow, from which a white tower sprang upward to an immense height. Almost as deep into the bowels of the earth as the tower itself, a hollow shaft descended, and up and down the well a shiny column and a splendid lift were rising and falling. There was nothing in the tower but the lift shaft and countless little platforms, guarded by strong brass gates, and connected one with another by ladder-like stairs. Then she thought to herself, in her dream, “This will cure him of his melancholy! This will give him the healthy occupation that he has been pining for. He shall take me up and down, and I will pretend to be his passengers. Then I will get out and pretend to be myself in the old days, and he shall come rumbling up and look at me with his dear eyes, and speak to me with his dear voice in those old words—the dearest words a girl ever heard—Indian Lace Ottbman Velvet Etcetera! That will cure him!”

THE SPINSTER AUNT

Once upon a time a tall thin man was walking through the hall of the H6tel des Anglais at Nice. It was a long, long time ago, when the little waves in the Angels’ Bay had only recently begun to break upon a French beach, when Mont Blanc had quite lately moved across the frontier, and turned its back on a united Italy, when English gentlemen went on their travels in peg-top trousers and side whiskers, and when no English lady would leave her home without her crinoline and her crochet needles. But the sun shone in those days just as brightly as now, and when you came out of the glare of sunlight into a dark hall, with all the Venetian blinds down, it was quite as difficult to see where you were going; and chairs, when you ran into them, hurt as much as nowadays, and “Oh, d-!” said the thin man as soon as he walked against one.

Because he was tall the chair caught him on the shin, and because he was thin the chair was able to give him a most unmerciful hack.

He stooped and rubbed his shin, feeling as though the bone must be broken, and then he stared for a moment at the nondescript female who was busily plying her crochet needles in an obscure corner of the hall. I hope she didn’t hear what I said,” he thought, as he stood by the sharp-edged chair rubbing his smarting leg.

Oh, my pets, my pets,” the old aunt used to say to her three pretty nieces, don’t be conceited. Don’t be self-conscious. Don’t let your heads be turned by a few empty compliments. Don’t think about the men at all.”

But the pretty nieces used to laugh at Auntie in open derision, and tell her that, much- as they loved her, they could not swallow such outrageous nonsense as that last piece of advice.

It would be downright cruel not to think about them,” they cried. I am sure they are always thinking about us.”

And then they tossed their pretty heads and compelled Auntie to listen to their tales of innocent triumphs:—Of how, at the county ball last night, three of the London fops, which Mrs Stemchase had expressly imported to dance continuously with the three Miss Sternchases, would persist in dancing with them instead; of how a certain Captain Splendid —beau sabreur and bel esprit—said pointedly, Some people don’t require pearl-necklaces,” while glancing from the scraggy, but richly decked, Lady Scapula to the round bare neck of his partner; of how one Lord Magnificent—with a cornet upon which the balls nestled like fruit between the strawberry leaves—who, because of his exalted rank, should have taken, and, indeed, was told to take, the Lady-Lieutenant in to supper, did with roguish artifice slip out of the engagement and, after six Tomboy extras, sup with none other than-

But then the dear old aunt would stop her ears with her white-mittened hands, saying, “I will not hear any more—I think you young ladies of the modern school are the very vainest, most feather-headed-”

And then the nieces would have to stop Auntie’s mouth with kisses, because, as they said, she was getting abusive. They loved this aunt better than all their other aunts. They loved and they admired her. They loved to cluster round her, and get her to themselves at the far-end of the big drawing-room after dinner, while Mamma and the other ladies grouped themselves about the marble fire-place. They loved to smooth and praise her satin gown, to stroke and estimate the value of her lace fichus and Indian shawls, to rattle and pull her slender gold chains and old amethyst bracelets, and to open and shut the famous locket which contained the miniatures of their Grandpapa and Grandmamma—painted when they were a pair of boy-and-girl lovers. A tender, sentimental music of a bygone age seemed always to be playing behind Auntie’s low voice, and they loved the music. In her smiles—even her smiles of reproof —far-off days seemed to come to life again, so that her nieces felt the same thrill of wonder as when, out visiting, they were shown some beautiful portrait by the long dead hand of a famous artist—Reynolds, Gainsborough, or Romney. Auntie was to them a kind and amiable ghost—a ghost that nobody could be afraid of—a dear sweet phantom of the impossible, unintelligible, yet delightful Past: not that silly old musty Past of history, about which their governesses had uselessly bothered them, but the real, true, romantic Past of live people like themselves, which peeped at them from bound volumes of Punch and the Illustrated London News, from fading photographs in family albums, from preposterous fashion-plates and egregious Books of Beauty, and which made them laugh of course, but somehow moved them to sadness in the midst of mirth.

And when, by teasing and cajoling, they succeeded in luring Auntie to retrace her own steps down some avenue of Time, in which the light of Memory flickered, now bright, now low, like the sunlight through the stately trees of a real avenue, they would cluster so close, and become so entrancingly absorbed, that they would not even hear the drawingroom doors swing open to admit the gentlemen coming from their coffee and cigarettes.

“Oh, my pets, my pets, we all have our little triumphs.’

“None more than you, Auntie. I believe you were a dreadful flirt. You thought no more of breaking hearts than we do about egg-shells/’ say the three cajoling nieces.

Nonsense. Men were different when I was young. They said less, but they meant so much more—and I don’t think they spoke until they were quite sure we wanted to listen. . . .

Well, then, if you won’t leave me in peace—I think the greatest conquest I ever made was of a total stranger.

He positively staggered when he saw me—“What a d-d pretty woman I ’ he said under his breath.

Then he leant upon a chair and stood staring at me. It was all so natural and irresistible that I could not find it in my heart to be really angry with him. . . .

Ah me! We remained strangers.”

THE CLUB-BORE

He was what is termed a club-bore. He was old and he was fidgety, and, worst of all, he used to talk to himself. As a rule it only amounted to a mutter, a sotto voce grumbling, as though making the responses to an internal litany which was always being sung inside him; but now and then he talked to himself, or gave the answer to his unspoken thought out loud. Then of course the club members heard, and they said it was a nuisance which the secretary and the committee between them ought to attend to and abate or remove. When the club servants heard him they only smiled discreetly behind their hands. The servants, you see, were more easy-going than their masters; or perhaps, in their ignorance they considered all the members club-bores, and did not observe that he was much worse than some of the others.

That’s right,” said the wine steward to the head waiter, as the old fellow walked out of the coffee-room with one hand in his trouser pocket and the other in the library novel which he had been reading at his solitary meal. “That’s right. Oo and do it now. D’yer hear him say that? Do it now,’ he says, as he passed me—right out loud.”

“Let me see,” the members would say, cutting the cards in the comfortable card-room—it is a very good club—“Yours was the king, mine the knave. You are the eight, aren’t you? And he cut the deuce, so it is his deal. Where is he though? Disappeared?

I say, too much of a bore!”

But he had drifted no farther than a writing-table. Adjusting his spectacles, he would look round depre-catingly. Please deal for me, will you?” he would plead. Quite a short note to write.”

But can’t you do your letter writing later?”

Well, if you don’t mind, I’d like to do it now—do it now—do it now,” and he would go on mumbling those words, to himself rather than to the impatient card-players.

Then, perhaps, at dinner-time, when he and one or two other members were sitting down together at the round table in the snug corner of the luxurious coffee-room—it is said to be one of the best dining clubs in London—when each had ordered his wine, when the silver toast racks had just arrived, and the soup was half way up the lift, and someone was trying to call to mind the funny story which had either been heard yesterday in another good club or read at school in a dog’s-eared Boccaccio, he would suddenly call for an ABC guide.

And bring the telegraph forms and a pencil, or the ink. Better bring the ink. I hate writing in pencil.”

Now nothing can well be a greater bore to a little band of club cronies—in the best club in Europe—just when they are sitting down to dinner, than to have the glasses and knives and forks pushed this way and that way to make room for ink-pots and blotting-pads and railway guides.

“I know, I know,” he would say gently, when this was pointed out to him, “but pray forgive me, for two minutes only. A telegram! I should perhaps still have time to get it off after dinner, but I shall enjoy my dinner so much more if I do it now—do it now—do it now!”

And how can you collect your mind and tell a funny story with an old fossil saying in your ear, “do it now, do it now?”

An unmitigated bore, it was generally agreed on such occasions. “He is not right,” and they tapped their bald foreheads. “Not quite all there. Not quite like other, people.”

And in truth, he was not like all the other members in all respects. For instance, in his life there had been a great love, and with many this was not so; unless one should count a great love for their dinner. Then, too, almost as long as he could remember—and that was a very long time now—he had carried about with him, inside him, quite beyond his own control, a voice: a real, actual, speaking voice, no illusion or self-deception he was assured, but a voice. Now none of the other members suffered from anything strange like this. The voice which asked for their whiskeys and sodas rather more often than was good for them perhaps, they were well aware was their own voice, even when it issued its orders without any mental effort of which they were conscious.

And it was this voice of his which he was simply echoing when people thought he was talking to himself. It was the voice which had acquired the habit of saying that one phrase, and not he.

It had begun at that almost incredibly distant period of time when he was a little flaxen-haired boy. It had begun to interpose itself in his childish relations with his mamma, who was extremely partial to him. He had perhaps been rude or churlish, as the best little boys sometimes are to excessively partial mammas; and now, when jogging on his little pony after the hounds with Papa (Papa was always after the hounds and hardly ever alongside of them), the thought would come into his little mind that he would take an early opportunity of smoothing Mamma's ruffled feelings by a few kind words, if not by an abject apology. But “do it now," said the voice. “How can I?” he would answer, “we are ten miles from home; and, besides, Pa says we may hear whoo hoop at any minute. It's unreasonable to go on saying do it now I ’ " Yet that is precisely what the voice did go on saying.

Well, he would slip Papa in the crowd at a field-gate or going through the fir copse, and, with the greatest difficulty, pull his pony round and turn his back on the music of the horn and the bell notes of the blood-greedy pack, as they ding-donged after their sinking fox. He would walk until Jack the pony was cool again, as the old coachman had instructed him; and then he would jog along the high road at the six-mile jog which Papa had taught him as the correct thing; but then again he would begin the canter and even gallop, on the hard high road. He had not learnt to do that from either Papa or the coachman. It was the voice which was driving him.

The voice had not altered its reiterated remark by the addition or suppression of a single word, but from its persistence it had made him read all sorts of absurd meaning into the words, had caused him to supply words of his own behind the words of the voice such as: Suppose you are too late. Suppose the chance is gone—for ever. Suppose you are prevented from making it up with your Ma. You have seen her once stop and put her hand to her side, while her face turned white. Remember what nurse said about that? Well, suppose it has happened, is happening now. I would drive that little slug along if I were you. I should make him travel somehow. Use your heels though there are no spurs on them. Use your stick too . .

“Well, upon my word, Master Jack,” the old coachman would say, that’s a very pretty state to bring a pony home in.”

Then had come the love. A strong, grown-up man’s first and only love; very different from a boyish partiality. It had filled him as rich wine fills a common bottle: it had done for him what the flame does for the cheap and tawdry Chinese lantern: it had made him glow most gloriously. There was nothing out of the way or unusual in his feelings; only his feelings were of the deep sort which seemed to flow like a river hurrying to the sea, and there was plenty of room in him for the feelings. He provided a really adequate bed for the river. And he was lucky in love. When he felt disposed to stretch himself at full length in the dusty path where the fairy princess was about to pass, hoping that she would use his heart to step upon if she wanted something soft to walk over, the princess checked him and said: “I do want something soft—to lean my face against, but not to put my foot upon.”

“On my death-bed,” he said to himself that afternoon, “I shall humbly thank Ood for giving me this great blessing.” But do it now,” said the voice, and he gladly obeyed.

If she left her book upstairs he used to run and fetch it, not waiting as she suggested until he had to go up to fetch his own slippers. When he had decided on the present which he would give her for her birthday, he just bought it. He found he could not wait for the birthday. When she named the particular pleasure resort which she had selected for their next year’s holiday, he told her maid to pack, and he took her to the place this year. When she was gradually forming a thought, he would try to say it for her. She found it difficult to express a wish, because the wish was gratified ere she could express it. And when she pondered on how she might best thank him, he answered her silent musings, “You have repaid me in advance, one hundred million times.” You see, he simply could not wait, with that voice always whispering. He was driven into action without a moment’s delay. It is not perhaps a bad method of dealing with those you love.

Be that as it may, he only once disobeyed the voice.

They were living in London and he had been down into the country to transact some troublesome, tiring business. It was in the summer and when he returned to their house, her carriage was at the door—her pretty new carriage with the pretty new horses which he had given her as his last present. She was going for a drive in the park, the servants told him, and would be down in a few minutes. He was too good a husband to disturb his wife while she was dressing, so he went into the library and sat down in the big armchair, and, being so tired, immediately fell asleep.

His last waking thought was that he had not seen her for nearly forty-eight hours. Then the warm waves of sleep rolled over him: little rippling waves of light slumber rolling over his head until they had drowned him in their gentle caresses. Yet the slumber was so light that he was not really drowned. It was as though he lay on the sandy floor of a shallow sea, like some lazy, amphibious creature looking up with blinking eyes to the sunlight and the sea birds, certain that it can rise to the surface whenever it cares to do so. So he lay for what seemed an immense time dozing in the arm-chair, until, all at once, he heard her footfall on the stairs. “She will come in here and kiss me in my sleep,” he said to himself. But the light footfall passed on through the hall—the servants had not told her that he had returned. “Then I want to wake,” he said in his sleep. “I want to go and see my love after forty-eight hours’ absence.” “Do it now, do it now,” said the voice. But the spirit that governs sleep had turned treacherous. “Tell the voice you have done so,” the wicked spirit whispered, and he, caught in the toils of the treacherous sleep-serpent, conquered by the invincible delight in this brief rest after his great fatigue, accepted the prompting and believed he was telling the truth. “See,” he said to the voice, “I have roused myself. I have gone into the hall. I have overtaken her on the steps. I hold her little hand in mine; I see the delicate beauty of the face, the soft lustre of the eyes. “All well, my darling; all well, all well.” Then the hall doors closed; the prancing horses carried his treasure away from him, while he still lay sleeping in the big armchair.

He never saw her again. Through the drowsy summer sunlight she had been whirled away by the horrible horses to her death, to her unspeakably dreadful death. “He must not see this,” the wise doctors and the other people at the hospital had said. “You understand, he must not see her.” And he did not question their wisdom, understanding that they were in truth wise. He waited until his treasure had been placed in its solid casket, until the solid lid of the casket had been tightly fastened down, and then he laid his forehead on the lid, and never once raised it throughout the short summer night.

But the metal and wood of the casket lid were hard things like life itself, not soft things like his heart, and they marked his forehead—cut into the flesh, nearly to the bone, and left a mark which you can see to this day, and which makes him different from other people. And some evil principle or canker or noxious corrosion in the head of one of the brass nails seemed to pass into the wound and through the bone into the brain itself, to corrode the thoughts inside with a bitter, biting gangrene of unquenchable regret, and to make him not quite right for the rest of his days.

Now that is the true story of the club-bore, and when you and I who know it come across him, if we are not pilled and live long enough to get into the most exclusive club in the world, we will make allowances for the old fellow: allowances which the members, and even the servants, can’t be expected to make, because, if they see the faint scar upon his bald forehead, they don’t in the least know how it came there.

IN THE BLACK FOREST COUNTRY

In the Black Forest the pine trees are of an immense height. Inside the dark woods they are bare poles; but on the outside fringe—that is to say, where there is light and air and elbow room—they are beautiful trees clothed in graceful foliage, with spreading arms and sweeping skirts. And this is so like life. For if you are bom in easy circumstances, and -always have everything you want, it is not difficult to look pleasant; whereas, if you have to struggle to rise in the world, and the competition is severe, your character and aspect are likely to become hard and forbidding. This is the thought which always comes into the mind of the travelling tourist as he drives through the dark fir woods in his hired fly. And the thought, though he does not know it, is so very like the carriage in which he sits. It is not his own, but he is quite entitled to use it whenever he cares to do so.

It really is a black forest. The bare poles are close together, and all among them there hangs a blackish twilight. The tourists, many of whom have come from a great distance and have paid a lot of money for their railway tickets, are always pleased to observe this black dusk, which falls like a thin crape curtain between them and all the world as soon as they enter through the green doors of the forest. There is nothing which a tourist on his travels likes so much as getting his money’s worth. And the forest might be blue or pink or all the colours of the rainbow and it would not give him half so much pleasure as it does by being what is really no colour at all—but just black. So he rolls along through the dingy twilight in the happiest frame of mind, and hardly cares to look when the chance comes now and then for a peep at the bright green valley. They are but peeps, down through the pine shafts at things which one can see anywhere: little red-roofed towns; a river; and piles of timber—with the song of the saw-mill rising faintly and sweetly.

Here and there, amid the pines, are humble wooden houses, in which the clever peasants are busily engaged on making and decorating the wooden clock-cases of those cheap little wooden clocks which are now familiar objects all over the world. Here and there, but wide apart and generally on the outer fringe, frowning down upon the valley from their rocky perches, are old stone castles. In some of these, the same noble family has resided for many hundreds of years, and is now residing. The English tourists seem delighted when they hear this interesting fact. There is nothing which the tourists when at home like so much to hear about as a grand old family, which has always lived in the same spot. Perhaps, with regard to such English noble houses, they feel that they have got their money’s worth. They have certainly had to pay for them.

On a summer morning, in one of the humble houses by the roadside, a number of peasant lads were sitting at their benches, hard at work on their woodcarving. The windows and doors were thrown wide, to admit as much light and air as might possibly be persuaded to come in, and any idlers standing in the road could watch the boys’ diligence and skill. The young children of the Count who lived in the nearest castle, out for a holiday walk with their sharp-eyed, young governess and their old, blinking tutor, had stopped and were watching the work with open-mouthed intentness. Then, as the children became more and more interested, being young people of quality, they took it for granted that they must be quite as welcome as the common light and air, so they went inside to have a closer inspection.

Nothing could afford a stronger contrast than the lordly little boys and girls, with their soft hands and their fine clothes and pretty manners, and the poor little peasants, with their rough yellow ^leather aprons, coarse hard fingers, and gruff, shy demeanour. The old peasant-patron doffed his blue cap to the professor-tutor, and walked backwards in his workshop before the young visitors, until they paused, clustering round the bench of the boy whom they had been watching from outside.

Oh, how clever you are!” they cried. “How your fingers fly about like birds, and how you do make the sharp tools obey you! You are quite the master here. You have made them docile little slaves. They never try to turn upon you and bite you with their sharp teeth.”

Oh, that’s nothing,” said the boy. Just practice! This is easy work,” and he showed them how it was done.

Don’t crowd upon him so,” said the governess.

He doesn’t mind it,” cried the smiling children. We have made such friends with him that he doesn’t mind a bit.”

You don’t mind, do you?” said the sweetest of the little girls, in a soft lisp that was like a caress.

No, he did not mind, he said, and then he showed them the docile tools using their teeth. They made the small square block of wood, held tight in the iron vice, appear like a piece of soft cheese in a mousetrap; while they seemed wise little mice, biting bits off the cheese in all directions, and never getting caught. They bit greedily, carelessly, big chunks on all sides; then they began to nibble—to nibble more and more deftly and cautiously; and then, all at once, they left off; and, behold! there stood the most perfectly sculptured chamois standing on a rock, and all ready to be glued upon the top of the clock-case.

“Oh,” cried the children, with long drawn breaths of rapture. “Oh, how wonder-beautiful! Give it to me as a present—to me, me, me, me, ME!”

Then he gave it as a present to the little girl with the hair like spun glass, who was leaning against his elbow.

“There is nothing on earth which I would rather be than a wood-carver,” said the Count’s little boys. “You must be excessively proud of yourself.”

“Oh, no,” said the peasant’s son. “That is nothing—it is not, for instance, nearly so difficult as making the hunter with his gun, who climbs the side of the clock-case to shoot the chamois.”

Then he showed them how to make a hunter; and the Count’s eldest boy claimed that and, in spite of the outcry of the others, seized it as his present, by right of his birth and the custom of the country.

“Come, come,” cried the governess. “Come away. You are imposing on his kindness.”

“Nonsense, he likes us,” said the children. “He looks on us as old friends. You do like us, don’t you? Make us something else. Let us play with your tools. Give me a little piece of wood to cut with this fine chisel.” They praised him; they admired him; they joked with him. It was impossible not to be gratified. There was nothing stand-offish about all these little counts and countesses. They were as familiar and affable as though they had been his common cousins, come to see him from the charcoal-burner’s hut, instead of being the quality from the castle. The smallest of them—the little girl with the pretty hair —was leaning her soft cheek against his rough coat; he could hear her little heart beating from pleasure; when he laid his coarse hand for a moment on the iron wrench, she patted it affectionately: certainly to her clear blue eyes he was as good as though he too had been a little count, and not a little peasant.

But while he was continuing the exhibition of his art—making a pig this time, out of his own head, in response to a friendly challenge, he suddenly became aware that some of the admiring crowd were drifting away from him. Then presently there came a joyous shout from one of the stragglers.

“Oh, come here. Here’s a boy doing it twice as well,” and they all hurried off to the other end of the workshop, and he and the little girl were left quite alone. She did not understand at first; but, looking up, just as he gave her the pig, she jumped in l^r little skin, and hastily toddled after the others—in so great a hurry, indeed, that she had not even time to say “Thank you.”

Well, he was free at last to go on with his day’s work. But, as he sat staring ruefully at his disordered bench, he saw what a dreadful mess they had made of everything. It would take him until dinnertime to put things straight again; to properly collect his materials and his ideas. They had completely unsettled him, he confessed to himself, as he lifted his coarse, trembling hand to his forehead.

“Ha, ha, my friend/ said the blinking old tutor in a loud, harsh voice, making him start because the tutor had not said a word to anybody till now. “What is that? There, on the chisel, just under your eyes I What is that?”

“It must have been a drop of water—dropt through the loose boards in the ceiling,” said the boy.

“Yet it rains not," said the old professor severely. “Do not let me see another drop. Stop!” and the old man brandished his cane, as though he were about to beat the boy. “ And listen to me. If I were the Count, I would give you a piece of gold, but because I am the tutor, I will give you instead a bit of advice. Profit by your lesson. You now know all that the artist will get from the world. Henceforth, seek only for reward in your art itself. .

“Nevertheless," added the tutor, “I will give you a silver coin—out of my own pocket, Aot out of the Count’s; because it occurs to me that you may not really be an artist after all, and, in that case, you will rather have my money than my sympathy."

But the boy would not accept the coin, so then the Herr Professor shook hands with him, very ceremoniously, and wished him good morning.