Chapter XVIII…

Chapter XVIII

BLIND MEN CAN'T SMOKE. CAN'T THEY? HOW THE COUNTESS AND HER DAUGHTER AT LAST INTERVIEWED THEIR GUEST. HIS SUBTLE ARRANGEMENTS FOR SEEMING TO SEE THEM. A BLUNDER OVER A HANDSHAKE, AND ALL THE FAT IN THE FIRE, NEARLY! AN ELECTRIC SHOCK. THE EXCELLENCE OF ACHILLES' HEART. HOW MR. TORRENS SPOILED IT ALL! BLUE NANKIN IS NOT CROWN DERBY. GWEN'S GREAT SCHEME. HOW SHE CARRIED IT OUT

The morning passed, with intermittent visitors, one at a time. Each one, coming away from the bedside, confirmed the report of his predecessor as to the visible improvement of the convalescent. Each one in turn, when questioned about the eyesight, gave a sanguine report--an echo of the patient's own confidence, real or affected, in its ultimate restoration. He would be all right again in a week or so.

Underhand ways were resorted to of cheating despair and getting at the pocket of Hope. Said one gentleman to the Earl--who was keeping his counsel religiously--"He can't read small print." Whereto the Earl replied--"Not yet awhile, but one could hardly expect that"; and felt that he was carrying out his promise with a minimum of falsehood. Yet his conscience wavered, because an eyesight may be unable to read small print, and yet unable to read large print, or any print at all. Perhaps he had better have left the first broad indisputable truth to impose on its hearer unassisted.

Another visitor scored a success on behalf of Optimism by reporting that the patient had smoked a cigar in defiance of medical prohibitions. "Can't be much wrong with his eyes," said this one, "if he can smoke. You shut your eyes, and try!" Put to the proof, this dictum received more confirmation than it deserved, solely to secure an audience for the flattering tales of Hope.

Much of the afternoon passed too, but without visitors. Because it would never do, said Irene, for her brother not to be at his best when Gwen and her mother came to pay their visit, resolved on this morning, at what was usually the best moment of his day--about five o'clock. Besides, he was to be got up and really dressed--not merely huddled into clothes--and this was a fatiguing operation, never carried out in dire earnest before. Doctor and Nurse had assented, on condition that Mr. Torrens should be content to remain in his room, and not insist on going downstairs. Where was the use of his doing so, with such a journey before him to-morrow? Better surely to husband the last grain of strength--the last inch-milligramme of power--for an eighteen-mile ride, even with all the tonics in the world to back it! Mr. Torrens consented to this reservation, and promised not to be rebellious.

So--in time--the hour was at hand when he would see.... No!--not see--there was the sting of it!... that girl he had spoken with at Arthur's Bridge. The vision of her in the sunset was upon him still. He had pleaded with his sister that, come what might, she should not come to him in his darkness, in the hope that this darkness might pass away and leave her image open to him as before. For this hope had mixed itself with that strong desire of his heart that his own disaster should weigh upon her as little as possible. He had kept this meeting back almost till the eleventh hour, hoping against hope that light would break; longing each day for a gleam of the dawn that was to give him his life once more, and make the whole sad story a matter of the past. And now the time had come; and here he stood awaiting the ordeal he had to pass successfully, or face his failure as he might.

If he could but rig up an hour's colourable pretext of vision, however imperfect, the reality might return in its own good time--if that was the will of Allah--and that time might be soon enough. She might never know the terrible anticipations his underthought had had to fight against.

"You look better in the blue Mandarin silk than you would in your tailor's abominations," said Irene, referring to a dressing-gown costume she had insisted on. "Only your hair wants cutting, dear boy! I won't deceive you."

"That's serious!" He lets it pass nevertheless. "Look here, 'Rene, I want you to tell me.... Where are you?--oh, here!--all right.... Now tell me--should you say I saw you, by the look of my eyes?"

"Indeed I should. Indeed, indeed, nobody could tell. Your eyes look as strong as--as that hooky bird's that sits in the sun at the Zoological and nictitates ... isn't that the word?... Goes twicky-twick with a membrane...."

"Fish eagle, I expect."

"Shouldn't wonder! Only, look here!... You mustn't claw hold of Gwen like that. How can you tell, without?"

"Where they are, do you mean? Oh, I know by the voice. You go somewhere else and speak." Whereupon Irene goes furtively behind him, and says suddenly:--"Now look at me!" It is a success, for the blind man faces round, looking full at her.

She claps her hands. "Oh, Adrian!" she cries, "are you sure you don't see--aren't you cheating?" A memory, in this, of old games of blindman's-buff. "You always did cheat, darling, you know, when we played on Christmas Eve. How do I know I can trust you?" She goes close to him again caressing his face. "Oh, do say, dear boy, you can see a little!" But it is no use. He can say nothing.

There are a few moments of distressing silence, and then the brother says:--"Never mind, dear! It will be all right. They say so. Take me to the window that I may look out!" They stand together at the open casement, listening to the voices of the birds. The shrewdest observer might fail to detect the flaw in those two full clear eyes that seem to look out at the leagues of park-land, the spotted deer in the distance, the long avenue-road soon indistinguishable in the trees. The sister sees those eyes, no other than she has always known them, but knows that they see nothing.

"When I was here first," says the brother, "the thrushes were still singing. They are off duty by now, the very last of them." He stops listening. "That's a yellow-hammer. And that's a linnet. You can't tell one from the other."

"I know. I'm shockingly ignorant.... What, dear? What is it you want?" Her brother has been exploring the window-frame with a restless hand, as though in search of some latch or blind-cord. He cannot find what he wants.

"I want to come to a clearness about the position of this blessed window," he says. "Which direction is the bed in now? Well--describe it this way, suppose! Say I'm looking north now, with my shoulder against the window. Where's the bed? South-west--south-east--due south?"

"South-west by south. Perhaps that's not nautical, but you know what I mean."

"All right! Now, look here! As I stand here--looking out slantwise--where's the sunset? I mean, where would it be?--where does it mean to be?"

"You would be looking straight at it. Of course, you are not really looking north.... There--now you are!" She had taken her hands from the shoulder they were folded on and turned his head to the right. "But, I say, Adrian dear!..." She hesitates.

"What, for instance?"

"Don't try to humbug too much. Don't try to do it, darling boy. You'll only make a hash of it."

"All right, goosey-woosey! I'll fry my own fish. Don't you be uneasy!" And then they talk of other things: the journey home to-morrow, and how it shall be as good as lying in bed to Adrian, in the big carriage with an infinity of cushions; the new friends they have made here at the Towers, with something of wonderment that this chance has been so long postponed; the kindness they have had from them, and the ill-requital Adrian made for it yesterday by breaking that beautiful blue china tea-cup--any trifle that comes foremost--anything but the great grief that underlies the whole.

For Irene would have her brother at his best, that the visit to him of her new-made friend Gwen may go off well, and steer clear of the ambushes that beset it. Better that that visit should never come off, than that her friend should be left to share their fears for the future. Each is hiding from the other a weakening confidence in the renewal of suspended eyesight, weaker at the outset than either had been prepared to admit to the other.

"Look here, 'Rene," says Adrian, an hour later, during which his sister has read aloud to him, lying by the open window. "Never mind Becky Sharp; she'll keep till the evening. Can we see Arthur's Bridge from this window, where I saw your friend Lady Gwen? It was Arthur's, wasn't it? What Arthur? King Arthur?"

"Yes, if you like. Only don't go and call it Asses' Bridge, as you did the other day--not when the family's here. It sounds disrespectful."

"Not a bit. It only looks as if Euclid had been round. But answer my question.... Oh, we can see it! Very well, then; show me which way it lies. Is it visible--the actual bridge itself, I mean--not the place it's in?"

Irene got up and looked out of the window from behind her brother's chair. "Yes," she said. "One sees the stone arch plain. How can I show you?" She took his head in her hands again to guide it to a true line of sight.

"Between us and the sunset?"

"Thereabouts. Rather on the left."

"Very good. Now we can go on with Becky Sharp."

"That's it, my lord, is it? Where was I?--oh, Sir Pitt Crawley...." And then the reading was continued, till tea portended, and Irene went away to capture her visitors.

All the sting of his darkness came upon him in its fulness as he heard that voice on the stairs. Oh, could he but see her for one moment--only one moment--to be sure that that dazzling image of three weeks since was not a mere imagination! He knew well the enchantment of the rainbow gleam on sea and earth and sky--the glory that makes Aladdin's palace of the merest hovel. He could scarcely have said to a nicety why a self-deception on this score seemed to him fraught with such evil. If it was a terror on Gwen's behalf, that a false image cherished through a period of reviving eyesight should in the end prove an injustice to her, and cast a chill over his own passionate admiration--for it was that at least that a chance of five minutes had enthralled him with--he banished that terror artificially from his mind. What could it matter to her, if he was taken aback and disappointed at her not turning out what his excited fancy had made her that evening at Arthur's Bridge? What was he to her that any chance man might not have been, after so scanty an interchange of words?

That was his dominant feeling, or underlying it, as her voice neared the door of his room, saying:--"Fancy your carrying him away without our seeing him--so much as thinking of it! I call you a wicked, unprincipled sister." To which another voice, a maternal sort of voice, said what must have been: "Don't speak so loud!"--or its equivalent. For the girl's voice dropped, her last words being:--"He won't hear, at this distance."

Then, she was actually coming in at the door! He could hear the prodigious skirt-rustle that is now a thing of womanhood's past--though we adored every comely example, mind you, we oldsters in those days, for all that she carried a milliner's shop on her back--and as it climaxed towards entry had to remember by force how slight indeed had been his interchange of words with the visitor he wished to see--to see by hearing, and to touch the hand of twice. For he had counted his coming privileges in his heart already, even if his reason had made light of its arithmetic. He would be on the safe side now--so he said to himself--and think of the elder lady as the player of the leading role. No disparagement to her subordinate; the merest deference to convention!

There was no mishap about the first meeting; only a narrow escape of one. The man in the dark reckoned it safest to extend his hand and leave it, to await the first claimant. He took for granted this would be the mother, and as his hand closed on a lady's, not small enough to call his assumption in question, said half interrogatively:--"Lady Ancester?"

"That's Gwen," said his sister's voice. And at the word an electric shock of a sort passed up his arm, the hand that still held his showing no marked alacrity to release it.

"Yes, this is me," says the voice of its owner, "that's mamma."

Lady Ancester, standing close to her, meets his outstretched hand and shakes it cordially. Then follows pleasantry about mistaking the mother for the daughter, with assumption of imperfect or dim vision only to account for it, and a declaration from Adrian that he had been cautioned not to confuse the one with the other. There is a likeness, as a matter of fact, and Irene has talked to him of it. The whole thing is slighter than the telling of it.

Then the three ladies and the one man have grouped--composed themselves--for reasonable chat. He is in his invalid chair by special edict, at the window, and the two visitors face him half-flanking it. His sister leans over him behind on the chair-back. She has kept very close to him, guiding him under pretence that he wants support, which is scarcely the case now, so rapid has been his progress in this last week. She is very anxious lest her brother should venture too rashly on fictitious proofs of eyesight that does not exist. But it can all be put down to uneasiness about his strength.

The platitudes of mere chat ensue, the Countess being prolocutrix. But she can be sincerely earnest in speaking of her own concern about the accident, and her family's. Also to the full about the rejoicing of everyone when it was "certain that all would turn out well." She has been bound over to say nothing about the eyesight, and keeps pledges; almost too transparently, perhaps. A word or two about it as a thing of temporary abeyance might have been more plausible.

Gwen has become very silent since that first warmth of her greeting. She is leaving the conversation to her mother, which puzzles Irene, who had framed a different picture of the interview, and is disappointed so far. Achilles, the dog, too, may be disappointed--may be feeling that something more demonstrative is due to the position. Irene imputes this view to him, inferring it from his restless appeals to Gwen, as he leans against her skirts, throwing back a pathetic gaze of remonstrance for something too complex for his powers of language. Her comment:--"He is always like that,"--seems to convey an image of his whereabouts to his master, confirmed perhaps by expressive dog-substitutes for speech.

"You mustn't let my bow-wow worry you, Lady Gwendolen. He presumes till he's checked, on principle. Send him to lie down over here. Here, Ply, Ply, Ply!... Oh, won't he come?" Probably Achilles knows that his master, who speaks, is only being civil.

"No--because I'm holding him. I want him here. He's a darling!" So says Gwen; and then continues:--"Oh yes, I know why he's Ply--short for Pelides. I think he thinks I think it was his fault, and wants forgiveness."

"Possibly. But it is also possible that he sees his way by cajolery to all the sweet biscuits with a little crown on them that come about with tea. He wants none of us to have any. Pray do not think any the worse of him. How is he to know that a well-bred person hungers for little crown biscuits? We are so affected that there is nothing for him to go by."

"And he's a dear, candid darling! Of course he is. He shall have everything he wants." Achilles appears to accept the concession as deserved, but to be ready to requite it with undying love.

"It is all the excellence of his heart, I am aware, and a certain simplicity and directness," says Adrian. "But all the same he mustn't spoil ladies' dresses--beyond a certain point, of course. I have been very curious to know, Lady Gwendolen, whether his paws came off--the marks of them, I mean--on that lovely India muslin I saw you in three weeks ago, just before this unfortunate affair which has given so much trouble to everybody at--at ... Arthur's Bridge, of course! Couldn't think of the name at the moment. At Arthur's Bridge. I'm afraid he didn't do that dress any good."

"It wasn't a new dress," says Gwen, "as far as I remember." A point her maid would know more about, clearly.

Lady Ancester seems to think a little ex post facto chaperonage would not be inappropriate. "Gwen was out of bounds, I understand," she says; which means absolutely nothing, but sounds well.

The remark seems somehow to focus the conversation, and become a stepping-stone to a review of the recent events. Evidently the principal actor in them takes that view. "I had no idea whom I was speaking to," he says, "still less that Lady Gwendolen had taken the trouble to come away from the house with so kind a motive. Of course, I have heard all about it from my sister."

Gwen perfectly understands. "And then you walked over to Drews Thurrock, and Achilles' collar broke, and he got away." She speaks as one who waits for more.

"He did, and I am sorry to say he forgot himself. The old Adam broke out in him in connection with the sudden springing of a hare, just under his nose. It was almost the moment after his collar broke, and it is quite possible he thought I meant to let him go. But after all, Achilles is human, and really I could not blame him in any case. Try to see the thing from his point of view. Fancy discovering an unused faculty lying dormant--art, song, eloquence--and an unprecedented opportunity for its use! Do you know, I don't believe Achilles had ever so much as seen a hare before?--not a live one! He smelt one once at a poulterer's--a dead one that was starting for the Antipodes with its legs crossed. The poulterer lost his temper, very absurdly...."

"Well--did he catch the hare? I mean the first hare."

"That I can't say. Both vanished, and I suspect the hare got away. I'm sure of one thing, that if Achilles did catch him he didn't know what to do with him. He has not the sporting spirit. Cats interest him in his native town, but when they show fight he comes and complains to me that they are out of order. He overhauled a kitten three weeks old once, that had come out to see the world, and it defied him to mortal combat. Achilles talked to me all the way down the street about that kitten."

"I want to know what happened next." From Gwen.

"Yes--silly old chatterbox!--keep to the point." Thus Irene; and Lady Ancester, who has been accepting the hare and the cats with dignity, even condescension, adds:--"We were just at the most interesting part of the story." This was practically her ladyship's first sight of the son of the man she had gone so near to marrying over five-and-twenty years ago. The search to discover a modus vivendi between a past and present at war may have thrown her a little out of her usual demeanour. Gwen wondered why mamma need be so ceremonious.

Adrian was perfectly unconscious of it, even if Irene was not. He ran on:--"Oh--the story! Yes--Achilles forgot himself, and was off after the hare like a whirlwind.... I don't know, Lady Ancester, whether you have ever blown a whistle in the middle of an otherwise unoccupied landscape, with no visible motive?"

Her ladyship had not apparently. Irene found fault with the narrator's style, suggesting a more prosaic one. But Gwen said: "Oh, Irene dear, what a perfect sister you are! Why can't you let Mr. Torrens tell his tale his own way?"

So Mr. Torrens went on:--"It doesn't matter. If you had ever done so, I believe you would confirm my experience of the position. If Orpheus had whistled, instead of singing to a lute, Eurydice would have stopped with Pluto, and Orpheus would have cut a very poor figure. I began to perceive that Achilles wasn't going to respond, and I knew the hare wouldn't, all along. So I walked on and got to a wood of oaks with an interesting appearance. The interesting appearance was inviting, so I went inside. Achilles was sure to turn up, I thought. Poor dear!--I didn't see him for some days after that, when I came to and heard all about it. He had been very uneasy about me, I'm afraid."

"But inside the wood with the interesting appearance--what happened then?" Gwen would not tolerate digression.

"Well, I came to the edge of a wall with a little sunk glade beyond, and was looking across some blackberry bushes when I heard a rifle-shot, and the whirr of a bullet. I had just time to notice that the whirr came with the gunshot--if it had been in the opposite direction it would have followed it--when I was struck on the head and fell. It was the fall that knocked me insensible, but it was the gunshot that was responsible for all that bleeding.... Do you know, I can't tell you how sorry I am for that old boy that fired the shot? I can't imagine anything more miserable than shooting a man by accident."

It was then that an uneasy feeling about those eyes, that looked so clear and might be so deceiving, took hold of Gwen's mind, and would not be ignored on any terms. The speaker's "you"--was it addressed in this case to her or to her mother? The line of his vision seemed to pass between them. If he could see at all, ever so dimly, he could look towards the person he addressed. One does not always do so; true enough! But one does not stare to right or to left of him. And she felt sure these words had been spoken to herself.

So while her mother was joining in commiseration of old Stephen, towards whom she herself felt rather brutal, she was casting about for some means of coming at the truth. Irene was no good, however altruistic her motives might be for story-telling.... No!--his eyes looked at her in quite another fashion that evening at Arthur's Bridge, in the light of the sunset. She must get at the truth, come what might!

She left her mother to express sympathy for old Stephen, remaining rather obdurately silent; checking a wish to say that it served the old man right for meddling with loaded guns. She waited for the subject to die down, and then recurred to its predecessor. Did Mr. Torrens walk straight from Arthur's Bridge to the Thurrock or go roundabout? She did not really want to know--merely wanted to get him to talk about himself again. He might say something about his sight, by accident.

He replied:--"I did not go absolutely straight. I went first to where a couple of stones--a respectable married couple, I should say--were standing close together in the fern, with big initials cut on them. Their own, I presume." Gwen said she knew them; they were parish boundaries. "Well--probably that hare was trying what it felt like to be in two parishes at once, for he jumped from behind that stone and started for the Thurrock--that's right, isn't it?"

"Drews Thurrock? Yes."

"It was unfortunately just then that the collar broke. I whistled until I felt undignified, and then went straight for the said Thurrock, rather dreading that I should find Achilles awaiting applause for an achievement in--in leporicide, I suppose...."

"I'm sure you didn't."

"I did not. So I waited a little, and was thinking what I had better do next, when the shot came. You can almost see the place from this window." He got up from his chair, standing exactly where he had stood when his sister made his hand point out Arthur's Bridge in blind show. He made a certain amount of pretence that he could see; and, indeed, seemed to do so. No stranger to the circumstances could have detected it. "I couldn't be sure about the place of the stones, though," said he, carefully avoiding direct verbal falsehood; at least, so Irene thought, trembling at his rashness. He went on:--"Oh dear, how doddery one does feel on one's legs after a turn out of this kind!" and fell back in his chair, his sister alone noticing how he touched it with his hand first to locate it. "I shall be better after a cup of tea," said he. And the whole thing was so natural that although he had not said in so many words that he could see anything, the impression that he could was so strong that Gwen could have laughed aloud for joy. "He really does see something!" she exclaimed to herself.

If he could only have been content with this much of success! But he must needs think he could improve upon it--reinforce it. His remark about the cup of tea had half-reference to its appearance on the horizon; or, rather on the little carved-oak table near the window, whose flaps were being accommodated for its reception as he spoke. The dwellers in this part of the country considered five o'clock tea at this time an invention of their own, and were rather vain of it. Another decade made it a national institution.

"If there is one thing I enjoy more than another," he said, "it is a copper urn that boils furiously by magic of its own accord. When I was a kid our old cook Ursley used to allow me to come into the kitchen and see the red-hot iron taken out of the fire and dropped into the inner soul of ours, which was glorious." This was all perfectly safe, because there was the urn in audible evidence. Indeed, the speaker might have stopped there and scored. Why need he go on? "And these blue Nankin cups are lovely. I never could go crockery-mad as some people do. But good Nankin blue goes to my heart." And he really thought, poor fellow, that he had done well, and been most convincing.

Alas for his flimsy house of cards! Down it came. For there had only been four left of that blue tea-service, and he had broken one. The urn was hissing and making its lid jump in the middle of a Crown Derby tea-set, so polychromatic, so self-assertive in its red and blue and gold, that no ghost of a chance was left of catching at the skirts of colour-blindness to find a golden bridge of escape from the blunder. The most colour-blind eyes in the world never confuse monochrome and polychrome.

There is a sudden terror-struck misgiving on the beautiful face of Gwen, and an uneasy note of doubt in her mother's voice, seeking by vague speech to elude and slur over the difficulty. "The patterns are quite alike," she says weakly. The blind man feels he has made a mistake, and is driven to safe silence. He understands his slip more clearly when the servant, speaking half-aside, but audibly, to the Countess, says:--"Mrs. Masham said the blue was spoiled for four, my lady, and to bring four of the China." Crown Derby is more distinctly China in English vernacular than Nankin blue.

Please understand that the story is giving at great length incidents that passed in fractions of a minute--incidents Time recorded currente calamo for Memory to rearrange at leisure.

The incident of the tea-cups was easily slurred over and forgotten. Adrian Torrens saw the risks of attempting too much, and gave up pretending that he could see. Irene and the Countess let the subject go; the former most willingly, the latter with only slight reluctance. Gwen alone dwelt upon it, or rather it dwelt upon her; her memory could not shake it off. Do what she would the thought came back to her: "He cannot see at all. I must know--I must know!" She could not join in the chit-chat which went on under the benevolent influence of the tea-leaf, the great untier of tongues. She could only sit looking beautiful, gazing at the deceptive eyes she felt so sure were blind to her beauty, devising some means of extracting confession from their owner, and thereby knowing the worst, if it was to come. It was interesting to her, of course, to hear Mr. Torrens talk of the German Universities, with which he seemed very familiar; and of South America, the area of which, he said, had stood in the way of his becoming equally familiar with it. He had been about the world a good deal for a man of five-and-twenty.

"Gwen thought you were more," said Irene. "At Arthur's Bridge, you know! She thought you were twenty-seven."

"Because I was so wet through. Naturally. I was soaked and streaky. Are you sure it wasn't thirty-seven, Lady Gwendolen?"

It has been mentioned that Lady Ancester had a matter-of-fact side to her character. But was it this that made her say thoughtfully:--"Twenty-five perhaps--certainly not more!" Probably her mind had run back nearly thirty years, and she was calculating from the date of this man's father's marriage, which she knew; or from that of his eldest brother's birth, which she also knew. She was not so clear about Irene. At the time of that young lady's first birthday--her only one, in fact--her close observation of her old flame's family dates was flagging. But she was clear that this Adrian's birth had followed near upon that of her own son Frank, drowned a few years since so near the very place of this gunshot accident. The coincidence may have made her identifications keener. Or Adrian's reckless chat, so like his father's in old days that she had more than once gone near to comment on it, may have roused old memories and set her a-fixing dates.

Adrian laughed at the way his age seemed to be treated as an open question. "We have the Registrar on our side, at any rate, Lady Ancester. I can answer for that. By-the-by, wasn't my father ... did not my father?..." He wanted to say: "Was not my father a friend of your brother in old days?" But it sounded as if the friendship, whatever it was, had lessened in newer days, and he knew of nothing to warrant the assumption. He knew nothing of his father's early love passages, of course. Fathers don't tell their sons what narrow escapes they have had of being somebody else, or somebody else being they--an awkward expression!

Her ladyship thought over a phrase or two before she decided on:--"Your father used to come to Clarges Street in my mother's time." She was pleased with the selection; but less so with a second, one of several she tried to herself and rejected. "We have really scarcely met since those days. I thought him wonderfully little changed."

Has a parent of yours, you who read--or of ours, for that matter--ever spoken to one or other of us, I wonder, of some fancy of his or her bygone days; one whose greeting, company manners apart, was an embrace; whose letters were opened greedily; whose smile was rapture, and whose frown a sleepless night? If he or she did so, was the outcome better than the Countess's?

She wanted to run away, but could not just yet. She made believe to talk over antecedents--making a conversation of indescribable baldness, and setting Irene's shrewd wits to work to find out why. It was not her brother, but her husband's, who had been Sir Hamilton's college-friend. Yes, her father was well acquainted with Mr. Canning, and so on. This was her contribution to general chat, until such time had elapsed as would warrant departure and round the visit plausibly off.

It was Clarges Street that had done it. Irene was sure of that! She, the daughter of the Miss Abercrombie her father had married, sitting there and coming to conclusions!

However, the Countess meant to go--no doubt of it. "You have paid my brother such a short visit, after all," said Irene. "Please don't go away because you fancy you are tiring him." But it was no use. Her ladyship meant to go, and went. Regrets of all sorts, of course; explanatory insincerities about stringent obligations elsewhere; even specific allegations of expected guests; false imputation of exacting claims to the Earl. All with one upshot--departure.

Gwen had taken little or no notice of what was passing, since that betraying incident of the Crown Derby set. Her mind was at work on schemes for discovery of the truth about those eyes. She got on the track of a good one. If she could only contrive to be alone with him for one moment. Yes--it was worth trying?

It was her mother's inexplicable alacrity to be gone that gave the opportunity. Her ladyship said good-bye to Mr. Torrens; was sorry she had to go, but the Earl was so fussy about anything the least like an appointment--some concession to conscience in the phrasing of this--in short, go she must! Having committed herself thus, to wait for her daughter would have been the merest self-stultification. She went out multiplying apologies, and Irene naturally accompanied her along the lobby, assisted and sanctioned by Achilles. Gwendolen was alone with the man who was still credited with sight enough to see something--provided that it was a palpable something. Now--if she could only play her part right!

"Mamma is always in such a fuss to go somewhere and do something else," she said, rather affecting the drawl of a fashionable young lady; for she could hide anxiety better, she felt, that way. "Do you know, Mr. Torrens, I don't believe a word of all that about people coming. Nobody's coming. If there is, they've been there ever so long. I did so want to talk to you about one of your poems. I mustn't stop now, I suppose, or I shall be in a scrape." But all the while that she was saying this she was standing with her right hand outstretched, as though to say good-bye. Only the word remained unspoken.

"Which of my poems was it?" He was to all seeming looking full at her, yet his hand did not come out to meet hers. There was hope still. How could he ratify an adieu with a handshake, on the top of a question that called for an answer?

Gwen had not arranged the point in her mind--had not thought of any particular poem in fact. She took the first that occurred to her. "It's the one called 'A Vigil in Darkness,'" she said. And then she would have been so glad to withdraw it and substitute another. That was not possible--she had to finish:--"I wanted to know if any other English poet has ever used 'starren' for stars."

Adrian laughed. "I remember," said he; then quoted: "'The daughters of the dream witch come and go,' don't they? 'The black bat hide the starren of the night.' That's it, isn't it?... No--so far as I know! But they are a queer lot. Nobody ever knows what they'll be at next in the way of jargon. It's some rubbish I wrote when I was a boy. I put it with the others to please 'Re." This was his shortest for Irene.

If he would only have toned down his blank ignorance of the beautiful white hand stretched out so appealingly to him--made the least concession! If he had but held in readiness an open-fingered palm, with intent, there would have been hope. But alas!--no such thing. When, instead, he thrust both hands into the pockets of the blue Mandarin-silk dressing-gown, Gwen felt exactly as if a knife had cut her heart. And there were his two beautiful eyes looking--looking--straight at her! Need Fate have worded an inexorable decree so cruelly?

Hope caught at a straw, more suo. What was more likely than that darkness was intermittent? Many things--most things for that matter! Any improbability to outwit despair. Anything rather than final surrender. Therefore, said Gwen to herself, her hand outstretched should await his, however sick at heart its owner felt, till the last pretext of belief had flagged and died--belief in the impossibility of so terrible a doom, consistently with any decent leniency of the Creator towards His creatures.

"Oh--to please Irene, was it?" said Gwen, talking chancewise; not meaning much, but hungering all the while for the slightest aliment for starving Hope. "Who were 'the daughters of the Dream Witch?'" And then she was sorry again. Better that a poem about darkness should have been forgotten! She kept her hand outstretched, mind you!--even though Adrian made matters worse by folding his hands round his arms on a high chair-back, and leaning on it. "I wonder who she is," was the girl's thought, as she looked at a ring.

"Let me see!" said he. "How does it go?" Then he quoted, running the lines into one: "'In the night-watches in the garden of Night ever the watchman sorrowing for the light waiteth in silence for the silent Dawn. Dead sleep is on the city far below.' Then the daughters of the Dream Witch came and went as per contract. No--I haven't the slightest idea who they were. They didn't leave their names."

"You will never be serious, Mr. Torrens." She felt too heartsick to answer his laugh. She never moved her hand, watching greedily for a sign that never came. There was Irene coming back, having disposed of her ladyship! "I must go," said Gwen, "because of mamma. She's the Dream Witch, I suppose. I must go. Good-bye, Mr. Torrens! But I can leave my name--Gwen or Gwendolen. Choose which you prefer." She had to contrive a laugh, but it caught in her throat.

"Gwen, I think." It was such a luxury to call her by her name, holding her hand in his--for, the moment she spoke "good-bye," his hand had come to meet hers like a shot--that he seemed in no hurry to relinquish it. Nor did she seem concerned to have it back at the cost of dragging. "Did you ever live abroad?" said he. "In Italy they always kiss hands--it's rather rude not to. Let's pretend it's Italy."

She was not offended; might have been pleased, in fact--for Gwen was no precisian, no drawer of hard-and-fast lines in flirtation--if it had not been for the black cloud that in the last few minutes had been stifling her heart. As it was, Adrian's trivial presumption counted for nothing, unless, indeed, it was as the resolution of a difficulty. It was good so far. Even so two pugilists are glad of a way out of a close grip sometimes. It ended a handshake neither could withdraw from gracefully. "Good-bye, Mr. Torrens," she said, and contrived another laugh. "I'll come again to talk about the poetry. I must go now." She passed Irene, coming in from a moment's speech with the nurse outside, with a hurried farewell, and ran on to her mother's room breathless.

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Chapter XIX

GWEN'S PESSIMISM. IT WAS ALL OUR FAULT! HOW SHE KNEW THAT ADRIAN TORRENS WAS FIANCE, AND HOW HER MOTHER TOOK KINDLY TO THE IDEA. PEOPLE ONLY KNOW WHAT THE WILL OF GOD IS, NOT WHAT IT ISN'T. BUT ADRIAN TORRENS DID NOT COME TO TABLE. LONELINESS, AND NIGHT--ALL BUT SLEEPLESS. WANT OF COMMON SENSE. THE FATE OF A FEATHER. COUNTING A THOUSAND. LOOKING MATTERS CALMLY IN THE FACE. A GREAT DECISION, AND WHAT GWEN SAW IN A MIRROR

Lady Ancester, not sorry to get away from a position which involved the consideration that she was unreasonable in feeling reluctance to remain in it, endeavoured on arriving in her own room to congratulate herself on her own share in an embarrassing interview.

She had got through it very well certainly, but not so well as she had been led to expect by her meeting with his father three weeks since. She had had her misgivings before that interview, and had been pleasantly surprised to find how thoroughly the inexorable present had ridden rough-shod over the half-forgotten past. Their old identities had vanished, and it was possible to be civil and courteous, and that sort of thing; even to send messages of sympathy, quite in earnest, to the lady who up till now had been little more than the Miss Abercrombie Hamilton Torrens married. Being thus set at ease about what seemed rocks of embarrassment ahead, in the father's case, Lady Ancester had looked forward with perfect equanimity to making the acquaintance of the son--had, in fact, only connected him in her mind with this deplorable accident, which, however, she quite understood to be going to be a thing of the past. All in good time. Her equanimity had, however, been disturbed by the young man's inherited manner, which his father had so completely lost; above all things by his rapid nonsense, one of his father's leading characteristics in youth. She condemned it as more nonsensical, which probably only meant that she herself was older. But the manner--the manner of it! How it brought back Clarges Street and her mother, and the family earthquake over her resolution to marry a young Dragoon, with three good lives between him and his inheritance! She was taken aback to find herself still so sensitive about that old story.

She had not succeeded in ridding herself of her disquieting memories when her daughter followed her, choking back tense excitement until she had fairly closed the door behind her. Then her words came with a rush, for all that she kept her voice in check to say them.

"He cannot see, mamma--he cannot see at all! He is dead stone-blind--for life--for life! And we have done it--we have done it!" Then she broke down utterly, throwing herself on a sofa to hide in its cushions the torrent of tears she could no longer keep back. "We have done it--we have done it!" she kept on crying. "We have ruined his life, and the guilt is ours--ours--all!"

The Countess, good woman, tried to mix consolation with protest against such outrageous pessimism. She pointed out that there was no medical authority for such an extreme view as Gwen's. On the contrary, Sir Coupland had spoken most hopefully. And, after all, if Mr. Torrens could see Arthur's Bridge he could not be absolutely blind.

"He could not see Arthur's Bridge at all," said Gwen, sitting up and wiping her tears, self-possessed again for the moment from the stimulus of contradiction, always a great help. "I stood facing him for five minutes holding out my hand for him to shake, and he never--never--saw it!"

"Perhaps he doesn't like shaking hands," said her mother weakly. "Some people don't."

"They do mine," said Gwen. "Besides, he did in the end, and...."

"And what?"

"And nothing." At which point Gwen broke down again, crying out as before that he was blind, and she knew it. The doctors were only talking against hope, and they knew it. "Oh, mother, mother," she cried out, addressing her mother as she would often do when in trouble or excited, "how shall we bear it, years from now, to know that he can see nothing--nothing!--and to know that the guilt of his darkness lies with us--is ours--is yours and mine? Have we ever either of us said a word of protest against that wicked dog-shooting order? It was in the attempt to commit a crime that we sanctioned, that old Stephen tried to shoot that darling Achilles. Oh, I know it was no fault of old Stephen's!" She became a little calmer from indulgence of speech that had fought for hearing. "Oh no, mother dear, it's no use talking. If Mr. Torrens never recovers his eyesight he has only us to thank for it." She paused a moment, and then added:--"And how I shall look that girl in the face I don't know!"

"What girl?"

"Oh, didn't you see? The girl he's got that engaged ring on his finger about. You didn't see? You never do see, mamma dear!"

"I didn't notice any particular ring, dear." Her ladyship may have felt a relief about something, to judge by her manner. "Has Irene said anything to you?" she asked.

Gwen considered a little. "Irene talks a good deal about a Miss Gertrude Abercrombie, a cousin. But she has never said anything."

"Oh!--it's Miss Gertrude Abercrombie?..."

"I know nothing about it. I was only guessing. She may be Miss Gertrude Anybody. Whoever she is, it's the same thing. Think what she's lost!"

"She has, indeed, my dear," says the elder lady, who is not going to give up this acceptable Miss Gertrude Anybody, even at the risk of talking some nonsense about her. "And we must all feel for the cruelty of her position. But if she is--as I have no doubt she is--truly attached to Mr. Torrens, she will find her consolation in the thought that it is given to her to ... to...." But the Countess was not rhetorician enough to know that choice words should be kept for perorations. She had quite taken the edge off her best arrow-head. She could not wind up "to be a consolation to her husband" with any convincingness. So when Gwen interrupted her with:--"I see what you mean, but it's nonsense," she fell back upon the strong entrenchment of seniors, who know the Will of God. They really do, don't you know? "At least," she said, "this Miss Abercrombie must admit that no blame can fairly be laid at our door for what was so manifestly ordained by the Almighty. Sir Hamilton Torrens himself was the first to exonerate your father. His own keeper is instructed to shoot all dogs except poodles."

"It was not the Will of God at all...."

"My dear!--how can you know that?"

"Well--not more than everything else is! It was old Stephen's not hitting his mark. And he would have killed Achilles, then. Oh dear, how I do sometimes wish God could be kept out of it!... No, mamma, it's no use looking shocked. Whatever makes out that it was not our fault is wrong, and Sir Hamilton Torrens didn't mean that when he said it."

"My dear, it is his own son."

"Very well, then, all the more! Oh, you know what I mean.... No, mamma," said she as she left the room, "it isn't any use. I am utterly miserable about it."

And she was, though she herself scarcely knew yet how miserable. So long as she had someone else to speak to, the whole deadly truth lingered on the threshold of her mind and would not enter. She ascribed weight to opinions she would have disregarded had she had no stake on the chance of their correctness.

She caught at the narration of her maid Lutwyche, prolonging her hair-combing for talk's sake. Lutwyche had the peculiarity of always accommodating her pronunciation to the class she was speaking with, elaborating it for the benefit of those socially above her. So her inquiry how the gentleman was getting on was accounted for by her having seen him from the guardian. Speaking with an equal, she would have said garden. She had seen him therefrom, and been struck by his appearance of recovered vigour, especially by his visible enjoyment of the land escape. She would have said landscape to Cook. Pronounced anyhow, her words were a comfort to her young mistress, defending her a very little against the black thoughts that assailed her. Similarly, Miss Lutwyche's understanding that Mr. Torrens would come to table this evening was a flattering unction to her distressed soul, and she never questioned her omniscient handmaid's accuracy. On the contrary, she utilised a memory of some chance words of her mother to Irene, suggesting that her brother might be "up to coming down" that evening, as a warrant for replying:--"I believe so."

Nevertheless, she had no hope of seeing him make his appearance in the brilliantly illuminated Early Jacobean drawing-room, where at least two of the upstairs servants had to light wax tapers for quite ten minutes at dusk, to be even with a weakness of the Earl's for wax-candlelight and no other. And when Irene appeared without him, her "Oh dear!--your brother wasn't up to coming down, then?" was spiritless and perfunctory. Nor did she believe her friend's "No--we thought it best to be on the safe side." For she knew now why it was that this absence from the evening banquet--"family dinner-table" is too modest a phrase--had been so strenuously insisted on. There was no earthly reason why Irene's brother should not have dressed and sat at table. Were there no sofas in the Early Jacobean drawing-room? There was no reason against his presence at all except that his absolute blindness must needs have been manifest to every observer. She could see it all now.

"You know, dear," said Irene, "if Adrian were a reasonable being, there would be no harm in his dining down, as Lutwyche calls it. He could sit up to dinner perfectly, but no earthly persuasion would get him up to bed till midnight. And as for lying down on sofas in the drawing-room after dinner, you could as soon get a mad bull to lie down on a sofa as Adrian, if there was what Lutwyche calls company."

So that evening the beauty of the Earl's daughter--whose name among the countryfolk, by-the-by, was "Gwen o' the Towers"--was less destructive than usual to the one or two new bachelors who helped the variation of the party. For monumental beauty kills only poets and dreamers, and these young gentlemen were Squires. The verdict of one of them about her tells its tale:--"A stunner to look at, but too standoffish for my money!" She was nothing of the sort; and would gladly, to oblige, have shot a smile or an eye-flash at either of them if her heart had not been so heavy. But she wanted terribly to be alone and cry all the evening, and was of no use as a beauty. Perhaps it was as well that it was so, for these unattached males.

When the time came for the loneliness of night she was frightened of it, and let Irene go at her own door with reluctance. In answer to whom she said at parting:--"No--no, dear! I'm perfectly well, and nothing's the matter." Irene spoke back after leaving her:--"You know I'm not the least afraid about him. It will be all right." Then Gwen mustered a poor laugh, and with "Of course it will, dear!" vanished into her bedroom.

She got to sleep and slept awhile; then awoke to the worst solitude a vexed soul knows--those terrible "small hours" of the morning. Then, every mere insect of evil omen that daylight has kept in bounds grows to the size of an elephant, and what was the whirring of his wings becomes discordant thunder. Then palliatives lose their market-value, and every clever self-deception that stands between us and acknowledged ill bursts, bubblewise, and leaves the soul naked and unarmed against despair.

Gwen waked without provocation at about three in the morning; waked Heaven knew why!--for there was all the raw material of a good night's rest; the candidate for the sleepership; a prodigiously comfortable bed; dead silence, not so much as an owl in the still night she looked out into during an excursion warranted to promote sleep--but never sleep itself! She had been dragged reluctantly from a dreamless Nirvana into the presence of a waking nightmare--two great beautiful eyes that looked at her and saw nothing; and this coercion, she somehow felt, was really due to an unaccountable absence of mind on her part. Surely she could have kept asleep with a little more common sense. She would go back from that excursion reinforced, and bid defiance to that nightmare. Sleep would come to her, she knew, if she could find a modus vivendi with a loose flood of golden hair, and could just get hold of a feather-quill that was impatient of imprisonment and wanted to see the world. She searched for it with the tenderest of finger-tips because she knew--as all the feather-bed world knows--that if one is too rough with it, it goes in, and comes out again just when one is dropping off....

There!--it was caught and pulled out. She would not burn it. It would smell horribly and make her think of Lutwyche's remedy for fainting fits, burned feathers held to the nostrils. No!--she would put it through the casement into the night-air, and it would float away and think of its days on the breast of an Imbergoose, and believe them back again. Oh, the difference between the great seas and winds, and the inside of that stuffy ticking! Poor little breast-feather of a foolish bird! Yes--now she could go to sleep! She knew it quite well--she had only to contrive a particular attitude.... There, that was right! Now she had only to put worrying thoughts out of her head and count a thousand ... and then--oblivion!

Alas, no such thing! In five minutes the particular attitude was a thing of the past, and the worrying thoughts were back upon her with a vengeance. Or, rather, the worrying thought; for her plural number was hypocrisy. She was in for a deadly wakeful night, a night of growing fever, with those sightless eyes expelling every other image from her brain. She was left alone with the darkness and a question she dared not try to answer. Suppose that when those eyes looked upon her that evening at Arthur's Bridge for the first time--suppose it was also the last? What then? How could she know it, and know how the thing came about, and whom she held answerable for it, and go on living?...

No--her life would end with that. Nothing would again be as it had been for her. Her childhood had ended when she first saw Death; when her brother's corpse was carried home dripping from within a stone's throw of this new tragedy. But was not that what bills of lading call the "Act of God"--fair play, as it were, on the part of Fate? What was this?... Come--this would never do, with a pulse like that!

No one should ever feel his pulse, or hers, at night. Gwen was none the better for doing it. Nor did she benefit by an operation which her mind called looking matters calmly in the face. It consisted in imaginary forecasts of a status quo that was to come about. She had to skip some years as too horrible even to dream of; years needed to live down the worst raw sense of guilt, and become hardened to inevitable life. Then she filled in her scenario with Sir Adrian Torrens, the blind Squire of Pensham Steynes, and his beautiful and accomplished wife, a dummy with no great vitality, constructed entirely out of a ring on Mr. Torrens's finger and an allusion of Irene's to the Miss Gertrude Abercrombie, whose skill in needlework surpassed Arachne's. Gwen did not supply this lady with a sufficiently well-marked human heart. Perhaps the temptation to make her clever and shrewd but not sympathetic, not quite up to her husband's deserts, was irresistible. It allowed of an unprejudiced consciousness of what she, Gwen, would have been in this dummy's situation. It allowed latitude to a fancy that portrayed Lady Gwendolen Whatever-she-had-become--because, of course, she would have to marry some fool--as the staunch and constant friend of the family at Pensham. Her devotion to the dummy when in trouble--and, indeed, she piled up calamities for the unhappy lady--was monumental; an example to her sex. And when, to the bitter grief of her devoted husband, the dummy died--all parties being then, at a rough estimate, forty--and she herself, his dearest friend, stood by the dummy's grave with him, and, generally speaking, sustained him in his tribulation, a disposition to get the fool out of the way grew strong enough to make its victim doubt her own vouchers for her own absolute disinterestedness. She turned angrily upon her fancies, tore them to tatters, flung them to the winds. One does this, and then the pieces join themselves together and reappear intact.

She was no nearer sleep after looking matters calmly in the face, that way, for a full hour. Similar trials to dramatize a probable future all ended on the same lines, and each time Gwen was indignant with herself for her own folly. What was this man to her, whom she had seen twice? Little enough!--she pledged herself to it in the Court of Conscience! What was she to him, who had spoken with her twice certainly; but seen her--oh, how little! Why, she had seen him more, of the two, if one came to close quarters with Time. See how long he was stooping over that unfortunate dog-chain!

Sitting up in bed in the dim July dawn, wild-eyed in an unshepherded flock of golden locks, this young lady was certainly surpassingly beautiful. She was revolving in her poor, aching head a contingency she had not fully allowed for. Suppose--merely to look other things in the face, you see!--suppose there were no dummy! What chance would the poor fellow have then of winning the love of any woman, with those blind eyes in his head? Gwen got up restlessly and went to the casement, meeting a stream of level sunlight that the swallows outside in the ivy were making the subject of comment, and stood looking out over the leagues of the ancient domain of her forefathers. "Gwen o' the Towers"--that was her name. It seemed to join chorus with her own answer to the last question, to her satisfaction.

To offer the consolation of her love, to give all she had to give, to this man as compensation for the great curse that had fallen on him through the fault of her belongings, seemed to her in her excited state easy and nowise strange--mere difficulty of the negotiation apart. She elected to shut her eyes to a fact we and the story can guess--we are so shrewd, you see!--and to make a parade in her own eyes of a self-renunciation approaching that of Marcus Curtius. If only the gulf would open to receive her she would fling herself in. She ignored the dissimilarities of detail in the two cases, especially the conceivable promised land at the bottom of her gulf. The Roman Eques had nothing but death and darkness to look forward to.

The difficulties of the scheme shot across her fevered conception of it. How if, though he was not affianced to the dummy, or any other lay figure she might provide, his was a widowed heart left barren by the hand of Death? How if some other disappointment had marred his life?--some passion for a woman who had rashly accepted somebody else before meeting him? This happens we know; so did Gwen, and was sorry. How if some minx--Lutwyche's expression--had bewitched him and slighted him? He might nurse a false ideal of her till Doomsday. Men did sometimes, coeteris paribus. But how could she--how could she?... Anyhow, Gwen might have seen her way through that difficulty with a fair chance. But--to be invisible!

The morning sun had been at variance with some flames, hard to believe clouds, and had just dispersed them so successfully that their place in the heavens knew them no more. His rays, unveiled, bore hard upon the blue eyes, sore with watching, of the girl a hundred million miles off, and drove her from her casement. Gwen of the Towers fell back into the room, all the flowing lawn of the most luxurious robe-de-nuit France could provide turned to gold by the touch of Phoebus. She paused a moment before a mirror, to glance at her pallor in it, and to wonder at the sunlight in the wealth of its setting of ungroomed, uncontrollable locks. It was not vanity exactly that provoked the despairing thought:--"But he will never see me--never!" A girl would have been a hypocrite indeed who could shut her eyes to what Gwen saw in that looking-glass. She knew all about it--had done so from babyhood.

Some relaxation of the mind gave Morpheus an opportunity, and he took such advantage of a willing victim that Lutwyche, coming three hours later, scarcely knew how to deal with the case, and might have been uneasy at such an intensive cultivation of sleep if she had been a nervous person. But she was prosaic and phlegmatic, and held to the general opinion that nothing unusual ever happened. So she was content to make a little extra noise; and, when nothing came of it, to go away till rung for. That was how Gwen came to be so late at breakfast that morning.

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Chapter XX

HOW THE HON. PERCIVAL GAVE MISS DICKENSON HIS ACCOUNT OF THE BLIND MAN. HOW THAT ANY YOUNG MAN SOEVER IS GLAD THAT ANY YOUNG LADY SOEVER ISN'T FIANCEE, EXCEPT SHE BE UGLY. MISS DICKENSON'S EFFRONTERY. HOW MR. PELLEW SAID "POOH!" IRENE'S ABSENCE, VISITING. EVERYONE'S ELSE ABSENCE, EXCEPT THE BLIND MAN'S, GWEN'S, AND MRS. BAILEY'S, WHO HAD A LETTER TO WRITE

The Hon. Percival Pellew had not been at the Towers continuously throughout the whole three weeks following the accident. The best club in London could not have spared him as long as that. He had returned to his place in the House a day or two later, had voted on the Expenses at Elections Bill, and had then gone to a by-election in Cornwall to help his candidate to keep his expenses at a minimum. His way back to the club did not lie near Ancester Towers, but he reconciled a renewal of his visit there to his conscience by the consideration that an unusually late Session was predicted. A little more country air would do him no harm, and the Towers was the best club in the country.

He had had absolutely no motive whatever for going there, outside what this implies. Unless, indeed, something else was implied by his pledging his honour to himself that this was the case. Self-deception is an art that Man gives a great deal of attention to, and Woman nearly as much.

The Countess said to him, on the evening of his reappearance in time to dress for dinner:--"Everybody's gone, Percy--I mean everybody of your lot a fortnight ago." Whereto he replied:--"How about the wounded man?" and her ladyship said:--"Mr. Torrens? Oh yes, Mr. Torrens is here still and his sister--they'll be here a few days longer.... There's nobody else. Yes, there's Constance Dickenson. Norbury, tell them to keep dinner back a little because of Mr. Pellew." This was all in one sentence, chiefly to the butler. She ended:--"All the rest are new," and the gentleman departed to dress in ten minutes--long ones probably. This was two or three evenings before Miss Dickenson saw that glow-worm in the garden. Perhaps three, because two are needed to account for the lady's attitude about that cigar, and twelve hours for a coolness occasioned by her ladyship's saying in her inconsiderate way:--"Oh, you are quite old friends, you two, of course--I forgot." Only fancy saying that a single lady and gentleman were "quite old friends"! Both parties exhibited mature courtesy, enriched with smiles in moderation. But for all that their relations painfully resembled civility for the rest of that evening.

However, whatever they were then, they were reinstated by now; that is to say, by the morning after Gwen's bad night. Eavesdrop, please, and overhear what you can in the arbutus walk, half-way through the Hon. Percival's first cigar.

The gentleman is accounting for something he has just said. "What made me think so was his being so curious about our friend Cumberworld. As for Gwen, I wouldn't trust her not to be romantic. Girls are."

The lady speaks discreetly:--"Certainly no such construction would have occurred to me. One has to be on one's guard against romantic ideas. She might easily be--a--eprise, to some extent--as girls are...."

"But spooney, no! Well--perhaps you're right."

"I don't know whether I ought to say even that. I shouldn't, only to you. Because I know I can rely on your discretion...."

"Rather. Only you must admit that when she appeared this morning--and last night--she was looking ..."

"Looking what?"

"Well ... rather too statuesque for jollity."

"Perhaps the heat. I know she complains of the heat; it gives her a headache."

"Come, Miss Dickenson, that's not fair. You know it was what you said began it."

"Began what?"

"Madam, what I am saying arises naturally from ..."

"There!--do stop being Parliamentary and be reasonable. What you mean is--have those two fallen head over ears in love, or haven't they?" Discussions of this subject of Love are greatly lubricated by exaggeration of style. It is almost as good as a foreign tongue. She continued more seriously:--"Tell me a little more of what Mr. Torrens said."

"When I saw him this morning?" Mr. Pellew looked thoughtfully at what was left of his cigar, as if it would remind him if he looked long enough, and then threw it abruptly away as though he gave it up as a bad job. "No," he said, falling back on his own memory. "It wasn't what he said. It was the way of saying it. Manner is incommunicable. And he said so little about her. He talked a good deal about Philippa in a chaffy sort of way--said she was exactly his idea of a Countess--why had one such firm convictions about Countesses and Duchesses and Baronets and so on? It led to great injustice, causing us to condemn nine samples out of ten as Pretenders, not real Countesses or Duchesses or Baronets at all. He was convinced his own dear dad was a tin Baronet; or, at best, Britannia-metal. Alfred Tennyson had spoken of two sorts--little lily-handed ones and great broad-shouldered brawny Englishmen. Neither would eat the sugar nor go to sleep in an armchair with the Times over his head. His father did both. I admitted the force of his criticism, but could not follow his distinction between Countesses and Duchesses. Duchesses were squarer than Countesses, just as Dukes were squarer than Earls."

"I think they are," said Miss Dickenson. She shut her eyes a moment for reflection, and then decided:--"Oh yes--certainly squarer--not a doubt of it!" Mr. Pellew formed an image in his mind, of this lady fifteen years ago, with its eyes shut. He did not the least know why he did so.

"Torrens goes on like that," he continued. "Makes you laugh sometimes! But what I was going to say was this. When he had disposed of Philippa and chaffed Tim a little--not disrespectfully you know--he became suddenly serious, and talked about Gwen--spoke with a hesitating deference, almost ceremoniously. Said he had had some conversation with Lady Gwendolen, and been impressed with her intelligence and wit. Most young ladies of her age were so frivolous. He was the more impressed that her beauty was undeniable. The brief glimpse he had had of her had greatly affected him artistically--it was an Aesthetic impression entirely. He overdid this."

Miss Dickenson nodded slightly in confidence with herself. Her insight jotted down a brief memorandum about Mr. Pellew's, and the credit it did him. That settled, she recalled a something he had left unfinished earlier. "You were asking about Lord Cumberworld, Mr. Pellew?"

"Whether there was anything afoot in that quarter? Yes, he asked that, and wanted to know if Mrs. Bailey, who had been retailing current gossip, was rightly informed when she said that there was, and that it was going to come off. He was very anxious to show how detached he was personally. Made jokes about its 'coming off' like a boot...."

"Stop a minute to see if I understand.... Oh yes--I see. 'If there was anything afoot.' Of course. Go on."

"It was a poor quip, and failed of its purpose. His relief was too palpable when I disallowed Mrs. Bailey.... By-the-by, that's a rum thing, Miss Dickenson,--that way young men have. I believe if I did it once when I was a young fillah I did it fifty times."

"Did what?"

"Well--breathed free on hearing that a girl wasn't engaged. Doesn't matter how doosid little they know of her--only seen her in the Park on horseback, p'r'aps--they'll eat a lot more lunch if they're told she's still in the market. Fact!"

Miss Dickenson said that no doubt Mr. Pellew knew best, and that it was gratifying to think how many young men's lunches her earlier days might have intensified without her knowing anything about it. The gentleman felt himself bound to reassure and confirm, for was not the lady passee? "Rather!" said he; this favourite expression this time implying that the name of these lunches was no doubt Legion. An awkward sincerity of the lady caused her to say:--"I didn't mean that." And then she had to account for it. She was intrepid enough to venture on: "What I meant was, never being engaged," but not cool enough to keep of one colour exactly. It didn't rise to the height of embarrassment, but something rippled for all that.

A cigar Mr. Pellew was lighting required unusual and special attention. It had a mission, that cigar. It had to gloss over a slight flush on its smoker's cheeks, and to take the edge off the abruptness with which he said,--"Oh, gammon!" as he threw a Vesuvian away.

He picked up the lost thread at the point of his own indiscreet excursion into young-manthropology--his own word when he apologized for it. "Anyhow," said he, "it struck me that our friend upstairs was very hard hit. He made such a parade of his complete independence. Of course, I'm not much of a judge of such matters. Not my line. I understand that he has been prorogued--I mean his departure has. He's to try his luck at coming downstairs this evening after feeding-time. He funks finding the way to his mouth in public. Don't wonder--poor chap!"

Then this lady had a fit of contrition about the way in which she had been gossiping, and tried to back out. She had the loathsome meanness to pretend that she herself had been entirely passive, a mere listener to an indiscreet and fanciful companion. "What gossips you men are!" said she, rushing the position boldly. "Fancy cooking up a romance about this Mr. Torrens and Gwen, when they've hardly so much as," she had nearly said, "set eyes on each other"; but revised it in time for press. It worked out "when she has really only just set eyes on him, and chatted half an hour."

Mr. Pellew's indignation found its way through a stammer which expressed the struggle of courtesy against denunciation. "Come--hang it all!" said he. "It wasn't my romance.... Oh, well, perhaps it wasn't yours either. Only--play fair, Miss Dickenson. Six of the one and half a dozen of the other! Confess up!"

The lady assumed the tone of Tranquillity soothing Petulance. "Never mind, Mr. Pellew!" she said. "You needn't lie awake about it. It doesn't really matter, you know.... Have you got the right time? Because I have to be ready at half-past eleven to drive with Philippa. I promised.... What!--a quarter past? I must run." She looked back to reassure possible perturbation. "It really does not matter between us," said she, and vanished down the avenue.

The Hon. Percival Pellew walked slowly in the opposite direction in a brown study, leaving his thumbs in his armholes, and playing la ci darem with his fingers on his waistcoat. He played it twice or thrice before he stopped to knock a phenomenal ash off his cigar. Then he spoke, and what he said was "Pooh!"

The story does not know why he said "Pooh!" It merely notes, apropos of Miss Dickenson's last words, that the first person plural pronoun, used as a dual by a lady to a gentleman, sometimes makes hay of the thirdness of their respective persons singular. But if it had done so, this time, "Pooh!" was a weak counter-blast against its influence.

* * * * *

Irene's friend Gretchen von Trendelenstein had written that morning that she was coming to stay with the Mackworth Clarkes at Toft, only a couple of miles off. She would only have two days, and could not hope to get as far as Pensham, but couldn't Irene come to her? She was, you see, Irene's bosom friend. The letter had gone to Pensham and been forwarded, losing time. This was the last day of visiting-possibility at Toft. So Irene asked to be taken there; and, if she stayed, would find her way back somehow. Mr. Norbury, however, after referring to Archibald, the head of the stables, made dernier ressorts needless, and Irene was driven away behind a spirited horse by the young groom, Tom Kettering.

Her brother would have devolved entirely on Mrs. Bailey and chance visitors, if he had not struck vigorously against confinement to his room, after a recovery of strength sufficient to warrant his removal to his home eighteen miles away. If he was strong enough for that, he was strong enough for an easy flight of stairs, down and up, with tea between. Mrs. Bailey, the only obstacle, was overruled. Indeed, that good woman was an anachronism by now, her only remaining function being such succour as a newly blinded man wants till he gets used to his blindness. Tonics and stimulants were coming to an end, and her professional extinction was to follow. Nevertheless, Mr. Torrens held fast to dining in solitude until he recovered his eyesight, or at least until he had become more dexterous without it.

Now, it happened that on this day of all others three attractive events came all at once--the Flower Show at Brainley Thorpe, the Sadleigh Races, and a big Agricultural Meeting at King's Grantham, where the County Members were to address constituents. The Countess had promised to open the first, and the absence of the Earl from the second would have been looked upon as a calamity. All the male non-coronetted members of the company of mature years were committed to Agriculture or Bookmaking, and the younger ones to attendance on Beauty at the Flower Show. Poor Adrian Torrens!--there was no doubt he had been forgotten. But he was not going to admit the slightest concern about that. "Go away to your Von, darling Stupid!" said he. "And turn head over heels in her and wallow. Do you want to be the death of me? Do you want to throw me back when I'm such a credit to Mrs. Bailey and Dr. Nash?" Irene had her doubts--but there!--wasn't Gretchen going to marry an Herr Professor and be a Frau when she went back to Berlin, and would she ever see her again? Moreover, Gwen said to her:--"He won't be alone if he's downstairs in the drawing-room. Some of the women are sure to stop. It's too hot for old Lady Cumberworld to go out. I heard her say so."

"She'll be no consolation for him," said Irene.

"No--that she won't! But unless there's someone else there she'll have Inez--you've seen the Spanish dame-de-compagnie?--and she'll enjoy a flirtation with your brother. He'll speak Spanish to her, and she'll sing Spanish songs. He won't hurt for a few hours."

So Tom Kettering drove Irene away in the gig, and Adrian was guided downstairs to an empty hall by Mrs. Bailey at four o'clock, so as to get a little used to the room before anyone should return. Prophecy depicted Normal Society coming back to tea, and believed in itself. Achilles sanctioned his master's new departure by his presence, accompanying him to the drawing-room. This dog was not only tolerated but encouraged everywhere. Dogs are, when their eyes are pathetic, their coats faultless, and their compliance with household superstitions unhesitating.

"Anybody in sight, Mrs. Bailey?"

"Nobody yet, Mr. Torrens."

"Speriamo! Perhaps there's a piano in the room, Mrs. Bailey?"

"There's two. One's stood up against the wall shut. The other's on three legs in the middle of the room." That one was to play upon, she supposed, the other to sing to.

"If you will be truly obliging--you always are, you know--and conduct me to the one on three legs in the middle of the room, I will play you an air from Gluck's 'Orfeo,' which I am sure you will enjoy.... Oh yes--I can do without any music-books because I have played it before, not infrequently...."

"I meant to set upon." In fact, Mrs. Bailey regarded this as the primary purpose of music-books; and so it was, at the home of her niece, who could play quite nicely. There was only two and they "just did." She referred to this while Mr. Torrens was spinning the music-stool to a suitable height for himself. He responded with perfect gravity--not a fraction of a smile--that books were apt to be too high or too low. It was the fault of the composers clearly, because the binders had to accept the scores as they found them. If the binders were to begin rearranging music to make volumes thicker or thinner, you wouldn't be able to play straight on. Mrs. Bailey concurred, saying that she had always said to her niece not to offer to play a tune till she could play it right through from beginning to end. Mr. Torrens said that was undoubtedly the view of all true musicians, and struck a chord, remarking that the piano had been left open. "How ever could you tell that now, Mr. Torrens?" said Mrs. Bailey, and felt that she was in the presence of an Artist.

Nevertheless, she seemed to be lukewarm about Che faro, merely remarking after hearing it that it was more like the slow tunes her niece played than the quick ones. The player said with unmoved gravity this was andante. Mrs. Bailey said that her niece, on the contrary, had been christened Selina. She could play the Polka. So could Mr. Torrens, rather to the good woman's surprise and, indeed, delight. He was so good-humoured that he played it again, and also the Schottische; and would have stood Gluck over to meet her taste indefinitely, but that voices came outside, and the selection was interrupted.

The voice of Lady Ancester was one, saying despairingly:--"My dear, if you're not ready we must go without you. I must be there in time." Miss Dickenson's was another, attesting that if the person addressed did not come, sundry specified individuals would be in an awful rage.

"Well, then, you must go without me. Flower shows always bore me to death." This was a voice that had not died out of the blind man's ears since yesterday; Lady Gwendolen's, of course. It added that its owner must finish her letter, or it would miss the six o'clock post and not catch the mail; which would have, somehow, some disastrous result. Then said her mother's voice, she should have written it before. Then justification and refutation, and each voice said its say with a difference--more of expounding, explaining--with a result like in Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha's mountainous fugue, that one of them, Gwen's, stood out all the stiffer hence. No doubt you know your Browning. Gwen asserted herself victor all along the line, and remonstrance died a natural death. But what was she going to do all the afternoon? A wealth of employments awaited her, she testified. Rarely had so many arrears remained unpaid. Last and least she must try through that song, because she had to send the music back to the Signore. So the Countess supposed she must go her own way, and presently Adrian Torrens was conscious that her ladyship had gone hers, by the curt resurrection of sounds in abeyance somewhile since; sounds of eight hoofs and four wheels; suddenly self-assertive, soon evanescent.

Was Gwen really going to come to sing at this piano? That was something worth living for, at least. But no!--conclusions must not be jumped in that fashion. Perhaps she had a piano in her own room. Nothing more likely.

Achilles had stepped out, hearing sounds as of a departure; and now returned, having seen that all was in satisfactory order. He sighed over his onerous responsibilities, and settled down to repose--well-earned repose, his manner suggested.

"I suppose I shall have to clear out when her young ladyship comes in to practise," said Mrs. Bailey. Mr. Torrens revolted inwardly against ostracising the good woman on social grounds; but then, did he want her to remain if Gwen appeared? Just fancy--to have that newcomer all to himself for perhaps an hour, as he had her for five minutes yesterday! Too good to be true! He compromised with his conscience about Mrs. Bailey. "Don't go away till she does, anyhow," said he. And then he sang Irish Melodies with Tom Moore's words, and rather shocked his hearer by the message the legatee of the singer received about his heart. She preferred the Polka.

It chanced that Mrs. Bailey also had weighty correspondence on hand, relating to an engagement with a new patient; and, with her, correspondence was no light matter. Pride had always stood between Mrs. Bailey and culture, ever since she got her schooling done. Otherwise she might have acquired style and a fluent caligraphy. As it was, her style was uncertain and her method slow. Knowing this--without admitting it--she was influenced by hearing a six o'clock post referred to, having previously thought her letters went an hour later. So she developed an intention of completing her letter, of which short instalments had been turned out at intervals already, as soon as ever the advent of a guest or visitor gave her an excuse for desertion. Of course a member of the household was better than either; so she abdicated without misgiving when--as she put it--she heard her young ladyship a-coming.

Her young ladyship was audible outside long enough for Mrs. Bailey to abdicate before she entered the room. They met on the stairs and spoke. Was that Mr. Torrens at the piano?--asked Gwen. Because if it was she mustn't stop him. She would cry off and try her song another time.

But Mrs. Bailey reassured her, saying:--"He won't go on long, my lady. You'll get your turn in five minutes," in an undertone. She added:--"He won't see your music-paper. Trust him for that." These words must have had a new hope in them for the young lady, for she said quickly: "You think he does see something, then?" The answer was ambiguous. "Nothing to go by." Gwen had to be content with it.

* * * * *

Is there any strain of music known to man more harrowingly pathetic than the one popularly known as Erin go bragh? Does it not make hearers without a drop of Erse blood in their veins thrill and glow with a patriotism that complete ignorance of the history of Ireland never interferes with in the least? Do not their hearts pant for the blood of the Saxon on the spot, even though their father's name be Baker and their mother's Smith? Ours does.

Adrian Torrens, though his finger-tips felt strange on the keys in the dark, and his hands were weak beyond his own suspicion of their weakness, could still play the Polka for Mrs. Bailey. When his audience no longer claimed repetition of that exciting air, he struck a chord or two of some Beethoven, but shook his head with a sigh and gave it up. However, less ambitious attempts were open to him, and he had happened on Irish minstrelsy; so, left to himself, he sang Savourneen Dheelish through.

Gwen, entering unheard, was glad she could dry her eyes undetected by those sightless ones that she knew showed nothing to the singer--nothing but a black void. The pathos of the air backed by the pathos of a voice that went straight to her heart, made of it a lament over the blackness of this void--over the glorious bygone sunlight, never a ray of it to be shed again for him! There was no one in the room, and it was a relief to her to have this right to unseen tears.

The feverish excitement of her sleepless night had subsided, but the memory of a strange resolve clung to her, a resolution to do a thing that then seemed practicable, reasonable, right; that had seemed since, more than once, insurmountable--yes! Insane--yes! But wrong--no! Now, hard hit by Savourneen Dheelish, the strength to think she might cross the barriers revived, and the insanity of the scheme shrank as its rightness grew and grew. After all, did she not belong to herself? To whom else, except her parents? Well--her duty to her parents was clear; to ransom their consciences for them; to enable them to say "We destroyed this man's eyesight for him, but we gave him Gwen." If only this pianist could just manage to love her on the strength of Arthur's Bridge and that rainbow gleam! But how to find out? She could see herself in a mirror near by as she thought it, and the resplendent beauty that she could not handle was a bitterness to her; she gazed at it as a warrior might gaze at his sword with his hands lopped off at the wrists. Still, he had seen her; that was something! She would not have acknowledged later, perhaps, that at this moment her mind was running on a foolish thought:--"Did I, or did I not, look my best at that moment?"

She never noticed the curious naivete which left unquestioned her readiness to play the part she was casting for herself--the role of an eyeless man's mate for life--yet never taxed her with loving him. Perhaps it was the very fact that the circumstances of the case released her from confessing her love, that paved the way for her to action that would else have been impossible. "By this light," said Beatrice to Benedick, "I take thee for pure pity." It was a vast consolation to Beatrice to say this, no doubt.

Achilles stopped Savourneen Dheelish by his welcome to the newcomer. To whom Gwen said:--"Oh, you darling!" But to his master she said:--"Go on, it's me, Mr. Torrens. Gwen."

"I know--'Gwen or Gwendolen.'" How easy it would have been for this quotation from yesterday's postscript to seem impertinent! This man had just the right laugh to put everything in its right place, and this time it disclaimed audacious Christian naming. He went on:--"I mustn't monopolize your ladyship's piano," and accommodated this mode of address to the previous one by another laugh, exactly the right protest against misinterpretation.

"My ladyship doesn't want her piano," said Gwen. "She wants to hear you go on playing. I had no idea you were so musical. Say good-evening, and play some more."

He went his nearest to meeting her hand, and his guesswork was not much at fault. A galvanic thrill again shot through him at her touch, and again neither of them showed any great alacrity to disconnect. "You are sorry for me," said he.

"Indeed I am. I cannot tell you how much so." She seemed to keep his hand in hers to say this, and the action and the word were mated, to his mind. She could not have done this but for my misfortune, thought he to himself. But oh!--what leagues apart it placed them, that this semi-familiarity should have become possible on so short an acquaintance! Society reserves would have kept him back still in the ranks of men. This placed him among cripples, a disqualified ruin.

His heart sank, for he knew now that she had no belief that this awful darkness would end. So be it! But, for now, there was the pure joy of holding that hand for a moment! Forget it all--forget everything!--think only of this little stolen delirium I can cheat the cruelty of God out of, before I am the forsaken prey of Chaos and black Night. That was his thought. He said not a word, and she continued:--"How much can you play? I mean, can you do the fingering in spite of your eyes? Try some more." She had barely withdrawn her hand even then.

"I only make a very poor business of it at present," he said. "I shall have to practise under the new circumstances. When the music jumps half a mile along the piano I hit the wrong note. Anything that runs easy I can play." He played the preliminary notes of the accompaniment of Deh vieni alla finestra. "Anything like that. But I can't tackle anything extensive. My hands haven't quite got strong again, I suppose. Now you come!"

He was beginning a hesitating move from the music-stool with a sense of the uncertainty before him when his anchorage was forsaken, but postponed it as a reply to his companion's remark:--"I'm not coming yet. I'll play presently.... You were accompanying yourself just now. I was listening to you at the end of the piano."

"Anybody can accompany himself; he's in his own confidence." He struck a chord or two, of a duet, this time, and she said:--"Yes--sing that. I can recollect it without the music. I've sung it with the Signore no end of times." They sang it together, and Gwen kept her voice down. She was not singing with the tenor known all over Europe, this time; nor was the room at any time, big as it was, more than large enough for this young lady a pleine voix. Besides, Mr. Torrens was not in force, on that score. In fact, at the end of this one song he dropped his fingers on his knees from the keyboard, and said in a tone that professed amusement at his own exhaustion: "That's all I'm good for. Funny, isn't it?"

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Chapter XXI

BOTHER MRS. BAILEY! A GOOD CREATURE. MARCUS CURTIUS AND UNMAIDENLINESS. THE DREAM WITCH AND HER DAUGHTERS. HOW GWEN TOLD OF HER TRICK, AND MR. TORRENS OF HOW HE WAKED UP TO HIS OWN BLINDNESS. THE PECULIARITIES OF DOWAGER-DUCHESSES. CAN GRIGS READ DIAMOND TYPE? THE HYPOTHESIS MR. TORRENS WAS AFFIANCED TO. ADONIS, AND THAT DETESTABLE VENUS. EARNESTNESS AND A CLIMAX. AN EARTHQUAKE, OR HEARTQUAKE

The Philosopher may see absurdity in the fact that, when two persons make concordant consecutive noises for ten minutes, the effect upon their relativities is one that without them might not have come about in ten weeks. We are not prepared to condemn the Philosopher, for once. He is prosy, as usual; but what he says refers to an indisputable truth. Nothing turns diversity into duality quicker than Music.

Gwen did not think the breakdown of the tenor at all funny, and was rather frightened, suggesting Mrs. Bailey. "Bother Mrs. Bailey!" said Adrian. "Only it's very ungrateful of me to bother Mrs. Bailey." Said Gwen:--"She really is a good creature." He replied:--"That's what she is precisely. A good creature!" Gwen interpreted this as disposing of Mrs. Bailey. Acting as her agent, she piloted the blind man through the perils of the furniture to a satisfactory sofa, but could not prevail on him to lie down on it. He seemed determined to assert his claim to a discharge cured; allowing a small discount, of course, in respect of this plaguy eye-affection. In defence of his position that it was a temporary inconvenience, sure to vanish with returning vigour, he simply nailed his colours to the mast--would hear of no surrender.

Tea was negotiated, as customary at the Towers, and he made a parade of his independence over it. No great risks were involved, the little malachite table placed as a cup-haven being too heavy to knock over easily. He was able, too, to make a creditable show of eyesight over the concession of little brown biscuits to Achilles; only really Achilles did all the seeing. A certain pretence of vision was possible too, in the distinguishing of those biscuits which were hard from a softer sort; which Achilles accepted, under protest always, with an implication that he did it to oblige the donor. He had sacrificed his sleep--that was his suggestion--and he did not deserve to be put off with shoddy goods.

"He always has a nap during music now," said his master. "He used to insist on singing too, if he condescended to listen. I had some trouble to convince him that he couldn't sing--hadn't been taught to produce his voice...."

"Dear creature!--his voice produced itself like mine. M. Sanson--you know the great training man?--wanted me to sing in one of my thoraxes or glottises or oesophaguses. I believe I have several, but I don't know which is which. He said my voice would last better. But I said I would have both helpings at once; a recollection of nursery dinner, you know...."

"I understand--Achilles's view. There, you see!" This was a claim that an audible tail-flap on the ground was applause. It really was nothing but its owner's courteous recognition of his own name, to which he was always alive.

Gwen continued:--"Luckily I met the Signore, who told me Sanson's view was very natural. What would become of all the trainers if people produced their own voices?"

"What, indeed? But you did get some sort of drill?"

"Of course. The dear old Signore gave me some lessons. He told me an infallible rule for people with souls. I was to sing as if the composer was listening. I might sing scales and exercises if I liked. They had a use. They prevented one's spoiling the great composers by hacking them over and over before one could sing."

Adrian felt that chat of this sort was the best after all, to keep safe for him his modus vivendi with this girl, in a world she was suddenly lighting up for him in defiance of his darkness. He could have friendship, and he was not prepared to admit that estrangement might be the more livable modus of the two. So he shut his mental eyes as close as his physical ones, and chatted. He told a story of how a great poet, being asked a question in a lady's album:--"What is your favourite employment?" wrote in reply:--"Cursing the schoolmaster who made me hate Horace in my boyhood." It was a pity to spoil "Ah vous dirai-je, maman?" for the young pianist, but pluies de perles taught nobody anything.

Gwen for her part was becoming painfully alive to the difficulties of her Quixotic undertaking. Marcus Curtius's self-immolation was easy by comparison, with all the cheers of assembled Rome crowding the Forum to back him. If only the horse her metaphor had mounted would take the bit in his teeth and bolt, tropically, how useful a phantasy it would be! She became terribly afraid her heroic resolve might die a natural death during intelligent conversation. Bother pluies de perles and the young pianist! This dry alternation of responses quashed all serious conversation. And if this Adrian Torrens went away, to-morrow or next day, what chance would there be in the uncertain future to compare with this one? When could she be sure of being alone with him for an hour, at his father's house or elsewhere? She must--she would--at least find from him whether some other parallel of the Roman Knight had bespoken the plunge for herself. She could manage that surely without being "unmaidenly," whatever that meant. If she couldn't, she would just cut the matter short and be unmaidenly. But know she must!

There is a time before the sun commits himself to setting--as he has done every day till now, and we all take it for granted he will do to-morrow--when the raw afternoon relents and the shadows lengthen over the land; an hour that is not sunset yet, but has begun to know what sunset means to do for roof and tree-top, and the high hills when a forecast of the night creeps round their bases; and also for the good looks of man and wench and beast, and even ugly girls. This hour had come, and with it the conviction that everybody was sure to be very late to-night, before Gwen, sitting beside the blind man on the sofa he had flouted as a couch, got a chance to turn the conversation her way--to groom the steed, so to speak, of Marcus Curtius for that appointment in the Forum. It came in a lull, consequent on the momentary dispersion of subject-matter by the recognition of Society's absence and its probable late recurrence.

"I was so sorry yesterday, Mr. Torrens." A modulation of Gwen's tone was not done intentionally. It came with her wish to change the subject.

"What for, then?" said Mr. Torrens, affecting a slight Irish accent with a purpose not quite clear to himself. It might have given his words their degree on a seriometer, granted the instrument.

"Don't laugh at me, because I'm in earnest. I mean for being so unfeeling...."

"Unfeeling?"

"Yes. I don't think talking about it again can make it any worse. But I do want you to know that I only said it because I got caught--you know how words get their own way sometimes...."

"But what?--why?--when? What words got their way this time?"

"I'm almost sorry I've spoken, if you didn't notice it. Because then I'm such a fool for raking it up again.... Why, of course, when I pitched on those lines of yours. And any others would have done just as well...."

"Lord 'a massy me!--as Mrs. Bailey says. 'The daughters of the Dream Witch'? What's the matter with them? They're all right."

"Oh yes--they're all right, no doubt. But I was thinking of.... Oh, I can't bear to talk about it!... Oh dear!--I wish I hadn't mentioned it...."

"Yes, but do mention it. Mention it again. Mention it lots of times. Besides, I know what you mean...."

"What?"

"The 'watchman sorrowing for the light,' of course! It seemed like me. Do you know it never crossed my mind in that connection?"

"Is that really true? But, then, what an idiot I was for saying anything about it! Only I couldn't help myself. I was so miserable! It laid me awake all night to think of it." This was not absolutely true, because Gwen had really lain awake on the main question, the responsibility of her family for that shot of old Stephen's. But, to our thinking, she was justified in using any means that came to hand. She went on:--"I'm not sure that it would not have come to nearly the same thing in any case--the sleepless night, I mean. I did not know till yesterday how ... b-bad your eyes were"--for she had nearly said the word blind--"because they kept on making the best of it for our sakes, Irene and Mrs. Bailey did...."

Adrian cut her speech across with an ebullition of sound sense--a protest against extremes--a counterblast to hysterical judgments. Obviously his duty! He succeeded in saying with a sufficient infusion of the correct bounce:--"My dear Lady Gwendolen, indeed you are distressing yourself about me altogether beyond anything that this unlucky mishap warrants. In a case of this sort we must submit to be guided by medical opinion; and nothing that either Sir Coupland Merridew or Dr. Nash has said amounts to more than that recovery will be a matter of time. We must have patience. In the meantime I am really the gainer by the accident, for I shall always look upon my involuntary intrusion on your hospitality as one of the most fortunate events of my life...."

"'Believe me to remain very sincerely yours, Adrian Torrens.'" She struck in with a ringing laugh, and finished up what really would have been a very civil letter from him. "Now, dear Mr. Torrens, do stop being artificial. Say you're sorry, and you won't do so any more."

"Please, I'm sorry and I won't do so any more.... But I did do it very well, now didn't I? You must allow that."

"You did indeed, and Heaven knows how glad I should be to be able to be taken in by it and believe every word the doctors say. But when one has been hocus-pocussed about anything one ... one feels very strongly about, one gets suspicious of everybody.... Oh yes--indeed, I think very likely the doctors are right, and if Dr. Merridew had only said that you couldn't see at all now, but that the sight was sure to come back, I should have felt quite happy yesterday when...." She stopped, hesitating, brought up short by suddenly suspecting that she was driving home the fact of his blindness, instead of helping him to keep up heart against it. But how could she get to her point without doing so? How could Marcus Curtius saddle up for his terrible leap, and keep the words of the Oracle a secret?

At any rate, he could not see her confusion at her own malapropos--that was something! She recovered from it to find him saying:--"But what I want to know is--what happened yesterday? I mean, how came you to know anything you did not know before? Was it anything I did? I thought I got through it so capitally." He spoke more dejectedly than hitherto, palpably because his efforts at pretence of vision had failed. The calamity itself was all but forgotten.

Gwen saw nothing ahead but confession. Well--it might be the best way to the haven she wanted to steer for. "It was not what you did," said she. "You made believe quite beautifully all the time we were sitting there, talking talk. It was when I was just going. You remember when mamma had gone away with 'Rene, and I put my foot in it over those verses?"

"Yes, indeed I do. Only, you know, that wasn't because of the Watchman. I never mixed him in--not with my affairs. A sort of Oriental character!"

"Well--that was my mistake. You remember when, anyhow? Now, do you know, all the time I was standing there talking about the Watchman, I was holding out my hand to you to say good-night, and you never offered to take it, and put your hands in your pockets? It must have gone on for quite two minutes. And I was determined not to give a hint, and there was no one else there...." Gwen thought she could understand the gesture that made her pause, a sudden movement of the blind man's right hand as though it had been stung by the discovery of its own backwardness.

He dropped it immediately in a sort of despairing way, then threw it up impatiently. "All no use!" he said. "No use--no use--no use!" The sound of his despair was in his voice as he let the hand fall again upon his knee. He gave a heart-broken sigh:--"Oh dear!" and then sat on silent.

Gwen was afraid to speak. For all she knew, her first word might be choked by a sob. After a few moments he spoke again:--"And there was I--thinking--thinking...." and stopped short.

"Thinking what?" said Gwen timidly.

"I will tell you some time," he said. "Not now!" And then he drew a long breath and spoke straight on, as though some obstacle to speech had gone. "It has been a terrible time, Lady Gwendolen--this first knowledge of ... of what I have lost. Put recovery aside for a moment--let the chance of it lie by, until it is on the horizon. Think only what the black side of the shield means--the appalling darkness in the miserable time to come--the old age when folk will call me the blind Mr. Torrens; will say of me:--'You know, he was not born blind--it was an accident--a gunshot wound--a long while back now.' And all that long while back will have been a long vacuity to me, and Heaven knows what burden to others.... I have known it all from the first. I knew it when I waked to my senses in the room upstairs--to all my senses but one. I knew it when I heard them speak hopefully of the case; hope means fear, and I knew what the fear was they were hoping against. That early morning when stupor came to an end, and my consciousness came back, I remembered all. But I thought the darkness was only the sweet, wholesome darkness of night, and my heart beat for the coming of the day. The day came, sure enough, but I knew nothing of it. The first voice I heard was Mrs. Bailey's, singing paeans over my recovery. She had been lying in wait for it, in a chair beside the bed which I picture to myself as a chair of vast scope and pretensions. I did not use my tongue, when I found it, to ask where I was--because I knew I was somewhere and the bed was very comfortable. I asked what o'clock it was, and was told it was near nine. Then, said I, why not open the shutters and let in the light?"

"What did Mrs. Bailey say?"

"Mrs. Bailey said Lord have mercy, gracious-goodness-her, and I at once perceived that I was in the hands of a good creature. I must have done so, because I exhorted her to act in her official capacity. When she said:--'Why ever now, when the sun's a-shining fit to brile the house up!' I said to her--to remove ambiguity, you see--'Do be a good creature and tell me, is the room light or dark? She replied in a form of affidavit:--'So help me, Mr. Torrens, if this was the last Bible word I was to speak, this room is light, not dark, nor yet it won't be, not till this blessed evening when there come candles or the lamp, as preferred.' I had a sickening perplexity for a while whether I was sane or mad, awake or dreaming, lying there with my heart adding to my embarrassment needlessly by beating in a hurry. Then I remember how it came to me all at once--the whole meaning of it. Till now, blind men had been other people. Now I was to be one myself.... Say something!... I don't like my own voice speaking alone.... there is no one else in the room, is there?"

"Not a soul. And nobody will come. The dowager-duchess is having tea in her own room, and all the others will be late."

Something in this caused Mr. Torrens to say, with ridiculous inconsecutiveness:--"Then you're not engaged to Lord Cumberworld?"

"I certainly am not engaged to Lord Cumberworld," said Gwen with cold emphasis. "Why did you think I was?"

"Mrs. Bailey."

"Mrs. Bailey! And why did you think I wasn't?"

"That requires thought. I don't quite see, now I come to think of it, why a lady shouldn't be engaged to a party and speak about his grandma as ..."

"As I spoke of his just now? Why not, indeed? She is a dowager-duchess."

"I admit it. But there are ways and ways of calling people dowager-duchesses. It struck me that your way suggested that there was something ridiculous about ... about dowadging."

"So there is--to me. I believe it arose from the newspaper saying, when we had a ball in London for me to come out, that the Dowager Lady Scamander had a magnificent diamond stomacher. Perhaps you don't happen to know the shape of that good lady?... Never mind. Anyhow, I am not engaged to this one's grandson; and she's safe in the west wing, where the ghost never goes. We've got it all to ourselves. Go on!"

"My first idea was how to prevent Europe and Asia finding it out and frightening my family, at least until my eyes had had time to turn round. The next voice I heard was the doctor's, summoned, I suppose, by Mrs. Bailey. It was cheerful, and said that was good hearing, and now we should do. He said:--'You lie quiet, Mr. Torrens, and I'll tell you what it all was; because I daresay you don't know, and would like to.' I said yes--very much. So he told me the story in a comfortable optimist way--said it was a loss of blood from the occipital artery that had made such a wreck of me, but that a contusion of the head had been the cause of the insensibility, which had nearly stopped the action of the heart, else I might have bled to death...."

"Oh, how white you were when we found you!" Gwen exclaimed--"So terribly white! But I half think I can see how it happened. Your heart stopped pumping the blood out, because you were stunned, and that gave the artery a chance to pull itself together. That's the sort of idea Dr. Merridew gave me, with the long words left out."

"What a very funny thing!" said Adrian thoughtfully, "to have one's life saved by being nearly killed by something else. Similia similibus curantur. However, all's fish that comes to one's net. Well--when Sir Coupland had told me his story, he said casually:--'What's all this Mrs. Bailey was telling me about your finding the room so dark?' I humbugged a little over it, and said my eyesight was very dim. Whatever he thought, he said very little to me about it. Indeed, he only said that he was not surprised. A shock to the head and loss of blood might easily react on the optic nerve. It would gradually right itself with rest. I said I supposed he could try tests--lenses and games--to find out if the eyes were injured. He said he would try the lenses and games later, if it seemed necessary. For the present I had better stay quiet and not think about it. It would improve. Then my father and 'Rene came, and were jolly glad to hear my voice again. For I had only been half-conscious for days, and only less than half audible, if, indeed, I ever said anything. But I was on my guard, and my father went away home without knowing, and I don't believe 'Rene quite knows now. It was your father who spotted the thing first. Had he told you, to put you up to the hand-shaking device?"

"He never said a word. The handshaking was my own brilliant idea. When I found--what I did find out--I went away and had a good cry in mamma's room." This speech was an effort on Gwen's part to get a little nearer--ever so little--to Marcus Curtius; nearer, that is, to her metaphorical parallel of his heroism. Marcus had got weaker as an imitable prototype during the conversation, and it had seemed to Gwen that he might slip through her fingers altogether, if no help came. Her "good cry" reinforced Marcus, and quite blamelessly; for who could find fault with her for that much of concern for so fearful a calamity? What had she said that she might not have said to a friend's husband, cruelly and suddenly stricken blind? Indeed, could she as a friend have said less? Was her human pity to be limited to women and children and cases of special licence, or pass current merely under chaperonage? No--she was safe so far certainly.

"Oh, Lady Gwendolen, I can't stand this," was Adrian's exclamation in a tone of real distress. "Why--why--should I make you miserable and lay you awake o' nights? I couldn't help your finding out, perhaps. But what a selfish beast I am to go on grizzling about my own misfortune.... Well--I have been grizzling! And all the while, as like as not, the medicos are right, and in six weeks I shall be reading diamond type as merry as a grig...."

"Do grigs read diamond type?"

"I may be doing so, anyhow, grigs or no!" He paused an instant, his absurdity getting the better of him. "I may have employed the expression 'grigs' rashly. I do not really know how small type they can read. I withdraw the grigs. Besides, there's another point of view...."

"What's that?" Gwen is a little impatient and absent. Marcus Curtius has waned again perceptibly.

"Why--suppose I had been knocked over two miles off, carried in, for instance, at the Mackworth Clarkes', where 'Rene's gone...!"

"But you weren't!"

"Lady Gwendolen, you don't understand the nature of an hypothesis"--his absurdity gets the upper hand again--"the nature of an hypothesis is that its maker is always in the right. I am, this time. If I had been nursed round at the Mackworth Clarkes', you would have known nothing about me except as a mere accident--a person in the papers--a person one inquires after...."

Gwen interrupts him with determination. "Stop, Mr. Torrens," she says, "and listen to me. If you had been struck by a bullet fired by my father's order, by his servant, on his land, it would not have mattered what house you were taken to, nor who nursed you round. I should have felt that the guilt--yes, the guilt!--the sin of it was on the conscience of us all; every one of us that had had a hand, a finger, in it, directly or indirectly. How could I have borne to look your sister in the face...?"

"You wouldn't have known her! Come, Lady Gwen!"

"Very well, then, give her up. Suppose, instead, the girl you are engaged to had been a friend of mine, how could I have borne to look her in the face?"

"She's a hypothesis. There's no such interesting damsel--that I know of...."

"Oh, isn't there?... Well--she's a hypothesis, and I've a right to as many hypothesisses as you have."

"I can't deny it."

"Then how should I look her in the face? Answer my question, and don't prevaricate."

"What a severe--Turk you are! But I won't prevaricate. You wouldn't be called on to look the hypothesis in the face. She would have broken me off, like a sensible hypothesis that knew what was due to itself and its family...."

"Do be serious. Indeed I am serious. It was in my mind all last night--such a dreadful haunting thought!--what would this girl's feelings be to me and mine? I made several girls I know stand for the part. You know how one overdoes things when one is left to oneself and the darkness?..."

"Yes--that I do! No doubt of it!" The stress of a meaning he could not help forced its way into his words, in spite of himself. Surely you need not have shown it, said an inner voice to him. He made no reply. But he did not see how.

Almost before he had time to repent she had cried out:--"Oh, there now! See what I have done again! I did not mean it. Do forgive me!" Neither saw a way to patching up this lapse, and it was ruled out by tacit consent. Gwen resumed:--"You know, I mean, how one dreams a thousand things in a minute, and everything is as big as a house, even when it's only strong coffee. This was worse than strong coffee. There were plenty of them, these hypothesisses.... Oh yes!--we know plenty of girls you do. I could count you up a dozen...."

"--One's enough!--that means that one's the allowance, not that it's one too many...."

"Well--there were a many reproachful dream-faces, and every one of them said to me:--'See what you have made of my life that might have been so happy. See how you have con ...'" Gwen had very nearly said condemned, but stopped in time. She could not refer to the demands of an eyeless mate for constant help in little things, and all the irksomeness of a home.

Adrian, pretending not to hear "con," spoke at once. "But did none of these charming girls--I'm sure I should have loved heaps of them--did none of them remind you that they were hypothetical?"

"Dear Mr. Torrens, I can't tell you how good and brave you seem to me for laughing so much, and turning everything to a joke. But I was in earnest."

"So was I."

"Then I did not understand."

"What did you think I meant?"

"I thought you were playing fast and loose with the nonsense about the hypothesis. I did indeed."

"Well, I was serious underneath. Listen, and I'll tell you. This fiancee of mine that you seem so cocksure about has no existence. I give you my honour that it is so, and that I am glad of it.... Yes--glad of it! How could I bear to think I was inflicting myself on a woman I loved, and making her life a misery to her?"

Gwen thought of beginning:--"If she loved you," and giving a little sketch of a perfect wife under the circumstances. It never saw the light, owing to a recrudescence of Marcus Curtius, who stood to win nothing by his venture--was certainly not in love with Erebus. An act of pure self-sacrifice on principle! Nothing could be farther from her thoughts, be so good as to observe, than that she loved this man!

He went on uninterrupted:--"No, indeed I am heartily glad of it. It would be a terrible embarrassment at the best. I should want to let her off, and she would feel in honour bound to hold on, and really of all the things I can't abide self-sacrifice is.... Well, Lady Gwendolen, only consider the feelings of the chap on the altar! Hasn't he a right to a little unselfishness for his own personal satisfaction?" This was a sad wet blanket for Marcus Curtius.

Gwen did not believe that Adrian's disclaimer of any preoccupation of his affections was genuine. According to her theory of life--and there is much to be said for it--a full-blown Adonis, that is to say, a lovable man, refusing to love any woman on any terms, was a sort of monstrosity. The original Adonis of Art and Song was merely an homme incompris, according to this young lady. He hated Venus--odious woman!--and no wonder. She to claim the rank of a goddess! Besides, Gwen suspected that Adrian was only prevaricating. Trothplight was one thing, official betrothal another. It was almost too poor a shuffle to accuse him of, but she was always flying at the throat of equivocation, even when she knew she might be outclassed by it. "You are playing with words, Mr. Torrens," said she. "You mean that you and this young lady are not 'engaged to be married'? Perhaps not, but that has nothing to do with the matter. I cannot feel it in my bones--as Mrs. Bailey says--that any woman you could care for would back out of it because you ... because of this dreadful accident." Her voice was irresolute in referring to it, and some wandering wave of that electricity that her finger-tips were so full of made a cross-circuit and quickened the beating of her hearer's heart. The vessel it struck in mid-ocean had no time to right itself before another followed. "Surely--if she were worth a straw--if she were worth the name of a woman at all--she would feel it her greatest happiness to make it up to you for such...." She was going to say "a privation," but she always shied off designating the calamity. In her hurry to escape from "privation" she landed her speech in a phrase she had not taken the full measure of--"Well--perhaps I oughtn't to say that! I may be taking the young woman's name in vain. I only mean that that is what I should feel in her position."

It had come as a chance speech before she saw its bearings. There was not the ghost of an arriere pensee behind the simple fact that she had no choice but to judge another woman's mind by her own; a natural thought! Her first instinct was to spoil the force she had not meant it to have, by dragging the red herring of some foolish joke across the trail.

But--to think of it! Here had she been hatching such a brave scheme of making her own life, and all the devotion she somehow believed she could give, a compensation for a great wrong, and here she was now affrighted at the smell of powder! Pride stepped in, and the memory of Quintus Curtius. No--she would not say a single word to undo the effect of her heedlessness. Let the worst stand! They had left her in the place of that hypothesis whom she had herself discarded. It was no fault of hers that had involved her personally. Was she bound to back out? She bit her lip to check her own impulse to utter some cheap corrective.

Until that rather scornful disclaimer of the Duke's son, Mrs. Bailey's piece of fashionable intelligence had served--whether Adrian believed it or not--as a sort of chaperon's aegis extended over this interview. It had protected him against himself--against his impulse to break through a silence that his three weeks' memory of this girl's image had made painful. Recollect that her radiant beauty, in that setting sun-gleam, was the last thing human his eyes had rested on before the night came on him--the night that might be endless. It was not so easy, now that an imaginary fiancee had been curtly swept away, to fight against a temptation he conceived himself bound in honour not to give way to. Not so easy because something, that he hoped was not his vanity, was telling him that this girl beside him, her very self that he had seen once, whose image was to last for ever, was at least not placing obstacles in his way. For anything that she was doing to prevent it, he might drive a coach-and-six through the social code that blocks a declaration of passion to a girl under age without the consent of her parents. He was conscious of this code, and his general acceptance of it. But he was not so law-abiding but that he must needs get on the box--of the coach-and-six--and flick the leaders with his whip.

For he asked abruptly:--"How do you know that?" driving home the nail of personality to the head.

"Perhaps I am wrong," said Gwen, dropping her flag an inch. "But I was thinking so all last night. I was in a sort of fever, you see, because I felt so guilty, and it grew worse and worse...."

"You were thinking that...?"

"Well--you know--it was before I had any idea she was a hypothesis. I thought she was real because of the ring."

"My ring! Fancy!... But I'll tell you about my ring presently. Tell me what you were thinking...."

"Why--what I said before!"

"But what was it?"

"Do you know, I think it was only a sort of attempt to get a little sleep. You were so fearfully on my conscience, and it made it so much easier to bear.... Only it worried me to think that perhaps she might turn round and say:--'This was no fault of mine. Why should I bear for life the burden of other people's sins?' ... If she was a perfect beast--beast, you know!..."

"The hypothesis would not have been a perfect beast. She would have been a perfect lady, and Mrs. Bailey would have attested it. She would have pointed out the desirability of a sister's love--at reasonable intervals; visits and so on--for a man with his eyes poked out. She might even have gone the length of insinuating that the finger of Providence did it...."

"Now you are talking nonsense again. Do be serious!"

"Well--let's be serious! Suppose you tell me what it was you were thinking that made the existence of that very dry and unsatisfying hypothesis such a consolation!"

"I should like to tell you--only I know I shall say it wrong, and you will think me an odd girl; or unfeeling; which is worse."

"I should do nothing of the sort. But I'll tell you what I should think--what I have thought all this time I have been hearing your voice--I merely mention it as a thing of pathological interest...."

"Go on."

"I should think it didn't matter what you said so long as you went on speaking. Because whenever I hear your voice I can shut my eyes and forget that I am blind."

"Is that empty compliment, or are you in earnest?"

"I was jesting a minute ago, but now I am in earnest. I mean what I say. Your voice takes the load off my heart and the darkness off my brain, and we are standing again by that stone bridge over yonder--Arthur's Bridge--and I see you in all your beauty--oh! such beauty--as I look up from Ply's cut collar against the sunset sky. That was my last hour of vision, and its memory will go with me to the grave. And now when I hear your voice, it all comes back to me, and the terrible darkness has vanished--or the sense of it anyhow!..."

"If that is so you shall hear it until your sight comes back--it will--it must!"

"How if it never comes back? How if I remain as I am now for life?"

"I shall not lose my voice."

How it came about neither could ever say; but each knew that it happened then, just at that turn in the conversation, and that no one came rushing into the drawing-room as they easily might have done--this lax structure of language was employed later in reference to it--nor did any of the thousand interruptions occur that might have occurred. Mrs. Bailey might have come to Mr. Torrens to know how many g's there were in agreeable, or a tea-collector might have prowled in to add relics to her collection, or even the sound of the carriage afar--inaudible by man--might have caused Achilles to requisition the opening of the drawing-room door, that he might rush away to sanction its arrival. Two guardian angels--the story thinks--stopped any of these things happening. What did happen was that Gwen and Adrian, who a moment before were nominally a lady and gentleman chatting on a sofa near the piano, whose separation involved no consequences definable for either, were standing speechless in each other's arms--speechless but waiting for the power to speak. For nobody can articulate whose heart is thumping out of all reason. He has to wait--or she, as may be. One of each is needed to develope an earthquake of this particular kind.

It was just as well that the Hon. Percival Pellew and Aunt Constance Smith-Dickenson, who had started to walk from the flower-show with a couple of young monkeys whose object in life was to spare everybody else their company from selfish motives, did not come rushing into the drawing-room just then, but a quarter of an hour later. For even if the parties had caught the sound of their arrival in time, the peculiarity of Mr. Torrens' blindness would have stood in the way of any successful pretence that he and Lady Gwendolen had been keeping their distance up to Society point. We know how easy it is for normal people, when caught, to pretend they are looking at dear Sarah's interesting watercolours together, or anything of that sort. And even if the blind man had been able to strike a bar or two carelessly on the piano, to advertise his isolation, their faces would have betrayed them. Not that the tears of either could have been identified on the face of the other. It was a matter of expression. Every situation in this world has a stamp of its own for the human face, and no stamp is more easily identified than that on the face of lovers who have just found each other out.

* * * * *

Anyhow this story cannot go on, until the absurd tempest that has passed over these two allows them to speak. Then they do so on an absolutely new footing, and the man calls the girl his dearest and his own, and Heaven knows what else. There one sees the difference between the B.C. and A.D. of the Nativity of Love. It is a new Era. Call it the Hegira, if you like.

"I saw you once, dear love,"--he is saying--"I saw you once, and it was you--you--you! The worst that Fate has in store for me cannot kill the memory of that moment. And if blindness was to be the price of this--of this--why, I would sooner be blind, and have it, than have all the eyes of Argus and ... and starve."

"You wouldn't know you were starving," says Gwen, who is becoming normal--resuming the equanimities. "Besides, you would be such a Guy. No--please don't! Somebody's coming!"

"Nobody's coming. It's all right. I tell you, Gwen, or Gwendolen--do you know I all but called you that, when you came in, before we sang...?"

"Why didn't you quite? However, I'm not sorry you didn't on the whole. It might have seemed paternal, and I should have felt squashed. And then it might never have happened at all, and I should just have been a young lady in Society, and you a gentleman that had had an accident."

"It would have happened just the same, I believe. Because why? I had seen you. At least, it might have."

"It has happened, and must be looked in the face. Now whatever you do, for Heaven's sake, don't go talking to papa and being penitent, till I give you leave."

"What should I be able to say to him? I don't know. I can't justify my actions--as the World goes...."

"Why not?"

"Nobody would hold a man blameless, in my circumstances, who made an offer of marriage to a young lady under...."

"It's invidious to talk about people's ages."

"I wasn't going to say twenty-one. I was going to say under her father's roof...."

"Nobody ever makes offers of marriage on the top of anybody's father's roof. Besides, you never made any offer, strictly speaking. You said...."

"I said that if I had my choice I would have chosen it all as it now is, only to hear your voice in the dark, rather than to be without it and have all the eyes of ... didn't I say Argus?"

"Yes--you said Argus. But that was a facon-de-parler; at least I hope so, for the sake of the Hypothesis.... Oh dear!--what nonsense we two are talking...." Some silence; otherwise the status quo remained unchanged. Then he said:--"I wonder if it's all a dream and we shall wake." And she replied: "Not both--that's absurd!" But she made it more so by adding:--"Promise you'll tell me your dream when we wake, and I'll tell you mine." He assented:--"All right!--but don't let's wake yet."

By now the sun was sinking in a flame of gold, and every little rabbit's shadow in the fern was as long as the tallest man's two hours since, and longer. The level glare was piercing the sheltered secrets of the beechwoods, and choosing from them ancient tree-trunks capriciously, to turn to sudden fires against the depths of hidden purple beyond--the fringe of the mantle the vanguard of night was weaving for the hills. Not a dappled fallow-deer in the coolest shade but had its chance of a robe of glory for a little moment--not a bird so sober in its plumage but became, if only it flew near enough to Heaven, a spark against the blue. And the long, unhesitating rays were not so busy with the world without, but that one of them could pry in at the five-light window at the west end of the Jacobean drawing-room at the Towers, and reach the marble Ceres the Earl's grandfather brought from Athens. And on the way it paused and dwelt a moment on a man's hand caressing the stray locks of a flood of golden hair he could not see--might never see at all. Or who might live on--such things have been--to find it grey to a half-illuminated sight in the dusk of life. So invisible to him now; so vivid in his memory of what seemed to him no more than a few days since! For half the time, remember, had been to him oblivion--a mere blank. And now, in the splendid intoxication of this new discovery, he could well afford to forget for the moment the black cloud that overhung the future, and the desperation that might well lie hidden in its heart, waiting for the day when he should know that Hope was dead. That day might come.

"Shall I tell you now, my dearest, my heart, my life"--this is what he is saying, and every word he says is a mere truth to him; a sort of scientific fact--"shall I tell you what I was going to say an hour ago?..."

"It's more than an hour, but I know when. About me sticking my hand out?"

"Just exactly then. I was thinking all the while that in another moment I should have your hand in mine, and keep it as long as I dared. Eyes were nothing--sight was nothing--life itself was nothing--nothing was anything but that one moment just ahead. It would not last, but it would fill the earth and the heavens with light and music, and keep death and the fiend that had been eating up my soul at bay--as long as it lasted. Dear love, I am not exaggerating...."

"Do you expect me to believe that? Now be quiet, and perhaps I'll tell you what I was thinking when I found out you couldn't see--have been thinking ever since. I thought it well over in the night, and when I came into this room I meant it. I did, indeed."

"Meant what?"

"Meant to get at the truth about that ring of yours. I had got it on the brain, you see. I meant to find out whether she was anybody or nobody. And if she was nobody I was going to...." She comes to a standstill; for, even now--even after such a revelation, with one of his arms about her waist, and his free hand caressing her hair--Marcus Curtius sticks in her throat a little.

"What were you going to?" said Adrian, really a little puzzled. Because even poets don't understand some women.

"Well--if it wasn't you I wouldn't tell. I ... I had made up my mind to apply for the vacant place." This came with a rush, and might not have come at all had she felt his eyes could see her; knowing, as she did, the way the blood would quite unreasonably mount up to her face the moment she had uttered it. "It all seemed such plain sailing in the middle of the night, and it turned out not quite so easy as I thought it would be. You know.... Be quiet and let me talk now!... it was the guilt--my share in it--that was so hard to bear. I wanted to do something to make it up to you. And what could I do? A woman is in such a fix. Oh, how glad I was when you opened fire on your own account! Only frightened, you know." He was beginning to say something, but she stopped him with:--"I know what you are going to say, but that's just where the difficulty came in. If only I hadn't cared twopence about you it would have been so easy!... Did you say how? Foolish man!--can't you see that if I hadn't loved you one scrap, or only half across your lips as we used to say when we were children, it would have been quite a let-off to be met with offers of a brother's love ... and that sort of thing.... Isn't that them?" This was colloquial. No doubt Gwen was exceptional, and all the other young ladies in the Red Book would have said:--"Are not these they?"

This story does not believe that Gwen's statement of her recent embarrassment covered the facts. Probably a woman in her position would be less held at bay by the chance of a rebuff, than by a deadly fear of kisses chilled by a spirit of self-sacrifice.... Ugh!--the hideous suspicion! The present writer, from information received, believes that little girls like to think that they are made of sugar and spice and all that's nice, and that their lover's synthesis of slugs and snails and puppy-dogs' tails doesn't matter a rap so long as they are ravenous. But they mustn't snap, however large a percentage of puppy-dogs they contain.

Anyhow, Marcus Curtius never came off. He was really impossible; and, as we all know, what's impossible very seldom comes to pass. And this case was not among the exceptions.

It wasn't them. But a revision of the relativities was necessary. When Miss Dickenson and the Hon. Percival did come in, Gwen was at the piano, and Adrian at the right distance for hearing. Nothing could have been more irreproachable. The newcomers, having been audibly noisy on the stairs, showed as hypocritical by an uncalled-for assumption of preternatural susceptibility to the absence of other members of their party acknowledging their necessity to make up a Grundy quorum. There is safety in number when persons are of opposite sexes, which they generally are.

"Can't imagine what's become of them!" said Mr. Pellew, rounding off some subject with a dexterous implication of its nature. "By Jove!--that's good, though! Mr. Torrens down at last!" Greetings and civilities, and a good pretence by the blind man of seeing the hands he meets half-way.

"That young Lieutenant What's-his-name and the second Accrington girl, Gwen dear. They must have missed us and gone round by Furze Heath. I shall be in a fearful scrape with Lady Accrington, I know. Why didn't you come to the flower-show?" Thus Miss Dickenson, laying unnecessary stress on the absentees.

"I had a headache," says Gwen, "and Gloire de Dijon roses always make my headaches worse.... Yes, it's very funny. Mr. Torrens and I have been boring one another half the afternoon. But I've written some letters. Do you know this in the new Opera--Verdi's?" She played a phrase or two of the Trovatore. For it was the new Opera that year, and we were boys ... eheu fugaces!

"I really think I ought to walk back a little and see about those young people," says Aunt Constance fatuously. Thereupon Gwen finds she would like a little walk in the cool, and will accompany Aunt Constance. But just after they have left the room Achilles, whose behaviour has really been perfect all along, is seized with a paroxysm of interest in an inaudible sound, and storms past them on the stairs to meet the carriage and keep an eye on things. So they only take a short turn on the terrace in the late glow of the sunset, and go up to dress.

Adrian and the Hon. Percival spend five minutes in the growing twilight, actively ignoring all personal relations during the afternoon. They discuss flower-shows on their merits, and recent Operas on theirs. They censure the fashions in dress--the preposterous crinolines and the bonnets almost hanging down on the back like a knapsack--touch politics slightly: Louis Napoleon, Palmerston, Russian Nicholas. But they follow male precedents, dropping trivialities as soon as womankind is out of hearing, and preserve a discreet silence--two discreet silences--about their respective recencies. They depart to their rooms, Adrian risking his credit for a limited vision by committing himself to Mr. Pellew's arm and a banister.

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Chapter XXII

THEOPHILUS GOTOBED. HOW A TENOR AND A SOPRANO VANISHED. HOW GWEN ANNOUNCED HER INTENDED MARRIAGE. PRACTICAL ENCOURAGEMENT. AUNT CONSTANCE AND MR. PELLEW, AND HOW THEY WERE OLDER THAN ROMEO, JULIET, GWEN, AND MR. TORRENS. HOW THEY STAYED OUT FIVE MINUTES LONGER, AND MISS DICKENSON CAME ACROSS THE EARL WITH A CANDLE-LAMP. HOW GWEN'S FATHER KNEW ALL ABOUT IT. NEVERTHELESS THE EARL DID NOT KNOW BROWNING. BUT HE SUSPECTED GWEN OF QUIXOTISM, FOR ALL THAT. ONE'S TONGUE, AND THE CHOICE BETWEEN BITING IT OFF OR HOLDING IT. HOW GWEN HAD BORROWED LORD CUMBERWORLD'S PENCIL. MRS. BAILEY AND PARISIAN PROFLIGACY

The galaxy of wax lights had illuminated the Jacobean drawing-room long enough to have become impatient, if only they had had human souls, before the first conscientious previous person turned up dressed for dinner, and felt ashamed and looked at a book. He affected superiority to things, saying to the subsequent conscientious person:--"Seen this?--'The Self-Renunciation of Theophilus Gotobed?'--R'viewers sayts 'musing;" and handing him Vol. I., which he was obliged to take. He just looked inside, and laid it on the table. "Looks intristin'!" he said.

It was bad enough, said Mr. Norbury to Cook sympathetically in confidence, to put back three-quarters of an hour, without her ladyship making his lordship behindhander still. This was because news travelled to the kitchen--mind you never say anything whatever in the hearing of a servant!--that their two respective ships were in collision in the Lib'ary; harguing was the exact expression. It was the heads of the household who were late. Lady Gwendolen apologized for them, saying she was afraid it was her fault. It was. But she didn't look penitent. She looked resplendent.

The two couples who had parted company, being anxious to advertise their honourable conduct, executed a quartet-without-music in extenuation of what appeared organized treachery. The soprano and tenor had lost sight of the alto and basso just on the other side of Clocketts Croft, where you came to a stile. They had from sheer good-faith retraced their steps to this stile and sat on it reluctantly, in bewilderment of spirit, praying for the spontaneous reappearance of the wanderers. These latter testified unanimously that they had seen the tenor assist the soprano over this stile, and that then the couple had disappeared to the right through the plantation of young larches, and they had followed them along a path of enormous length with impenetrable arboriculture on either hand, without seeing any more of them, and expected to find them on arriving. The tenor and soprano gave close particulars of their return along this self-same path. All the evidence went to show that a suspension of natural laws had taken place, the simultaneous presence of all four at that stile seeming a mathematical certainty from which escape was impossible.

Guilty conscience--so Gwen thought at least--was discernible in every phrase of the composition. This was all very fine for Lieutenant Tatham and Di Accrington, the two young monkeys. But why Aunt Constance and her middle-aged M.P.? If they wanted to, why couldn't they, without any nonsense? That was the truncated inquiry Gwen's mind made.

She herself was radiant, dazzling, in the highest spirits. But her mother was silent and pre-occupied, and rather impatient with her more than once during the evening. The Earl was the same, minus the impatience.

This was because of two very short colloquies under pressure, between Gwen's departure upstairs and the Countess's overdue appearance at dinner. The first began in the lobby outside Gwen's room, where her mother overtook her on her way to her own. Here it is in full:

"Oh--there you are, child! What a silly you were not to come! How's your headache?... I do wish your father would have those stairs altered. It's like the ascent of Mount Parnassus." Buckstone was presenting a burlesque of that name just then, and her ladyship may have had it running in her head.

"It wasn't a real headache--only pretence. Come in here, mamma. I've something to say.... No--I haven't rung for Lutwyche yet. She's all right. Come in and shut the door."

"Why, girl, what's the matter? Why are you...?"

"Why am I what?"

"Well--twinkling and--breathing and--and altogether!" Her ladyship's descriptive power is fairly good as far as it goes, but it has its limits.

"I don't believe I'm either twinkling or breathing or altogether.... Well, then--I'm whatever you like--all three! Only listen to me, mamma dear, because there's not much time. I'm going to marry Adrian Torrens. There!"

"Oh--my dear!" It is too much for the Countess after those stairs! She sinks on a chair clutching her fingers tight, with wide eyes on her daughter. It is too terrible to believe. But even in that moment Gwen's beauty has such force that the words "A blind man!--never to see it!" are articulate in her mind. For her child never looked more beautiful--one half queenly effrontery, her disordered locks against the window-light making a halo of rough gold round a slight flush its wearer would resent the name of shame for; the other half, the visible flinching from confession she would resent still more for justifying it.

"Why--do you know anything against him?"

"Darling!--you might marry anybody, and you know it."

"Oh yes; I know all about it. I prefer this one. But do you know anything against him?"

"Only ... only his eyes!... Oh dear! You know you said so yourself yesterday--that the sight was destroyed...."

"Who destroyed his sight? Tell me that!"

"If you are going to take that tone, Gwendolen, I really cannot talk about it. You and your father must settle it between you somehow. It was an accident--a very terrible accident, I know--but I must go away to dress. It's eight.... Anyhow, one thing, dear! You haven't given him any encouragement--at least, I hope not...."

"Given him any what?"

"Any practical encouragement ... any ..."

"Oh yes--any quantity." She has to quash that flinching and brazen it out. One way is as good as another. "I didn't tell him to pull my hair down, though. I didn't mind. But if he had been able to see I should have been much more strict."

"Gwen dear--you are perfectly ... shameless!... Well--you are a very odd girl...." This is concession; oddity is not shamelessness.

"Come, mamma, be reasonable! If you can't see anybody and you mayn't touch them, it comes down to making remarks at a respectful distance, and then it's no better than acquaintance--visiting and leaving cards and that sort of thing.... Come in!" Lutwyche interrupted with hot water, her expression saying distinctly:--"I am a young woman of unimpeachable character, who can come into a room where a titled lady and her daughter are at loggerheads, no doubt about a love-affair, and can shut my eyes to the visible and my ears to the audible. Go it!"

Nevertheless, the disputants seemed to prefer suspension of their discussion, and the elder lady departed, saying they would both be late for dinner.

This was the first short colloquy. The second was in the Earl's dressing-room, from which he was emerging when his wife, looking scared, met him coming out in grande tenue through the district common to both, the room Earls and Countesses had occupied from time immemorial. He saw there was some excitement afoot, but was content to await the information he knew would come in the end. Tacit reciprocities of misunderstanding ensuing, he felt it safest to say:--"Nothing wrong, I hope?" This is what followed:

"I think you might show more interest. I have been very much startled and annoyed.... But I must tell you later. There's no time now."

"I think," says his lordship deferentially, "that, having mentioned it, it might be better to ..."

"I suppose you mean I oughtn't to have mentioned it.... Starfield, I cannot possible wear that thick dress to-night. It's suffocating. Get something thinner.... Oh, well--if I must tell you I must tell you! Go back in your room a minute while Starfield finds that dress.... Oh no--she's not listening ... never mind her! There, the door's shut!"

"Well--what is it?"

"It's Gwen. However, I dare say it's only a flash in the pan, and she'll be off after somebody else. If only my advice had been taken he never would have come into the house...."

"But who is he, and what is it?"

"My dear, I'll tell you if you'll not be so impatient. It's this young Torrens.... Yes--now you're shocked. So was I." For no further explanations are necessary. When one hears that "it" is John and Jane, one knows.

"But, Philippa, are you sure? It seems to me perfectly incredible."

"Speak to her yourself."

"She's barely seen him; and as for him, poor fellow, he has never seen her at all." The rapidity of events seems out of all reason to a constitutionally cautious Earl.

"My dear, how unreasonable you are! If he could see her, of course, she wouldn't think of him for one moment. At least, I suppose not."

"I cannot understand," says the bewildered Earl. And then he begins repeating her ladyship's words "If--he--could ..." as though inviting a more intelligible repetition. This is exasperating--a clear insinuation of unintelligibility.

"Oh dear, how slow men are!" The lady passes through a short phase of collapse from despair over man's faculties, then returns to a difficult task crisply and incisively. "Well, at any rate, you can see this? The girl's got it into her head that the accident was our fault, and that it's her duty to make it up to him."

"But, then, she's not really in love with him, if it's a self-denying ordinance."

The Countess is getting used to despair, so she only shrugs a submissive shoulder and remarks with forbearance:--"It is no use trying to make you understand. Of course, it's because she is in love with him that she is going in for ... what did you call it?..."

"A self-denying ordinance."

"I call it heroics. If she wasn't in love with him, do you suppose she would want to fling herself away?"

"Then it isn't a self-denying ordinance at all. I confess I don't understand. I must talk to Gwen herself."

"Oh, talk to her by all means. But don't expect to make any impression on her. I know what she is when she gets the bit in her teeth. Certainly talk to her. I really must go and dress now...."

"Stop one minute, Philippa...."

"Well--what?"

"Apart from the blindness--poor fellow!--is there anything about this young man to object to? There's nothing about his family. Why!--his father's Hamilton Torrens, that was George's great friend at Christ Church. And his mother was an Abercrombie...."

"I can't go into that now." Her ladyship cuts Adrian's family very short. Consider her memories of bygones! No wonder she became acutely alive to her duties as a hostess. She had created a precedent in this matter, though really her husband scarcely knew anything about her affaire de coeur with Adrian's father thirty years ago. It was not a hanging matter, but she could not object to the young man's family after such a definite attitude towards his father.

Here ends the second short colloquy, which was the one that caused the Earl to be so more than usually absent that evening. It had the opposite effect on her ladyship, who felt better after it; braced up again to company-manners after the first one. Gwen, as mentioned before, was dazzling; superb; what is apt to be called a cynosure, owing to something Milton said. Nevertheless, the Shrewd Observer, who happened in this case to be Aunt Constance, noticed that at intervals the young lady let her right-hand neighbour talk, and died away into preoccupation, with a vital undercurrent of rippled lip and thoughtful eye. Another of her shrewd observations was that when the Hon. Percival, referring to Mr. Torrens, still an absentee by choice, said:--"I tried again to persuade him to come down at feeding-time, but it was no go," Gwen came suddenly out of one dream of this sort to say from her end of the table, miles off:--"He really prefers dining by himself, I know," and went in again.

It was this that Aunt Constance referred to in conversation with Mr. Pellew, at about half-past ten o'clock in that same shrubbery walk. They had cultivated each other's absence carefully in the drawing-room, and had convinced themselves that neither was necessary to the other. That clause having been carried nem. con., they were entitled to five minutes' chat, without prejudice. Neither remembered, perhaps, the convert to temperance who decided that passing a public-house door a contre-coeur entitled him to half-a-pint.

"How did you get on with little Di Accrington?" the lady had said. And the gentleman had answered:--"First-rate. Talked to her about your partner all the time. How did you hit it off with him?" A sympathetic laugh over the response: "Capitally--he talked about her, of course!" quite undid the fiction woven with so much pains indoors, and also as it were lighted a little collateral fire they might warm their fingers at, or burn them. However, a parade of their well-worn seniority, their old experience of life, would keep them safe from that. Only it wouldn't do to neglect it.

Mr. Pellew recognised the obligation first. "Offly amusin'!--young people," said he, claiming, as the countryman of Shakespeare, his share of insight into Romeo and Juliet.

"Same old story, over and over again!" said Aunt Constance. They posed as types of elderliness that had no personal concern in love-affairs, and could afford to smile at juvenile flirtations. Mr. Pellew felt interested in Miss Dickenson's bygone romances, implied in the slight shade of sentiment in her voice--wondered in fact how the doose this woman had missed her market; this was the expression his internal soliloquy used. She for her part was on the whole glad that an intensely Platonic friendship didn't admit of catechism, as she was better pleased to leave the customers in that market to the uninformed imagination of others, than to be compelled to draw upon her own.

The fact was that, in spite of its thinness and slightness, this Platonic friendship with a mature bachelor whose past--while she acquitted him of atrocities--she felt was safest kept out of sight, had already gone quite as near to becoming a love-affair as anything her memory could discover among her own rather barren antecedents. So there was a certain sort of affectation in Aunt Constance's suggestion of familiarity with Romeo and Juliet. She wished, without telling lies, to convey the idea that the spinsterhood four very married sisters did not scruple to taunt her with, was either of her own choosing or due to some tragic event of early life. She did not relish the opposite pole of human experience to her companion's. Of course, he was a bachelor nominally unattached--she appreciated that--just as she was a spinster very actually unattached. But all men of his type she had understood were alike; only some--this one certainly--were much better than others. Honestly she was quite unconscious of any personal reason for assigning to him a first-class record.

Attempts to sift the human mind throw very little light upon it, and the dust gets in the eyes of the story. Perhaps that is why it cannot give Miss Dickenson's reason for not following up her last remark with:--"And will go on so, I suppose, to the end of time!" as she had half-intended to do, philosophically. Possibly she thought it would complicate the topic she was hankering after. It would be better to keep that provisionally clear of subjects made to the hand of writers of plays. She would not go beyond hypnotic suggestion at present. She approached it with the air of one who dismisses a triviality.

"It seems Mr. Adrian Torrens is a musician as well as a poet."

"Had they been playing the piano?"

"Really, Mr. Pellew, how absurd you are! Where does 'they' come in?"

"Oh--well--a--of course--I thought you were referring to ..."

"Whom did you suppose I was referring to?" Aggressive equanimity here that can wait weeks, if necessary.

"Torrens and my cousin Gwen! Be hanged if I can see why I shouldn't refer to them!"

"Do so by all means. I wasn't, myself; but it doesn't matter. It was Nurse Bailey told Lutwyche, whom I borrow from Gwen sometimes, that Mr. Torrens was a great musician."

"How does Nurse Bailey know?"

"He was playing to her quite beautiful in the drawing-room just before her young ladyship came in. And then Mrs. Bailey went upstairs to write a letter because there was plenty of time before the post."

"Can't say I believe Nurse Bailey's much of a dab at music." Mr. Pellew was reflecting on the humorous background of Miss Dickenson's character, clear to his insight in her last speech. "But it was just post-time when we got back from the flower-show.... What then? Why, her young ladyship must have been there long enough for Mrs. Bailey to write a letter."

"Is that the way you gossip at your Club, Mr. Pellew?"

"Come, I say, Miss Dickenson, that's too bad! I merely remark that a lady and gentleman must have had plenty of time for music, and you call it 'gossip.'"

"Precisely."

"Well, I say it's a jolly shame!... You don't suppose there is anything there, do you?" This came with a sudden efflux of seriousness.

Aunt Constance had landed her fish and was blameless. Nobody could say she had been indiscreet. She, too, could afford to be suddenly serious. "I don't mind saying so to you, Mr. Pellew," she said, "because I know I can rely upon you. But did you notice at dinner-time, when you said you had tried to persuade Mr. Torrens to come down, that Gwen took upon herself to answer for him all the way down the table?"

"By Jove--so she did! I didn't notice it at the time. At least, I mean I did notice it at the time, but I didn't take much notice of it. Well--you know what I mean!" As Miss Dickenson knows perfectly well, she tolerates technical flaws of speech with a nod, and allows Mr. Pellew to go on:--"But, I say, this will be an awful smash for the family. A blind man!" Then he becomes aware that a conclusion has been jumped at, and experiences relief. "But it may be all a mistake, you know." Aunt Constance's silence has the force of speech, and calls for further support of this surmise. "They haven't had the time. She has only known him since yesterday. At least he had never seen her but once--he told me so--that time just before the accident."

"Gwen is a very peculiar girl," says the lady. "A spark will fire a train. Did you notice nothing when we came in from the flower-show?"

"Nothing whatever. Did you?"

"Little things. However, as you say, it may be all a mistake. I don't think anything of the time, though. Some young people are volcanic. Gwen might be."

"I saw no sign of an eruption in him--no lunacy. He chatted quite reasonably about the division on Thursday, and the crops and the weather. Never mentioned Gwen!"

"My dear Mr. Pellew, you really are quite pastoral. Of course, Gwen is exactly what he would not mention."

Mr. Pellew seems to concede that he is an outsider. "You think it was Love at first sight, and that sort of thing," he says. "Well--I hope it will wash. It don't always, you know."

"Indeed it does not." The speaker cannot resist the temptation to flavour philosophy with a suggestion of tender regrets--a hint of a life-drama in her own past. No questions need be answered, and will scarcely be asked. But it is candid and courageous to say as little as may be about it, and to favour a cheerful outlook on Life. She is bound to say that many of the happiest marriages she has known have been marriages of second--third--fourth--fifth--_n_th Love. She had better have let it stand at that if she wanted her indistinct admirer to screw up his courage then and there to sticking point. For the Hon. Percival had at least seen in her words a road of approach to a reasonably tender elderly avowal. But she must needs spoil it by adding--really quite unconsciously--that many such marriages had been between persons in quite mature years. Somehow this changed the nascent purpose kindled by a suggestion of _n_th love in Autumn to a sudden consciousness that the conversation was sailing very near the wind--some wind undefined--and made Mr. Pellew run away pusillanimously.

"By-the-by, did you ever see the Macganister More man that died the other day? Married the Earl's half-sister?"

"Never. Of course, I know Clotilda perfectly well."

"Let's see--oh yes!--she's Sister Nora. Oh yes, of course I know Clotilda. She's his heiress, I fancy--comes into all the property--no male heir. She'll go over to Rome, I suppose."

"Why?"

"Always do--with a lot of independent property. Unless some fillah cuts in and snaps her up."

"Do tell me, Mr. Pellew, why it is men can never credit any woman with an identity of her own?"

"Well, I only go by what I see. If they don't marry they go over to Rome--when there's property--dessay I'm wrong.... What o'clock's that?--ten, I suppose. No?--well, I suppose it must be eleven, when one comes to think of it. But it's a shame to go in--night like this!" And then this weak-minded couple impaired the effect of their little declaration of independence of the united state--the phrase sounds familiar somehow!--by staying out five or six minutes longer, and going in half an hour later; two things only the merest pedant would declare incompatible. But it kept the servants up, and Miss Dickenson had to apologise to Mr. Norbury.

How many of us living in this present century can keep alive to the fact that the occupants of country-mansions, now resplendent with an electric glare which is destroying their eyesight and going out suddenly at intervals, were sixty years ago dependent on candles and moderator lamps, which ran down and had to be wound up, and then ran down again, when there was no oil. There was no gas at the Towers; though there might have been, granting seven miles of piping, from which the gas would have escaped into the roots of the beeches and killed them.

Even if there had been, it does not follow that Miss Dickenson, in full flight to her own couch, would not have come upon the Earl in the lobby near Mr. Torrens's quarters, with a candle-lamp in his hand, which he carried about in nocturnal excursions to make sure that a great conflagration was not raging somewhere on the premises. He seemed, Miss Dickenson thought, to be gazing reproachfully at it. It was burning all right, nevertheless. She wished his lordship good-night, and fancied it was very late. The Earl appeared sure of it. So did a clock with clear ideas on the subject, striking midnight somewhere, ponderously. The lady passed on; not, however, failing to notice that the lamp stopped at a door on the way, and that its bearer was twice going to knock thereat and didn't. Then a dog within intimated that he should bark presently, unless attention was given to an occurrence he could vouch for, which his master told him to hold his tongue about; calling out "Come in!" nevertheless, to cover contingencies.

The passer-by connected this with Gwen's behaviour at dinner, and other little things she had noticed, and meant to lie awake on the chance of hearing his lordship say good-night to Mr. Torrens, perhaps illuminating the situation. But resolutions to lie awake are the veriest gossamer, blown away by the breath that puts the bedside candle out. Miss Dickenson and Oblivion had joined hands some time when his lordship said good-night to Mr. Torrens.

He had found him standing at his window, as though the warm night-air was a luxury to him, in the blue silk dressing-gown he had affected since his convalescence. There was no light in the room; indeed, light would have been of no service to him in his state. He did not move, but said: "I suppose I ought to be thinking of turning in now, Mrs. Bailey?"

"It isn't Mrs. Bailey," said the Earl. "It's me. Gwen's father."

"God bless my soul!" exclaimed Adrian, starting back from the window. "I thought it was the good creature. I had given you up, Lord Ancester--it got so late." For his lordship had made a visit of inquiry and a short chat with this involuntary guest an invariable finish to his daily programme, since the latter recovered consciousness. "I'm afraid there's no light in the room," said Adrian. "I told 'Rene to blow the candles out. I can move about very fairly, you see, but I never feel safe about knocking things down. I might set something on fire." If he had had his choice, he would rather not have had another interview with his host until he was at liberty to confess all and say peccavi. Even "Gwen's father's" announcement of himself did not warrant his breaking his promise.

"There is no light," said the visitor, "except mine that I have brought with me. I expected to find you in the dark--indeed, I was afraid I might wake you out of your first sleep. I came because of Gwen--because I felt I must see you before I went to bed myself." He paused a moment, Adrian remaining silent, still at a loss; then continued:--"This has been very sudden, so sudden that it has quite ..."

Then Adrian broke out:--"Oh, how you must be blaming me! Oh, what a brute I've been!..."

"No--no, no--no! Not that, not that at all! Not a word of blame for anybody! None for you--none for Gwen. But it has been so--so sudden...." Indeed, Gwen's father seems as though all the breath, morally speaking, had been knocked out of his body by this escapade of his daughter's. For, knowing from past experience the frequent tempestuous suddenness of her impulses, and convinced that Adrian in his position neither could nor would have shown definitely the aspirations of a lover, his image of their interview made Gwen almost the first instigator in the affair. "Why, you--you have hardly seen her----" he says, referring only to the shortness of their acquaintance, not to eyesight.

Adrian accepts the latter meaning without blaming him. "Yes," he says, "but see her I did, though it was but a glimpse. I tell you this, Lord Ancester--and it is no rhapsody; just bald truth--that if this day had never come about.... I mean if it had come about otherwise; I might have gone away this morning, for instance ... and if I had had to learn, as I yet may, that this black cloud I live in was to be my life for good, and all that image I saw for a moment of Gwen--Gwen in her glory in the light of the sunset, for one moment--one moment!..." He breaks down over it.

The Earl's voice is not in good form for encouragement, but he does his best. "Come--come! It's not so bad as all that yet. See what Merridew said. Couldn't say anything for certain for another three months. Indeed he said it might be more, and yet you might have your sight back again without a flaw in either eye. He really said so!"

"Well--he's a jolly good fellow. But what I mean is, what I was going to say was that my recollection of her in that one moment would have been the one precious thing left for me to treasure through the pitch-darkness.... You remember--or perhaps not--that about a hand's breadth of it--the desert, you know--shining alone in the salt leagues round about...."

"N-no. I don't think I do. Is it ... a ... Coleridge?"

"No--Robert Browning. He'd be new to you. You would hardly know him. However, I should try to forget the rest of the desert this time."

The Earl did not follow, naturally, and changed the subject. "It is very late," he said, "and I have only time to say what I came to say. You may rely on my not standing arbitrarily in the way of my daughter's wishes when the time comes--and it has not come yet--for looking at that side of the subject. It can only come when it is absolutely certain that she knows her own mind. She is too young to be allowed to take the most important step in life under the influence of a romantic--it may be Quixotic--impulse. I have just had a long talk with her mother about it, and I am forced to the conclusion that Gwen's motives are not so unmixed as a girl's should be, to justify bystanders in allowing her to act upon them--bystanders I mean who would have any right of interference.... I am afraid I am not very clear, but I shrink from saying what may seem unfeeling...."

"Probably you would not hurt me, and I should deserve it, if you did."

"What I mean is that Gwen's impulse is ... is derived from ... from, in short, your unhappy accident. I would not go so far as to say that she has schemed a compensation for this cruel disaster ... which we need hardly be so gloomy about yet awhile, it seems to me. But this I do say"--here the Earl seemed to pick up heart and find his words easier--"that if Gwen has got that idea I thoroughly sympathize with her. I give you my word, Mr. Torrens, that not an hour passes, for me, without a thought of the same kind. I mean that I should jump at any chance of making it up to you, for mere ease of mind. But I have nothing to give that would meet the case. Gwen has a treasure--herself! It is another matter whether she should be allowed to dispose of it her own way, for her own sake. Her mother and I may both feel it our duty to oppose it."

Adrian said in an undertone, most dejectedly: "You would be right. How could I complain?" Then it seemed to him that his words struck a false note, and he tried to qualify them. "I mean--how could I say a word of any sort? Could I complain of any parents, for trying to stop their girl linking her life to mine? And such a life as hers! And yet if it were all to do again, how could I act otherwise than as I did a few hours since. Is there a man so strong anywhere that he could put a curb on his heart and choke down his speech to convention-point, if he thought that a girl like Gwen ... I don't know how to say what I want. All speech goes wrong, do what I will."

"If he thought that a girl like Gwen was waiting for him to speak out? Is that it?... Oh--well--not exactly that! But something of the sort, suppose we say?" For Adrian's manner had entered a protest. "Anyhow I assure you I quite understand my Gwen is--very attractive. But nobody is blaming anybody. After all, what would the alternative have been? Just some hypocritical beating about the bush to keep square with the regulations--to level matters down to--what did you call it?--convention-point! Nothing gained in the end! Let's put all that on one side. What we have to look at is this--meaning, of course, by 'we,' my wife and myself:--Is Gwen really an independent agent? Is she not in a sense the slave of her own imagination, beyond and above the usual enthralment that one accepts as part of the disorder. I myself believe that she is, and that the whole root and essence of the business may be her pity for yourself, and also I should say an exaggerated idea of her own share in the guilt...."

"There was none," Adrian struck in decisively. "But I understand your meaning exactly. Listen a minute to this. If I had thought what you think possible--well, I would have bitten my tongue off rather than speak. Why, think of it! To ask a girl like that to sacrifice herself to a cripple--a half-cripple, at least...."

"Without good grounds for supposing she was waiting to be asked," said the Earl; adding, to anticipate protest:--"Come now!--that's what we mean. Let's say so and have done with it," to which Adrian gave tacit assent. His lordship continued:--"I quite believe you; at least, I believe you would rather have held your tongue than bitten it off. I certainly should. But--pardon my saying so--I cannot understand ... I'm not finding fault or doubting you ... I cannot understand how you came to be so--so ... I won't say cocksure--let's call it sanguine. If there had been time I could have understood it. But I cannot see where the time came in."

Adrian fidgetted uneasily, and felt his cheeks flush. "I can answer for when it began, with me. I walked across that glade from Arthur's Bridge quite turned into somebody else, with Gwen stamped on my brain like a Queen's head on a shilling, and her voice in my ears as plain as the lark's overhead. But whether we started neck and neck, I know not. I do know this, though, that I shall never believe that if I had been first seen by her in my character as a corpse, either she or I would ever have been a penny the wiser."

"You are the wiser?--quite sure?" The Earl seemed to have his doubts.

"Quite sure. Do you recollect how 'the Duke grew suddenly brave and wise'? He was only the 'fine empty sheath of a man' before. But it's no use quoting Browning to you."

"Not the slightest. I suppose he was referring to a case of love at first sight--is that it?... It is a time-honoured phenomenon, only it hardly comes into practical politics, because young persons are so secretive about it. I can't recollect any lady but Rosalind who mentioned it at the time--or any gentleman but Romeo, for that matter. Gwen has certainly kept her own counsel for three weeks past."

"Dear Lord Ancester, you are laughing at me...."

"No--no! No, I wouldn't do that. Perhaps I was laughing a little at human nature. That's excusable. However, I understand that you are cocksure--or sanguine--about the similarity of Romeo's case. I won't press Gwen about Rosalind's. Of course, if she volunteers information, I shall have to dismiss the commiseration theory--you understand me?--and suppose that she is healthily in love. By healthily I mean selfishly. If no information is forthcoming, all I can say is--the doubt remains; the doubt whether she is not making herself the family scapegoat, carrying away the sins of the congregation into the wilderness."

"You know I think that all sheer nonsense, whatever Gwen thinks? She may think the sins of the congregation are as scarlet. To me they are white as wool."

"The whole question turns on what Gwen thinks. Believing, as I do, that my child may be sacrificing herself to expiate a sin of mine, I have no course but to do my best to prevent her, or, at least to postpone irrevocable action until it is certain that she is animated by no such motive. I might advocate that you and she should not meet, for--suppose we say--a twelvemonth, but that I have so often noticed that absence not only 'makes the heart grow fonder,' as the song says, but also makes it very turbulent and unruly. So I shall leave matters entirely alone--leave her to settle it with her mother.... Your sister knows of this, I suppose?"

"Oh yes! Gwen told her of it across the table at dinner-time."

"Across the table at dinner-time? Imp-ossible!"

"Well--look at this!" Adrian produces from his dressing-gown pocket a piece of paper, much crumpled, with a gilt frill all round, and holds it out for the Earl to take. While the latter deciphers it at his candle-lamp, he goes on to give its history. Irene had been back very late from the Mackworth Clarkes, and had missed the soup. She had not spoken with Gwen at all, and as soon as dessert had effloresced into little confetti, had been told by that young lady to catch, the thing thrown being the wrapper of one of these, rolled up and scribbled on. "She brought it up for me to see," says Adrian, without thought of cruel fact. Blind people often speak thus.

The Earl cannot help laughing at what he reads aloud. "'I am going to marry your brother'--that's all!" he says. "That's what she borrowed Lord Cumberworld's pencil for. Really Gwen is...!" But this wild daughter of his is beyond words to describe, and he gives her up.

If the Duke's son had not been honourable, he might have peeped and known his own fate. For he had been entrusted with this missive, to hand across the table to Irene lower down. Lady Gwendolen ought to have given it to Mr. Norbury, to hand to Miss Torrens on a tray. That was Mr. Norbury's opinion.

When the Earl looked up from deciphering the pencil-scrawl, he saw that Adrian's powers were visibly flagging; and no wonder, convalescence considered, and such a day of strain and excitement. He rose to go, saying:--"You see what I want--nothing in a hurry."

Adrian's words were slipping away from him as he replied, or tried to reply:--"I see. If I were to get my eyes back, Gwen might change her mind." But he failed over the last two letters. Mrs. Bailey, still in charge, lived on the other side of a door, at which the Earl tapped, causing a scuttling and a prompt appearance of the good creature, who seemed to have an ambush of grog ready to spring on her patient. It was what was wanted.

"Remember this, Mr. Torrens," said his lordship, when a rally encouraged him to add a postscript, "that in spite of what you say, I feel just as Gwen does, that the blame of your mishap lies with me and mine--with me chiefly...."

"All nonsense, my lord! Excuse my contradicting you flatly. Your instruction, not expressed but implied, to old Stephen, was clearly not to miss his mark. If he had killed Achilles you would have been responsible, as Apollo was responsible for the arrow of Paris.... Yes, my dear, we were talking about you." This was to the collie, who woke up from deep sleep at the sound of his name, and felt he could mix with a society that recognised him. But not without shaking himself violently and scratching his head, until appealed to to stop.

The Earl let further protest stand over, and said good-night, rather relieved at the beneficial effect of the good creature's ministrations. The excellent woman herself, when the grog was disposed of, facilitated her charge's dispositions for the night, and retired to rest with an ill-digested idea that she had interrupted a conversation about the corrupt gaieties of a vicious foreign capital, inhabited chiefly by atheists and idolaters.

* * * * *

The Countess's long talk with her husband, wedged in between an early abdication of the drawing-room and the sound of Gwen laughing audaciously with Miss Torrens on the staircase, and more temperate good-nights below, had tended towards a form of party government in which the Earl was the Liberal and her ladyship the Conservative party. The Bill before the House was never exactly read aloud, its contents being taken for granted. When the Countess had said, in their previous interview, first that it was Gwen, and then that it was this young Torrens, she had really exhausted the subject.

Nevertheless she seemed now to claim for herself credit for a clear exposition of the contents of this Bill, in spite of constant interruptions from a factious Opposition. "I hope," she said, "that, now that I have succeeded in making you understand, you will speak to Gwen yourself. I suppose she's not going to stop downstairs all night."

The Earl also supposed not. But even in that very improbable event the resources of human ingenuity would not be exhausted. He could, for instance, go downstairs to speak to her. But other considerations intervened. Was her ladyship's information unimpeachable? Was it absolutely impossible that she should have been misled in any particular? Could he, in fact, consider his information official?

The Countess showed unexampled forbearance under extreme trial. "My dear," she said, "how perfectly absurd you are! How can there be any doubt of the matter? Listen to me for one moment and think. When a girl insists on talking to her mother when both are late for dinner, and have hardly five minutes to dress, and says flatly, 'Mamma dear, I am going to marry So-and-so, or So-and-so'--because it's exactly the same thing, whoever it is--how can there be any possibility of a mistake?"

"Very little, certainly," says the Earl reflectively. He seemed to consider the point slowly. "But it can hardly be said to be exactly the same thing in all cases. This case is peculiar--is peculiar."

"I can't see where the peculiarity comes in. You mean his eyes. But a girl either is, or is not, in love with a man, whether he has eyes in his head or not."

"Indisputably. But it complicates the case. You must admit, my dear, that it complicates the case."

"You mean that I am unfeeling? Wouldn't it be better to say so instead of beating about the bush? But I am nothing of the sort."

"My dear, am I likely to say so? Have you ever heard me hint such a thing? But one may be sincerely sorry for the victim of such an awful misfortune, and yet feel that his blindness complicates matters. Because it does."

"I'm not sure that I understand what you are driving at. Perhaps we are talking about different things." This is not entirely without forbearance--may show a trace of uncalled-for patience, as towards an undeserved conundrum-monger.

"Perhaps we are, my dear. But as to what I'm driving at. Can you recall what Gwen said about his eyes?"

"I think so. Let me see.... Yes--she said did I know anything against him. I said--nothing except his eyes. And then she said--I recollect it quite plainly--'Who destroyed his sight? Tell me that!'"

"What did you answer to that?"

"I refused to talk any longer, and said you and she must settle it your own way."

"Nothing else?"

"Oh--well--nothing--nothing to speak of! Lutwyche came worrying in with hot water."

The Earl sat cogitating until her ladyship roused him by saying "Well!" rather tartly. Then he echoed back:--"Well, Philippa, I think possibly you are right."

"Only possibly!"

"Probably then. Yes--certainly probably!"

"What about?"

"I thought I understood you to say that, in your opinion, Gwen had got it into her head that ..."

"Oh dear!... There--never mind!--go on." She considered her husband a prolix Earl, sometimes.

"... That the accident was our fault, and that it was her duty to make it up to him."

"Of course she has. What did you suppose?"

"I supposed she might have--a--fallen in love with him. I thought you thought so, too, from what you said."

"My dear Alexander, shall I never make you understand?" Her ladyship only used the long inconvenient name to emphasize rhetoric, which she did also in this instance by making every note staccato. "Gwen, has, fallen, in, love, with, Mr. Torrens, because, we, did it? Now do you see?"

"She has a--mixture of motives, in fact?"

"Absolutely none whatever! She's over head and ears in love with him because his eyes are out. No other reason in life! What earthly good do you think the child thinks she could do him if she didn't love him? Men will never understand girls if they live till Doomsday."

The Earl did not grapple with the problems this suggested; but reflected, while her ladyship waited explicitly. At last he said:--"It certainly appears to me that if Gwen's ... predilection for this man depends in any degree on a mistaken conviction of duty, the only course open to us is to--to temporise--to deprecate rash actions and undertakings. Under the circumstances it would be impossible to condemn or find fault with either. It is perfectly inconceivable that poor Torrens--should have--should have taken any initiative...."

"Oh, my dear, what nonsense! Of course, Gwen did that. She proposed to him when I was away at the flower-show...."

"Philippa--how can you? How would such a thing be possible? Really--really! ..."

"Well, really really as much as you like, but any woman could propose to a blind man--a little way off, certainly--only I don't know that Gwen ..." However, the Countess stopped short of her daughter's reference to a respectful distance and card-leaving.

It was at this point that Gwen and Irene were audible on the stairs, suggesting the lateness of the hour. The Earl said:--"I think I shall go and see Torrens as soon as there's quiet. I have gone to him every evening till now. I may speak to him about this." To which her ladyship replied:--"Now mind you put your foot down. What I am always afraid of with you is indecision." He made no answer, but listened, waiting for the last disappearance couchwards. Then he went to his room for his hand-lamp, as described, and after satisfying himself about that conflagration's non-existence, was just in time to cross Miss Dickenson, a waif overdue, and wonder what on earth had made that very spirit and image of all conformity guilty of such a lapse.

Then followed his interview with Mr. Torrens already detailed. Perhaps the foregoing should have come first. If ever you retell the tale you can make it do so. But whatever you do be careful to insist on that point of not talking before the servants. Dwell on the fact that Miss Lutwyche went straight to the Servants' Hall, after putting a finishing touch on her young ladyship, and said to the housekeeper:--"You'll be very careful, Mrs. Masham, to say nothing whatever about her young ladyship and Mr. Torrenson"; it being one of her peculiarities to alter the names of visitors on the strength of alleged secret information, to prove that she was in the confidence of the family. To which Mrs. Masham replied:--"Why not be outspoken, Anne Lutwyche?" provoking, or licensing, further illumination on the subject; with the result that in half an hour the household was observing discreet silence about it, and exacting solemn promises of equal discretion from acquaintances as discreet as itself. But there were words between Mrs. Starfield, the Countess's abettor in dressing, and Miss Lutwyche; the former having found herself forestalled in her theory of the argument in the Lib'ary, which she had reported as the cause of delay, by the latter's prompt expression of cautious reserve, and having accused her of throwing out hints and nothing to go upon. Whereupon the young woman had indignantly repudiated the idea that a frank nature like hers could be capable of an underhand insinuendo, and had felt a great and just satisfaction with her powers of handling her mother-tongue.

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Chapter XXIII

PSYCHOLOGIES ABOUT THE COUNTESS. HOW GWEN WOULDN'T GO TO ATHENS, OR ROME, OR TO STONE GRANGE. BUT SHE WOULD GO WITH HER COUSIN CLO TO CAVENDISH SQUARE. HOW THEY DROVE OVER TO GRANNY MARRABLE'S, AND DAVE'S LETTER WAS TALKED ABOUT. HIS AMANUENSIS. OH, BUT HOW STRANGE THAT PHOEBE SHOULD READ MAISIE'S WRITING AGAIN! AN ODIOUS LITTLE GIRL, WITH A STYE IN HER EYE. AN IMPRESSIONIST PICTURE. HOW MICHAEL'S FRIENDS SHOULD BE ESCHEWED, IF NOT HIMSELF. HOW GRANNY MARRABLE AND HER SISTER HAD MADE SLIDES ON ICE THAT THAWED SEVENTY YEARS AGO. HOW A LADY AND GENTLEMAN JUMPED FARTHER OFF

The Countess of Ancester was mistaken when she said to Gwen's mother that that young lady was sure to cool down, as other young ladies, noteworthily her own mother's daughter, had done under like circumstances. The story prefers this elaborate way of referring to what that august lady said to herself, to more literal and commonplace formulas of speech; because it emphasizes the official, personal, and historical character of the speaker, the hearer, and the instance she cited, respectively. She spoke as a Countess, a Woman of the World, one who knew what her duty was to herself and her daughter, and had made up her mind to perform it, and not be influenced by sentimental nonsense. She listened as a parent, really very fond of this beautiful creature for which she was responsible, and painfully conscious of a bias towards sentimental nonsense, which taxed her respect for her official adviser. She referred to her historical precedent--her own early experience--with a confidence akin to that of the passenger in sight of Calais, who dares to walk about the deck because he knows how soon it will be safe to say he was always a very good sailor.

But just as that very good sailor is never quite free from painful memories of moments on the voyage, over which he might have had to draw a veil, so this lady had to be constantly on her guard against recurrent images of her historical precedent, during her periods of wavering between her two suitors. Could she not remember--could she ever forget rather?--Romeo's passionate epistles and Juliet's passionate answers, during that period of enforced separation; when the latter had not begun to cool down, and was still able to speak of Gwen's father--undeveloped then in that capacity--as a tedious, middle-aged prig whom her ridiculous aunt wanted to force upon her? Was it a sufficient set-off against all this fiery correspondence that she had burned one preposterous--and red-hot--effusion, and started seriously on cooling, because a friend brought her news that Romeo was not pining at all, but had, on the contrary, danced three waltzes with a fascinating cousin of hers? Of course it was, said the Countess officially, and she had behaved like a good historical precedent, which Gwen would follow in due course. Give her time.

Nevertheless her unofficial self was grave and reflective more than once over the likeness of this young Adrian to Hamilton, his father, especially in his faculty for talking nonsense. Some people seemed to think his verses good. Perhaps the two things were not incompatible. Hamilton had never written verses, as far as she knew. No doubt that Miss Abercrombie his father married was responsible for the poetry. If he had married another Miss Abercrombie it might have been quite different. She found it convenient to utilise a second example of the same name; some suppositions are more convenient than others. She shirked one which would have cancelled Gwen, as an impossibility. One must look accomplished facts in the face.

The cooling down did not start with the alacrity which her ladyship had anticipated. She had expected a fall of at least one degree in the thermometer within a couple of months. Time seems long or short to us in proportion as we are, so to speak, brought up against it. Only the unwatched pot boils over; and, broadly speaking, pudding never cools, and blowing really does very little good. This lady would have blown her daughter metaphorically--perhaps thrown cold water on her passion would be a better metaphor--if her husband had not earnestly dissuaded her from doing so. It would only make matters worse. If Gwen was to marry a blind man, at least do not let her do it in order to contradict her parents. Fights and Love Affairs alike are grateful to bystanders who do not interfere; but interference is admissible in the former, to assist waverers up to the scratch. In the latter, the sooner time is called, the better for all parties. But if time is called too soon, ten to one the next round will last twice as long.

The Earl also interposed upon his wife's attempt to stipulate for a formal declaration of reciprocal banishment. "Very well, my dear Philippa!" said he. "Forbid their meeting, if you like! You can do it, because Adrian is bound in honour to forward it if we insist. But in my opinion you will by doing so destroy the last chance of the thing dying a natural death." Said Philippa:--"I don't believe you want it to"--a construction denounced, we believe, by sensitive grammarians. The Earl let it pass, replying:--"I do not wish it to die a violent death." Her ladyship dropped the portcullis of her mind against a crowd of useless reflections. One was, whether her own relation with this young man's father had died a violent death; and, if so, was she any the worse? The rest were a motley crowd, with "might have been!" tattooed upon their brows and woven into the patterns of the garments. Among them, two images--a potential Adrian and a potential Gwen--each with one variation of parentage, but quite out of court for St. George's, Hanover Square. Are the Countess's thoughts obscure to you? They were, to her. So she refused to entertain them.

In the Earl's mind there was an element bred of his short daily visits to the young man, whose disaster had been a constant source of self-reproach to him. If only its victim had been repugnant to him, he would have been greatly helped in the continual verdicts of the Court of his own conscience, which frequently discharged him without a stain on his character. How came it, then, that he so soon found himself back in the dock, or re-arguing the case as counsel for the prisoner? Probably his sentiments towards the young man himself were responsible for some of his discontent with his own impartial justice, however emphatically he rejected the idea. There is nothing like a course of short attendances at the bedside of a patient to generate an affection for its occupant, and in this case everything was in its favour. All question of responsibility for Adrian's accident apart, there was enough in his personality to get at the Earl's soft corners, especially the one that constantly reminded its owner that he was now without a son and heir. For, since his son Frank was drowned, he was the father of daughters only. It was not surprising that he should enter some protest against any but a spontaneous cancelling of Gwen's trothplight. It was only fair that spontaneity should have a chance. He did not much believe that the cooling down process would be materially assisted by a spell of separation; but if Philippa would not be content without it, try it, by all means! If she could persuade her daughter to go with her to Paris, Rome, Athens--New York, for that matter!--why, go! But the Earl's shrug as he said this meant that her young ladyship had still to be reckoned with, and that pig-headed young beauties in love were kittle cattle to shoe behind. Those were the words his brain toyed with, over the case, for a moment.

The reckoning bristled with difficulties, and every unit was disputed. Paris was not fit to be visited, with the present government; and was not safe, for that matter. Cholera was raging in Rome. Athens was a mass of ruins from the recent earthquakes. Gwen wavered a moment over New York, not seriously suggested. It was so absurd as to be worth a thought. This seems strange to us, nowadays; but it was then nearly as far a cry to Broadway as it is now to Tokio.

Appeals to Gwen to go abroad with her mother failed. She also made difficulties--good big ones--about going with her parents to Scotland. Her scheme was transparent, though she indignantly disclaimed it. How could anything be more absurd than to accuse her of conspiring with Irene towards a visit to that young lady at Pensham Steynes? Had she not promised to live without seeing Adrian for six months, and was she not to be trusted to keep her word?

She really wished to convince her father of the reality of her attachment, apart from compensation due to loss of sight. So she agreed to accompany Cousin Clotilda to London, and to stay with her at the town-mansion of the Macganister More, who had just departed this life, leaving the whole of his property to the said Cousin, his only daughter and heiress. She rather looked forward to a sojourn in the great house in Cavendish Square, a mysterious survival of the Early Georges, which had not been really tenanted for years, though Sister Nora had camped in it on an upstairs floor you could see Hampstead Heath from. It would be fun to lead a gypsy life there, building castles in the air with Sister Nora's great inheritance, and sometimes peeping into the great unoccupied rooms, all packed-up mirrors and chandeliers and consoles and echoes and rats--a very rough inventory, did you say? But admit that you know the house! Its individuality is unimportant here, except in so far as it supplied an attraction to London for a love-sick young lady. Its fascination and mystery were strong. So were the philanthropies that Sister Nora was returning to, refreshed by a twelve-month of total abstinence, with more power to her elbow from a huge balance at her banker's, specially contrived to span the period needed for the putting of affairs in order.

So when Miss Grahame--that was the family name--went on to London, after a month's stay at the Towers, Gwen was to accompany her. That was the arrangement agreed upon. But before they departed, they paid a visit to Granny Marrable at Chorlton, who was delighted at the reappearance of Sister Nora, and was guilty of some very transparent insincerity in her professions of heartfelt sorrow for the Macganister More. He, however, was very soon dismissed from the conversation, to make way for Dave Wardle.

Her young ladyship from the Castle hardly knew anything about Dave. In fact, his fame reached her for the first time as they drove past the little church at Chorlton on their way to Strides Cottage, Mrs. Marrable's residence. Sister Nora was suddenly afraid she had "forgotten Dave's letter after all." But she found it, in her bag; and rejoiced, for had she not promised to return it to Granny Marrable, to whom--not to herself--it was addressed, after Dave's return last year to his parents. Lady Gwendolen was, or professed to be, greatly interested; reading the epistle carefully to herself while her cousin and Granny Marrable talked over its writer. But she was fain to ask for an occasional explanation of some obscurity in the text.

It was manifestly a dictated letter, written in a shaky hand as of an old person, but not an uneducated one by any means; the misspellings being really intelligent renderings of the pronunciation of the dictator. As, for instance, the opening:--"Dear Granny Marrowbone," which caused the reader to remark:--"I suppose that doesn't mean that the writer thinks you spell your name that way, Mrs. Marrable, only that the child says Marrowbone." The owner of the name assented, saying:--"That would be so, my lady, yes." And her ladyship proceeded: "I like you. I like Widow Thrale. I like Master Marmaduke!"--This was the other small convalescent, he who had an unnatural passion for Dave's crutch, likened to Ariadne--"I like Sister Nora. I like the Lady. I like Farmer Jones, but not much. I am going to scrool on Monday, and shall know how to read and write with a peng my own self." "Quite a love-letter," said Gwen, after explanations of the persons referred to--as that "the lady" was the mother of her own personal ladyship; that is, the Countess herself. Gwen continued, identifying one of the characters:--"But that was hypocrisy about Farmer Jones. He didn't like Farmer Jones at all. I don't.... That's not all. What's this?" She went on, reading aloud:--"'Writited for me by Mrs. Picture upstairs on her decks with hink.' I see he has signed it himself, rather large. I wonder who is Mrs. Picture, who writes for him."

"We heard a great deal about Mrs. Picture, my lady." Sister Nora thought her name might be Mrs. Pitcher, though odd. "I could hardly say myself," said Granny Marrable diffidently.

Gwen speculated. "Pilcher, or Pilchard, perhaps! It couldn't be Picture. What did he tell you about her?"

"Oh dear--a many things! Mrs. Picture had been out to sea, in a ship. But she will be very old, too, Mrs. Picture. I call to mind now, that the dear child couldn't tell me from Mrs. Picture when he first came, by reason of the white hair. So she may be nigh my own age."

Gwen was looking puzzled over something in the letter. "'Out to sea in a ship!'" she repeated. "I wonder, has 'decks' anything to do with that?... N-n-no!--it must be 'desk.' It can't be anything else." It was, of course, Mrs. Prichard's literal acceptance of Dave's pronunciation. But it had a nautical air for the moment, and seemed somehow in keeping with that old lady's marine experience.

Widow Thrale then came in, bearing an armful of purchases from the village. With her were two convalescents; who must have nearly done convalescing, they shouted so. The ogress abated them when she found her granny had august company, and removed them to sup apart with an anaemic eight-year-old little girl; in none of whom Sister Nora showed more than a lukewarm interest, comparing them all disparagingly with Dave. In fact, she was downright unkind to the anaemic sample, likening her to knuckle of veal. It was true that this little girl had a stye in her eye, and two corkscrew ringlets, and lacked complete training in the use of the pocket-handkerchief. All the ogress seemed to die out of Widow Thrale in her presence, and the visitors avoided contact with her studiously. She seemed malignant, too, driving her chin like a knife into the nuque of one of the small boys, who kicked her shins justifiably. However, they all went away to convalesce elsewhere, as soon as their guardian the ogress had transplanted from a side-table a complete tea-possibility; a tray that might be likened to Minerva, springing fully armed from the head of Jove. "Your ladyship will take tea," said Granny Marrable, in a voice that betrayed a doubt whether the Norman Conquest could consistently take tea with Gurth the Swineherd.

Her ladyship had no such misgiving. But an aristocratic prejudice dictated a reservation:--"Only it must be poured straight off before it gets like ink.... Oh, stop!--it's too black already. A little hot water, thank you!" And then Mrs. Thrale, in cold blood, actually stood her Rockingham teapot on the hob; to become an embittered deadly poison, a slayer of the sleep of all human creatures above a certain standard of education. When all other class distinctions are abolished, this one will remain, like the bones of the Apteryx.

"We'll pay a visit to Dave," said Sister Nora. "Perhaps he'll introduce us to Mrs. Picture." Nothing hung on the conversation, and Mrs. Picture, always under that name--there being indeed none to correct it--cropped up and vanished as often as Dave was referred to. One knows how readily the distortions of speech of some lovable little man or maid will displace proper names, whose owners usually surrender them without protest. That Granny Marrowbone and Mrs. Picture were thereafter accepted as the working designations of the old twins was entirely owing to Dave Wardle.

"Mrs. Picture lives upstairs, it seems," said Gwen, referring to the letter. "I wonder you saw nothing of her, Cousin Chloe."

"Why should I, dear? I never went upstairs. I heard of her because the little sister-poppet wanted to take the doll I gave her to show to a person the old prizefighter spoke of as the old party two-pair-up. But I thought the name was Bird."

"A prizefighter!" said Gwen. "How interesting! We must pay a visit to the Wardle family. Is it a very awful place they live in?" This question was asked in the hope of an affirmative answer, Gwen having been promised exciting and terrible experiences of London slums.

"Sapps Court?" said Miss Grahame, speaking from experience. "Oh no!--quite a respectable place. Not like places I could show you out of Drury Lane. I'll show you the place where Jo was, in this last Dickens." Which would fix the date of this story, if nothing else did.

Granny Marrowbone looked awestruck at this lady's impressive knowledge of the wicked metropolis, and was, moreover, uneasy about Dave's surroundings. She had had several other letters from Dave; the latter ones to some extent in his own caligraphy, which often rendered them obscure. But the breadth of style which distinguished his early dictated correspondence was always in evidence, and such passages as lent themselves to interpretation sometimes contained suggestions of influences at work which made her uneasy about his future. These were often reinforced by hieroglyphs, and one of these in particular appeared to refer to persons or associations she shrank from picturing to herself as making part of the child's life. She handed the letter which contained it to Sister Nora, and watched her face anxiously as she examined it.

Sister Nora interpreted it promptly. "A culprit running away from the Police, evidently. His legs are stiff, but the action is brisk. I should say he would get away. The police seem to threaten, but not to be acting promptly. What do you think, Gwen?"

"Unquestionably!" said Gwen. "The Police are very impressive with their batons. But what on earth is this thing underneath the malefactor?" Sister Nora went behind her chair, and they puzzled over it, together. It was inscrutable.

At last Sister Nora said slowly, as though still labouring with perplexity:--"Is it possible?--but no, it's impossible--possible he means that?..."

"Possible he means what?"

"My idea was--but I think it's quite out of the question---- Well!--you know there is a prison called 'The Jug,' in that sort of class?"

"I didn't know it. It looks very like a jug, though--the thing does.... Yes--he's a prisoner that's got out of prison. He must have had the Jug all to himself, though, it's so small!"

"I do believe that's what it is, upon my word. There was an escape from Coldbath Fields--which is called the Stone Jug--some time back, that was in the papers. It made a talk. That's it, I do believe!" Sister Nora was pleased at the solution of the riddle; it was a feather in Dave's cap.

Said Gwen:--"He did escape, though! I'm glad. He must have been a cheerful little culprit. I should have been sorry for him to get into the hands of those wooden police." Her acceptance of Dave's Impressionist Art as a presentment of facts was a tribute to the force of his genius. Some explanatory lettering, of mixed founts of type, had to be left undeciphered.

The ogress came back from the convalescents; having assigned them their teas, and enjoined peace. "You should ask her ladyship to read what's on the back, Granny," she said; not to presume overmuch by direct speech to the young lady from the Towers. The old lady said acquiescingly:--"Yes, child, that would be best. If you please, my lady!"

"This writing here?" said Gwen, turning the paper. "Oh yes--this is Mrs. Picture again. 'Dave says I am to write for him what this is he has drawed for Granny Marrowbone to see. The lady may see it, too.' ... That's not me; he doesn't know me.... Oh, I see!--it's my mother...."

"Yes--that's Cousin Philippa. Go on."

Gwen went on:--"'It is the Man in High Park at the Turpentine Micky'--some illegible name--'knew and that is Michael in the corner larfing at the Spolice. The Man has got out of sprizzing and the Spolice will not cop him.' There was no room for Michael Somebody, and he hasn't worked out well," said Gwen, turning the image of Michael several ways up, to determine its components. But it was too Impressionist. "I suppose 'cop' means capture?" said she.

"That's it," said Sister Nora. "I think I know who Michael is. He's Michael Rackstraw, a boy. Dave's Uncle had a bad impression of him--said he would live to be hanged at an early date. He wouldn't be surprised to hear that that young Micky had been pinched, any minute. 'Pinched' is the same as 'copped.' Uncle Moses' slang is out-of-date."

She looked again at the undeciphered inscription. "I think 'Michael' explains this lot of big and little letters," she said; and read them out as: "'m, i, K, e, y, S, f, r, e, N, g.' Mickey's friend, evidently!"

"Oh, dearie me!" said the old lady. "To think now that that dear child should be among such dreadful ways. I do wonder now--and, indeed, my lady and Miss Nora, I've been thinking a deal about him, with his blue eyes and curly brown hair, and him but just turned of seven.... I have been thinking, my lady, only perhaps it's hardly for me to say ... I have been a wondering whether this ... elderly person ... only God forgive me if I do her wrong!... whether this Mrs. Picture...." Granny Marrable wavered in her indictment--hoped perhaps that one of the ladies would catch her meaning and word her interpretation.

Sister Nora understood, and was quite ready with one. "Oh yes, I see what you mean, Mrs. Marrable--whether the old woman is the right sort of old woman for Dave. And it's very natural and quite right of you to wonder. I should if I hadn't seen the boy's parents--his uncle and aunt.... Oh yes, of course, they are not his parents in the vulgar sense! Don't be commonplace, Gwen!... nice, quiet, old-fashioned sort of folk, devoted to the children. As for the prizefighting, I don't think anything of that. I'm sure he fought fair; and it was the same for both anyhow! He's an old darling, I think. I'll show him to you, Gwen, down his native court. Really, dear Granny Marrable, I don't think you need be the least uneasy. We'll go and see Dave the moment we get up to London--won't we, Gwen?"

"We'll go there first," said Gwen. But for all this reassurance the old lady was clearly uneasy. "With regard to the boy Michael," said she hesitatingly, "did you happen, ma'am, to see the boy Michael.... I mean, did he?..."

"Did he turn up when I was there, you mean? Well--no, he didn't! But after all, what does the boy Michael come to in it? He'd made a slide down the middle of the Court, and Uncle Moses prophesied his death on the gallows! But, dear me, all children make slides--girls as well as boys. I used to make slides, all by myself, in Scotland."

Granny Marrable's mind ran back seventy years or so. "Yes, indeed, that is true; and so did I." She nodded towards the chimneyshelf, where the mill-model stood--Dave's model. "There's the mill where I had my childhood, and it's there to this day, they tell me, and working. And the backwater above the dam, it's there, too, I lay, where my sister Maisie and I made a many slides when it froze over in the winter weather. And there's me and Maisie in our lilac frocks and white sun-bonnets. Five-and-forty years ago she died, out in Australia. But I've not forgotten Maisie."

She could mention Maisie more serenely than Mrs. Prichard, per contra, could mention Phoebe. But, then, think how differently the forty-five years had been filled out in either case. Maisie had been forced to ricordarsi del tempo felice through so many years of miseria. Phoebe's journey across the desert of Life had paused at many an oasis, and their images remained in her mind to blunt the tooth of Memory. The two ladies at least heard nothing in the old woman's voice that one does not hear in any human voice when it speaks of events very long past.

Gwen showed an interest in the mill. "You and your sister were very much alike," she said.

"We were twins," said Granny Marrable. But, as it chanced, Gwen at this moment looked at her watch, and found it had stopped. She missed the old woman's last words. When she had satisfied herself that the watch was still going she found that Granny Marrable's speech had lost its slight trace of sadness. She had become a mere recorder, viva voce. "Maisie married and went abroad--oh dear, near sixty years ago! She died out there just after our father--yes, quite forty-five--forty-six years ago!" Her only conscious suppression was in slurring over the gap between Maisie's departure and her husband's; for both ladies took her meaning to be that her sister married to go abroad, and did not return.

It was more conversation-making than curiosity that made Gwen ask:--"Where was 'abroad'? I mean, where did your sister go?" The old lady repeated:--"To where she met her death, in Australia. Five-and-forty years ago. But I have never forgotten Maisie." Gwen, looking more closely at the mill-model as one bound to show interest, said:--"And this is where you used to slide on the ice with her, on the mill-dam, all that time ago. Just fancy!" The reference to Maisie was the merest chat by the way; and the conversation, at this mention of the ice, harked back to Sapps Court.

"Of course you made slides, Granny Marrable," said Sister Nora; "and very likely somebody else tumbled down on the slides. But you have never been hanged, and Michael won't be hanged. It was only Uncle Moses's fun. And as for old Mrs. Picture, I daresay if the truth were known, Mrs. Picture's a very nice old lady? I like her for taking such pains with Dave's letter-writing. But we'll see Mrs. Picture, and find out all about it. Won't we, Gwen?" Gwen assented con amore, to reassure the Granny, who, however, was evidently only silenced, not convinced, about this elderly person in London, that sink of iniquities.

Gwen resumed her seat and took another cup of tea, really to please her hosts, as the tea was too strong for anything. Then Feudalism asserted itself as it so often does when County magnates foregather with village minimates--is that the right word? Landmarks, too, indisputable to need recognition were ignored altogether, and all the hearsays of the countryside were reviewed. The grim severance between class and class that up-to-date legislation makes every day more and more well-defined and bitter had no existence in fifty-four at Chorlton-under-Bradbury. Granny Marrable and the ogress, for instance, could and did seek to know how the gentleman was that met with the accident in July. Of course, they knew the story of the gentleman's relation with "Gwen o' the Towers," and both visitors knew they knew it; but that naturally did not come into court. It underlay the pleasure with which they heard that Mr. Adrian Torrens was all but well again, and that the doctors said his eyesight would not be permanently affected. Gwen herself volunteered this lie, with Sir Coupland's assurance in her mind that, if Adrian's sight returned, it would probably do so outright, as a salve to her conscience.

"There now!" said Widow Thrale. "There will be good hearing for Keziah when she comes nigh by us next, maybe this very day. For old Stephen he's just gone near to breaking his heart over it, taking all the fault to himself." Keziah was Keziah Solmes, Stephen Solmes's old wife, whose sentimentalism would have saved Adrian Torrens's eyesight if she had not had such an obstinate husband. Stephen was a connection of the departed saddler, the speaker's husband.

Said Sister Nora as they rose to rejoin the carriage:--"Now remember!--you're not to fuss over Dave, Mrs. Thrale. We'll see that he comes to no harm." The ogress did not seem so uneasy about the child, saying:--"It's the picture of the man running from the Police Granny goes by, and 'tis no more than any boy might draw." Whereat Sister Nora said, laughing: "You needn't get scared about Mickey, if that's it. He's just a young monkey." But the old woman seemed still to be concealing disquiet, saying only:--"I had no thought of the boy." She had formed some misapprehension of Dave's surrounding influences, which seemed hard to clear up.

Riding home Gwen turned suddenly to her cousin, after reflective silence, saying:--"What makes the old Goody so ferocious against the little boy's Mrs. Picture?" To which the reply was:--"Jealousy, I suppose. What a beautiful sunset! That means wind." But Sister Nora was talking rather at random, and there may have been no jealousy of old Maisie in the heart of old Phoebe.

Moreover, Gwen's was not an inquiry-question demanding an answer. It was interrogative chat. She was thinking all the while how amused Adrian would have been with Dave's letter and the escaped prisoner. Then her thought was derailed by one of the sudden jerks that crossed the line so often in these days. Chat with herself must needs turn on the mistakes she had made in not borrowing that letter to enclose with her next one to Adrian, for him to ... to what? There came the jerk! What could he see? Indeed, one of the sorest trials of this separation from him was the way her correspondence--for she had insisted on freedom in this respect--was handicapped by his inability to read it. How could she allow all she longed to say to pass under the eyes even of Irene, dear friend though she had become? She would have given worlds for an automaton that could read aloud, whose speech would repeat all its eyes saw, without passing the meaning of it through an impertinent mind.

Sister Nora was quite in her confidence about her love-affair; in fact, she had seen Adrian for a moment, her arrival at the Towers on her way from Scotland after her father's death having overlapped his departure--which had been delayed a few days by pretexts of a shallow nature--just long enough to admit of the introduction. She inclined to partisanship with the Countess. Why--see how mad the whole thing was! The girl had fancied herself in love with him after seeing him barely once, for five minutes. It never could last. She was, however, quite prepared to back Gwen if it did show signs of being, or becoming, a grande passion. Meanwhile, evidently the kindest thing was to turn her mind in another direction, and the inoculation of an Earl's daughter with the virus of an enthusiasm which has been since called slumming presented itself to her in the light of an effort-worthy end. Sister Nora was far ahead of her time; it should have fallen twenty years later.

But she was not going to imperil her chances of success by using too strong a virus at the first injection. Caution was everything. This projected visit to Sapps Court was a perfect stepping-stone to a stronger regimen, such as an incursion into the purlieus of Drury Lane. Tom-all-alone's might overtax the nervous system of a neophyte. The full-blown horrors which civilisation creates wholesale, and remedies retail, were not to be grappled with by untrained hands. A time might come for that; meanwhile--Sapps Court, clearly!

The two ladies had a quiet drive back to the Towers. How very quiet the latter end of a drive often is, as far as talk goes! Does the Ozymandian silence on the box react upon the rank and file of the expedition, or is it the hypnotic effect of hoof-monotony? Lady Gwen and Miss Grahame scarcely exchanged a word until, within a mile of the house, they identified two pedestrians. Of whom their conversation was precisely what follows, not one word more or less:--

"There they are, Cousin Chloe, exactly as I prophesied."

"Well--why shouldn't they be?"

"I didn't say anything about shoulds and shouldn't. I merely referred to facts.... Come--say you think it ridiculous!"

"I can't see why. Their demeanour appears to me unexceptionable, and perfectly dignified. Everything one would expect, knowing the parties...."

"Are they going to walk about like that to all eternity, being unexceptionable? That's what I want to know?"

"You are too impatient, dear!"

"They have been going on for months like that; at least, it seems months. And never getting any nearer! And then when you talk to them about each other, they speak of each other respectfully! They really do. He says she is a shrewd observer of human nature, and she says he appears to have had most interesting experiences. Indeed, I'm not exaggerating."

"My dear Gwen, what do you expect?"

"Oh--you know! You're only making believe. Why, when I said to him that she had been a strikingly pretty girl in her young days, and had refused no end of offers of marriage, he ... What do you say?"

"I said 'not no end.'"

"Well--of course not! But I thought it as well to say so."

"And what did he say to that?"

"He got his eyeglass right to look at her, as if he had never seen her before, and came to a critical decision:--'Ye-es, yes, yes--so I should have imagined. Quite so!' It amounted to acquiescing in her having gone off, and was distinctly rude. She's better than that when I speak to her about him certainly. This morning she said he smoked too many cigars."

"How absurd you are, Gwen! Why was that better?"

"H'm--it's a little difficult to say! But it is better, distinctly. There--they've heard us coming!"

"Why?"

"Because they both jumped farther off. They were far enough already, goodness knows!... Good evening, Percy! Good evening, Aunt Constance! We've had such a lovely drive home from Chorlton. I suppose the others are on in front." And so forth. Every modus vivendi, at arm's length, between any and every single lady and gentleman, was to be fooled to the top of its bent, in their service.

The carriage was aware it was de trop, but was also alive to the necessity of pretending it was not. So it interested itself for a moment in some palpable falsehoods about the cause of the pedestrians figuring as derelicts; and then, representing itself as hungering for the society of their vanguard, started professedly to overtake it. It was really absolutely indifferent on the subject.

"I suppose," said Miss Grahame enigmatically, as soon as inaudibility became a certainty, "I suppose that's why you wanted Miss Smith-Dickenson to come to Cavendish Square?"

Gwen did not treat this as a riddle; but said, equally inexplicably:--"He could call." And very little light was thrown on the mystery by the reply:--"Very well, Gwen dear, go your own way." Perhaps a little more, though not much, by Gwen's marginal comment:--"You know Aunt Constance lives at an outlandish place in the country?"

"Do you know, Gwen dear," said Miss Grahame, after reflection, "I really think we ought to have offered them a lift up to the house. Stop, Blencorn!" Blencorn stopped, without emotion. Gwen said:--"What nonsense, Cousin Chloe! They're perfectly happy. Do leave them alone. Go on, Blencorn!" Who, utterly unmoved, went on. But Sister Nora said:--"No, Gwen dear, we really ought! Because I know Mr. Pellew has to catch his train, and he'll be late. Don't go on, Blencorn!" Gwen appearing to assent reluctantly, the arrangement stood; as did the horses, gently conversing with each other's noses about the caprices of the carriage.

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