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VALTER GORING. 
 
WALTER GORING 
 
 Stag. 
 
 BY 
 
 ANNIE THOMAS, 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'DENIS DONNE, 1 'ON GUARD, 1 ' THEO LEIGH,' ETC, 
 
 " And yet, believe me, good as well as ill, 
 Woman's at best a contradiction still." 
 
 A NEW EDITION. 
 
 LONDON : 
 HUTCHINSON & CO., 
 
 25, PATERNOSTER SQUARE. 
 [All rights reserved^ 
 
TO 
 
 SHIRLEY BROOKS, ESQ., 
 
 WITH EVERY SENTIMENT OF ESTEEM FOR HIM AS A FRIEND, 
 
 AND ADMIRATION FOR HIS BRILLIANT ACHIEVEMENTS 
 AS A WRITER, 
 
 IS 
 
 (BY PERMISSION) DiminATED BY 
 
 THE AUTHOR 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 OHAP. PAGE 
 I. THE COUSINS, ...... 1 
 
 II. MRS WALSH, c ... 7 
 
 III. A PAIR OP ADVJSERS, . . . . .13 
 
 IV. CHARLIE THINKS THINGS OVER, . , . -19 
 V. WAS SHE HIS FRIEND ? . . . . .25 
 
 VI. FEVERISH ! . . . . . . ,37 
 
 VII. TEMPORARY OBLIVION, . . . . 43 
 
 VIII. DAISY ! ...... 50 
 
 IX. A WAYWARD WARD, . . 63 
 
 X. A GOOD INFLUENCE, . ... * 70 
 
 XI. GLOVES i . . . . . .76 
 
 XII. GETTING IN ORDER AT GORING PLACE, . . .89 
 
 XIII. A BEAUTY MAN, . . . . ,96 
 
 XIV. A STORM AT GORING PLACE, . -, . . ] 02 
 
 XV. A TURNING POINT IN THE ROAD ! . . . .110 
 
 XVI. A PROUL- CAPTIVE, . . . . . .117 
 
 xvii. six O'CLOCK, . . . . . .123 
 
 XVIII. THE WEDDING TOUR, . . . . .136 
 
 XIX. A CHILLING RECEPTION, . . . . '142 
 
 XX. VERY STRANGE ! .... . 149 
 
 XXI. THE BRIDE AT HOME, . . .' . . 160 
 
 XXII. MRS FELLOWES, SENIOR, ON PROPRIETY, , . .166 
 XXIII. MASTER AND PUPIL, , . . , 171 
 
vhi Contents, 
 
 CHAP. MOB 
 
 XXIV. A LITTLE CLOUD, . . . . .183 
 
 XXV. FRANK ! . . . . . .195 
 
 XXVI. AGAINST THE GRAIN, rt . . 201 
 
 XXVII. A PAINFUL MEETING, ..... 207 
 
 XXVIII. HOSTESS AND GUEST, . , , .217 
 
 XXIX. A WALK TO THE COTTAGE, .... 22,1 
 
 XXX. FRESH RESOLUTIONS, ..... 234 
 
 XXXI. THE PRESCOTTS AS GUESTS AT THE HURST, . .242 
 
 XXXJU. TWO OFFERS, ...... 250 
 
 XXXIII. A SYREN SMILE, ...... 258 
 
 XXXIV. DAISY WINS, ...... 265 
 
 XXXV. THE LAST DAY IN THE OLD HOME, . . . 272 
 
 XXXVI. THE AUCTION, . . . . . .279 
 
 XXXVII. " SHE SHINES ME DOWN," .... 287 
 
 xxx vm. LOVE'S YOUNG DREAM, . . . . .295 
 
 XXXIX. " WOMAN 'S AT BEST A CONTRADICTION STILL," . . 303 
 
 XL. IN DOUBT, ...... 309 
 
 XLI. BY THE LITTLE BROOK, . . . . .321 
 
 XLH. UNDER GREEN TREES, ..... 328 
 
 XLIII. A MOONLIGHT WALK, ..... 334 
 
 XLIV. AN EMPTY SADDLE, . . . . .341 
 
 XLV. ONLY A WOMAN, ...... 348 
 
 XLVI. DAISY'S APPEAL, ...... 355 
 
 XL VII. " MY ELAINE," ...... 362 
 
 XLVHI. AT BAY, . . . . . . 367 
 
 XLIX. WEARING AWAY, . . . . . .374 
 
 L. VERY UNDECIDED, ..... 379 
 
 LI. KELEASED, . . . . . .385 
 
 LIL THE DEAD TO THE LIVING, . . . .391 
 
 AII7. MORNING AND EVENING, .... 403 
 
 LIV. "NOXIOUS VAPOURS," . . , .414 
 
WALTER GORING. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE COUSINS. 
 
 THEY were the children of twin sisters the lovely hostess 
 and her handsome guest and they had been brought up to- 
 gether as brother and sister, which fact must be accepted in 
 extenuation of any peculiar interest either may display for 
 the other in the course of this story. 
 
 Moreover, in addition to having been brought up together 
 on terms of fraternal intimacy, they had, when arrived at 
 years of discretion, sunk the fraternity for a time, and fallen 
 in love with one another. Their passion had not prospered ; 
 that is to say, the lady had taken fright at matrimony on no- 
 thing a year, and had released her cousin-lover with a great 
 deal of affected magnanimity and real affection. 
 
 She had been Horatia Leslie in the days of this exhibition 
 of feminine devotion, and shortly after it she had married a 
 Mr Walsh, an elderly gentleman, who was a merchant by 
 profession and an artist by taste. His perfect cultivation of 
 the latter quality had induced him to select Horatia Leslie 
 for his wife, and the selection did him credit. 
 
 She was a grand-looking woman fair and large, but not 
 tall. A woman with a wealth of golden hair and a pair of 
 naughty blue eyes, and a manner that absorbed a great deal 
 of attention, and seemed to expect it. Withal, a woman 
 with a good head and a sound heart, and a never-flagging 
 
 A 
 
2 Walter Goring. 
 
 interest in my hero, the boy who had been brought up with 
 } ier the lover whom she had rejected the man whose good 
 she most ardently desired Walter Goring, my hero. 
 
 He, Walter Goring, had never reviled her, or bewailed him- 
 self, in consequence of that rejection. He had seen that she 
 had done wisely in pausing on the brink, and availing herself 
 of the best match that offered. Laughingly in his sentimental 
 boyhood he had been wont to call her " his goddess ; " ear- 
 nestly in manhood he continued to apply the title to her, to 
 confide in her as his sister, and to make her house his home 
 as often as it seemed convenient to him. 
 
 He had commenced life with being disappointed about 
 going into the army. Then he had gone into a militia regi- 
 ment. Then he had gone into debt and difficulties, and, to 
 pay the former, had taken to writing novels that overflowed 
 with vitality well-bred horses, well-bred women, and well- 
 stored wine and that were very successful from the com- 
 mercial point of view. He had varied the amusements by 
 fighting for Italian liberty, and getting ever so slightly 
 wounded, and by publishing prettty little square volumes 
 of poems, plagiarised from the German of Heine and 
 others. 
 
 Though his cousin, Mrs Walsh, had not chosen to marry 
 him herself, she was far from being indifferent as to his fu- 
 ture. She knew his best and his worst, his recklessness 
 and remorsefuhiess and, above all things, she did ardently 
 desire that he should marry money, not having any of his 
 own. As a captain in a militia regiment, his expenses far 
 exceeded his receipts ; consequently he was compelled to 
 write as a task occasionally, and so do himself sparse jus- 
 tice as a literary man. 
 
 And it was as this latter that the grand blonde valued him. 
 She wanted him to cut that spurious soldiering, and get into 
 regular harness in the army of literature ; and to enable him 
 to do this, she knew that he must marry a wife with some for- 
 tune besides her face. 
 
 This night of her introduction to the reader she had as- 
 sembled a goodly number of well-dowered ones for Walter's 
 sake, down in her well-proportioned rooms in her house at 
 Roehampton. She gave a ball to celebrate something in con- 
 nexion with her cousin either his birthday or his " return " 
 
The Cousins. $ 
 
 irom some place or other, and she had secured an heiress 
 from Bengal for him for the first waltz. 
 
 But after that first waltz Mr Goring or Captain Goring, 
 as people who imagined him proud of being a militiaman 
 called him had behaved very badly in the eyes of all pru- 
 dent people. He had danced all the round dances, and re- 
 tired to sequestered nooks in the big conservatory, between 
 the same, with a Miss St John, who was notoriously penni- 
 less, and who seemed to incline very favourably towards 
 the young man who wrote and danced with equal vigour and 
 ease. 
 
 Twice the pair under consideration Charlie St John and 
 her partner had done the "back steps" down between the 
 flowers to a shady spot at the end where no chaperones did 
 dwell, and twice Mr Walsh had come upon them, offering to 
 find them fresh partners and strawberry ices, and twice they 
 had thanked him with suavity, and then revolved away from 
 his immediate notice to the strains of an inspiring waltz, 
 played by a military band. They stepped together well, in 
 fact, and so defied censure, after the manner of pig-headed 
 people. 
 
 At last Mrs Walsh got very angry with her cousin Walter. 
 Wallflowers, with the perspicuity of their order, thought that 
 the extra compression of tlie hostess's lips, as she at last sent 
 a peremptory summons to " Mr Goring " (she abominated the 
 militia, and never called him " Captain ") was due to her an- 
 noyance at his defalcation from her side; but they were 
 wrong, after the manner of their kind. She saw that the 
 heiress from Bengal was huffed with humanity because 
 Walter Goring preferred Miss St John's style of dancing 
 and Miss St John's style of talking to her own. And Mrs 
 Walsh knew that poor Walter could no more afford to offend 
 heiresses than he could to marry Charlie St John ; so at last 
 Mrs Walsh made a clever move, and sent Mr Prescott 
 Charlie St John's brother-in-law to stop the gyrations of 
 the pair, and then divide them. 
 
 There were always a lot of military men at Mrs Walsh's 
 parties. Though her husband was an artist, and a clever 
 one too, she never sought to draw recruits from the ranks of 
 the army of literature and art ; but nearly the whole of the 
 British army had at various times circulated through her 
 
4 Walter Goring. 
 
 saloons. The home of the merchant prince at Koehampton 
 ranked with the girls they left behind them in the regretful 
 memories of many scores of men when ordered on foreign 
 service. 
 
 The supper was splendidly done on this special occasion. 
 Lovely, fair, foolish Mrs Prescott Charlie's sister looked 
 about eagerly for Miss St John, in order to express her admi- 
 ration of it when it was served ; but Charlie had vanished, 
 therefore Ellen Prescott fell upon her hostess instead. 
 
 "Mr Prescott is telegraphing for me to go, and I can't 
 find my sister," she said, smilingly. 
 
 " I saw her waltzing down a lot of plants just now with 
 Mr Goring," Mrs Walsh replied, coolly ; she rarely, if ever, 
 called him "my cousin" or "Walter" to a third person; 
 conoequently an amiable majority ignored the relationship, 
 and affected to be scandalised at Mrs Walsh's great intimacy 
 with that young man. 
 
 " I hardly like to take her away ; but Mr Prescott says 
 the distance is great, and so it is, you see," Mrs Prescott re- 
 plied dubiously ; and then being silly, Mrs Prescott hazarded 
 a feeble smile of partial intelligence at Mrs Walsh, who de- 
 tested her, and so immediately resented it. 
 
 " Mr Goring is a flirt, and won't scruple to retain your 
 sister as long as she suffers herself to be retained by him," 
 Mrs Walsh said coldly, and her words were iced by the sight 
 of the Bengal heiress bowing her gracious adieus. She felt 
 very angry with her cousin, and very angry with the girl 
 whose twinkling feet bad been going in unison with his all 
 the night. It was not for this end that she had given this 
 ball. Ralph and herself had rather sought the heiress, who 
 was blessed with an ungainly form, an awkward temper, and 
 fifty thousand pounds. And when Mrs W T alsh went out of 
 her way to make plans, she did not like to see them fail. 
 
 Moreover she knew that her husband would be very much 
 annoyed. Ralph Walsh was good-nature and brotherly- 
 kindness itself to Walter Goring; but Ralph Walsh had 
 no strong sympathy with Walter's semi-military philander- 
 ing propensities, and none whatsoever with Walter's habit of 
 asking him to back bills. " If he only worked steadily, he 
 might make a glorious income and marry whom he pleased," 
 he would say to his wife. But then, unfortunately, Walter 
 
The Cousins. 5 
 
 would not work steadily ; he would only work by fits and 
 starts ; in fact, despite those squarely bound poems of " Love 
 and Life," he had been more oppressed with the duns than 
 the bays heretofore ; and the Walshes knew that it was so, 
 and desired to see him free and unfettered as money alone 
 enables a man to be. 
 
 They rather over-rated the danger he was in on this 
 occasion. Miss St John was not a beauty; she was only 
 good-looking and rather clever; neither of which facts were 
 very patent to a man bent on whirling round double time to 
 a brilliantly-played waltz tune. Even when they had taken 
 a turn round the conservatory, to the detriment of the plants 
 and gold fishes and plaster casts, and had finally rested on a 
 couch at the end ; the conversation had scarcely been of a 
 sentimental order. 
 
 " Mrs Walsh's parties are the best I know," Miss St John 
 had said. 
 
 " Rather too many artillery fellows, I think," he replied. 
 
 " I don't think there can be toe many," the girl rejoined ; 
 " civilians do very well for every-day life ; but a ball is fairy 
 land, and they 're out of place in it." 
 
 " That 's pleasant for me to hear." 
 
 " But you are not a civilian, are you ? Mrs Walsh called 
 you Captain Goring." 
 
 " I hardly like to tell you what I am after your former 
 speech." 
 
 " Well, I fancied that you were two of the things that I 'd 
 most desire to be were I a man." 
 
 "And they are?" 
 
 " Soldier and writer." 
 
 " You can be the latter as a woman, surely. I *m only in 
 the militia, and that I mean to cut." 
 
 " I should think so," she said, contemptuously ; and then 
 they got up and took another turn round the room. As they 
 were pausing to breathe, Mr Prescott came up to them, and 
 said somewhat abruptly, 
 
 " Your sister wants you, Charlotte, are you ready to go?' 
 
 " Of course I am, Robert," she replied, promptly. 
 
 " Just one turn more," Walter Goring whispered, putting 
 his arm round her as he spoke, and the clanging band 
 brought out the stirring Stiirm March Galop in a way that 
 
6 Walter Goring. 
 
 utterly disabled her resolution to attend to her brother- 
 in-law's request. "I wonder if they've any dancing in 
 heaven ? " he said, as they came to a forced conclusion in 
 consequence of the band stopping. 
 
 " Don't be airing your unorthodox sentiments here, please, 
 Walter," Mrs Walsh exclaimed, coming up to them at the 
 moment. " I wanted you just now ; why didn't you come 
 to me when I sent for you ? " 
 
 " I did go .to your high place among the grandees up at 
 the other end. I went three times running ; not so much 
 running as in rapid succession ; but you didn't seem to want 
 me ; you were not looking out for me." 
 
 " Conceited boy," she whispered, as she passed along. 
 
 "Now I must find my sister," Charlie St John said, 
 rather dejectedly. 
 
 " At any rate sit down and rest yourself a little first, Miss 
 St John," he said, steering her as he spoke away once more 
 across the tesselated pavement, and amongst the flowers to 
 a sort of divan at the end of the conservatory. When they 
 were seated, she began speaking of the dreariness that in- 
 variably set in after any pleasure, more especially for women 
 who had nothing important to distract their attention. 
 
 " But it 's as easy for women to have their own stand- 
 point, as it is for men, isn't it?" he replied. 
 
 " For some women, I suppose; for women who can write 
 or paint, or do anything that has a life in itself." 
 
 " I shall see you coming out with a three-volume novel be- 
 fore long, I 'm convinced," he said, laughing. 
 
 " As if I could." 
 
 " As if you couldn't." 
 
 " I should be so bitterly ashamed of myself if it were said 
 to be bad." 
 
 " Oh, I see, you're ambitious ; you want to mark an epoch 
 in literature with your first work." 
 
 " No, I don't ; but I feel disgusted that I can't do anything, 
 save bore myself and others." 
 
 " The fact is, you're discontented at not having made 
 a success before you have tried for it," he replied. And then 
 they had a long talk on the subject, and forgot that Mrs 
 Prescott was waiting for her sister. 
 
 When at last they remembered this fact, they came out 
 
Mrs Walsh. 7 
 
 from amidst the flowers into the full blaze of the ball-ioom 
 unconcernedly enough. A heavy cannonade from a full 
 battery of eyes was brought to bear on them at once, on the 
 girl indeed a trifle more severely than on the man. But 
 Charlie St John was fully equal to the position. She did 
 not attempt to give back shot for shot, glance for glance, as 
 she slowly threaded her way through the throng to her 
 sister's side, but she showed herself to be utterly unmoved 
 by them. Mrs Prescott greeted her with a reproachful face, 
 and the querulous question, 
 
 " Oh, Charlie, why did you dance so much with that Cap- 
 tain Goring ? and why did you go into that conservatory 
 when Mr Prescott wanted you?" 
 
 " I went there to please myself, Ellen ; I stayed to talk to 
 Captain Goring." 
 
 As she answered this, her brother-in-law came up to them 
 to say their carriage was just called, with an expression on 
 his face that made Charlie feel that she had offended him 
 bitterly in something, which she might expect to hear of 
 later. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 MRS WALSH. 
 
 As soon as the last carriageful of guests had rolled away 
 from the door, and before Walter Goring could come back to 
 the ball-room, after speeding his cousin'sv latest guests, Mr 
 Walsh said to his wife, 
 
 " Miss Haflen " (Miss Haflen was the appendage to the 
 fifty thousand pounds) " didn't make the impression desired, 
 it appeared to me." 
 
 " Walter 's foolish to the last degree," Mrs Walsh replied 
 crossly ; then she added laughingly, " I might just as well 
 have married him myself, mightn't I, Pvalph, as far as he 's 
 concerned ? " 
 
 " As far as I 'm concerned, I prefer things as they are," he 
 replied. 
 
8 Walter Goring. 
 
 " Well, but lie does go on in such a foolish way ; he 's a 
 dear fellow, of course, but I am getting out of patience with 
 him ; he told me this morning that he couldn't work here, 
 and that he must have chambers in town. If he goes to 
 town he '11 do nothing, you know." 
 
 As she spoke, Walter Goring came back into the room. 
 " Whom are you backbiting now, my goddess ? " he asked, 
 carelessly. 
 
 " You, naturally ; and be careful how you call me that 
 before people." 
 
 " Too late, too late ; you should have broken me into dis- 
 cretion before, shouldn't she, Ralph ? " 
 
 " I wish she 'd go to bed now, and let us have a cigar," Mr 
 Walsh replied. 
 
 But Mrs Walsh did not feel at all inclined to go to bed. 
 " You '11 stay up all night if I leave you, Ralph, and then 
 to-morrow I shall suffer for it, for you will both be too lazy 
 and tired to go out with me, and I must go to town." 
 
 " I must stay at home and work to-morrow," Walter said, 
 commencing a march up and down the room. 
 
 " The desire for ' work,' curiously enough, always seizes 
 you when I want you," Mrs Walsh said, coldly. Then she 
 rose, saying, " Good-night," and was about to pass out of the 
 room, when Walter stopped her. 
 
 " You 're not annoyed with me in reality ? You don't 
 mean it seriously ? " he asked affectionately. 
 
 She had been so much to him all her life that he could not 
 bear the slightest cloud between them. " Come," he added, 
 raising her hand to his lips, " I '11 do anything you like, save 
 make up to Miss Haflen ; she looks to me like a nigger with 
 a rush of blood to the head. You having been my boyhood's 
 dream, can't expect me to come down to the Haflen in my 
 maturity." 
 
 " Very well," she said laughingly. " I '11 forgive you for 
 having slighted my friend, if you, on your part, will promise 
 not to flirt with Miss St John. You know you neither of you 
 have a penny, and you couldn't marry her until you are both 
 well-stricken, which isn't a desirable prospect to start with." 
 
 " Let Miss St John alone, if you please, and I '11 promise 
 anything." 
 
 " That 's right. Good-night." 
 
Mrs Walsh. 9 
 
 " Good-night. Pass on my queen forgiven," he said, 
 
 bowing down almost to the ground before her ; while Mr 
 Walsh made a mental sketch of the scene, and resolved to 
 paint it in a series he contemplated from " Idylls of the Ring." 
 
 " It would be a shame to wish him to sacrifice himself to 
 that odious Miss Haflen," Mrs Walsh thought as she wended 
 her way up-stairs ; " yet what is to become of him if he won't 
 work more than he has hitherto. That old Mr Goring will 
 never die ; and even when he does, it may happen that poor 
 Walter has built his hopes on sand. At any rate, whether 
 or not, he shall not get entangled with Miss St John. I 
 can't bear her." 
 
 The two men did not stay smoking very long after Horatia 
 left them; but when Ralph went to bed Walter Goring 
 sauntered away to the study, and sat down to read. Very 
 soon the book dropped from his hand, and he began to think 
 instead. 
 
 Then passed before his mind visions of the old days, when 
 he was quite a boy, before he had even began to think 
 about a career, when his widowed aunt and his little cousin 
 Horatia first came to live in his father's house. He remem- 
 bered how he had immediately put his neck under the yoke of 
 the imperial little beauty ; how he had worn her chains for 
 years, always rattling them in a way that redounded to her 
 honour and glory, when others were by to hear them clink. 
 He recalled his first burst of genuine jealousy, which had 
 arisen from such slight cause as a curate who insisted on 
 many interviews previous to Miss Leslie's confirmation, and 
 which had resulted in Walter making an offer which was 
 accepted by his gracious goddess. His love's young dream 
 had been very golden while it lasted. No brighter beauty 
 than his betrothed bride had ever woven a chain for any 
 man's heart. But it broke at last, this chain, or rather it 
 melted away. His father, loving the girl as his own daugh- 
 ter, still could not wish to see her his son's wife. As for 'the 
 twin sisters, they wept in each other's arms, till Horatia took 
 them to task somewhat sharply about it. 
 
 " You don't think either Walter or I are going to be 
 idiotic enough to die over it, do you ? And as for you, 
 mamma, you needn't be afraid that I shall be an old maid 
 3n your hands." 
 
i o Walter Goring. 
 
 She kept her promise, and married Ralph Walsh, as has 
 b-.vii seen ; and Walter buried his dead, and resumed his old 
 adoring manner to her, with her husband's cordial permis- 
 sion, and Hilled freely with other women. But for all that, 
 he had not met the woman yet who had the power to banish 
 the image of his dearest friend his beautiful " goddess " 
 from his heart. 
 
 To-night, though he had been seeming to improve the 
 shining hours very much to his own satisfaction, Walter 
 Goring was feeling something very near akin to jealousy, yet 
 it was not that either. Mrs Walsh was far too pure a woman, 
 far too proud a matron, far too dear and precious a thing 
 in his eyes for him even to own to himself that another man 
 than her husband might perchance experience a pang about 
 her. But sometimes it seemed to him that she was a little 
 too gracious to other people, " and these cads don't know 
 where to draw the line," he thought. She gave her smiles 
 and a good deal of her best manner to a good many men, 
 " even to beasts in the line," he told himself. Not that she 
 came off her pedestal, but she suffered adoring legions to 
 come up to the foot of it, and worship in the light of day. 
 The moon is unassailable in her beauty, purity, and dazzling 
 tenderness ; still misguided brooks make mistakes, and think 
 the shining is done expressly for them, individually. Mrs 
 
 Walsh was as the moon, and . Well, there are some 
 
 tilings hard to understand ; and Walter Goring lived in 
 dread of the majority of her acquaintances misunderstanding 
 them. 
 
 Mrs Walsh was as the moon, and " By Jove ! " he said, 
 springing to his feet, " the moonlight is dying in the gray 
 dawn. What a row the goddess will make to-morrow if she 
 finds I have been up all the time soliloquising, or, as she will 
 have it, smoking. She's right about me never working, or 
 doing any other good in life. Well, perhaps if she had 
 stuck by me I should have done something better than write 
 rattling novels." Then he went off to bed at last, with a 
 growl on his lips at her defalcation, the first he had ever 
 uttered. 
 
 She meanwhile was thinking more sadly than she had ever 
 thought before of Walter Goring. It is always agreeable to 
 a woman to imagine that a man has not entirely got over 
 

 Mrs Walsh. IT 
 
 any tender feeling he may at one time have had for her. 
 She may not wish him to be actually regretful about her, but 
 assuredly if he ever lets her know of the liking, she will take 
 pleasure in the thought that a little of it lives still. 
 
 Now Horatia had been entirely conversant with every 
 phase of feeling through which Walter Goring had passed 
 on her account. He had been as boisterous a young bear as 
 most boys are when that before-mentioned confirmation to- 
 gether v/ith the curate brought his passion to a crisis. She 
 had seen him in the smilingly semi-idiotic state of serene 
 satisfaction in his wooing and probable chances of winning. 
 She had seen him hopelessly despondent when his papa 
 began to scowl and say prudent but unreasonably unpleasant 
 things. Above all, she had seen him sob like a child, or ra- 
 ther like the loving man he had become suddenly, when she 
 told him that she herself had put an end to the struggle for 
 supremacy between love and duty, by accepting Ralph 
 Walsh. Walter had never reviled her; nevertheless her 
 marriage with the amiable elderly merchant had been a 
 bitter draught to swallow. At first Ralph Walsh treated 
 his wife's cousin and former lover with a good-natured show 
 of tolerance that was aggravating to the object of it to the 
 last degree. But after a time, as Walter merged into more 
 complete manhood, and satisfaction with things as they were, 
 Mr Walsh began to take a different and more exalted view of 
 him. It was never actually said between the husband and 
 wife that they felt themselves to have been instrumental in 
 unsettling Walter, and making him a trifle more careless as 
 to his lot in life than it is well for a man to be. But when- 
 ever Walter was unsettled and careless, each knew what the 
 other's sentiments were on the subject. Mr Walsh did not 
 curry his love and regard for the generally bright clever 
 young fellow to the point of wishing himself dead, in order 
 that the bright clever young fellow might marry his widow ; 
 but he sincerely wished to see Walter happy with some one 
 else. "It's a great pity that he thinks Miss Haflen like a 
 nigger with a rush of blood to the head/' Ralph said 
 dreamily to his wife that night, before he fell asleep. 
 " 50,000 is no joke. He '11 never get much from his uncle, 
 I'm afraid." 
 
 "Then he'll be driven to work," the lady replied j "and 
 
1 2 Walter Goring. 
 
 I'd rather see him work well than married to an heiress 
 when it comes to the point." 
 
 "I suppose you'll take care to keep Miss St John away 
 from your next ball, my dear ? " 
 
 " Of course I shall," Mrs Walsh replied promptly. " Danc- 
 ing the whole night with one man is bad taste, and I won't 
 have tJiat displayed in my room ; besides, if she natters 
 "Walter about his books, as she does you about your pic- 
 tures, he will make the mistake of thinking her peculiarly in- 
 terested in him. Men are such conceited boobies." 
 
 " I don't fancy she flatters me about my painting." 
 
 " Oh, you take all that glib nonsense for gospel truth al- 
 ways. She is a humbug, I tell you, Ralph ; and I 'm not 
 prejudiced. I don't dislike her; in fact, she doesn't exist 
 for me. It's impossible to dislike any one of whom one 
 never thinks." 
 
 After uttering this, Mrs Walsh refused to say any more. 
 She was an essentially moderate woman usually in the matter 
 of expressing her opinion ; but to-night, for some cause or 
 other, she felt incapable of expressing herself moderately 
 about Walter. 
 
 In truth, she was rather agitated by a thought that had 
 occurred to her a thought which she could neither crush 
 nor check, do what she would. 
 
 According to her wont, she had circulated very freely and 
 very fast with many of her military guests to waltz and galop 
 strains, and she feared that Walter, whose hatred of these 
 men was patent to her, was about to develop jealousy on the 
 subject. Her cheeks flushed as she thought it. 
 
 " He surely can't nurse such a feeling in relation to me, 
 after all the frank love I 've shown him," she said to herself ; 
 and yet would it have been so very unnatural that he should 
 have done so, after all that had gone before? "If he is 
 going to make a fool of himself, he must be taught to re- 
 member that I am a married woman," she went OD. But 
 how to teach him ? That was the thing ! 
 
A Pair of Advisers. 13 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 A PAIR OF ADVISERS. 
 
 THE Walshes' house was down at Roehampton : the Prescotts 
 lived in one of the dark, solemn Bayswater squares. Charlie, 
 therefore, had good and reasonable grounds for hoping that 
 any annoyance her brother-in-law and sole guardian might 
 be feeling with her would die out during the drive home. 
 That something in her manner had annoyed him she felt 
 very sure, from the sharp, quick step with which he had 
 come upon her in the Walshes' conservatory, and the cold 
 tone in which he had cut into her conversation with Walter 
 Goring with the words "Your sister wants you directly, 
 Charlie." She was sure from this that he was displeased 
 with her ; but she was in utter darkness as to the cause. 
 
 Mr Prescott's wrath was perhaps the hardest cross Charlie 
 St John had to bear, and this not because she feared, but be- 
 cause she despised it. Eight years before the opening of my 
 story, her father, a naval officer, after having lived like a 
 grand seigneur all his life, died insolvent, leaving one son 
 and two daughters to the guardianship of Mr Prescott the 
 lawyer, who had been trying to introduce something like 
 order into Captain St John's affairs for the last few years. 
 A bachelor of forty, without a female relative whom he could 
 place at the head of his establishment, Mr Prescott found 
 himself in a position of extreme delicacy through the unde- 
 sirable confidence displayed in him by his old friend and 
 client. Frank, the son, was the lesser evil of the three, for 
 he was a lieutenant in the navy, away on the West Coast of 
 Africa, an atom in the cause of the suppression of the slave- 
 trade ; but the girls were oppressive to the last degree. 
 
 At last, about six mouths after Captain St John's death, 
 Mr Prescott put the case plainly and honestly before the 
 elder girl, who was then about twenty. He told Ellen St 
 John that she and her sister were alone in the world, and 
 penniless that he was to all appearance their only friend 
 that she especially was ill-fitted to battle with the world, and 
 therefore that she had better enable him to befriend and pro- 
 tect little Charlie and herself by marrying him. It was 
 
14 Walter Goring. 
 
 a hard, prosaic, galling courtship ; at least it would have ap- 
 peared so to many women, but Ellen St John was satisfied 
 with it. He had been very kind to her at a time when other 
 friends had stood aloof. He offered her peace and plenty, 
 and both were essential to her well-being. He was " very 
 old," she told herself, and rather round-backed, and his 
 clothes did not sit upon him as did the clothes of the men 
 who had been about her in the bright old days in her father's 
 house. However, they had forgotten her, it seemed, since 
 her father's death, and he, the man with the round back and 
 the ill-fitting clothes, had remembered her. So she accepted 
 the fate he offered smilingly and gratefully ; and he took her 
 home to his dull house in the Bayswater square, and sent 
 Charlie, who was just fourteen, to school for four years. 
 
 At the expiration of those four years, Charlie was added 
 to the establishment as a permanent member. She found 
 Ellen as fresh, as fair and lovely, as utterly and entirely 
 unruffled as of old, when all things had been different with 
 them ; and remembering some of the old scenes and one of 
 the actors in them vividly, she did marvel greatly at Ellen's 
 blessed calm. She marvelled even more when she discovered 
 that this calm happiness was no mere cloak, but that Ellen 
 was in reality as satisfied as she seemed. Mrs Prescott had, 
 in truth, married her husband for the simple and excellent 
 reason that he had asked her to do so. But having married 
 him, she never gave a thought to any one else ; she was, in 
 fact, devoted to him, to the decent ordering of his house and 
 to her children. He had done a good thing in obeying the 
 dictates of that generosity which first impelled him to offer 
 the fatherless, friendless girls a home on the only terms on 
 which they could accept it. He had done very well, very 
 wisely ; never in his life had he been so cared for, so con- 
 sidered; in the satisfaction of his heart at the admirable 
 manner in which virtue had been rewarded in his case, he 
 frequently told himself that he had done wisely and well. 
 He spoke thus during the first four years of his married life, 
 while he had had to do with the elder sister alone. 
 
 Then Charlie came home, and his troubles began. She 
 was vivacious, high-spirited, and not at all disposed to accept 
 his dicta on all subjects under heaven and on earth unques- 
 tioningly. She had seen little or nothing of the Prescotts 
 
A Pair of A dviscrs. \ $ 
 
 during the four years that had elapsed since her father's 
 death. Her holidays had been spent with some old friends 
 of her father's who remembered her when they found that 
 nothing was expected of them. She had seen little or 
 nothing of them, and Ellen's letters had told her little or 
 nothing. Mrs Prescott's letters for the first year of her 
 married life had been mere catalogues of dresses and bonnets. 
 After that they became mere bulletins of baby's health and 
 progress. Occasionally the young aunt felt her sister's babies 
 to be little bores, and wished that Ellen would find some- 
 thing else to write about. But that was only because she 
 had never seen them ; and maternal pride insisted on detail- 
 ing the same thrilling experiences about number three as had 
 been given at great length about number one. 
 
 Being generous-natured and grateful-hearted, she went 
 back to the home her brother-in-law offered her, thoroughly 
 disposed to fulfil every claim he had upon her affection and 
 gratitude. He had been very good to her, she knew. What 
 education she had had been his gift, secured by his care, 
 paid for with his money. True she had not been a free 
 agent in the matter, it had all been arranged for her while 
 she was too much of a child to think about it. But now 
 she was no longer a child, and she did think about it, and 
 was very grateful and well inclined towards her guardian 
 brother-in-law. 
 
 Unfortunately the four years which had passed between 
 the day of her coming home and the date of her introduc- 
 tion to the reader, had seen these feelings weaken, flag, 
 wither, and then utterly crumble away. That there was 
 fault on both sides there can be no manner of doubt. He 
 had no forbearance, and she gave much provocation ; had he 
 only remembered in another spirit that all the might and 
 power was on his side, she possibly would have bowed under 
 it a little more gracefully than she did. 
 
 For four years a woman had sat at his fireside without 
 having, to the best of his knowledge, a wish or a thought in 
 opposition to wish or thought of his. She had yielded him 
 an implicit obedience from the first moment of their union. 
 A soft, sweet, smiling obedience, that strengthened his faith 
 in his own infallibility. Clearly she never found him exact- 
 ing or masterful, whatever his decrees. Therefore when 
 
1 6 Walter Goring. 
 
 another woman one, too, who had no such claim on his 
 forbearance as his wife possessed came, and not alone had 
 but expressed wishes and thoughts that were antagonistic to 
 his own, Mr Prescott was fairly staggered. 
 
 The history of those four years need not be written. The 
 weariness of them may be well imagined, but the recapitula- 
 tion of the incidents that deepened the weariness would not 
 forward the action of the story. Suffice it to say that Mr 
 Prescott, though not absolutely unkind to her, had so worn 
 out the slender original stock of patience possessed by his 
 ward had so chafed her by exercising authority about 
 trifles, that now she not only disliked, but heartily despised 
 him. 
 
 When they came into the light of the hall that night, she 
 gave a hasty glance at Mr Prescott's face, and there was the 
 expression upon it which was most odious to her. Mr 
 Prescott's upper lip was of undue length at all times, but 
 whenever he felt himself called upon to cavil at Charlie, it 
 elongated itself portentously, it went down and folded itself 
 severely over the under one in a way that caused him to look 
 mean and unmerciful to an extraordinary degree. His back 
 too always looked rounder, his coat hung about him more 
 loosely, and indeed his whole appearance was more irritating 
 than imposing on such occasions. Charlie glanced at him, 
 and saw clearly that there w r as a lecture in store for her ; and 
 he glanced at her and saw that the lecture would not be 
 taken well. 
 
 Hers was a face that altered with every gust of feeling 
 that swept over her soul. A dark, impassioned face, as has 
 been said ; a face which could soften to a rare degree when 
 the chord of tenderness was touched, but that could also 
 Hash and flame in a way that cautioned many a man not to 
 learn to love it and deem it necessary to the adornment of 
 his home. A face whose ever- varying expression told plainly 
 the rapid way in which the spirits of its owner travelled 
 from the seventh heaven to the nethermost hell. You could 
 read in that face that she had a marvellous capacity for feel- 
 ing either pleasure or pain, that she had a great love of so 
 much of her kind as were congenial to her, and a deep-rooted 
 detestation of being regulated and controlled in minor 
 matters. In fact, it was a face that told too much for 
 
A Pair of Advisers. 17 
 
 safety. The few weak weapons with which she had to 
 fight the battle of life were clearly visible to all beholders. 
 
 Pretty Mrs Prescott had just the same soft pink tint on 
 her round cheek when she came back to her home that night, 
 as had been on it when she departed six hours previously. 
 She was one of those women who never take anything out of 
 themselves by getting in the least degree excited. She took 
 all the little pleasures that came in her way willingly and 
 quietly. Nothing ever carried her out of herself, as it were ; 
 and verily she had her reward ; there was no reaction for her. 
 
 But with Charlie it was very different. Poor Charlie ! 
 Her nerves were too close to the surface for her place in the 
 world. A word, a look, a something more intangible than 
 either, a feeling that there had been an expression or a 
 thought on another's face, or in another's heart, to which she 
 and she alone of those present had been sympathetic, any 
 one of these things would steep her in a passionate pleasure 
 that would have been delirium, had her intellect not been 
 more active at such moments than at any other. But those 
 periods were so very brief, and the intervals between them so 
 very long, and she invariably found all things so darkly 
 dreary, and herself so thoroughly exhausted after one of them ! 
 
 It was clear, or it would have been clear to any one capable 
 of reading her face, that she had tasted some such pleasur- 
 able excitement to-night, and that its influence was upon her 
 still ; reaction had not set in yet. There was a deep clearly- 
 marked line across her brow a line that was only visible 
 when the girl had been strongly wrought upon and her eyes 
 gleamed like stars. But her face was very pale, and there 
 came a slight quiver over her lips as she held out her hand 
 to her brother-in-law and said, 
 
 " Good-night, Robert. I can come in and help you when 
 I have taken off my dress, if you like, Ellen." 
 
 Mrs Prescott kissed her sister on the cheek. 
 
 " I shall not want you, dear good-night. Green is wait- 
 ing up for me." 
 
 u I want to speak to you before you go to bed, Charlotte, * 
 Mr Prescott said, and he marched as he spoke into the din- 
 ing-room, which was dimly lighted by one gas-burner. He 
 only called her Charlotte when he was very much displeased 
 with her ; she detested her name, and calling her by it was 
 
1 8 Walter Goring. 
 
 the surest means of upsetting her self -possession which he had 
 yet discovered. 
 
 She had taken a step or two forward, but she paused on the 
 mat in the doorway, and drew her cloak more closely around 
 her. 
 
 " I 'm tired and cold, Eobert ; won't to-morrow do as well?" 
 
 She spoke in a cool quiet tone ; and when he looked at 
 her to say, " Cold in July nonsense ! " there was a smile on 
 her face. 
 
 " Are you coming in, Charlie ( t " he asked angrily. 
 
 She walked in and sat down by the table, neither facing him 
 nor turning away from him : as she seated herself he said, 
 
 " I think you must know how you're situated ? " He 
 paused, and she made no reply. " I say, you must be aware 
 of your position ? " 
 
 " I 'm perfectly aware of it," she said, without looking at 
 him. " Did you call me in here at this hour of the night solely 
 to remind me of it, Robert ? " 
 
 " I called you in to tell you once more what I have told 
 you frequently before, that I am not pleased with the manner 
 you choose to adopt when you are in society ; there is an 
 affectation of singularity, and a disregard of conventionality 
 about it that I do not approve of at all." 
 
 Once more he paused, and when he did so, she heaved a 
 email sigh, so small a one that it might have been only a 
 breath of relief at his speech having come to a conclusion. 
 Then she settled her head more comfortably against the high 
 oak-backed chair, and looked steadily at the further end of 
 the room. 
 
 " Do you hear me, Charlie ? " 
 
 " Yes, I hear you," she replied, just letting her eyes light 
 upon him for an instant, and then hastily averting them, the 
 sight of that elongated lip was not to be endured. 
 
 " And you say nothing ? " 
 
 "What can I say?" 
 
 " You openly disregard my wishes and advice." 
 
 " I do neither, excuse me," she replied rather more warmly ; 
 " I answered while there was anything to answer ; I spoke 
 while I had anything to say. You asked me if I knew what 
 my position was, and I told you I did perfectly, and so I do." 
 
 She started to her feet as she said this, and all trace of 
 
Charlie Thinks Things Over. 19 
 
 the composure which had been offensive to him had vanished, 
 as she stood with her clenched trembling hand resting on the 
 table, and her head bent down in a proud abasement that 
 might have touched any man's heart to tenderness. 
 
 " It 's no use speaking kindly to you," said her brother-in- 
 law. 
 
 " You 've never tried it, Robert." 
 
 Before the words were out of her mouth she bitterly re- 
 pented having been betrayed into using them, for he had 
 been very kind in act though not in word to her. However, 
 the words were uttered, and they bore fruit instantaneously. 
 
 " I will not trouble you with any more of my remarks ; in 
 future I shall not presume to interfere with your conduct 
 whatever it may be," he said coldly ; then he added, u good- 
 night," without offering her his hand, and went away out of 
 the room. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 CHARLIE THINKS THINGS OVER. 
 
 CHARLIE ST JOHN'S impulse when her brother-in-law left the 
 room in the manner recorded at the end of the last chapter, 
 was to rush after him, and say some word expressive of 
 penitence for that speech into which she had been goaded 
 of penitence, and a desire to be forgiven. But she did not 
 obey her impulse. By this time she knew her man too 
 well. The word would have fallen on ears rendered deaf by 
 wounded self-love, and a determination to make her drink 
 the cup of remorse, for her brief ingratitude, to the dregs. 
 He was not a high-minded or generous-spirited man himself, 
 but he had some faint notions of what those who are feel 
 when they have been stung into the exhibition of some feel- 
 ing less noble than themselves. He was resolved upon mak- 
 ing her suffer to the full extent of his power, partly because 
 she had told him the truth in telling him that he had never 
 tried speaking kindly to her, and partly because she had done 
 a thing in the course of the evening of which he exceedingly 
 
2O Walter Goring". 
 
 disapproved. She had so deported herself with a man as to 
 haveieen remarked; she, a girl whose only chance in life, 
 whose only chance of eventually removing the burden of her- 
 self from off him, lay in marriage. And the man with whom 
 she had so deported herself was a man whom Mr Prescott 
 rather disliked than otherwise, and who was spoken off by 
 his own friends as " a fearful flirt, and utterly unscrupulous." 
 He told himself, and he told his wife, that Charlie could not 
 be made to feel her sin too severely. " I shall not say a word 
 more to her myself, but you had better speak to her to-mor- 
 row, Ellen. If she gets spoken of with that fellow Goring, 
 the only prospect I see for her is destroyed." 
 
 " But if thej did come to like each other, and he was to 
 marry her, Robert, would you mind then ? " 
 
 " Marry ! He 's not a man to do anything of that kind/* 
 Mr Prescott replied ; and in this he judged Walter Goring 
 very rightly. As far as that gentleman knew himself, he 
 was not likely to marry for a good many years to come. 
 Eternal smiles from a wife might grow to be monotonous, he 
 had always felt. But there was never-ending variety in the 
 smiles accorded him by the unmarried. There was a chance 
 of some of the brilliancy vanishing from them, he knew, did 
 he marry ; so, in all honour he determined to retain them 
 unaltered while he could. Unquestionably, Mr Prescott was 
 right. Walter Goring was not the man, of all others, whom 
 an anxious guardian desirous of seeing his ward married, 
 would wish to see that ward's companion in the soft, seduc- 
 tive atmosphere of a half -lighted conservatory on a summer 
 night. 
 
 It never occurred to this prosaic middle-aged moral man 
 to this irreproachable husband and father to this astute 
 lawyer, who had ever been too earnest in his profession to 
 look soft things at a lady till he looked them at Ellen after 
 she became Mrs Prescott it never occurred to him that the 
 handsome young novelist with the witching tongue could be 
 for an hour alone with a pretty woman who interested him> 
 without making love to her. Had Mr Prescott but known 
 what they had been conversing about, and how they had 
 been conversing about it during that terrible time in the 
 conservatory, all his anger would have been assuaged, and 
 all his fears would have died a sudden death. 
 
Charlie Thinks Things Over. 21 
 
 A portion of this conversation has been already reported. 
 She had avowed that she was discontented, and he, nearly a 
 Btranger, had reproved her for such discontent in a way that, 
 truth to tell, had not made her like him at all the better for 
 it. After that they had talked a little about art, and a little 
 about literature, and she had learned that there were mines 
 out of which even she, weak as she was, might draw some- 
 thing, had she but patience and perseverance. The scene, 
 the soft light, the fragrant atmosphere of the flowers, were 
 one and all affecting her in their different ways. But he 
 sought no aid from one of them. He talked to her as he 
 would have done to a sister, or (better still, when she came 
 to think about it) a brother ; and while Mrs Walsh was 
 accusing her of playing dexterously for a great stake out in 
 that dim light, she was only feeling through the whole 
 of her sensitive being that it was not more dim than that 
 light which had been shed upon her mind, and that he must 
 see it and know it to be so, and yet yet why did he stay 
 there, and talk to her ? 
 
 The last words she said to him that were addressed to 
 him alone that night were uttered when she heard Mr 
 Frescott's voice summoning her to return to her sister's side 
 and her normal life. 
 
 " Here comes what I was wishing for just now the an- 
 nouncement that it 's time to go." 
 
 " Don't you wish it now ? " he asked. 
 
 " No, of course I do not. You have been causing me to 
 feel ignorant and foolish to the last degree, but I thank you 
 for it," she paused, and her head went up, and a frank, 
 true woman's smile broke over her face as she added, " and 
 like you for it. Now, good-bye." 
 
 She put her hand out, and he took it and shook it heartily 
 as he would have shaken a man's not at all as those who 
 only saw one side of Walter Goring imagined he would have 
 shaken the hand of a girl to whose side he had been chained 
 in the moonlight for half-an-hour. 
 
 " Good-bye! You'll do something worth doing yet, if you 
 try," he said ; to which she replied, 
 
 " I will try." 
 
 And they were the last words he ever heard in private 
 from Charlie St John. 
 
22 Walter Goring. 
 
 When Charlie St John reached her room that night, she 
 threw off her clothes and got herself into bed as rapidly aa 
 she could, in order to he able to think. It was absolutely 
 essential to this young lady to be physically at ease before 
 she could be " mentally active. She could not think coher- 
 ently, much less clearly, while in a position of bodily discom- 
 fort. 
 
 She was well aware of this peculiarity ; therefore to-night, 
 being desirous of bringing all the powers of her mind to bear 
 upon a certain subject, she made haste to secure the first 
 condition of success, by lying down and being at rest. She 
 wanted to think out an idea which had been put into her 
 head by a speech of Mr Goring's, made in answer to one of 
 hers : " It is easy for you to recommend me to find content 
 and satisfaction in action, since I can't find it, like a cater- 
 pillar in a cabbage, in passively existing. You are a man, 
 and can help yourself ; you can read and write, and travel 
 " she was running on, when he stopped her to say, 
 
 " And what on earth is there to prevent your reading and 
 writing, and travelling too ? If you have a good, honest 
 desire to do these things, you '11 do them sooner or later, take 
 my word for it. One need not be a man in order to read the 
 best things that have ever been written, or to write what 
 may be worth reading. As for travelling ! that will 
 come." 
 
 ." Yes, I may read lofty things with a limited comprehen 
 sion, and write out of the barrenness of an uncultivated mind : 
 Never ! " 
 
 " It rests with yourself to enlarge both, surely ! " he had 
 said, persuasively ; then he had added, very kindly, " Other 
 women have done very great things, Miss St John ; name a 
 novelist of this age who has done better work than the author 
 of ' Adam Bede,' or since this seems to be a consideration 
 with you the value of whose work has been more fully and 
 completely acknowledged by the world ? " 
 
 " You tell me to touch a star, and I have no wings. I ; m 
 utterly uneducated, as, of course, you perceive." 
 
 " Make wings for, by educating, yourself." 
 
 " I can't" she cried, passionately ; "that's just it. I can't; 
 I haven't the patience and perseverance. Above all, I haven't 
 the incentive ! ' 
 
Charlie Thinks Things Over. 23 
 
 " What incentive do you lack ? " 
 
 " Every inspiring one. Supposing that I did work, and 
 plod, and learn something ? It would be to this end that I 
 might teach it again." 
 
 " It's the aim whish animates the majority of those men 
 whom you envy. We all hope to teach it again, whatever it 
 may be." 
 
 " Ah ! but I meant that it would only be to deal it out by 
 the yard by the long, weary, weak yard as it has been 
 dealt out to me. But you don't understand me. It would 
 be that I might go out as a governess ; and I 'd rather be a 
 cook." 
 
 " You 're not fit for either place," he said laughing ; " you 
 would spoil the best food and the best children. If I were 
 the father of a family, I should decline you in either capacity. 
 But other women have made other paths for themselves ; why 
 should not you, since you're tired of the one you're 
 treading ? " 
 
 She looked at him, with her lips parted, and her eyes 
 flashing. 
 
 " Tell me, would there be anything but the wildest, weak- 
 est folly in my making the attempt ? " 
 
 " In what direction ? " 
 
 " I don't know yet ; in any of the paths you indicate." 
 
 "Unquestionably not, if you will work. Don't send a 
 picture to the Academy before you can paint, or hope to storm 
 Fame by the first story you get into a magazine ; for, if I 'm 
 not much mistaken, it will be upon one or other of those 
 paths that you '11 adventure. You have an artist's soul, 
 though you don't know it yet." 
 
 It was this portion of their conversation this last sentence 
 of his especially on which Charlie St John wanted to 
 ponder. He had indicated the paths plainly enough which a 
 clever woman, capable of working, and earnestly desirous of 
 pursuing honourably, might pursue with success. He had 
 indicated the paths, and he had appeared to accredit her with 
 the possession of an artist's soul ! Had he flattered her in 
 this ? or had he been mistaken, perchance ? While striving 
 to solve this question, she fell fast asleep, and forgot for a few 
 hours the drearinesses of the life that was past, and the aspi- 
 cations that were to gild the life that was to oome. 
 
24 Walter Goring. 
 
 At about four in the morning, the nursemaid came hastily 
 into the room, and woke her suddenly, by asking, 
 
 " Will you come and look at Ella, Miss Charlie ? " 
 
 Ella was the eldest child a seven-years' old golden-haired 
 epitome of all that is most charming and unintelligible in her 
 sex. She was Charlie's favourite the only one who was 
 never unwelcome in Miss St. John's room, and unable to wear 
 out Miss St John's patience. 
 
 " Let me come out on your lap, Aunt Charlie," the child 
 asked, as soon as Charlie reached her bedside, and little Ella's 
 face was so flushed, and her eyes so bright and pleading, that 
 Charlie could not refuse the request she craved. 
 
 So a blanket was put over the child, and Charlie seated 
 herself on a nursery chair with Ella in her lap; and the 
 night wore away, and the morning light crept slowly into the 
 room, and still she sat there almost motionless, but with no 
 weariness in her manner, and no lack of tenderness in her 
 face. At eight o'clock, when Mr and Mrs Prescott came 
 into the room to see what was the matter, there was no trace 
 in the eager eyes that were lifted to greet them of the defiant 
 contempt which had dared censure in the Walshes' drawing- 
 room, or the cold reproach which had given force to the 
 words, " You have never tried it." There was no trace of 
 either feeling in the eager, sympathetic, mobile face that was 
 lifted to greet them, or in the whispered words, " She's 
 asleep now for the first time since four I'm afraid it's fever, 
 Ellen." But Mr Prescott was not too apt to forget ; there- 
 fore he only said coldly in reply, " If it is fever, you have been 
 very foolish to keep her on your lap in this way. It can do 
 the child no good, and may be the means of your laying 
 yourself up, and then there will be two to nurse." 
 
 When he said that, she rose quickly but gently, very 
 gently still, and went and put little Ella on the bed. Then 
 she went away hurriedly to her own room, and when she 
 reached it, the angry tears poured from her eyes, and 
 she almost sobbed aloud, " Anything, anything to get away." 
 
Was she his Friend? 2$ 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 WAS SHE HIS FRIEND? 
 
 WHEN Mrs Walsh came down to breakfast on the morning 
 after her dinner-party, she found Walter Goring standing at 
 the open window with the Times in his hand. Evidently 
 he was reading vigorously. He gave it a sharp crack now 
 and again, in the way in which people are apt to crack that 
 stiff and bulky organ when they are anxious to get at its con- 
 tents. Moreover, he did not mark his hostess's entrance a 
 certain proof that he was very much absorbed. She shut 
 the cover of the tea-caddy sharply, but still he did not heed 
 her. She went a little nearer, and glanced over his shoulder, 
 and saw to her surprise that it was only the advertisement 
 sheet, after all, which he was intently perusing. Then she 
 went and rang the bell energetically, and spoke, 
 
 " Have you lost a pug-dog, or is anybody imploring you to 
 write and all shall be forgiven, that you can't tear yourself 
 away from the second column this morning, Mr Goring ? " 
 
 He had turned the instant she began to speak, and now he 
 stood with her hand in his, bowing over it deferentially. 
 
 " Neither ; forgive me for having been an unconscious 
 monster for a few moments, and then congratulate me ! " 
 
 " I do what on ? I thought by the rapt regard you 
 were bestowing on the Times, that one of your books had got 
 what you all sigh for a line of judiciously-mingled praise and 
 blame, that would look well in the advertisement 1 " 
 
 " It is not that ; my uncle is dead ! " 
 
 " And you are his heir ? " 
 
 " In the order of things, whatever he had to leave comes to 
 me." 
 
 She turned away to the table, and busied herself with the 
 cups, and he followed her, and seated himself close by her 
 side, with his folded arms before him on the table. 
 
 " Is it such a much smaller piece of fortune in your eyes 
 than the ' line of mingled praise and blame,' to which you 
 alluded would have been ? " 
 
 She looked down upon him, and smiled that same grand 
 sweet smile with which no husband could have quarrelled, even 
 
26 Walter Goring. 
 
 had he seen it bestowed on a, hundred men. How it might 
 have been had Mrs Walsh reserved it entirely for the one 
 may not be known ; but Mrs Walsh did not reserve it for the 
 one, though the one thought that she did. She was very 
 liberal with it. 
 
 " You will be so seldom in London," she said. There 
 was a touch of what a stranger might have been forgiven for 
 mistaking for complaint in her tone. 
 
 " Why so ? I shall be in London quite as often as you 
 care to see me," he replied, raising his eyes to her face. 
 
 " Nonsense ; ungrateful nonsense, too, when we are always 
 so glad to see you ; but now you will always want to be 
 away at that place in those wilds." 
 
 " You must come arid stay there often, and then it will 
 cease to be a wild ; by Jove ! I haven't been there since I 
 was a boy myself ; my recollection of it is that it is a glorious 
 old place." 
 
 She handed him his tea, and said, as she did so, 
 
 " You know that I 'm truly delighted at any good fortune 
 befalling you. You know that, don't you ? but I do wish 
 your uncle had lived a little longer; you'll go away and 
 bury yourself, and be married before you know what you are 
 about." 
 
 " Oh, no, I won't." 
 
 " Oh, yes, you will ; some day when you are feeling dull, 
 when you can't shoot or hunt, and are tired of your own 
 society, you will fall a prey to one of the dairymaid-faced 
 daughters of the land, who will be lurking ^bout seeking to 
 devour you." 
 
 " You 're a trifle severe upon the daughters of the land, 
 and a trifle mistaken about them too ; the Norfolk women 
 are some of the prettiest in England; besides, I'm never 
 tired of my own society." 
 
 "Is the place in Norfolk?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Fearful distance from town," she sighed. " We went to 
 Yarmouth last year, and I nearly went mad on the journey." 
 
 " Your sanity stood the test of the even longer journey 
 we all took together the year before." 
 
 Once more she glanced down at him and smiled. She did 
 not say, "You were with us then;" but, somehow, he re- 
 
Was she his Friend ? 27 
 
 memLered that he had been, and felt that she remembered it 
 too. 
 
 " What is the name of your place ? " 
 
 t{ Goring Place. Don't you think it odd that I haven't 
 heard of my uncle's death in another way ? " 
 
 " You mean from his lawyer ? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " How is he to know where you are ? " 
 
 " He knows my Club ; he might write there." 
 
 " Perhaps he has," she said laughing ; " for if you re- 
 member, you have not been up to town for the last five 
 days." 
 
 He laughed and rose, pushing his cup away as he did so. 
 
 " You are only kind to remind me of it," he said, looking 
 down on her upturned face. " Roehampton must not exer- 
 cise this fascination over me any longer, though ; I must ' be 
 up and doing' that is to say, I must go up to town to-day." 
 
 " You had better go up in the carriage with Horatia 
 then," Mr Walsh said, entering at the moment ; and 
 Mrs Walsh replied : " Well, we will arrange it so, shall 
 we, Mr Goring?" and, on his giving his assent, proceeded 
 to pour into her husband's friendly ear the tale of Walter 
 Goring's wonderful good fortune. 
 
 " Your wife has promised that you and she will be my 
 earliest guests," the fortunate man said, when the tale had 
 been told. 
 
 " Of course we will, won't we, Ralph ? We will take care 
 to go to Goring Place before he has a wife to teach him to 
 be cold and altered to us," the lady said, as she rose and 
 walked towards the open French window. When she 
 reached it, she paused, and asked, 
 
 " Will some one get me my gardening gloves ? I must 
 go and cut off those dead roses." 
 
 Some one got her the gardening gloves. Some one carried 
 them out into the garden for her even. 
 
 " I won't keep you from Ralph/' she said in a charmingly 
 ingenuous tone, as she took them from him. 
 
 " You may keep me from whom you please." 
 
 " I shall never want to keep you from any one with whom 
 it would be good for you to be." 
 
 " Don't you think I know it, my goddess ? " 
 
28 Walter Goring. 
 
 " It only vexes me to see you wasting your tirce in frivol- 
 ous trifling ; what could have induced you to devote yourself 
 in the way you did to that girl last night ? " 
 
 " Oh, I don't know ; here, let me cut that rose for you, 
 you 11 hurt your fingers." 
 
 So he cut the rose for her and made his peace. At least 
 he was certainly justified in supposing that he had done so, 
 for no more was said to him on the subject of " that girl." 
 
 When she was tired of cutting off the dead roses she signified 
 her intention of going in. 
 
 "And what am I to do all the morning ? " he asked. 
 
 " What an idle question ! " 
 
 " Indeed it is not. Walsh is painting, and you never have 
 a book down here that is worth looking at." 
 
 " And you don't want to write ? " 
 
 " I can't write here." 
 
 " Then come and read me what you have been writing 
 lately, will you ? and through it I will try to trace whose 
 has been the latest influence over you before you reached 
 Roehampton." 
 
 "Very well, I'll do that," he said. Then they went in 
 together, and he got his MS. and read to her ; and as she 
 recognised herself considerably idealised in it, she found it 
 interesting and delightful to an extraordinary degree. While 
 he, in reading it to her, and in listening to her well-modulated 
 praises of it, forgot all about the girl whose ambition he had 
 sought to fire in the conservatory the night before. 
 
 At two o'clock he went up to town with Mrs Walsh, and 
 found a letter at the Junior Carlton awaiting him from his 
 uncle's lawyer. He learnt that it was all as he expected he 
 was the old man's heir and the master of Goring Place. He 
 learnt also that the property was hampered in a way which 
 he would find fully explained in a sealed letter a secret 
 note only to be delivered into his hands by the lawyer. 
 Moreover, he learnt for the first time that he had a cousin, a 
 girl of seventeen, to whom he was to be guardian. 
 
 When he rejoined Mrs Walsh after reading his letter, she 
 said anxiously 
 
 " Something has gone wrong ; what is it, Walter ?" 
 
 She had never called him Walter before, and it touched 
 him that she should do so now in this his first trouble. 
 
Was she his Friend? 
 
 29 
 
 " Nothing wrong ; only it 's the very deuce to find myself 
 at my age the guardian of a girl of seventeen." 
 
 "Is that the worst?" 
 
 "Can anything be worse?" he replied evasively. 
 
 "A daughter of your uncle's, I suppose? Oh, you'll 
 soon be quit of your charge. I was afraid that the property 
 might be hampered," she said interrogatively. 
 
 To this he only replied bj~ asking her to advise him as to 
 what he should do with his charge. "It's certain that 
 she can't remain at Goring Place, if I am ever to go there." 
 
 "Of course she can't," Mrs Walsh answered decisively; 
 " but you must see what she 's like first, and then write and 
 tell me, and then I '11 advise you. Remain at Goring Place ! 
 I should think not." 
 
 "For all I know, she may not choose to budge from 
 there," he said moodily. 
 
 " But if you are her guardian you can make her." 
 
 " I think you know me well enough to know that I 'm not 
 the man to turn a girl out of a house that has been hers for 
 seventeen years, if she wishes to stay in it ; but it 's time 
 enough to talk about these things. Where is he going? 
 didn't you say Marshall & Snelgrove's ?" 
 
 " Yes ; Ralph has drawn me a design for the border of a 
 dress, and I am going to have it in silver on white silk ; it 
 is late in the season for such extravagance ; but there will be 
 a few more parties worth dressing for, and you must have 
 the ' set ' down at Goring Place in the autumn and entertain 
 the county." 
 
 "I wish I had never heard of Goring Place," he said, 
 almost savagely; but Mrs Walsh took no notice of his 
 remarks, for the carriage stopped at the moment at the 
 door of the shop where the design in silver on white was to 
 be carried out. 
 
 He assisted Mrs Walsh out of the carriage, and saw her 
 safely into the shop, and then he stepped into the little 
 silken-lined brougham and sat down to wait for her. He 
 was a man on whom Nature had smiled at his birth, on 
 whom women had smiled from hia boyhood, and on whom, 
 now Fortune had smiled magnificently, unless report had 
 largely exaggerated the possessions of the man whose heir he 
 "had this day heard himself declared to be. Only the night 
 
3O Walter Goring. 
 
 before, when he had believed himself to be entirely depen- 
 dent on his own efforts, he had talked a very bright philo- 
 sophy, and believed in it. Now that wealth was assured to 
 him whether his future efforts were successful or not, he 
 looked during these few minutes in which he dared to look 
 what he felt a bitterly disappointed man. 
 
 Nature had smiled upon him in so far as she had given 
 him a face and a manner that prepossessed both men and 
 women in his favour. She had smhed upon him, but she 
 had not given him that god-like beauty which she bestows 
 upon the heroes of most novels. His warmest admirers 
 could only say of him that he was "a fine good-looking 
 fellow." Not even enthusiastic girlhood, looking upon him 
 in the halo cast around him by the success of his very suc- 
 cessful books, had ever been heard to declare him an Apollo. 
 He had a fine brow, broad, open, and grandly intellectual, 
 and back from it there swept a richly curling mass of bonny 
 brown locks. His small delicately pointed beard and mous 
 tache were of a lighter brown, they were almost golden in 
 fact, and they were so arranged as not to conceal the fine 
 lines of his mouth .and chin. For the rest there was little 
 beauty in his face, save in his eyes, which were dark, deep- 
 set, and as expressive as any other man's spoken words- 
 they were in perfect unison with his voice, which was soft, 
 deep, rich, suave and sonorous as a poet's ever is or should 
 be. It was a face, in short, that you liked well at first and 
 better at last a face that won upon you a face that no 
 one on whom it had ever been bent, kindly could see averted 
 with indifference. 
 
 The lawyer's letter had informed him that his uncle's 
 funeral was to take place on Friday the 27th of July, and 
 this was Wednesday. " I shall leave Shoreditch by the 2.40 
 train to-morrow. If you receive this in time, I hope you 
 will be able to be there to go down to Goring Place with me 
 to pay the last respect that can be shown to your uncle, and 
 to receive, after the reading of the will, the sealed letter as 
 oon as possible." 
 
 " Without doubt I shall go," he said to himself, and he 
 said the same to Mrs Walsh when they were driving back to 
 Roehampton. 
 
 "What for? so soon?" 
 
Was she his Friend T 31 
 
 "In common decency I must attend the funeral of tho 
 man who has left me everything he had to leave." 
 
 " Including his daughter ! I fancied that he was huried 
 already. Of course you must go to the funeral since you 
 are able to do so ; when will you come back again ? " 
 
 "God knows!" 
 
 " But I want to know also. Really, Mr Goring, I never 
 saw a man so dejected by good fortune before. Won't you 
 tell me what distresses you ? if Ralph and I are not 
 amongst your oldest, we're amongst your warmest friends." 
 
 She put her hand on his arm as she spoke, and bent forward 
 to give force to her words. His eyes met hers gratefully, 
 and he lifted the kind gentle hand to his lips, but he did not 
 call her " his goddess," as he had done on a previous occasion. 
 
 " Both Ralph and you are dear good friends to me, I know 
 that very well." 
 
 " Treat me as such tell me what distresses you ; it can't 
 be that you regret a man for whom you had no special 
 regard, and whose death places you in your proper and 
 fitting position ; it can't be that." 
 
 "It is not that I make no such pretence; I'm thrown 
 out of gear, that is all." 
 
 " And how long will you be away ? " she asked with true 
 feminine pertinacity, going back to the point that was most 
 immediately interesting to herself. 
 
 " Probably not a week certainly not more." 
 
 " How very awkwardly you are placed about this unex- 
 pected cousin," she said meditatively. 
 
 "Awkwardly, rather! to have a girl cropping up in this 
 way in that quarter is enough to put any fellow out." 
 
 "I wonder if her mother is alive, or if it was a secret 
 marriage, or what the mystery has been," Mrs Walsh said 
 quickly ; " had you any idea that there was any old romance 
 of the sort in your uncle's life?" 
 
 " Not the slightest and I rather fear that it will turn out 
 to be a very shady sort of romance at best ; probably some 
 village amour repented of when the child grew up." 
 
 " In that case I shall be but a poor coadjutor, for I have 
 a slight prejudice in favour of gentlepeople. We won't talk 
 about her any more. I see she will be a bore to you ; how I 
 wish that she had never been born." 
 
32 Walter Goring. 
 
 How "Walter Goring wished it too ; but wishing was of no 
 avail. He agreed that it would be just as well, perhaps, not 
 to talk about her any more, until they knew something more 
 definite concerning her. 
 
 " It was the merest speculation on my part, remember," 
 he said ; " the mother may have been wedded wife or injured 
 maiden a peeress or a peasant ; it 's all one to me as far as 
 the confounded nuisance of the daughter is concerned." 
 
 But Mrs Walsh did not think it " all one " in the inner- 
 most recesses of her heart. Indeed, she rather hoped that 
 the " village amour " speculation would turn out to be a cor- 
 rect one. "He thinks too much of blue blood to go and 
 make a fool of himself in that case," she said to herself. 
 Mrs Walsh had some vague ideas about finding a nice wife 
 for Walter Goring at some future time. But she had a 
 strong feeling against Walter Goring finding a nice wife 
 for himself. She had got so into the habit of saying, " Oh ! 
 he ought not to marry yet/' that she quite believed in the 
 truth and justice of her statement. 
 
 The last evening at Koehampton which Walter Goring 
 spent before taking upon himself the cares of a man of pro- 
 perty was a very pleasant one. Mrs Walsh had the art of 
 making her house very like a home to him, and it seemed 
 more home-like than ever this night. In the drawing-room 
 he had his " own little, table and reading-lamp," very near to 
 hers ; quite near enough for her occasionally to re-adjust the 
 shade for him, and for them to give out little passages from 
 their respective books for each other's delectation, without 
 disturbing Ralph, who, overpowered by his arduous pursuit 
 of art during the day, was accustomed to slumber in space 
 somewhere at the other end of the room from nine till twelve 
 o'clock. 
 
 There was profound pleasure to the man of letters in this 
 intellectual interchange. Not but that he had met in the 
 course of his varied experiences with cleverer women, but he 
 had rarely met with a woman who seemed to think him so 
 clever. The incense she offered him was far more delicate 
 than any unmarried woman's could have been in his estima- 
 tion. Mrs Walsh had nothing to gain from him save the 
 simple pleasure of his society. Whereas, after the manner 
 of men, he believed that a name and ring are a sufficiently 
 
M 
 
 r n 
 
 Was she Jiis Friend? 33 
 
 glorious recompence in the eyes of most girls to account for 
 any amount of strivings to please. Without being a vain 
 man, he was fully conscious of the fact of his being regarded 
 as a man worth winning. On the whole, it certainly would 
 not have been the fault of the married women of his acquaint- 
 ance had he remained in ignorance of it. 
 
 It was a very pleasant evening. The French windows 
 were open that led out into the gardens, and through them 
 they could see the beds of scarlet geraniums looking black in 
 the light of the stars. The sky was one sheet of deep intense 
 hie spangled with gold ; not a breath stirred the silent sweet- 
 ness of the atmosphere. They rose up and went out and stood 
 on the borders of the lawn, and 
 
 " To-morrow night I shall be looking at it alone," Mrs 
 Walsh said, after a pause. 
 
 " Unless you wake Ealph, and bring him out to pick up a 
 new idea as to the cold light of stars." 
 
 She smiled. 
 
 " He wouldn't thank me for doing so ; he has an inveterate 
 dislike both to new ideas and to being woke up." 
 
 " In that case pray don't do it at ray instigation ; but just 
 compare your position to-morrow night with mine. You '11 
 not be minus one of the things that give you pleasure now," 
 (single-minded and little vain as he was, it gave him a sensa- 
 tion of pleasure to see the reproachful look she gave him 
 when he said this,) " while I shall be down in a house of 
 death, encountering all sorts of difficulties, such as contuma- 
 cious wards." 
 
 " She is not likely to be contumacious to you ; and how 
 can you say that I shall not be minus a single pleasure that 
 I have to-night ? Have we treated you so badly that you 
 are justified in declaring your society to be no pleasure 
 to us ? " 
 
 " You speak like a queen or a publisher," he said. 
 
 " I speak like a married woman but answer my question, 
 have we ? " 
 
 " Have you what ? " 
 
 "Treated you so badly?" 
 
 " Better than I deserve ; so well, that I feel myself 
 injured when I'm out of reach of the treatment, rny god- 
 dess ! " 
 
 (B 
 
34 Walter Goring. 
 
 " Perhaps we may as well go in to tea now," Mrs Walsh 
 said, coolly ; and perhaps it was as well that they did. 
 
 During the remainder of the evening there was little talk 
 of anything save Goring Place, and what he would do with 
 it. "I anticipate finding everything in a state of decay ; the 
 furniture was awfully old and rotten when I was there as a 
 boy." 
 
 " Then you will have to refurnish ; delightful task." 
 
 " Unfortunately I have no mother or sisters to direct my 
 tastes." 
 
 " As if you needed any one to direct your taste : hut you 
 forget, you will have la belle cousin, who will prohably want 
 everything to he pink, and tied up with ribbon." 
 
 " You must give me the benefit of your assistance in the 
 matter. I will give up the reception-rooms to you, to do as 
 you think proper with. Will you honour me so far ? " 
 
 " Indeed, I will not," she replied, laughing, " for your wife, 
 when you have one, to find fault with everything ' that ' Mrs 
 Walsh selected. I know what women are." 
 
 " My wife, if ever I have one, will never allude in such a 
 way to Mrs Walsh." 
 
 " How do you know that ? " 
 
 " Simply because I shall never permit her to do so." 
 
 " As if you could stop a woman's tongue." 
 
 "You seem determined to endow a person who doesn't 
 exist with a marvellous amount of animus against your- 
 self." 
 
 " There will be nothing marvellous in the animus. Sisters, 
 and friends who are almost like sisters, are generally hated 
 with a holy hatred by young wives." 
 
 " The projected young wife shall receive the fullest assur- 
 ance of your not being at all like a sister to me," he said, 
 laughing. 
 
 Soon after this Mr Walsh woke up, and began to take an 
 interest, which he had been too sleepy to feel or feign earlier 
 in the evening, in Walter's prospects. "Will it interfere 
 with your going abroad with us this year ? " he asked. 
 
 " When are you thinking of starting ? " 
 
 " About the middle of August." 
 
 ' Yes, that 's rather late ; if there 's plenty of game I shall 
 want to be at the Place in September." 
 
Was she his Friend ? 35 
 
 " Why must we go abroad at all this year ? " Mrs Walsh 
 asked. 
 
 " Why, indeed," Goring said. " Can't you put up with 
 English country scenery for one autumn, Ralph ? Come to 
 Goring Place in the middle of August, and stay till the 
 middle of next year if you can." 
 
 " It 's a lovely country, isn't it ? " Mrs Walsh asked ; and 
 her husband shook his head, and laughed, as he replied, 
 
 " ' Lovely ' is not the epithet we usually apply to Norfolk, 
 my dear." 
 
 " It has the beauty of superb cultivation," Walter Goring 
 said; "a trifle flat, but capital colour, and about Goring 
 Place very well wooded. You wrong Norfolk if you imagine 
 that you can find nothing worthy of painting in it." 
 
 " If you can induce my wife to give up Rome, where she 
 has been bothering me to take her for the last six months, 
 I '11 agree to the change gladly." 
 
 " And I know the goddess will be gracious won't she ?" 
 Walter Goring said humbly, half kneeling before her, and 
 lifting her hand to his lips. 
 
 It was a sight which some husbands would not have liked 
 to see ; but Mr Walsh was a remarkably sensible man. He 
 knew none better that there was nothing in it that it 
 meant no harm. Therefore, he looked at the scene from the 
 artistic point of view entirely, and admired it exceedingly. 
 " Just keep as you are for a minute," he said, quickly taking 
 out his note-book and pencil, " the situation is exactly what 
 I wanted." When he had made a rapid sketch, he told 
 them " that would do," and they both got up to look at the 
 result of their posing. 
 
 " What is it, Ralph ? " Walter asked. 
 
 " Mary Stuart and Chastelar." 
 
 '* But I 'm not a bit like Mary Stuart, Ralph." 
 
 '* According to the estimate I have formed of her, she 
 would have looked as you did then under the circum- 
 stances." 
 
 " What circumstances ? " 
 
 " The circumstances under which Chastelar always knelt 
 at her feet after he had ' put her out,' as you women call 
 it as a queen, and nattered her as a woman." 
 
 " Had I the look of being put out with Mr Goring ? " she 
 
36 Walter Goring. 
 
 asked, with a laugh. " I was only Ihinking whether Miss 
 St John would have looked as impertinently pleased as she 
 did last night, if she could have seen him kneeling to me even 
 in fun." 
 
 " Bother Miss St John ! I was in hopes I had heard the 
 last of her ! " Walter Goring said, shrugging his shoulders. 
 And Mr Walsh told him Horatia was determined that he 
 shouldn't fall a victim for want of being put on his guard. 
 
 " Now, Ralph, I never paid him so poor a compliment as 
 to fancy he would fall a victim to such a girl ; why, her look 
 of satisfaction last night was enough to provoke a saint." 
 Mrs Walsh said this with an air of putting it to them impar- 
 tially. It certainly was not a speech at all calculated to 
 enhance the charm that might otherwise have been cast 
 around the absent one. Walter Goring felt immediately that 
 in truth there had been no fear of his falling a victim to 
 such a girl. " But for all that," he thought, " I don't see 
 why she shouldn't have shown satisfaction if she felt it ; and 
 she's too clever a girl to feel satisfaction in any fellow's 
 attentions." 
 
 He was going to leave Roehampton for town early in the 
 morning ; so early that he could not in reason expect to see 
 his hostess before he started, therefore he made his adieux 
 when he was saying " good-night " to her. 
 
 " Good-bye, and God bless you ! " she said, heartily. 
 "Forget that foolish speech I made to-day, and remember 
 this, that if I can serve you by befriending your uncle's 
 daughter, I'll do it, whatever she may be. Will you remem- 
 ber this ? and believe it ? " 
 
 " Yes thanks. You don't know what a weight you have 
 lifted from my mind by the words. You are the only 
 woman in the world who can help me. Good-bye, my 
 goddess ! " 
 
 " Good-bye, my foolish worshipper ! " she said, as she 
 linked her arm within her husband's. " We would both do 
 more than that for him, wouldn't we, Ralph ? " 
 
 What do you say, reader ? Was she his friend ? 
 
Fevet is/i ! 37 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 FEVERISH ! 
 
 THE fever the first signs of which had shown themselves 
 on the night of the Walshes' dinner-party turned out to be 
 typhus of the worst sort. Poor little Ella was soon a mere 
 crimson, tossing, moaning mass of pain and insensibility. 
 The doctor shook his head, and looked graver than Mrs 
 Prescott had ever seen him look before, and recommended 
 that the other children should be sent away somewhere ; and 
 straw was laid down outside the house, and the door-knocker 
 was tied up, and a great air of hush settled over the whole 
 establishment. 
 
 Womanly woman, tender mother, as Mrs Prescott was, 
 she was not gifted with the nursing power. She sickened at 
 sickness with an utterly uncontrollable sickening, against 
 which it was useless to struggle. The sight of the feverish 
 little cheeks, dearly as she loved them, brought an equally 
 feverish hue of impatient dread into her own ; and the heavy 
 atmosphere of the darkened room, incapable as she was of 
 keeping out of it, oppressed and caused her sensations of 
 nausea. Accordingly, the task of tending upon the little 
 child who was sick nearly unto death, devolved chiefly upon 
 Charlie ; and righteously Charlie fulfilled every atom of the 
 task which was assigned to her by fate, and lightened by 
 love. 
 
 Day and night were scarcely distinguishable from one 
 another in that room; for the doctor belonged to that section 
 of the old school, one of the articles of whose faith it is that 
 disease flees before darkness. So thick green blinds were 
 lowered before the open windows, and heavy curtains drawn 
 across, and the balmy July air had the greatest difficulty in 
 getting in at all to the room, which was surcharged with heat 
 and suffering. 
 
 The child's golden locks had been sacrificed as soon as the 
 fever developed itself, and she looked " like a blushing con- 
 vict," Charlie thought, as she was bending over the pillow, 
 and striving to put the aching little head into a more com- 
 fortable position one night. Suddenly her hands faltered 
 
38 Walter Goring. 
 
 failed in their task and a. great qualm seized her, and 
 something began to beat at the back of her eyes. Trem- 
 blingly she seated herself on a chair by the bedside, and 
 strove to shake it off. She told herself that it was mere 
 fatigue mere giddiness, from bending so much, and for 
 want of sleep that she was as well as she had ever been in 
 her life. She told herself all these things, pressing her 
 hands against her face the while, as though she would have 
 pressed the fever flush out of her cheeks, and the beating 
 pain from behind her eye-balls. But it was no use. Pre- 
 sently, her hands fell down feebly into her lap; her head 
 restlessly sought a resting-place, and found it on the pillow 
 by the side of little Ella's, and with a moaning sob over the 
 misery of being ill in Robert Prescott's house, she passed 
 into that state of half-slumber, half-delirium which marks 
 the first stage of a fever. 
 
 Ella was tottering about a transparent, wistful-looking 
 thing on very attenuated legs, before Charlie St John came 
 out of the unconsciousness into which she had lapsed with a 
 moan that night. When she did so return, she heard, among 
 other agreeable things, that all her hair had been cut off. 
 " Master wanted to have your head shaved, Miss, but Mr 
 Frank wouldn 7 t agree to it. But there ! I wasn ? t to tell 
 you." 
 
 " Mr Frank is he ? " She stopped, with her heart 
 
 beating fiercely. Her brother the brother whom she 
 scarcely knew was home ; he would take her out of this 
 house, which she hated ; he would redeem her from this igno- 
 minious bondage and slavery ; she was no longer friendless 
 and alone. Her heart beat fiercely, but it was with hope and 
 love and joy. Suddenly it sank again. 
 
 " Having made the slip of the tongue, I may as well tell 
 you all, Miss. I wasn 't to speak of Mr Frank having been 
 home while you was at the worst, because he had to go again." 
 
 Charlie threw her arms up over her face, and the tears 
 streamed from her eyes. She was not a crying woman ; but 
 it was so hard to have this cup of joy dashed from her lips. 
 Presently she composed herself sufficiently to ask, 
 
 " Gone ! where ? Gone for how long ? " 
 
 " Only to the coast of Ireland, Miss ; at anyrate it's to one 
 of the Channel Fleet that he's appointed, though I don't 
 
Feverish ! 39 
 
 rightly know which. You'll see him again soon, Miss," the 
 girl continued, sympathetically. " Such a handsome young 
 gentleman he is, and he did take on so ahout leaving you 
 when you were so bad." 
 
 To which comforting assurance Charlie, while overpowered, 
 as she was, with joy, and weakness, and surprise, could only 
 reply by sobbing, " My brother ! my brother ! " He was the 
 one rock on which she had to -rely, you see ! this brother, 
 whom she had not seen for so many years, and who had come 
 back, and, like a good angel, saved her head from being 
 shaved while she was insensible ! 
 
 When her first emotion had subsided a little, curiosity and 
 vanity resumed their sway. She asked for her sister and a 
 looking-glass. It is difficult to decide which was the greatest 
 shock to her the tidings that Mrs Prescott, together with 
 her husband and children, were away at Brighton, or the 
 first sight of herself with her hair cropped like a boy's. 
 
 " What an ugly little wretch I am ! " she said, as the nurse 
 came and took the glass away ; and she heaved a sigh that 
 was not unnatural under the circumstances. Her hair had 
 been a great glory to her, and she had been seen shorn of it 
 by the only one in whose eyes she desired to look well just at 
 present her brother. It was useless the nurse telling her 
 that by-and-by, when she got well, she would look as "nicely 
 as possible with it frizzed in a crop." 
 
 " I know that I shall look like a nigger with it frizzed in 
 a crop." 
 
 In course of time, as she grew stronger, and so able to 
 listen to them, she heard some of the family arrangements, as 
 detailed in letters from Ellen, which were to be opened and 
 read by the nurse an injunction the nurse religiously obeyed, 
 and Charlie as irreligiously swore at in her heart. It irrita- 
 ted her through every fibre of her being to be read aloud to 
 by any one at any time, and nurse's treatment of Ellen's 
 sentences was an awful thing to endure. They were long 
 letters too, that the affectionate sister wrote to the invalid ; for 
 the evenings at Brighton 1 were dull, and pretty Mrs Prescott 
 had nothing to do but write them when her husband would 
 not let her walk on the pier. She told Charlie what each one 
 did, and said, and ate ; and the nurse read it all with a plod- 
 ding unction that frequently made Charlie long to smother 
 
40 Walter Goring. 
 
 iu;r. A client of .Robert's a Mr Fellowes was staying at 
 Brighton with them, and he had his horses and trap there, 
 and constantly took them for long drives. According to Mrs 
 Prescott's account, driving about Brighton was a proceeding 
 that bordered on madness. After each drive she described 
 the horses as " nearly " having done something rash, not to 
 say terrible. Cliffs and precipices, which they only just 
 escaped, were scattered with profusion over her letters. " I 
 don't know Mr Fellowes, and I do know Ellen, so 1 11 give 
 him the benefit of a doubt ; any one who didn't know her 
 might distrust his Jehuship," Charlie thought to herself. 
 
 At last Charlie was well enough to read the letters for her- 
 self then to answer them. Shortly after, the doctor wrote 
 such a fair account of her to Brighton, that Mr Prescott came 
 up to see her, and to graciously announce his intention 
 of taking her down to join her sister. Charlie " thought she 
 would rather remain where she was ;' ; but the doctor declared 
 change of air to be the only thing needed to complete her 
 recovery. Accordingly, in September, she was borne off to 
 Brighton, and introduced to Mr Fellowes. 
 
 They were introduced about two hours after her arrival. 
 He came into the Prescotts' drawing-room in the evening, 
 to ask if Mrs Prescott would go down and walk on the pier. 
 Mrs Prescott was not in the room when he entered ; but a 
 young lady, with a quantity of short curling hair, was lying 
 on a sofa near the window, and little Ella was kneeling by 
 her side. He. was about to withdraw, with an abrupt 
 apology, when the child ran after him and stopped him. 
 
 " Come in, and speak to my Aunt Charlie." 
 
 He came up to the sofa then, the child still clinging about 
 him. They were evidently good friends. 
 
 " May I be supposed to know you, Miss St John, on this 
 young lady's introduction ? " 
 
 " Certainly," she said, holding out her hand to him. " My 
 pet, don't be troublesome to Mr Fellowes." 
 
 " You know my name, too ? " 
 
 u Yes ; and your horses have played such an important 
 part in Ellen's letters that I shall not require an introduction 
 to them either." 
 
 " But I hope you will know them for yourself before we 
 separate. Your sister is good enough to allow me to drive 
 
Ftvcrish ! 41 
 
 her out occasionally. You will be equally good, will you 
 not ? " 
 
 Before Charlie could reply, Mrs Prescott came into the 
 room. "How d'ye do, Mr Fellowes? doesn't she look a 
 poor wan thing?'' 
 
 " The sea air 'will soon set her up." 
 
 " Yes; and if you'll transfer the offer you made me of a 
 riding-horse to her, you don't know how much obliged I shall 
 be to you." 
 
 "Ellen!" Charlie cried, reproachfully and quickly. 
 
 " Well, you ought to ride. The doctor says you 're to 
 ride, and Robert won't let you mount a Brighton hack." 
 
 " When she sees what a steady-going old fellow the Major 
 is, she '11 alter her mind, Mrs Prescott," Mr Fellowes said, 
 rather patronisingly Charlie fancied. She thought " that 
 great big man thinks I 'm afraid ; I 'd like to show him the 
 difference." 
 
 In time to come long after she had forgotten this idle 
 thought of hers she did show him the difference with a 
 Vengeance, poor man. 
 
 The husband and wife and their friend went out for a 
 stroll shortly after this, and Charlie watched them from her 
 position in the bay window until they were lost in the crowd 
 on the pier. Even then she could frequently trace their 
 progress by reason of Mr Fellowes being at least a head 
 taller than the majority of men. "What brings that big 
 robust man to Brighton, I wonder?" she thought, and 
 presently she said aloud, 
 
 " Ella, pet, is Mr Fellowes often here ? " 
 
 " Yes ; and he gives me such lots of fruit. I daresay 
 he'll give you some now; but he'll give me most, because he 
 loves me best." 
 
 " You '11 give me some of yours, that will be the best way, 
 eh?" 
 
 The child shook her head and pondered. The fruit question 
 was a delicate one. In the pride of her heart little Ella had 
 made a vaunt, and the vaunt was not based on sober fact. 
 She had spoken of " lots of fruit," whereas in truth it was 
 never more than she could eat with keen relish. She was 
 not greedy, and she was very fond of Charlie. But she was 
 only human. So now she shook her head and pondered. 
 
42 Walter Goring. 
 
 " Perhaps he '11 love you too and give you some, and then 
 .we shall both have enough," Ella suggested presently ; then 
 she added eagerly, " Pa wants him to like you, because I 
 heard him say so. Look here, Aunt Charlie : he said, ' If 
 Charlie only ' " 
 
 " Hush, you dear little child," Charlie cried, laughing and 
 stopping the child's mouth with a kiss ; " you pet monkey, 
 you must never repeat things that you hear papa or anybody 
 else say ; we '11 all have fruit enough, and like each other of 
 course ; and now, childie, here comes nurse to take you to 
 bed." 
 
 But though she had checked the child, she had heard 
 enough to make her feel sore and indignant. For the last 
 day or two she had been feeling more kindly towards her 
 brother-in-law ; she had been remembering more vividly 
 that she did in truth owe him a very heavy debt of gratitude. 
 He had been tender and considerate to her all the way down 
 from town. He had expressed much pleasure at the prospect 
 of having her at Brighton with them, and he had heartily 
 congratulated her on the fever not having destroyed an atom 
 of such good looks as had been hers previously to her illness. 
 " Upon my word, I think you look very well indeed 
 with your hair short in this way, Charlie," he had said to 
 her ; " though to be sure you look better with it long, in the 
 old way; but it will soon grow again." This, and one or 
 other things he had said to her, putting her in better conceit 
 with her personal appearance than she had ever felt after 
 speech of his before. Altogether she had been feeling more 
 kindly towards him, and now all such feeling was destroyed 
 and broken up by the reflection that she had been had down 
 to captivate the client who drove his horses nearly over the 
 cliffs or into some other equally perilous position every day. 
 As it grew dark, and she could get no further distraction by 
 watching the gay crowds on the parade and pier, she became 
 each moment more and .more embittered. " Of course he 
 doesn't care how he gets rid of me, or to whom," she muttered 
 savagely. " Why should he ? I shouldn't, were I in his 
 place ; only I never asked him to take me and provide for 
 me. He wouldn't have done it if he hadn't wanted to get 
 Ellen. And why should he ? No man likes to marry a 
 whole family. Oh dear 1 I wish I had died at my birth, or 
 
Temporary Oblivion. 43 
 
 in the fever ! any fate, any life, any curse must be better 
 than this life of mine, that I can't escape from, and that 
 I can't blame any one for its being the unendurable thing 
 it is!" 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 TEMPORARY OBLIVION. 
 
 IT will be seen that Charlie St John had utterly forgotten 
 the means of altering her life, or of making for herself an 
 object in it, which Walter Goring had indicated to her. 
 Whatever the cause, the fact remains. Whether it was that 
 the fever had burnt the feelings which had so immediately 
 preceded it out of her memory, or whether those feelings had 
 been merely affected for the sake of making talk, cannot be 
 decided yet. At any rate, they and the conversation which 
 had grown out of them, and the hopes and ambitions which 
 had been evolved by that conversation, had all faded away. 
 Charlie St John, lying there on the sofa in the bay window 
 looking out over the dark sea which stretched before her, in 
 September, was as hopeless of better things, as despairing 
 as to her own chances of ever getting out of the loathe- 
 some groove in which she was running, as oblivious of 
 the fact of other women having battled against and sur- 
 mounted worse difficulties than beset her path, as she had 
 been in the Walshes' conservatory on that fair July evening. 
 She had utterly forgotten that a voice which seemed to have 
 a prophetic tone in it had said to her, " You will do some- 
 thing yet, if you try," and that she had replied, " I will try/' 
 The very memory of these things had passed from her. 
 Whether they had died out never to spring up again remains 
 to be seen. 
 
 By-and-by, she lying there wearily so nearly asleep that 
 it was not worth while to wake up and pretend to be glad to 
 see them heard them come in. They said " Hush ! " at 
 first ; at least Ellen said, " Hush ! Charlie's asleep," and 
 forthwith fell to talking rather louder than either of the 
 
44 Walter Goring. 
 
 others. Then she heard the question of claret-cup raised, 
 and there was a brief dispute as to the best manner of 
 making it, which was finally settled by their " agreeing 
 to leave it to the waiter." After that they discussed the im- 
 portant question of what they should do the following day. 
 " Take your sister up and show her the Devil's Dyke," Mr 
 Fellowes suggested. 
 
 " Yes, if she's well enough to ride she can go upon horse- 
 back," Mr Prescott replied; "Charlie's a capital horse- 
 woman." 
 
 Charlie, half asleep as she was, heard this, and winced and 
 smarted. Her brother-in-law seemed to be throwing her at 
 this man's head. She had an almost unconquerable desire 
 to rise up and say to them, "I hear everything, and I know 
 everything, and I won't forward your game; do what you 
 please with me." But reason told her some hard truths, 
 and saved her from making such a futile exhibition of her- 
 self. 
 
 After a while they roused her, and Mr Prescott came and 
 busied himself about her sofa cushions and the shawl that 
 was spread over her. He said one or two kind little things 
 to her and of her things of which she couldn't take hold, 
 but which she felt were intended to put her in the best light 
 before the guest, and the guest regarded her with eyes that 
 told her that she stood in a very pleasant light for him 
 already. Attention from Robert Prescott ! Attempts to 
 enhance her value from Robert Prescott ! It was all too ridi- 
 culous, too mean and small and paltry. She could not play 
 " such a wretched part in such a wretched farce." Thinking 
 this, she rose impatiently, saying, " I shall go to bed, Ellen ; " 
 but even as she spoke she faltered, tottered, and fell back 
 upon the couch. They all crowded round her, as people do 
 when they believe a person to be faint, effectually precluding 
 all chance of the poor wretch's speedy recovery, and determi- 
 nately keeping out every reviving breath of air. However, 
 Charlie was not faint ; she was only weak and exhausted, so 
 it did not so much matter. 
 
 " I '11 carry you up to your room, my dear," Mr Prescott 
 said ; and Charlie, exhausted and angry as she was, burst out 
 laughing. Mr Prescott's little rounded back, and Mr Pres- 
 cott's altogether insignificant form, looked so very unlike 
 
Temporary Oblivioii. 45 
 
 "carrying" with anything like safety, much less comfort 
 to the carried. 
 
 " No, thank you, Robert, I would rather walk ; I shall ba 
 all right directly. I suppose it 's the sea air that has taken 
 me off my legs in this way," she said, as soon as she could 
 check her laughter. 
 
 Mr Fellowes had been standing at the head of the sofa 
 with a bottle of cruelly strong smelling salts in his hand. 
 He now came round to the side, and before she knew what 
 he was going to do, he had bent down and lifted her up in 
 his arms. Feeling rather small and very helpless, there she 
 remained perfectly quiescent ; and when he said, " If you '11 
 show me her room, Mrs Prescott, I will carry her to it," she 
 uttered no word of protest. So he carried her to her room 
 and deposited her there, and bade her good-night briefly be- 
 fore she could thank him. When he was gone, Mrs Prescott 
 commenced eagerly, 
 
 "What do you think of him, Charlie?" 
 
 " I think he 's a big brute," Charlie replied. 
 
 " How can you say so, after he has been so kind ? " 
 
 " My dear Ellen, I could have walked." 
 
 '* You didn't seem to manage the walking very well," Mrs 
 Prescott remarked, with some truth. 
 
 "I should have done better next time." 
 
 " He looked so handsome as he brought you up the stairs ; 
 it was quite like a scene in a play." 
 
 Charlie laughed. " From my point of view he looked like 
 a curled and oiled Assyrian bull. I never saw anything so 
 regular and crispy and tight in my life out of the British 
 Museum as those curls of his are. Where did Eobert and 
 you pick him up ? " 
 
 "He's a gentleman of large property in Norfolk; he's 
 not to be picked up by any one, I assure you, Charlie," 
 Ellen replied, rather tartly; "and oh ! dear Charlie, i r /ou 
 should come to like him, it would be such a maicfi for 
 you." 
 
 " Good night, dear," Charlie said, abruptly, turning round 
 and burying her face out of her sister's sight on the pillow; 
 and Mrs Prescott, fearing that she had done more harm than 
 good by her little suggestion, went away out of the room 
 meekly and dejectedly. 
 
46 Walter Goring. 
 
 The record of the days as they passed at Brighton during 
 that September is scarcely worth telling. Charlie St John 
 gradually gained strength, and gradually gained something 
 else too, a hearty, grateful liking for the honest-hearted 
 gentleman whom she had dubbed " a big brute " on the night 
 of her arrival. He was one of those men who are always 
 gentle and tender to anything that is physically weak. He 
 pitied Miss St John so much for having been ill. He strove 
 so very earnestly to think of little jaunts into the country 
 that might amuse her, and he was so careful to avoid rucks 
 and other causes of jolting in driving, that she could but be 
 grateful to him. Nevertheless she laughed at him to her 
 sister. "He either thinks me utterly decayed, and dreads 
 seeing me crumble to pieces at the first shock, or the females 
 of his own house must be perfect grenadiers," she would say 
 to Ellen ; and Ellen would with difficulty obey her husband' a 
 injunction " not to interfere " at such moments, and hold her 
 tongue sorely against her will. But though Charlie laughed 
 at him, she was always glad to see him ; and he marked her 
 gladness, and drew favourable deductions from it, not know- 
 ing that he owed the favour, such as it was, to that danger- 
 ous love of novelty which was at once her charm and her curse. 
 
 However, he was ignorant of this, and in his ignorance he 
 experienced very blissful feelings. The wealthy country 
 gentleman had led a very hum-drum life. He had seen 
 very little of women out of his own rather narrow circle; 
 he had been very little out of the neighbourhood where his 
 fathers had been born, and married, and buried. Charlie 
 came upon him like a revelation. She interested him ; he 
 did not understand her, and, after the manner of his kind, he 
 liked a thing in exact proportion as it appeared incompre- 
 hensible to him. He liked to watch her and telegraph his 
 "wonder" to Mrs Prescott, as to "what she would be at 
 next ; " and Charlie observed this and ridiculed him to her- 
 self and to her sister, who was still obedient to her lord's 
 command, that there should be no interference in the 
 matter. 
 
 "He looks as if he expected me to stand on my head/' 
 Charlie would say, and Ellen would humbly urge j.n ex- 
 tenuation of these looks of his, " Perhaps he admires you, 
 Charlie." 
 
Temporary Oblivion. 47 
 
 '* No, no ! it 's not admiration ; it 's the hope of seeing 
 me do something odd ; perhaps he thinks I have been 
 mad, as my hair is cut short. If I thought it was really 
 that, I 'd dance at him, and pretend I was going to bite 
 him." 
 
 But though she said this often to her sister, always freshly 
 inciting the gentle Ellen's terrors that she would in truth 
 carry her threat into execution, she never did it, and, 
 moreover, never intended to do it. The watching was 
 an odious thing, and a hard one to bear, and it was ren- 
 dered harder by being watched in turn by the Prescotts. 
 But she had no wish to put a stop to it in such a way 
 as should cause Mr Fellowes to cease from the watch for ever. 
 
 One evening, when Charlie had been at Brighton about 
 three weeks, Mr Fellowes came in to ask her if she "would go 
 "for a last ride with him." 
 
 u Are you going away ? " Charlie asked, opening her eye& 
 wide with surprise. The man had become very necessary to 
 her he and his good old brown horse the " Major." She 
 did not like the idea of being left entirely to herself and the 
 Prescotts again. 
 
 He looked down at her very gently, and asked " Are 
 you sorry that I am going ? " 
 
 " Uncommonly ! " Charlie replied, in a tone that robbed 
 both question and answer of anything like sentiment. Mr 
 Fellowes had fallen into an unpleasant habit of making similar 
 speeches to the one just recorded aloud before the Prescotts, 
 and the keen look which they invariably called into being in 
 Mr Prescott' s eyes, goaded Miss St John almost to madness. 
 " Uncommonly sorry to lose the old horse too, Mr Fellowes ; 
 at all events I will have as much as I can of him to-night, 
 so I '11 go and put on my habit at once/' 
 
 When she was gone out of the room, Mrs Prescott asked, 
 " Must you really go to-morrow ? " 
 
 " Yes, I think I had better/' he replied. " I 'm wanted at 
 home, and I 'm doing no good here." 
 
 " You may be wanted at home, but I 'm sure you are 
 wrong about doing no good here ; how poor Charlie will miss 
 you," Mrs Prescott said with a little sigh. The poor woman, 
 meek and long-suffering and lymphatic as she was, did suffer 
 many things about Charlie, of which Charlie had no con- 
 
48 Walter Goring. 
 
 ception. The list of Charlie's sins and offences against order 
 and discretion and conventionality was a long one as made 
 out by Mr Prescott, and he was constantly unrolling it before 
 his wife's eyes, and delivering a running commentary upon it. 
 She had. been hoping fervently for the last week that it was 
 complete, or rather that Charlie was going to obliterate this 
 scroll of shame by marrying Mr Fellowes. Now it appeared 
 as if Mr Fellowes was not going to give her the chance. 
 However it might be about his loving, it was clear, according 
 to his own statement, that he was going to ride away. No 
 wonder that she sighed as she thought of how her husband 
 would growl, and said, " How poor Charlie will miss you." 
 
 " Do you mean that ? " he asked eagerly. He was a man 
 of nine and twenty or thirty, but his face flushed like a boy's, 
 and his big frame trembled with agitation as he asked it. 
 
 " Yes," Mrs Prescott said hesitatingly. She was awfully 
 afraid of Mr Prescott declaring this speech of hers to come 
 under the head of that interference which he had prohibited, 
 and though he was not there to hear her, she knew herself 
 too well to doubt but that she should repeat every word to 
 him when he came in. So she said her 4( Yes " so hesitat- 
 ingly, that Mr Fellowes thought she did not mean it. 
 
 *' Now look here, Mrs Prescott," he began, and Mrs Pres- 
 cott could have taken her oath that his round honest blue 
 eyes were suffused with tears as she spoke. " It 's a great 
 deal to me whether you mean what you say or not. I never 
 saw a girl on whose truth I 'd sooner stake my life, or what 's 
 more, my honour, than on hers ; she seems to like me, but I 
 may be mistaken, and if I am I shall carry the marks of it 
 longer than most men perhaps ; did you mean all your words 
 implied, coming as they did from her sister, when you said 
 * Poor Charlie will miss you ? ' " 
 
 lie spoke very seriously, and Mrs Prescott was too much 
 agitated to answer him at once ; it arose principally from 
 feeling that she was in for it now, and that it was hopeless 
 to endeavour to extricate herself. She was in for that inter- 
 ference against which her husband had cautioned her with 
 something like a snarl ; there was no escape for her. 
 
 Happily for her, before she could speak, and so convict 
 herself still further, Charlie came back robed for her ride. 
 Mrs Prescott said a little thanksgiving on the spot. Provi- 
 
Temporary Oblivion. 49 
 
 dence had befriended her, and made Charlie's habit to button 
 easily that evening. 
 
 They went out together, Miss St John and Mr Fell owes, 
 and Mrs Prescott watched them from the window, and saw 
 him lift her to the saddle the instant her foot touched his 
 hand. " Oh dear," Ellen thought, " I hope they will be en- 
 gaged when they come back ; there 's no reason why she 
 shouldn't marry him. I don't believe she cares for anybody 
 else, and he is so tall and nice,." 
 
 Meanwhile the pair she was thinking about were cantering 
 along the road to Hove, and Charlie was glancing askance 
 now and again at her unusually silent cavalier, and feeling 
 very sure of something being said that would in some way 
 materially alter their relations to one another before they 
 cantered home again. 
 
 Her woman's wit told her that it would be well to defer 
 the inevitable something that was to come, until their ride 
 was nearly over ; then perhaps it would be just as well to 
 hear it. She told herself that she was very glad, and proud 
 and happy that it should have come to this that he should 
 have got to like her so well in such a short time, as to be 
 now brimming over with impatience to tell her of it. Never- 
 theless, as she looked at him, when they pulled up to walk 
 their horses down a hill on the Shoreham road when she 
 looked at him and saw clearly how the liking in his eyes 
 was deepening into love that would not remain long un- 
 spoken, she felt a qualm at her heart, and a tightening in 
 her throat. She had never felt so before in any of those 
 innocent flirtations for which she had been so reviled by 
 Robert Prescott. All the gaiety fled from her brow and eyes, 
 all the lightness from the hand that had been playing so 
 delicately with the curb, all the warmth seemed to her to die 
 out of the bright September air as she thought, " This is 
 going to be a very different a very serious thing : shall I be 
 able to stand it ? " She had not much time to reflect on the 
 question she had asked herself ; when they reached the level 
 he drew his horse a little nearer to hers, and laying his hand 
 on the pommel, he commenced at once. 
 
 " I asked you last night, when we were on the pier, if you 
 would let me call you Charlie, and you said ' Yes ; ' do you 
 know all that concession meant to me ? " 
 
5O Walter Goring. 
 
 She was nervous enough in reality, but it was part of her 
 character to strive to seem most blithe and careless when in 
 truth she was most wrought upon. So now she said, 
 
 " It meant two shillings. I said, ' Yes, if you 11 give the 
 German band something, and make them play my pet 
 waltzes ; ' and you gave them two shillings, for I saw you." 
 
 " It meant more than that, Charlie." 
 
 She laughed. "So it did ; it meant that we are such 
 capital friends, that you might call me anything anything 
 that is not Charlotte ; calling me Charlotte is Mr Prescott's 
 pet punishment for me when my sins and offences have been 
 too heavy for him to bear." 
 
 He moved his hand from the pommel now, and laid it 
 upon her wrist. 
 
 " It meant either that you were making a plaything of me 
 Charlie, or that I might go on loving you as I do as I have, 
 my darling, almost from the first day of my seeing you/' 
 
 Her lips parted, and she looked from side to side with the 
 startled gaze of a hunted animal. She was in the toils ; and 
 she could not decide whether she should escape from them 
 while there was yet time, or not ? 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 DAISY ! 
 
 WALTER GORING found his late uncle's lawyer, Mr Clarke, a 
 loquacious, big, black-whiskered, effusive-mannered man, in- 
 stead of the cut-and-dried epitome of reticence and quiet 
 keen-sightedness which he had anticipated. The young 
 litterateur had had little to do with law and lawyers hereto- 
 fore. True, he had once or twice made threatening mention 
 of " my solicitor " in letters to refractory publishers who 
 were very naturally trying to make out of him precisely what 
 he was trying to make out of them, namely, the most that 
 might be made. But in the flesh, all the knowledge he had 
 of the gentlemen of the long robe had been gained at the 
 
Daisy ! 51 
 
 various wine parties he had attended in the " Templet 
 festivities which were given by men who had limited their 
 exertions at the Bar to eating the dinners. 
 
 Mr Clarke was no bad travelling companion for a man who 
 had just come into possession of a property of which he knew 
 nothing. From the moment they stepped into the carriage 
 at Shoreditch, till they stepped out of it again at the Goring 
 Place platform, the lawyer poured out one fluent continuous 
 stream of valuable information connected with the estate and 
 affairs of the late Gilbert Goring, Esq. There was only one 
 subject on which he held his tongue; and that was the sealed 
 letter, the secret trust confided to his care by the deceased, to 
 be delivered by him (Mr Clarke) into the hands of the new 
 master of Goring Place immediately after the reading of the 
 will of the old one. 
 
 Two days before, Walter had been as indifferent about 
 Fortune as a man tolerably sure of being able to win her for 
 himself alone can be. He had the certain conviction that he 
 had it in him to make himself " famous by his pen," and he 
 had been careless of any extraneous aid. From his boyhood 
 he had known that, in the order of things, when his uncle 
 died, he would inherit a large property ; but he never suffered 
 himself to count upon it. He had always remembered three 
 things firstly, that the property was not entailed, and could 
 therefore be left to any one who seemed more deserving of it 
 in his uncle's eyes than he himself. Secondly, that Gilbert 
 Goring might marry and have a son of his own ; and thirdly, 
 that the country gentleman, who came of a long-lived line, 
 and who had never taken it out of himself, either mentally or 
 physically, as Walter felt that he had, might last the longer 
 of the two. These considerations had kept him from giving 
 much thought to the Norfolk property, which might or might 
 not be his in time to come. But, as is often the case, his 
 philosophy of indifference broke down when most it was 
 needed. He read the first portion of the lawyer's letter, and 
 suffered himself to feel that he was a landed proprietor and a 
 county man. 
 
 He read the after portion, and learnt that there was an 
 after-thought of his uncle's still to be made known to him 
 a sealed letter still to be read, containing Gilbert Goring's 
 latest intentions containing, perchance, some fell blow to Ms 
 
52 Walter Goring. 
 
 being either of the things which, as he was but human, his 
 heart had proudly swelled with the consciousness of being foi 
 a few brief seconds. 
 
 He could not go back to the old indifference, but after one 
 solitary attempt, which Mr Clarke baffled, Walter sought to 
 gain no clue as to what the contents of that letter might be. 
 At the first mention of it which the young master of Goring 
 Place made, the lawyer lapsed into a taciturnity which con- 
 trasted curiously with his previously almost jovial manner. 
 His sallow pale face hardened, and his big black whiskers 
 stiffened themselves portentously, and he was almost offen- 
 sively business-like, as he said, 
 
 " Professional matters must take their course, Mr Goring. 
 I can make every allowance for your impatience, but I cannot 
 gratify it." 
 
 Walter did not like the way Mr Clarke said it, or the way 
 in which Mr Clarke pressed his lips together after saying it ; 
 moreover, it was offensive to his taste that he should have 
 been reproved for impatience by a man whom, in his heart, 
 he denominated " a howling cad " the instant he saw him. 
 He took no notice of the rebuke, however, but looked out of 
 the window, and whistled a few bars of a waltz in which he 
 was rather fond of revolving with Horatia Walsh his grand 
 " goddess," who danced as well as she did most other things 
 that specially called for stateliness and grace. 
 
 His whistling was soon interrupted. Mr Clarke had as 
 little inclination to hold his tongue, apparently, as he had to 
 be unprofessional. The lawyer only intended to talk about 
 safe things, but evidently he intended to talk a great deal 
 about them. He began by extolling the admirable manner in 
 which the tenants on the Goring Place estate farmed the 
 land. " Greylirig's lease expires at Michaelmas," he con- 
 tinued, "but if I were in your place, I should renew it for him." 
 
 " Who is Grey ling ? and what does he hire ? " 
 
 "The home farm about six hundred acres." 
 
 " If I settle down at the place, I shall keep the home farm 
 in my own hands, in order to have something to do," Walter 
 replied. Mr Clarke's advocacy of Greyling was not made at 
 a propitious moment. 
 
 The lawyer shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 " Have you ever learnt farming ?" he asked. 
 
Daisy! 53 
 
 " No." 
 
 " Then in that case you will find yourself rather behind 
 the Norfolk men, Mr Goring ; all the land is most excellently 
 let at present, let to men who are steadily increasing the 
 value of your property. I can conceive nothing more 
 injudicious than your trying your hand at amateur farming;, 
 of course I only speak as a man of business." 
 
 "It's more than probable that I shall not settle there: 
 but in the event of my doing so, I shall want some occupa- 
 tion. How about the society in the neighbourhood?" 
 
 Mr Clarke assumed a judicial air : the truth was, that he 
 knew nothing of the society in the neighbourhood. The late 
 Gilbert Goring had kept his man of business strictly in his 
 place as a man of business. There had always been a bed- 
 room and a horse at Mr Clarke's disposal at Goring Place. 
 But Mr Goring assumed that his county neighbours were no 
 more desirous of meeting his lawyer on terms of equality 
 than he was of meeting theirs. Accordingly he never asked 
 them, and so it came to pass that Mr Clarke's knowledge of 
 the neighbourhood was but limited. However, he had no 
 intention of making this fact too patent to his new client. 
 So, in answer to the latter's question, " How about society 
 in the neighbourhood?" he looked judicial, and then re- 
 plied, 
 
 "Oh! very good good, you know; but dull, excepting 
 just in the hunting season." 
 
 " I have not been there since I was a boy. Whose are 
 the places immediately around Goring Place?" 
 
 This was safe ground. Mr Clarke knew well by whom 
 each inch of soil for many miles around Goring Place was 
 owned and occupied ; he answered briskly, 
 
 " Lord Harrocoat's estate lies to the north of Goring Place. 
 Tremendous property, that ! tremendous ! some of the 
 finest farms in the county ! I assure you his tenants go to 
 pay their rent in carriages that would take the shine out of 
 many a one that we see in the drive in the season : there is 
 a tradition that one of. them used to drive a four-in-hand of 
 the best bred and matched bays in the county ; but Lady 
 Harrocoat had hysterics about it, so he has an attack of ague 
 now every audit-day, and sends the rent by his bailiff." 
 
 " I have a faint recollection of the gable of a red house 
 
54 Walter Goring. 
 
 that I used to see through the trees when I was standing at 
 one of the drawing-room windows ! " 
 
 " I suppose that was the south lodge." 
 
 "Oh! no; it was beyond the grounds far beyond, I 
 should say!" 
 
 "Ah! to be sure, Fellowes' place, 'The Hurst:' it's a 
 small estate that belongs to a man of the name of Fellowes, 
 and it does lie to the south of Goring Place. The lands 
 meet, and there was an awful row some years ago between 
 your uncle and old Fellowes, the father of this man, about a 
 right of way. There was a sort of private road, that led 
 from The Hurst to the church at Deneham, and it cut across 
 a piece of your land ; suddenly your uncle blocked it up and 
 made no end of ill-feeling about it." 
 
 "What did he do it for?" 
 
 "Oh! some magisterial quarrel. Old Fellowes and he 
 were both on the bench, and they disagreed about some 
 poaching business. I forget what it was, but at any rate 
 your uncle got worsted in the matter, so he went and set 
 about annoying Fellowes in return in the only way that 
 seemed open to him, by blocking-up the lane where it ran 
 into his land ; foolish thing to do. ; ' 
 
 " Very," Walter replied. Then he went on to ask, " Have 
 you ever seen my his daughter?" 
 
 Mr Clarke broke into a laugh: "I have been waiting for 
 you to ask me that question before ; seen her ! I have, in- 
 deed ; and I am not likely to forget the interview ! " 
 
 "Why so?" Walter Goring asked. 
 
 "It was a foolish business, that too," Mr Clarke said, 
 rapidly, without answering Walter's question; "a very 
 foolishly mistaken chivalric piece of business as ever I heard 
 of; I went, at your late uncle's request, before the girl had 
 got accustomed to her home or her father, and I never heard 
 a young lady pour out home truths with more vicious em- 
 phasis in my life." 
 
 " What about ? what did she say ?" 
 
 " Her words rattled out like hailstones ; and us I moved 
 in the dark, being utterly ignorant of what had gone before, 
 I could not connect them ; but she actually cowed her father 
 with her reproaches about her own birth and her mother, as 
 I understood her." 
 
Daisy! 55 
 
 "When was this?" Walter asked, hoping that it was long 
 ago, and that time had tamed her. 
 
 " When she first came to Goring Place, six months since ; 
 she's a peculiar-looking girl a great deal of suppressed 
 power in her face, and a wonderful way of appearing to cool 
 down suddenly after a burst of excitement. I helieve it 's 
 only in appearance, and that she 's a deceitful little devil." 
 
 " Pleasant prospect for me, as I am her guardian." 
 
 " Worse for the man who may possibly be her husband," 
 the lawyer replied, laughing. " Your 's is the lesser evil, and 
 the pleasanter position of the two." 
 
 "What is her name?" 
 
 "Miss Goring, of course, now." 
 
 "Her other name her Christian name what's that?" 
 
 " Daisy, your uncle called her ; her name is Marguerite." 
 
 "Doesn't sound very appropriate; you say she isn't 
 pretty?" 
 
 "Not at all not at all!" Mr Clarke replied, decisively. 
 " Yet, as I tell you, there is a look in her face that you 
 don't forget in a hurry; she makes you think about her, 
 whether you admire her or not." 
 
 " And her manners her education ? where and how has 
 she been brought up ?" 
 
 "There's a mystery about it; I tried to find out, both 
 from your uncle, and from her : your uncle just put the 
 question aside, and she flared up at me in a way that was a 
 caution to me not to trouble her with too many of my 
 remarks during the remainder of my visit. What her 
 education may be I cannot tell, for she has those manners 
 which leave you in doubt as to whether she knows nothing 
 and thinks of nothing, or whether she knows a great deal 
 and thinks more. She has one charm a voice like a bird. 
 I 'm not judge enough of music to know whether it 's culti- 
 vated or not ; but it 's fresh and sweet to an extraordinary 
 degree." 
 
 " She '11 be rather an interesting charge, even if she is a 
 perplexing one," Walter Goring said, in rather more hopeful 
 tones than he had used about her before. 
 
 " I hope you may find her so," his lawyer replied, drily; 
 and then the talk about Daisy dropped, and they began to 
 speak about how well the game had been preserved on the 
 
56 Walter Goring. 
 
 Goring Place estate, and other topics of the like sort which 
 are naturally dear to the heart of a possessor. 
 
 It was past twenty minutes to eight when the train stopped 
 for the two gentlemen to get out at the Goring Place plat- 
 form. Round the corner of the station a groom was waiting 
 with a horse and dog-cart ; a groom who looked very sheepish, 
 and wished from the bottom of his heavt that he had dressed 
 himself more tidily when Mr Clarke said to him " This is 
 Mr Goring, your new master, John." Then he turned to 
 Walter, and said half-apologetically " You must not mind 
 in what sort of state you find things at Goring Place, Mr 
 Goring ; the fact is, I didn't telegraph your intention of 
 coming down to the poor confused creatures; we'll soon 
 have things in better order after the funeral." 
 
 " A dinner and a bed is all I shall care to have to-night," 
 Walter replied. 
 
 " You ; 11 have an interview with la belle cousin, will you 
 not?" 
 
 " Yes, certainly, if she will permit it." 
 
 " You are her guardian, remember ; her permission will 
 be a thing of course.''' 
 
 Walter laughed. "I have never been in command be- 
 fore ; but if I know myself, I am not likely to try it on any 
 woman, much less on this poor girl." 
 
 The Goring Place railway platform was situated close to 
 one of the entrances into the little park, in the centre of 
 which the house stood. A rapid drive along an avenue of 
 elms brought them into the chief approach to the house, 
 which with its darkened windows fronted them mournfully 
 in the clear bright light of the July evening. 
 
 " You are a fine old place," Walter said, admiringly. 
 
 " Yes ; a man would do many things rather than forfeit 
 it, Mr Gtring?" 
 
 " Yes," Walter replied, abstractedly. 
 
 It was a fine old place. It stood facing the south against 
 a background of abruptly rising, well-wooded hill. A long, 
 gray stone mansion, lofty too, though only two stories high. 
 An old mansion, with a grand Gothic arched entrance porch, 
 and a row of ecclesiastical-looking windows on either side, 
 that caused one to feel one's-self in church at the first glimpse, 
 but to which one got accustomed, and felt grand about alter 
 
Daisy. 57 
 
 a while. The Gothic arch was a hit of the original "building ; 
 but the groined ceilings, and the mullioned windows had 
 been added by the father of the late Gilbert Goring, and 
 antiquarians averred that they were not in '' keeping " with 
 other " bits " of the house. However that might be, they 
 were quite in keeping with beauty. 
 
 Down in a hollow at the left of the house a lake shim- 
 mered beautifully bright through the foliage that intervened ; 
 and two or three swans floated tranquilly upon it, and twc 
 or three little islets, covered with rhododendrons in full 
 bloom, broke its silver purity with their gorgeous colours. 
 To the right the view was interrupted by a mass of high 
 flowering shrubs, by cypresses and the arbutos, and the ever- 
 green oak, and the Spanish laurel, and the other trees which 
 are usually employed to shut off all the stables and the 
 kitchen gardens from the front of a house. 
 
 They went through the genuine old arch into the hall, 
 where a lot of armour and antlers were hanging about, and 
 the news that the new master had come spread like wildfire. 
 Before Walter could get into the dining-room the house- 
 keeper was at his heels offering him dinner and apologies, 
 and interesting little details of his uncle's last words and 
 illness, in a breath. The other servants, with the exception 
 of the butler, who commenced laying a most elaborate cloth, 
 kept out in the hall, and peered at Mr Goring through the 
 key-hole and the crevices by the hinges. Each individual in 
 the house came forward to look at the new master of it, save 
 she who was left to his guardianship his young cousin, 
 Daisy. 
 
 " While I am at dinner you will let Miss Goring know 
 that I should like to see her in the course of the evening, if 
 you please, Mrs Mason." Then he feared that this sounded 
 too authoritative, and he added, " that is, if it is agreeable to 
 her to see me." 
 
 The housekeeper smiled meaningly. 
 
 " I will tell her what you say, sir," she replied. Then she 
 went away out of the room, leaving the two men to the un- 
 disturbed enjoyment of that repast which had been provided 
 for Mr Clarke alone. 
 
 " Queer feeling it gives a fellow being in the house with a 
 dead body," Walter said after a little time ; " perhaps it is 
 
58 Walter Goring. 
 
 because I have never been brought so close to death before ; 
 but I own to having a sort of weight upon me that isn't re- 
 gret for my uncle. I should be a hypocrite to affect that, for 
 I knew nothing of him." 
 
 " I wonder what feeling kept Miss Goring secluded when 
 she heard of your arrival ?" Mr Clarke replied. 
 
 " What feeling ! why decent feeling, of course ; I should 
 not have thought the better of her if she had come tearing 
 forward to spy at a stranger while her father's corpse was 
 lying unburied in the house. I am not sure that I have 
 done right in asking to see her to-night at all." 
 
 The lawyer laughed. " My dear sir," he said presently, 
 " don't go to a meeting with Miss Goring with any of these 
 notions." 
 
 " Why not?" Walter asked, somewhat angrily. 
 
 " Why not ! because the way in which she may fall short 
 of them may disgust you with her ; we are all too apt to be 
 indignant when unconscious ones fall short of the ideal we 
 nave formed or them." 
 
 " On my soul it 's not your fault if the ideal I have formed 
 of my cousin is the reverse of exalted," Walter replied ; to 
 which Mr Clarke hastily answered, " Banish any impression 
 I may have given you unwittingly ; banish it, and judge her 
 for yourself." 
 
 The dinner had been long cleared away, the dessert had 
 been placed on the tables, the wine had decreased in the 
 bottles, and lamp-light had succeeded twilight, and still there 
 came no word of recognition from Miss Goring. Finally 
 Walter rang the bell, and re-summoned Mrs Mason. When 
 she came, he asked her, 
 
 "Does Miss Goring know I'm here?" 
 
 " Yes, sir." 
 
 " Did she send any message to me ?" 
 
 " No, sir." 
 
 " Didn't she say anything?" he urged. 
 
 " She said, ' I suppose he '11 do as he likes,' when I told 
 her what you said." 
 
 " Then I shall like to see her at once," he said haughtily, 
 as he saw Mr Clarke struggling to suppress a smile; per- 
 haps you '11 be good enough to take me to her, Mrs Mason." 
 And Mrs Mason said, " Certainly, sir," and led the way 
 
Daisy! 59 
 
 across the hall, and up the old winding oak staircase to 
 the door of a room at the end of a corridor which was 
 thickly hung with dead and gone Gorings. At this door the 
 housekeeper paused to knock, and Walter arrested her inten- 
 tion. A clear, sweet powerful soprano voice was exercising 
 itself in apparently unrestrained joyousness in the " Shadow 
 Song" from " Dinorah." 
 
 " God in Heaven/' he muttered, " what can this girl be 
 made of to be singing in this way, while her father lies un- 
 buried in the house ! " And the housekeeper shook her 
 head, and whispered in reply, 
 
 " The young lady's very hard to judge, sir, very hard to 
 judge." 
 
 As soon as the song ceased, he knocked a loud determined 
 knock, and got for answer, " Come in, do ! " sharply uttered. 
 Opening the door, he looked into a small sitting-room, at the 
 far end of which, at a grand piano, a girl was sitting with her 
 back to him. In the moment that he had to look at her, 
 he saw only a slight graceful girlish back and shoulders, 
 clothed in well-fitting black silk, and a small head, with 
 yellow hair braided closely about it. The next moment she 
 had risen, and was advancing towards him, saying with most 
 wonderful self-possession, 
 
 " Mr Goring, I presume ? won't you be seated ? " then she 
 looked round at the housekeeper, and added, " and you can 
 go, Mrs Mason, and shut the door behind you." 
 
 The housekeeper turned out of the room, and banged the 
 door as bidden; and Miss Goring seated herself on a low 
 chair, leaving her cousin still standing looking down upon 
 her. 
 
 The face upon which he looked down had been rightly de- 
 scribed by Mr Clarke as one that was " full of suppressed 
 power." It was a fair-complexioned, rather freckled face. 
 The jaw was a trifle squarer than we are accustomed to find 
 well in a woman ; and though the chin could not have been 
 called either heavy or prominent, it was very far from re- 
 treating, or lacking firmness. The mouth was rather wide, 
 and the full, well-formed lips were intensely sensitive he 
 saw them quivering now as he looked at her for all the self- 
 possession she was displaying. Her brow was wide and low, 
 and over its delicate surface the blue veins could be distinctly 
 
60 Walter Goring. 
 
 traced. Her eyes were cobalt blue, and her little straight 
 nose had an upward tendency ; and both eyes and nose were 
 strongly marked with about the most impertinent expression 
 it had ever been his lot to witness in any woman's face. 
 Withal it was not a pretty face, but it was a very remark- 
 able one. 
 
 " This won't do, you know ! " Walter Goring exclaimed, 
 after a few moments' pause, going nearer to her, and putting 
 out his hand. 
 
 She slid her own into his, and was going to slide it out 
 again, when he pressed and retained it. 
 
 " Are you annoyed with me for wanting to see you to- 
 night ? " he asked, seriously. 
 
 " Not a bit ! why to-night more than any other night ? " 
 she replied, indifferently. She made no further effort to re- 
 lease her hand, but it lay in his, cold and chilly, like a little 
 snake. 
 
 " I thought perhaps that it might be unpleasant to you to 
 see strangers just yet; but I reflected that we mustn't be 
 strangers, that we're almost like brother and sister, and 
 therefore I came." 
 
 Other women had found this man's smile very sweet, and 
 he gave her his sweetest smile now, as he stood holding her 
 hand and looking down upon her. But she remained ab- 
 solutely unmoved by it. 
 
 " Why shouldn't I have liked to see strangers yet ? " 
 
 " I hardly know." He was getting discomfited. 
 
 " Why didn't you hardly know ? " she asked, laughing. 
 
 " I fancied that perhaps it was too soon after your father's 
 death for you to care to see one whom you didn't know yet." 
 
 She wrung her hand out of his suddenly. 
 
 " Too soon after Mr Goring's death ! don't begin canting 
 to me. I had a dose of that from Mr Travers, the clergyman, 
 and then from old Mason. I know that I 'm left to you to 
 feed and clothe, and look after, for Mr Goring told me so ; 
 but, I 'm not going to pretend to please you by saying now 
 that I 'm sorry for the death of a man I never loved while he 
 was alive." 
 
 He drew a chair close up in front of hers, and sat down 
 upon it. He thought that she was treating him to a little 
 bit of foolish girlish acting; and who can tell whether ha 
 
Daisy! 6 1 
 
 was right or not in his judgment? At any rate he had 
 had enough of it. So he commenced somewhat sternly and 
 suddenly, 
 
 " Now look here, Daisy, you and I had better understand 
 one another at once. I don't expect you to try to please me 
 yet nor do I desire you to feign what you don't feel ; but 
 I am your guardian ; and for your own credit's sake, child, I 
 insist upon this, that you make respectful mention of your 
 father, or that you do not mention him at all." 
 
 She looked him straight in the face while he was speaking ; 
 the little fair face, and the simply arranged yellow hair 
 looked irresistibly young and innocent. The eyes, too, were 
 not so impertinent as they had been a minute before. Alto- 
 gether he felt sorry for having spoken so crossly, not that, 
 but so sternly to this little creature, who was so entirely in 
 his power. 
 
 " Do you hear me, and heed me, Daisy ?" he asked, softly ; 
 and then she threw her head back, and laughed her pealing 
 laugh for a moment or two, and then sang, 
 
 " In all else I will obey, 
 But in this I must be free." 
 
 And he rose up and turned away from her more disgusted 
 and surprised than he had ever been at a woman's conduct 
 before. 
 
 " For God's sake," he exclaimed, " remember that he was 
 your father." 
 
 " He forgot the fact for seventeen years," she replied, 
 quickly. 
 
 '" How do you know that he forgot it ?" 
 
 " How do I know it!" the girl repeated mockingly; "how 
 do I know that my mother my darling mother was borne 
 down by her shame, and her fear, and her anger at it." 
 
 " Is your mother alive still ?" he interrupted hastily. 
 
 " Do you know anything about her ? " the girl cried. 
 
 " Nothing, nothing." 
 
 " Then you will not hear anything from me," she said, with 
 a sudden re-assumption of coolness. " Yes, you shall hear 
 this much. I 've seen my mother nearly mad with remorse, 
 and I have heard myself twitted, and taunted, and reviled 
 with what was quite as much that man's sin as my mother's 
 the pretty creature. I hated him for it, and I never for- 
 
62 Walter Goring. 
 
 gave him for it while he was alive, and 1 don't see that I 'm 
 called upon to do it now he is dead. Mr Travers came and 
 talked to me about his ' being the author of my being' the 
 day he died, hoping to make me weep ; but I couldn't do it, 
 and so I didn't do it ; and because I told the truth about it, old 
 Travers was much shocked ; but you 'II be friends with me, 
 won't you ? " she continued, suddenly going up to him and 
 placing her hand on his as it rested on the back of the chair 
 he had formerly occupied. 
 
 " Yes, I will ; and you in turn will oblige me, perhaps, in 
 one thing ? " 
 
 " What is it ? " 
 
 " Keep quiet for a few days. I judged you very hardly 
 when I came to the door just now, and you offended my 
 taste by breaking out in the way you did when I was talking 
 to you." 
 
 " You don't like my singing ? " 
 
 " Your singing is glorious only just now it 's unseemly." 
 
 " Perhaps it won't offend your taste if I tell you that if 
 you were to die now I shouldn't feel inclined to outrage de- 
 corum by singing. Won't you sit down and talk to me ? " 
 
 " Not to-night ; Mr Clarke is down below, and I must go 
 and talk to him." 
 
 " I talked to him once," she said with a laugh. 
 
 He remembered Clarke's words, and asked, "What did 
 you say ? " 
 
 " I believe I reminded him that the rest of the servants 
 held their tongues when their master and mistress were 
 talking. He was in a fearful rage, and " (her face blanched, 
 and sparks of fire flashed from her eyes) " reminded me of 
 what / was. I went and told Mr Goring, and Mr Goring 
 didn't hound him from the house, or break his neck. What 
 would you have done ? " 
 
 " I hardly know which," he replied ; and as he said it, 
 the girl exclaimed warmly, 
 
 " I'll keep quiet for a few days, cousin Walter, and you'll 
 come and see me again to-morrow, won't you ?" 
 
 He promised her that he would do so, and then left her, 
 thinking as he walked along the corridor and down the 
 stairs to rejoin Clarke, " This Daisy of mine will keep my 
 hands employed. I wonder how she will hit it off with Mrs 
 
A Wayward Ward. 63 
 
 Walsh ; she 's rather affected and rather designing, at the 
 same time she is neither ill-mannered nor ill-minded ; what- 
 e\er her experiences of life, they have not been gained 
 amongst vulgar or illiterate people. I won't force her con- 
 fidence, hut I think in time that she will tell me where and 
 with whom her life has heen passed ; it will be essential to 
 her happiness that I should know, in order that I may 
 guard her from contact with what will pain her ; and essen- 
 tial to my own, too, for I fancy that I shall get to be as 
 fond of her as a sister. I hope my goddess won't be high 
 and mighty, after her ordinary dear imperial manner, with 
 the poor lovable child." 
 
 Then he joined Clarke, and they went out together and 
 walked about on the lawn, and smoked their cigars. Ever 
 and anon Walter's eyes fell upon the grand old mass of 
 building in the foreground, and he experienced pleasurable 
 sensations of ownership. Through his pen he had won for 
 himself a name that sounded already. But he had never 
 had a "local habitation" before; and now he had such a fair 
 one ! Small wonder that his bosom's lord sat lightly on his 
 throne, despite that uncertainty still existing about the sealed 
 letter containing old Gilbert Goring's latest desires. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 A WAYWARD WARD. 
 
 THE funeral was over. Decently and in order or rather 
 pompously and ceremoniously, as became his position in the 
 county had Gilbert Goring, Esq., of Goring Place, been 
 laid with his fathers. The neighbouring gentlemen sent their 
 carriages with the windows closed, and one or two of them 
 even attended in person. For " Old Goring " had been 
 much respected, as the phrase is ; though one or two, whose 
 own sins had not found them out yet, did shake their heads 
 about the daughter who came to their knowledge grown up, 
 and without an apparent or mentionable mother. 
 
64 Walter G 01 ing. 
 
 But riches, like charity, cover a multitude of sins. It waa 
 only those, after all, who were not asked, who had of late 
 not dined at Goring Place ; and now it was only those who 
 had remained ignorant of the day who stayed away from the 
 funeral, or omitted to pay some mark of respect to the old 
 man on his road to his long home. In all that county side 
 there was only one who thought about old Gilbert Goring at 
 all who did not wish " peace to his soul," and that one was 
 his daughter. 
 
 She attended to her cousin's injunctions, and kept very 
 quiet through the whole of the day. In common with the 
 rest of the household, she had been present when the will 
 was read in the presence of the heir and a few neighbours, 
 to whom were left trifling legacies, such as rings, racing cups, 
 &c. She had listened coldly and composedly, and had be- 
 trayed neither surprise nor annoyance when she found that 
 the whole property was left to her cousin, Walter Goring. 
 But her cheeks flushed a little when it was added that a sum 
 of three thousand pounds was bequeathed by the testator to 
 his beloved and only child, Marguerite. 
 
 This was Gilbert Goring's last will and testament; this waa 
 his final disposition of his property. But the lawyer explained 
 that there was still something else which he had to deliver 
 up to the heir namely, " a letter containing the expression 
 of wishes, heartfelt wishes, which his late esteemed friend and 
 client had not desired to make public, as they would have 
 been had they been mentioned in a will, and which therefore 
 he had contented himself with enjoining in the most sacred 
 manner on his nephew and heir in a letter, the decrees of 
 which, though they would not hold good in a court of law, 
 would, he was convinced, be respected by a man of such 
 well-known probity and honour as his nephew, Walter 
 Goring." 
 
 Immediately after thie, Daisy went back to her room, the 
 company dispersed, and the owner of the house and his 
 lawyer were alone together. The latter at once gave into the 
 hands of the former a square, sealed packet, and for at least 
 a couple of hours Walter Goring was employed in reading a 
 portion of the story of his uncle's life, and the statement of 
 his last earnest, heart-felt wishes. What these were may not 
 be told yet. When Walter Goring brought his reading to a 
 
A Wayward Ward. 65 
 
 Conclusion he raised his eyes, and found the round, black 
 orbs of the lawyer fixed upon him. 
 
 " You know the contents of this ?" he asked. 
 
 " Only the latter portion which is drawn up on parchment. 
 I wrote that, for your uncle was undecided whether or not to 
 make its conditions imperative on you by having it signed 
 by, and signing it in the presence of, witnesses. What he 
 might have done eventually I cannot tell ; but you see, as it 
 is, he died relying on your honour." 
 
 " And his reliance on what no man ever doubted yet shall 
 be justified. One or other of his conditions shall be fulfilled." 
 
 " Which do you at present incline towards fulfilling ? " 
 the lawyer asked. 
 
 " I don't ' incline towards fulfilling ' either, to tell the 
 truth ; but inclination is not to be mentioned in a case like 
 this. Come, what shall we do, Clarke, to get rid of the 
 time till half-past seven? Are there any horses in the 
 stables besides that fat brown brute that brought us over 
 yesterday ? " 
 
 " Only a pair of fatter black brutes that go in the carriage." 
 
 " By Jove, I '11 see to mending matters then, very soon. 
 I'll go up to town next week and get a stud together. 
 After all, I shall quarter myself here, and get a lot of my 
 friends about me the place is too fine to be deserted. 
 
 " And how about la belle cousin 1 " 
 
 " Ah ! what am I to do with her 1 She talked to me 
 beautifully for an hour to-day, but I didn't dare to venture 
 to suggest that she must go ; and where to send her I don't 
 know. I can't send her to school ; and she can't stay here 
 if I do 1 
 
 " It would be pleasant, but not proper," the lawyer laughed. 
 
 " I daresay I shall think of something soon," Walter said, 
 lightly ; " meanwhile let us go and have a look at the stable 
 accommodation. I shall have plenty to do for some months 
 in getting the place as I shall like to see it." 
 
 "The drawing-rooms are rather in a state of decay: have 
 you looked at them yet V Mr Clarke asked. 
 
 "No; the only rooms I've seen besides the dining-room 
 are the study and a sweet sort of little boudoir where my 
 cousin was sitting. Can't we get in through one of these 
 windows ? they 're open, arid they 're low enough." 
 
 E 
 
66 Walter Goring. 
 
 They walked as he spoke towards one of the windows to 
 the left of the entrance door ; it was open, and the faded, 
 heavy silken curtains were drawn back. He put his hand on 
 the sill and vaulted lightly into the room, calling out 
 " Come along, Clarke ! " and the next instant he wished that 
 he had not shouted to Clarke to come along, for there, kneel- 
 ing before a cabinet, the glass of which was freshly broken, 
 he saw Daisy. 
 
 She started to her feet as he entered, and gave a little cry 
 of anger not of fear. 
 
 " What do you come in in that way for ? " she asked ; and 
 he replied, 
 
 " What are you doing here ? " 
 
 " Looking for something that belongs to me, Mr Goring," 
 she replied haughtily. 
 
 " Excuse me, Daisy dear, but you shouldn't have done it 
 in this way," he said, good-humouredly. He was intensely 
 relieved to find that Clarke had not followed him. 
 
 " Excuse me, but I should, since I 'd no other way ; this 
 room is yours, and I 'd no right in it and the cabinet is yours, 
 and I ought not to have broken it but the picture is mine, 
 and I will have it ! " 
 
 " What picture, Daisy ? " 
 
 " My mother's my own darling mother's/' the girl said, 
 sullenly. " I wanted to get it away before you saw it ; he 
 showed it to me once, and showed me where he kept it, and 
 pretended that it was his love for her had made him keep it 
 his love for her ! I determined that I 'd take it away as 
 eoon as I could ; and you '11 let me have it, won't you ? 
 won't you ? " she continued, in a voice of passionate entreaty. 
 " It will be nothing to you, and it ; s so much to me." 
 
 He went over and tried the door ; it was fast locked. 
 " We won't risk cutting our hands by putting them through 
 this broken glass ; besides, young lady, we should have to de- 
 stroy that fine fluted silk before we could' get at what you 
 want ; let us go and look for the key, about a thousand were 
 put on the study table labelled this morning." 
 
 She put both, her hands round his arm. 
 
 " How good you are," she said, coaxingly. 
 
 " I can't return the compliment, Daisy," he said, kindly ; 
 "instead of making a small scene about getting your pic- 
 
A Wayward Ward. 67 
 
 hire, why didn't you come, or send, and ask me for it pro- 
 perly?" 
 
 Then they found the key, and went back to the dilapi- 
 dated drab silk drawing-room. 
 
 " You'll know the picture directly," she began, excitedly ; 
 " it 's in an oval frame, with my name, Marguerite, traced at 
 the bottom and she 's something like me, only her hair is 
 golden, and her face pretty." 
 
 Her own face looked pretty enough as she spoke, watching 
 him with parted lips, and cheeks into which a bright blush 
 had mounted. When he found the picture he handed it to 
 her without giving the face so much as a glance ; and when 
 she had clasped it caressingly to her bosom, she held it out, 
 saying, 
 
 " Won't you look at her my mother ? " 
 
 " You have forgotten," he said, gently, " that only last 
 night you did't wish me to know anything about her, Daisy ; 
 I won't take advantage of this to force your confidence/' 
 
 " Thank you/' she said, quietly, withdrawing her picture 
 again and turning to leave the room. 
 
 He watched her as she walked along. She moved beauti- 
 fully not with a mere natural grace and ease, but with a 
 certain studied elegance that had evidently been taught her. 
 Then for the first time he noticed the rare symmetry of her 
 figure. 
 
 " She 's built something like the girl I met at Walsh's the 
 other night," he thought ; " and she 's not unlike her in other 
 respects, though the other 's so dark." 
 
 Thinking this, he went back into the garden to Mr Clarke, 
 and told that gentleman that the drab drawing-room was in 
 a state of decay and no mistake, whatever the others might 
 be. "I J ve managed to smash the glass of one of the cabinets 
 already," he said ; but he added no word relative to Daisy. 
 
 It was arranged that the two gentlemen should return to 
 town together on the following day, (Saturday,) and that in 
 the course of the evening Walter should communicate this 
 arrangement to his ward, and at the same time sound her as 
 to her own wishes about her future manner of life. " Nofe 
 that she 's likely to suggest anything feasible, but still I may 
 as well hear what she has to say about it." He had deter- 
 mined to obviate any immediate awkwardness by not 
 
68 Walter Goring. 
 
 back himself to Goring Place until he could induce the 
 Walshes to come with him. " Then she 'II make it all 
 straight," he said to himself with a lively remembrance of 
 his friend's fertility of resource in all social difficulties. 
 
 Nevertheless, though he felt thus secure in the thoughts of 
 Mrs Walsh's future partisanship, his heart rather misgave 
 him when he found himself in the presence of his ward. 
 She was seated on a low stool near an open window, in a 
 cloud of crape, and she had been crying. On the whole she 
 looked very fragile and gentle and pretty. 
 
 "I'm very glad you have come," she said, lifting up her 
 head and holding out her hand to him cordially. Coming 
 out as it did from the cloud of crape he could see that it was 
 a very beautiful hand and arm which was thus extended to 
 him ; it was not only a hand that an artist would have ad- 
 mired, but it was an artistic hand a hand that expressed a 
 very strong feeling for the beautiful. " I 'in very glad you 
 have come, and I shall be very glad when that man goes 
 away, for then I shall see more of you, I hope." 
 
 " I am going away with him to-morrow, but when I come 
 back" 
 
 '' Going away to-morrow ! " she said ; " are you really ? " 
 
 " Yes, really." 
 
 "What for?" 
 
 " To go up and settle some business, and see some people, 
 and get horses and friends to come down here and cheer us 
 up a bit." 
 
 " I shall be glad enough to see the horses, but I hope the 
 friends won't come yet ; if they do, I shall see nothing of 
 you." 
 
 " You will see nothing of me till they do come." 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 " Because I shall not return until Mr and Mrs Walsh, very 
 old friends of mine, can come with me." 
 
 " Why not ? " she persisted. 
 
 He laughed. " If you will have it, then, because I won't 
 have it said that my ward is in a bachelor's house when there 
 are no married ladies there." 
 
 "Uncalled-for precautions," she said, sadly; "as far as 
 I'm concerned, rny name can't be called in question." 
 
 " Tt is now my turn to ask, ' Why not, Daisy ? ' ' 
 
A Wayward Ward. 69 
 
 "Because I have none," she answered, almost fiercely; 
 then she added more softly, " it 's rather hard, Mr Goring, 
 that I should feel this, isn't it ? That 's my inheritance, to 
 know it, and to feel it from the bottom of my heart." 
 
 She crossed her white arms over on her knees, letting the 
 cloudy crape float back from off them as she did so, and then 
 she bent forward till her little head rested on them. The 
 attitude was a wonderfully willowy, graceful one ; the girl 
 was like a cat, in that, do what she would, she never did any- 
 thing awkwardly. He watched her admiringly for a few 
 minutes, and thought and wondered what Mrs Walsh would 
 think of her. Then he felt uncomfortable ; he fancied she 
 was crying. 
 
 " Daisy, Daisy ! " he said, imploringly, " believe that all I 
 do is for your good, and to ensure your happiness." Then he 
 tried to raise the bowed head from the folded arms, and, when 
 he had succeeded, she looked at him reproachfully, arid the 
 tears fell down heavily in big drops. 
 
 "Daisy, don't cry I can't stand it. What can I do?" 
 he cried. 
 
 " Promise me that you won't send me away to live with 
 some old harridan of a woman, or have one here to live with 
 me," she sobbed. 
 
 " I promise. Yes yes ; do not cry, my dear child. Come 
 and sing me something." 
 
 When he said that, Daisy cleared up in a moment, and 
 bounded to the piano, and the next moment she was singing, 
 at the full Daisy-power, that wonderfully joyous, silly little 
 song, which has for refrain the words, 
 
 " And I eannot choose but sing how delightful is the day, 
 And the little birds that sing how very fair ! " 
 
 and Walter hung enraptured over her. 
 
 " Artist ! amend your craft ! with shields nor spears, 
 Sculpture your Venus Victrix, but in tears," 
 
 writes Alfred Austin, the brilliant satirist, who has said many 
 things that we do not like of us, but more that we do. 
 
 He could not reprove her any longer for singing " under 
 the sad circumstances." He was not hypocritical enough to 
 desire her to check what appeared to bo the natural expres- 
 sion of her feelings. Her voice was remarkably pure, power- 
 
/o Walter Goring 
 
 ful, and well cultivated. But its most remarkable quality 
 was the quality Walter Goring most admired in it 
 joyousness. Never a lark had carolled at heaven's gate 
 more exultantly, apparently, than did this girl. She was 
 great in the pathetic passages, and forcible and telling in the 
 powerful ones ; but it was in the joyous ones that she was 
 unequalled. 
 
 As I write of her I think of one whose life path ran par- 
 allel with mine for a while, whose will was as wayward, 
 whose heart was as true, whose defiant cobalt blue eyes were 
 as sweetly impertinent, whose antecedents were little less sad, 
 though in a widely different way, and whose voice was as 
 bright a strain of music, as joy-expressing, joy-inspiring a 
 thing as were those of this Daisy of mine. And I pause for 
 a moment to write "a blessing on the bright, young, yellow 
 head " that always played the part of a sunbeam to me, and 
 feel that I can write no more to-night. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 A GOOD INFLUENCE. 
 
 A FEW days after this "Walter was down at Roehampton, and 
 Daisy was alone at Goring Place, practising her singing scales 
 morning, noon, and night, in order to pleasure him with 
 apparently unpremeditated bursts of melody that should 
 never be half a note untrue or flat when he returned. The 
 one dread she had about her vocalisation was, that she might 
 not " come back " from some high-pitched shivering fit on the 
 upper notes with apparent ease. So now that he, the man 
 whom she wanted to please, was away, she strengthened her 
 voice by all the means of which she had ever heard, and 
 exercised it until its flexibility became a matter of marvel 
 even unto herself. The rumour of the wonderful beauty of 
 it reached the village, and Mrs Travel's, who thumped the 
 harmonium and led the choir, began to wish to get Daisy to 
 join it. But Daisy declined the honour when it was proffered 
 
A Good Influence. 71 
 
 her, in a way that made Mrs Travers remember " the girl's 
 origin " at once. 
 
 While Daisy was making the walls of old Goring Place 
 ring again with bursts of scientifically-managed glee, Walter 
 was at Eoehampton seeking to interest Mrs Walsh about his 
 ward, and for the first time finding Mrs Walsh utterly un- 
 sympathetic. He had gone down there to luncheon, and he 
 had found Mrs Walsh alone ; and then he had made the mis- 
 take of introducing the subject of his cousin at once, as if it 
 were of paramount importance to him. 
 
 " What would you suggest my doing with her?" he asked, 
 earnestly. 
 
 " Send her to school." 
 
 " She 's past that in every way." 
 
 " From what you told me, I judged her to be a flippant 
 little cub, and thought a year or two's schooling would do her 
 an immense deal of good. I can suggest nothing else." 
 
 " She 's past schooling in every way, and you did promise 
 to help me about her if I found myself in a difficulty. I ; m 
 in a difficulty now. I mean to live at Goring Place, so she 
 can't, that 's clear. Where had I better send her." 
 
 "Send her back to her own people," Mrs Walsh said, 
 scornfully. 
 
 He shook his head impatiently. 
 
 " You won't help me, then ? " 
 
 " I can't ; I am not prepossessed by what you have told 
 me about her." 
 
 " I have tried to give you my own impressions of her, and 
 I certainly am prepossessed. I was very much in hopes that 
 you would have liked her, in which case I should have placed 
 her with some duenna near you, in order that you might 
 have seen a good deal of her." 
 
 " I have no vocation that way," Mrs Walsh said, coldly. 
 " From what you have told me about her, I think she must 
 be a pert, under-bred, flirting girl." 
 
 "Flirting! Good heavens! Poor child, that was far 
 enough from her thoughts." 
 
 " Oh, nonsense ! Don't make her into a heroine brimming 
 over with fine feelings. She tried a few Clapham school-girl 
 tricks on you, and even she must have been amused to see 
 how wonderfully they told. Is she pretty ? " 
 
72 Walter Goring. 
 
 " Hardly yes, rather; in figure she's something like that 
 Miss St John." 
 
 " Miss St John has the typhus fever, and is not expected 
 to recover." 
 
 He started as if he had been shot. The girl had interested 
 him very much, though other things had put her out of his 
 head. He had not been wrought upon to the falling-in-love 
 point, but he had been very much interested in her. So now 
 when Mrs Walsh said "she is not likely to recover," he 
 started as if he had been shot, and exclaimed 
 
 " You don't say so ! Poor girl !" 
 
 Now that Miss St John was down nearly unto death, Mrs 
 Walsh could be very just, if not generous, to her. 
 
 " Yes, she is," she replied ; " she caught it nursing one of 
 her sister's children. Mrs Prescott is only a selfish, lovely 
 idiot, you know, although all you men make such an absurd 
 fuss about her, because she smiles at all your platitudes ; so, 
 directly the eldest child was taken ill, she rushed and en- 
 sconced herself in a far corner of the house with the well 
 ones, and left the nursing to her sister." 
 
 " My idea of Mrs Prescott was that the only mind she had 
 was the maternal." 
 
 "It's only one of the many mistakes you make about 
 women." 
 
 " I made no mistake about her sister. I thought her what 
 she has proved herself a brave, kind-hearted girl." 
 
 " You had such a good opportunity of judging while she 
 was in the conservatory with you, of course. Shall we go 
 for a drive this afternoon ( \ " 
 
 " Yes," he agreed to the proposition. So they had her 
 own pony-carriage out, and went for a long drive ; and while 
 they were out they discussed what style of phaeton and trap 
 it would be best to send down to Goring Place, and she was 
 interested as to the colour of his horses, and altogether talked 
 to him so bewitchingly, that he forgot both Charlie St John 
 and his cousin Daisy. Moreover, it was decided while they 
 were out, that she should ]"-r.su;ide Ralph to take her down 
 to Goring Place as soon as Yvaltcr could get a few horses and 
 some other things together that were needed at once. "And 
 till you go, you '11 stay with us, won't you 1 " she asked ; " if 
 you don't, I shall think you 've grown too big a man." 
 
A Good Influence. 73 
 
 So until he went back with the Walshes as his guests to 
 Goring Place, he stayed at Roehampton ; and though the 
 time seemed very short to him, Daisy had more than a fort- 
 night's clear practice of those upper notes with which she 
 wanted to astonish him on his return. He meanwhile thought 
 very little of Daisy, only wondered at intervals "how sho 
 would hit it off" with Mrs Walsh. 
 
 He tried very hard, he made frequent and earnest efforts 
 to get into the same grooves in which he had run so easily 
 before he was a man of property. " I shall have cause to 
 curse Goring Place if it makes me an idle hound," he said 
 one morning to Mrs Walsh. "I never do anything lik.- 
 work now ; I Ve forgotten where I left all my young people. 
 I shall never get them into position." 
 
 Then she urged him to try, begging him to read up bits of 
 it to her, and to think out some scenes that they had often 
 talked over together, and to work on at his novel generally, 
 in fact. 
 
 " I shall be sorry that you ever heard of Goring Place, too, 
 if it makes you lax about literature." 
 
 " Do you think more of my fame than my fortune \ " he 
 asked. 
 
 " Yes," she answered, warmly, like a true woman ; and he 
 rose at once to get the long-neglected MS., and as he passed 
 out of the room, he paused by her side for a moment to say 
 
 " Thanks for that, my goddess." 
 
 And she replied, kindly 
 
 " Ralph and I have always hoped such bright things for 
 you." 
 
 She was a woman whose little airs, and graces, and cap- 
 rices, all shown out of regard for him, were worth enduring, 
 after all. 
 
 It is far from a pleasant thing to read one's own MS. works 
 aloud, as a rule. The majority of people are utterly incap- 
 able of following the interest, unless each connecting link is 
 laid before them ; the majority also are addicted to the asking 
 of awkward questions about "what you mean to do with so- 
 and-so?" and "how such and such an incident is to be 
 worked " into the general pattern without looking patchy ] 
 As one is usually quite as much in the dark as one's inter- 
 rogator as to the ultimate end of the means used, the position 
 
74 Walter Goring. 
 
 must be admitted to be an awkward, not to say a humiliating 
 one. 
 
 But surely there can be no man or woman either so 
 cursed by fate, none so utterly desolate, but that at some pe- 
 riod or other of his literary career he has met with an entirely 
 appreciative listener met with one who follows him, and un- 
 derstands almost before he does himself on whom no point 
 is thrown away, no epigram wasted one whom the pathos 
 touches to no feigned tenderness, and from whom the hu- 
 mour wrings no falsely gleeful smiles. A sympathetic audi- 
 tor, in fact, who, abo^e all things, abstains from the disgust- 
 ing habit of charging the writer with having made lame 
 sketches of self or friends in any of the characters. Such a 
 listener is a crown of glory a superb joy to the one who is 
 listened to ; and such a listener was Horatia Walsh. 
 
 I say that this woman was his friend, and a very good, 
 true friend to him too, for, distracting as were the circum- 
 stances through which he had but just passed, he got into 
 harness again under her influence, and began to do some very 
 useful work at her feet. Many of her female friends, could 
 they have witnessed the scene of this morning the beautiful 
 woman sitting there on a low couch in a corner of the shaded 
 room, and the young attractive man reading page after page 
 of his own impassioned words to her many of her female 
 Friends, had they witnessed this, would have bridled their 
 blameless heads, and believed hard things of them both. Yet 
 in reality she was only urging him by the mute influence of 
 an interest and a trust in him that was felt rather than ex- 
 pressed, to touch a noble aim. He knew that she believed 
 in his best. He knew that she had reliance on his belief in 
 this confidence of hers ; and she was his friend, for he desired 
 to justify her faith in him. In just the same way would she 
 stand and see the best, and feel the best, in the pictures her 
 husband was painting. But many people declared that the 
 interest she took in these latter was but cold and artificial, 
 and that the interest she took in Walter Goring's works was 
 the genuine thing. She knew well that this was said, and 
 she smiled her proud smile about it, knowing that they 
 wronged her that was all. 
 
 The reading of his story to Mrs Walsh brought up Walter 
 Goring's own interest in it again to the working point j and 
 
A Good Influence. 75 
 
 so starting fresh as he did, he made great progress in it dur- 
 ing the remainder of the time he spent at Roehampton. " I 
 shall take it down and polish it off in time to get it out by 
 the end of September," he said. " I shall devote the winter 
 to the sports and pastimes of my country, and go in for the 
 collecting new ideas concerning country life; after this is 
 finished, I don't write another line till the spring." 
 
 " And then you'll break out into a novel all over horses 
 and men in pink ; your hero will ' ride straight' through the 
 book, and your heroine do marvellous things in the way of 
 ' gentling ' refractory colts and teaching setter-dogs to ' down- 
 charge ; ' that is always the result of an author going down 
 into the country to write a novel quietly." 
 
 He laughed : " Feminine influence shall intervene, and 
 strike out whatever may appear too animal in the sense you 
 mean." 
 
 " Whose influence ? Your cousin's ?" 
 
 " Yours, of course, if you '11 honour me by exercising it 
 still." 
 
 " I promise I will, even if you make a heroine of Daisy." 
 
 " Or of Miss St John ? " he asked, laughing. 
 
 " No ; in that case I couldn't. I should feel no interest 
 in a book in which such a very uninteresting character had a 
 prominent place ; it may be bad taste on my part, but to me 
 Miss Charlie St John is the type of mediocrity in manner, 
 appearance, and mind ; and " (Mrs Walsh reserved her heavi- 
 est shot for the last) "the worst of.it is, that she is too old 
 to improve." 
 
 He laughed good-humouredly ; on the whole he did not 
 dislike this display of animus ; it was not at all uncompli- 
 mentary to himself. 
 
 " I think you would like her better in a book than out of 
 it." 
 
 " Yes," she replied, coolly ; " because I could put her 
 down when I chose." 
 
 This conversation took place the day before they left Roe- 
 hampton for Goring Place. The following morning they 
 started, and the stud Walter Goring had got together met 
 them in charge of three grooms at the Shoreditch station. 
 There were six horses in all a couple of carriage-horses, a 
 couple of hunters, and a splendid pair of roadsters, one of 
 
76 Walter Goring". 
 
 which, a chestnut, beautiful as a star, was " warranted to 
 carry a lady." In the midst of his London business and 
 literary bliss, Walter Goring had remembered the delight 
 which had expressed itself in Daisy's face at the mention of the 
 horses that were coming down, and he promised himself the 
 pleasure of teaching her to ride, and watching the graceful 
 lines of her perfect figure, in at once the most trying and the 
 most becoming position in which it could be seen. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 GLOVES ! 
 
 AT a first, a cursory glance at the great subject of gloves, one 
 may imagine it easily to be divided into the two classes of 
 gloves (kid or otherwise) that fit, and those that don't. But 
 this is, to say the least of it, a very superficial view to take of 
 a matter of such colossal interest to that vast section of hu- 
 manity which consents to render itself partially incapable, 
 through the agency of, and for the sake of supporting, the 
 glover and trader in the skins of the pretty little baby goats. 
 Will any one of the countless thousands who will doubt- 
 less peruse this be kind enough to recall a vision of the first 
 pair of gloves into which he or she was inducted ? They will 
 shrink from the wraith of those lamb's-wool disfigurements pro- 
 bably ? Well, I will do it for them even at the risk of wring- 
 ing some fair soul to anguish. They were guileless of finger 
 divisions, those first handcoverings of yours and mine. They 
 were of thick texture, and undistinguishable outline. The 
 only art that was attended to in their construction was the 
 art of keeping baby's hands warm. They were of all colours, 
 blue and pink predominating, And they were generally tied 
 round the wrist, to the detriment of our circulation, with a 
 ribbon of the same colour, but a different shade. What pride 
 our mothers and aunts and grandmothers, and the rest of the 
 ministering spirits of our childhood, had in muffling us in 
 these knitted abominations! How regardless they were of 
 
Gloves! jf 
 
 the fact that we immediately gave our hands a vapour bath, a 
 thing that might have had an extremely injurious effect upon 
 our immature organisation, by thrusting them a long way 
 down our throat, and then waving them wildly abroad over 
 so much of the world as came under them conveniently ! 
 How we made scientific experiments on colour, by extracting 
 with our lips as much as we could from the confining ribbon ! 
 How surely within ten minutes of their being put upon us 
 was one lost, and the other mislaid, with so much baby-tact 
 that it was never found again ! What a refreshing and im- 
 proving spectacle one of those gloves w r ould be to us now ! 
 How small our hands were, and how innocent ! and how 
 entirely devoted to our own pleasures ! which ' last consisted 
 mainly in conveying everything that was nice, and much that 
 was not, to our mouths ! 
 
 Our next step in the glove world w r as not nice. "We went 
 from warm, soft, ingratiating lamb's-wool, which, if not pretty 
 was at least pleasant, into Lisle thread, or spun silk. The 
 former of these useful manufactures was a loathsome one. 
 We suffered them because we were anxious that the dignity 
 of gloves should be ours at any cost any cost of pain to our- 
 selves, that is. Our parents were not equally magnificent in 
 giving us the dignity at any cost of money. But these Lisle- 
 thread gloves were an awful suffering ! They grated harshly 
 on our skin every time we drew them on, in a way that sent 
 us " abroad in the meadows to see the young lambs," and in 
 quest of other genial Sanford and Merton sights, with our 
 teeth on edge and our tempers ruffled ! But we were then in 
 obedience to some imbecile imaginary law of gentility, against 
 which we were taught to think that we should offend if we 
 stripped them off and gave our hapless paws the fair play 
 which was not denied to Neptune and Trim and the rest of 
 our canine playfellows. We are ready now, of course, as 
 grown-up sensible people, to suffer a little for beauty's sake. 
 But I think we must all regret the suffering that odious thread 
 of Lisle imposed upon our youth, and which we bore, not for 
 beauty's, but mythical gentility's sake. 
 
 Spun silk was a milder form of agony that is to say, it 
 did not " hurt," it simply stuck to us like a caterpillar, a bad 
 name, an undesirable acquaintance, and other things of that 
 sort. When we drew off gloves in those days we always left 
 
78 Walter Goring. 
 
 a light hairy trimming on the backs of our hands from the 
 silk of which the coverings were composed. 
 
 The next was an honourable and glorious step in the days 
 when I was young we went into our first kids ! It is no- 
 thing now, when infants of six months, or their mammas for 
 them, are fastidious about the cut of the thumb, and object 
 to the triangular gusset because it makes them crease in the 
 back. But in olden times, the first time we inserted our hands 
 into kids was a white-stone day a day to be remembered and 
 talked about with pride, tempered with awe, amongst our 
 compeers. 
 
 They were not always a brilliant success. Mine, for in- 
 stance, were a decided failure. I loved them dearly for half- 
 an-hour, at the end of that time I was prone to confess 
 to myself that they bored me. I could not take a firm hold 
 of anything in life by reason of the liberality with which kid 
 had been expended on the fingers. The buttoning them cost 
 me a small piece of flesh, for I could not accomplish it for 
 myself, and the kind friend who assisted in installing me into 
 these new honours could not achieve it until a small piece of 
 me had been sacrificed between the button and her determined 
 nail. Looking back upon them now, I must confess, too, that 
 their hue was unpleasant. They were of an olive green ; they 
 would recklessly crease themselves to a degree that brought 
 me wrath; the price of them was mentioned, too, with 
 severity, and I was bidden to remember that kid gloves did 
 not grow upon trees, for which, all things considered, I was 
 devoutly thankful. Unmixed bliss not being in the wearing 
 them, I was very glad when they left me, which they did 
 shortly in a darkly mysterious manner, which brought me 
 more wrath. I have since had reason to suppose that they 
 afforded first recreation and then indigestion to a lethargic 
 pet King Charles spaniel, who was in the habit of trying to 
 eat everything, from the foundation of the house, at which in 
 his frequent hours of leisure he would dig furiously, to his 
 master's boot-laces, and failing, poor dog, in consequence of 
 having left his teeth behind him in a trap that he endeavoured 
 to swallow early in life. 
 
 Gloves have been treated at length because they were the 
 first rock on which Daisy split after meeting with Mrs Walsh. 
 
 Walter Goring and his guests had reached Goring Place in 
 
Gloves! 79 
 
 time to dress comfortably for a seven o'clock dinner on Satur- 
 day night. On their arrival, Mrs Walsh had been straightway 
 conducted to the rooms that had been set apart for her. Mr 
 Walsh had foundered in the corridor with the Lelys and 
 Vandycks, and Walter had gone at once to look for his 
 cousin. He found her, as he expected, in her own sitting- 
 room. It was the only room which had been refurnished for 
 the last seventy or eighty years, and it had been made as 
 bright and pretty as brilliant chintz, and polished wood, and 
 gold mouldings, and the pale green watered paper could make 
 it. Poor Gilbert Goring had tried to touch his daughter's 
 heart through its adornments, and failed. 
 
 The girl was a born actress. She knew intuitively the 
 situation and the scenes in which she showed to the best ad- 
 vantage. It was more with a desire of throwing a halo of 
 grace and sweetness and refinement around herself, than 
 from any love of the flowers, that she had laid a heavy tribute 
 on the gardens this day, and bedecked her room plentifully 
 with the fairest blooms she could find. She wanted Walter 
 to come in, and be struck at once with sweet odours and 
 sweet sounds. Young as she was, she had a great notion of 
 getting at men's hearts through their senses. So she grouped 
 roses about everywhere, in tall vases and flat baskets, and 
 wore a pale buff queen of flowers in her bosom, and, as the 
 hour approached for him to come in, she seated herself at the 
 piano and flooded the air with melody. 
 
 He opened the door quietly, and watched her and listened 
 admiringly to her for a minute or two before she became con- 
 scious of his presence. He wished that he had brought Mrs 
 Walsh to see and hear her, and be charmed as he was with 
 the air of sweet unpremeditation and unconsciousness. He 
 little knew that Mrs Walsh would have seen through it all, 
 and despised her for one of the little tricks of the trade with 
 which she herself was not wholly unacquainted. Women see 
 through these artless artifices much more clearly than men ; 
 they are on the track remorselessly in an instant, and rarely 
 leave it until they have run down the motive and held it up 
 to scorn. 
 
 At last that electric power which passes from the liked to 
 the liker thrilled her, and she knew, without hearing a sound 
 of him, without catching a glimpse of him, without giving a 
 
So Walter Goring. 
 
 sign that she knew it, that he was there and that he waa 
 looking at her. Very carefully and very brilliantly she 
 finished her song, and then very leisurely bent down and 
 selected from the music-rack that song which we all laugh at 
 and all like from some reason or other, and then treated 
 Walter to a burst of the melodious conviction 
 " He will return, I know Mm well, 
 He will not leave me here to die." 
 
 What man could have stood it ] 
 
 " I should rather think he wouldn't leave you ' here ' or 
 anywhere else to die*! H he exclaimed, going up to her quickly ; 
 and she started up, putting one hand out to greet him, and 
 the other down on the music stool to steady it, making her 
 figure take a graceful curve as she moved, that was not lost 
 upon that lover of the beautiful, Mr Walter Goring. 
 
 " When did you come in 1 " she asked. 
 
 " Two minutes ago." 
 
 " And I meant to have been down to meet you ! How 
 dreadfully provoking ! Has Mrs Walsh come 1 " 
 
 "Yes/' he replied. " She's gone to dress, and I must do 
 the same, but I thought I would just look you up first." 
 Then he added, " I want you to come down with me pre- 
 sently, and be 'ready to receive her. You must play hostess, 
 you know, Daisy." 
 
 " I '11 play anything you like, I 'm so v glad to have you back 
 again, Mr Goring." 
 
 " I don't call you ' Miss Goring.' " 
 
 Her brow crimsoned. 
 
 "You don't do it, partly because I'm your ward, and 
 partly because it 's not my name, I suppose. But what should 
 I call you if I didn't call you ' Mr Goring ? ; ' 
 
 He didn't like to say, " Call me Walter ; " there is a sort 
 of sentimentalism about such a request from which the 
 bravest man may shrink without reproach after one-and- 
 twenty. The Christian name should always rise to the lips 
 spontaneously ; there is something inharmonious about ask- 
 ing and being asked to utter it. Nevertheless, he wished her 
 t > call him " Walter," in a cousinly sort of way, at the out- 
 set iK-forg Mrs Walsh : so he said 
 
 k> Oh, call me anything, or nothing; not * Mr Goring' 
 I can't stand that ! " 
 
Gloves ! 8 1 
 
 To which she replied as simply as possible, " Very well, 
 Walter." 
 
 " It 's a quarter, to seven now, and we dine at seven I 
 must be off and dress : how well you look, Daisy." 
 
 She glanced over her shoulder at the effect of the black 
 dress she wore, then a purely feminine difficulty which had 
 been much oppressing her came to the surface and would be 
 spoken about. 
 
 " Walter," she began rather piteously, " I have been in 
 such trouble ; the dressmaker at Deneham is a beast." 
 
 " Is she, indeed ? " he said, laughing. 
 
 " You wouldn't laugh if you had to wear what she had 
 made. And that Mrs Walsh will have come down with all 
 her London Paris-modelled things ! " 
 
 " ' That Mrs Walsh ' won't judge you by your dress, 
 Daisy," he said, gravely ; " besides, dear, you couldn't look 
 better than you do." 
 
 " couldn't I indeed ? " the girl cried out heartily ; " you 
 give me a French milliner, and see whether I wouldn't come 
 out looking a trifle better. And as to Mrs Walsh ' not 
 judging me by my dress/ I don't care one bit for her judg- 
 ment. I only want to look as well as she does." 
 
 He was on the point of answering "you do that," but he 
 remembered just in time that he did not think so ; and that, 
 moreover, his goddess would not like him to think so. 
 Therefore he checked the utterance, and said instead, that he 
 would go and dress, and return for Daisy in ten minutes. 
 
 When he was gone Daisy rushed to her bed-room, and 
 ascertained through the agency of a cheval and hand-glass 
 exactly how the skirt of her dress looked. Then she thought 
 a thanksgiving for that Mrs Walsh had no cheval in her 
 room, put !?-er yellow hair into more perfect order, and 
 then returned to her boudoir, to look as composed as she 
 could, and await Walter's coming to lead her down to receive 
 the guests. 
 
 If it be thought that he made rather too much of this 
 young girl, let it be remembered that she was left in his 
 power as it were ; that she had no other friend in the world ; 
 and that he was a very chivalrous man. 
 
 Presently he came, and she went down with him into the 
 big drab drawing-room the same room in which he had 
 
82 Walter Goring. 
 
 found her kneeling before the broken cabinet. The stiff old 
 furniture the absence of flowers the look of disuse alto- 
 gether which was over the apartment, struck Walter forcibly, 
 coming as he did from Daisy's room above. 
 
 11 1 told Mrs Marsh to make the place look as well as she 
 could with the old things ; but she doesn't seem to have 
 effected much ; however, it does not irfuch matter," he con- 
 tinued, " Mrs Walsh understands that she is to see Goring 
 Place in the rough ; you might have had some flowers here 
 though, Daisy." 
 
 "ill get some after dinner, if you will come out and help 
 me to gather them," she replied. 
 
 "We will see about that," he answered. And then the 
 door opened slowly, and Mrs W T alsh came into the room. 
 
 He took Daisy's hand, and led her towards Mrs Walsh as 
 he would have led a child. He forgot entirely the speech 
 he had made up-stairs, relative to Daisy playing the hostess; 
 and Daisy, mortified at this forgetfulness of his, and feeling 
 resentfully that he wa x s thinking more of her youth and help- 
 lessness than of anything else at this moment, imparted as 
 unchildlike a rigidity to her bearing as she could, as he said, 
 
 " This is the young lady about whom I have talked to you 
 so much, my ward and cousin, Daisy Goring." 
 
 Mrs Walsh smiled, and held out her hand to the girl with 
 a grand graciousness that was beautiful to behold from the 
 impartial spectator's point of view, and Daisy held out her 
 hand with an absence of all cordiality in the movement, and 
 an absence of all graciousness in her face. She was put in 
 the position of the patronised, and her pride rebelled against 
 it. 
 
 Honestly in her heart of hearts the girl was prepossessed 
 by the woman. Daisy had chosen to picture Mrs Walsh as a 
 pretty, lively, domestic-mannered woman, who would be 
 wanting her (Daisy) to sit and work with her of a morning, 
 and otherwise interfere aggressively during the term of their 
 sojourn together at Goring Place. But from this stately 
 superb beauty no interference of a petty or aggravating nature 
 could be dreaded. Besides, her taste was gladdened by the 
 sight of the grace and beauty and calm in which Mrs Walsh 
 was steeped, so to say. Daisy had a keen appreciation of 
 that order of loveliness which mav be seen from any side, 
 
Gloves ! 83 
 
 and which is always lovely ; and of that passive grace \\hich 
 takes up what the sternest critic can but feel to be the most 
 exquisite of attitudes, and retains it for half an hour. Mrs 
 Walsh was an adept in this patrician art of keeping quiet. 
 Her stillness was not the stillness of stupidity. During her 
 longest periods of inaction, she never looked inane. Even 
 when she sat and looked long-past the person who was 
 addressing her, as she did occasionally, it was with the far-oft 
 look of the sibyl, not with the vacant eye of the non-under- 
 standing. This composed grace, this grand loveliness, was 
 precisely the thing that would appeal to a fluctuating, restless 
 nature such as Daisy's. She liked the contrast to herself. 
 Mrs Walsh was to her like a mountain, or an oratorio a 
 thing to be marvelled at and admired. 
 
 But the lady was not prepossessed by the girl. Daisy's 
 good looks and Daisy's grace were of that order which de r 
 pend much on the circumstances surrounding and the tem- 
 per of the possessor. Miss Goring had looked very pretty 
 up in her own room ten minutes before. She had thrown 
 herself into the spirit of her songs with a certain dramatic 
 power that is always attractive. She had been flushed and 
 excited with gratified vanity : the sound of her own voice had 
 thrilled her, and the feeling that a man was standing and ad- 
 miring her very much, had thrilled her still more. Let it not 
 be supposed for a moment that Daisy had a single warm feeling 
 towards her cousin Walter. She had not ; but she was very 
 open to admiration, and very eager for it, and not at all un- 
 willing to flatter any man forward on the path of offering it 
 to her. These things combined to give a sort of nervous 
 grace to her face and bearing, when she felt as she had felt 
 up-stairs that such charm as she had was patent to a man. 
 But here, before Mrs Walsh, she fell flat not from embar- 
 rassment, she never was embarrassed but from a conviction 
 that even at her best Mrs Walsh would not admire her; and 
 that even if Mrs Walsh had done so, she would not have 
 cared for another woman's admiration. In fact, she had no 
 liking for her own sex no appreciation of it no desire to 
 stand well with it no sense of the value of its sympathy. 
 Its companionship offered her no excitement, and excitement 
 was a thing she craved with an unhealthy craving that made 
 her yearn for it in any form. All this Mrs Walsh read in 
 
84 Walter Goring. 
 
 her at their first meeting : and, consequently, Mrs Walsh 
 was not prepossessed in Daisy's favour, foreseeing, as she did, 
 that his ward would give her friend Walter Goring some 
 trouble before he had clone with her. Mrs Walsh little 
 thought of the trouble he was in about Daisy already a 
 trouble he did not like to confide to any one a trouble he 
 could not share with any one a trouble that made him, 
 even in these early days of his proprietorship, regret that he 
 had ever heard of Goring Place. 
 
 After dinner they went over a portion of the house, and 
 still Daisy felt at a disadvantage, and so was at one. Walter 
 consulted Mr and Mrs Walsh about the colours to be em- 
 ployed on the walls, and the carpets to be put upon the 
 lloors; and Mrs Walsh came off her pedestal, and conde- 
 scended to give sound advice on the subject of upholstery ; 
 and Daisy walked in sulky silence by Mr Walsh's side, and 
 disapproved with her eyes and mute lips of every little design 
 he sketched, either in his note-book or in words, for the 
 ornamentation or arrangement of anything. But at last 
 twilight fell, and then her turn came. Walter proposed that 
 they should all go into " Daisy's sitting-room and have tea 
 while she sang to them ; " and Mrs Walsh acceded to the 
 proposition with one of her grand indifferent smiles; then 
 Daisy felt her hour of triumph was coming, and rejoiced 
 that she had had patience to practise as she had been doing 
 of late. 
 
 They went into Daisy's sitting-room, and as soon as they 
 entered Mrs Walsh read a little more of Miss Goring's char- 
 acter. Mrs Walsh was a votary of that creed which worships 
 the happy perfect medium, and which holds that it is very 
 possible to have too much of a good thing. She objected to 
 lavish profusion ; she was as classical in her taste as in her 
 person. 
 
 But Daisy revelled in luxuriousness. She liked an atmos- 
 phere to be heavy with fragrance and warm with colour ; she 
 liked the air to throb with sweet, soft sounds ; she liked a 
 subdued, artificial light to be shed over things. For all her 
 fair, freckled face, her yellow hair, and her blue eyes, there 
 was a strong touch of the oriental about this girl. The ex- 
 citement she craved was that of the senses, not of the intel- 
 lect. 
 
Gloves! 85 
 
 She was herself again now as she went to the piano her 
 graceful, undulating self. Mrs Walsh lounged on a couch. 
 and looked at the flowers, at the pictures, at the ceiling at 
 anything but Daisy ; and Daisy marked and determined that 
 Mrs Walsh should look at her before long ay, and marvel 
 at her too. She asked Mrs Walsh ' what songs she liked," 
 and Mrs Walsh " didn't care ; " and then Daisy turned care- 
 lessly to Walter, and Walter went up and turned over her 
 songs irresolutely, and finally left the selection to herself. 
 
 She sang ! What she sang is of little consequence ; suffice 
 it to say that she sang song after song, (always pausing indif- 
 ferently between them, and waiting to be asked to " go on " 
 by one or other of the gentlemen,) until Mrs Walsh lounged 
 no longer, but sat and listened, as Daisy had vowed to her- 
 self Mrs Walsh should sit and listen. She sang as though 
 she had been Queen Titania's darling Puck, endowed with 
 the voice of Adelina Patti as though she had felt the full 
 meaning of every word she uttered, which she did not. Her 
 bell-like notes rang pa?ans of triumph ; she threw her head 
 back, and warbled like a nightingale, and had about as much 
 feeling in the matter as a nightingale may be supposed to 
 have. The motive which inspired her was the thought that 
 two men were listening to her enraptured now, and that it 
 was good practice for enrapturing others in the days to come. 
 The true artist feeling of striving to excel in it for its own 
 sake she had not ; but she possessed to the full the wonder- 
 ful dramatic power of seeming to have it. 
 
 Perhaps, could she have heard a brief conversation which 
 took place between Walter and the Walshes, she would have 
 left off rather sooner than she did. Mr Walsh was struck 
 with that same expression of restraint of all not being 
 given out which Mr Clarke had described as " suppressed 
 power." He was much struck with it. She had precisely 
 the expression, and almost the face and head which he had 
 been in search of for some time, in order to introduce a few 
 touches of truth into a picture he was painting from Marmion 
 of Constance de Beverley. The passage he had selected was 
 that one in which the girl threatens her murderers with a 
 variety of unpleasant things when Marmion's late remorse 
 should wake; but he had not been able to work out his idea 
 in consequence of failing to convey the mingled expression of 
 
86 V/alter Goring. 
 
 innocence, determination, and bitter feeling for a heavy wrong 
 wrought, which he had conceived for Constance. Daisy had 
 the look he wanted ; therefore he watched her with interest, 
 and while she was singing he whispered to Walter, 
 
 " Wonderfully she throws herself into the spirit of what 
 she 's singing for an amateur." 
 
 " Yes," Walter replied ; " a little training and she would 
 feign with the first on the boards now." 
 
 " She shows intense feeling." 
 
 " And does not feel a bit, I 'm half afraid/' Walter an- 
 swered, rather seriously ; " if she did she wouldn't indicate 
 it in the admirable manner she does. My own belief, you 
 know, is that great mental power -and great musical (execu- 
 tive) power never do go together : she has the latter unques- 
 tionably, and I much doubt her having the former." 
 
 Mrs Walsh had listened to what passed between the two 
 men, and now she spoke, 
 
 " I think I know what you mean, and I agree with you, 
 Mr Goring ; it 's very extraordinary, but I 'm sure that it is 
 so hers is a face that expresses clearly and decidedly much 
 more than she feels/' 
 
 " I am afraid of it myself ; and yet she 's very interesting, 
 isn 't she ? " Walter replied. Then he rose, and carried a 
 cup of tea to Daisy, and thanked her for her singing; and 
 Daisy was very happy, not knowing what he had just been 
 saying and hearing of her. On the whole it must be admitted 
 that there was more than a touch of truth in Mrs Walsh's 
 estimate of the girl, about whom there were few things more 
 genuine than her artificiality. 
 
 The next day was Sunday, and it had been decreed that it 
 would only be right and proper for Walter Goring, Esq., and 
 his guests, to go to church in the morning, as it became those 
 on whom the eyes of Deneham were fixed. 
 
 "It's impossible to walk it's more than a mile. How 
 shall we go over?" Walter had said at breakfast. 
 
 " Not in a close carriage, please," Mrs Walsh answered ; 
 " I have quite enough of that in town." 
 
 " We '11 go in the trap, then no, we can't all go in the 
 trap. I will drive you. if you '11 allow me, and Ralph and 
 Daisy must go in something else. I '11 go and see about it." 
 
 Daisy followed him out into the hall, and he saw when she 
 
Gloves / 87 
 
 caught his arm and leant upon it, and looked up in his face 
 that there was something wrong. 
 
 " What 's the matter, Daisy ? " he asked. 
 
 " If I can't go in the trap with you, I '11 stay at home," 
 she replied. 
 
 " You can't go in the trap with me, Daisy, because I have 
 offered to drive Mrs Walsh, and I can't put you up behind 
 with John." 
 
 "Very well, then I'll stay at home," she replied. He 
 laughed. 
 
 " In such matters, of course, you '11 please yourself, Miss 
 Goring : but I could have wished you to go." 
 
 " Why should I be boxed up in the close carriage with Mr 
 Walsh more than his wife ? " 
 
 " For the simple reason that he can't drive ; therefore it 
 would be no use putting you in the phaeton with him. How- 
 ever, make up your mind ; will you go or not ? If you don't 
 go, Mr Walsh can go on the back of the trap with us." 
 
 " If you wish me to go, Walter, I '11 go." 
 
 " I 'm glad of it. I want you to be a great deal with Mrs 
 Walsh for many reasons." 
 
 He was not quite sure What these many reasons were him- 
 self ; therefore it was hard on him when Daisy asked, coax- 
 ingly, 
 
 " Tell me some of them, Walter." 
 
 " I should like you to grow as like her as possible," he re- 
 plied, rather lamely. It must be confessed this was not the 
 best way to recommend his friend to his ward. 
 
 " I '11 do my best to grow tall and Juno-like ; if I don't 
 succeed you won't attribute the failure to obstinacy, will you, 
 Walter ? and now I '11 go and get ready to sit and be im- 
 proved by her mere presence in the pew for an hour or two. 
 Oh, you haven't heard him yet, but old Travers is so prosy! " 
 
 Then she went up to dress for church, and Walter went 
 out to his stables to settle about which horses should be em- 
 ployed for the service. 
 
 Daisy's bed-room commanded the drive and the lawn in 
 front of the house. Presently, while she was putting on her 
 bonnet, she saw Mrs Walsh walking up and down with her 
 host, ready dressed, and waiting for the trap to come round. 
 
 There was a flow about Mrs Walsh's long silver-grey silk 
 
88 Walter Goring. 
 
 robe which the Den eham dressmaker had failed to give Daisy's ; 
 but this Daisy could have borne. The 'thing she could not 
 bear the thing against which she girded fiercely in her sou! 
 was the contrast between Mrs Walsh's gloved hands and 
 her own. Mrs Walsh's looked as if they were chiselled out 
 of silver-grey marble ; the proportions of her own far more 
 beautiful hands were spoilt, utterly spoilt, by the ill-fitting, 
 baggy, black ones, which were the best Deneham could supply. 
 They would not button at the wrist ; they would stretch them- 
 selves to an uncalled-for width over the backs of her hands ; 
 they would leave loose ends to themselves at the tips of her 
 fingers. Altogether, they contrasted odiously with the gloves 
 of the woman who was promenading beneath her window ; 
 and so Daisy went to church, and sat through the two hours' 
 service, vigorously hating Mrs Walsh ; and she no more suc- 
 ceeded in hiding the hatred than she did the hands from that 
 lady. 
 
 Poor Daisy! It was such a trifle, such an unworthy 
 crumple in her rose-leaf, that it cannot be hoped that sym- 
 pathy will be felt for her by the reader. Yet, why not ? Has 
 not every woman, at some period or other of her career, been 
 utterly thrown out of gear, and put at a disadvantage by 
 some such trifle as this ? Moreover, ill-fitting gloves are no 
 trifle ; they impede that free action of the hands, deprived of 
 which the active-handed ones of this world are reduced to the 
 first stage of imbecility. She looked at Mrs Walsh's hands, 
 and saw, as I said before, that they looked as though they were 
 chiselled out of silver-grey marble. She looked at her own, 
 and lo and behold ! they looked crumpled, lax, and feeble. 
 Then she, thinking that Walter marked the contrast more 
 clearly than he did, gave birth to and nursed carefully a dis- 
 like and distrust of Mrs Walsh, which effectually precluded 
 her even desiring to seem well and do well in that lady's eyes. 
 " She wants to make Walter think as little as possible of my 
 looks beside her own," Daisy thought ; and the thought kept 
 her silent, and prevented her raising her glorious voice in the 
 singing, as Mrs Travers had fondly hoped she would do when 
 she came in. 
 
Getting in Order at Goring Place. 89 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 GETTING IN ORDER AT GORING PLACE. 
 
 THEY lived a very busy life at Goring Place for the next three 
 weeks. For fair friendship's sake Mrs Walsh submitted to the 
 discomforts of the perfume of paint, and the tapping of ham- 
 mers. Walter had the ceilings freshly grained, and the walls 
 newly coloured, and an army of upholsterers came and took 
 possession, and made that fearful preliminary mess and con- 
 fusion for which months of after comfort cannot compensate. 
 Under judicious modern treatment the old entrance hall 
 came out with a more mediaeval aspect than it had ever laid 
 a claim to in mediaeval days. Old oak carvings were matched 
 from the Swiss shop in Regent Street. The periods of each 
 portion of the building were studied carefully, and furniture 
 to befit them respectively was procured. More light was let 
 in upon the Lelys and Vandykes, under Mr Walsh's auspices ; 
 a croquet ground was laid down on the lawn, under the aus- 
 pices of his wife. A French window, slightly out of keeping 
 perhaps with the rest of the house, was broken out at the end of 
 what had been called a saloon, and it was turned into a billiard- 
 room. From the drawing-room, the rickety old cabinets, 
 with straddling unsteady legs, full of cracked, hideous china, 
 were banished, and modern aid was invoked in the matter of 
 inlaying and marqueterie. Mrs Walsh came off her pedestal 
 for the whole of the time, and put her own hand to the wheel. 
 She superintended the installation of the new things as only 
 women can seeing "what" should "go where" at a glance, 
 and giving, by a few dexterous touches, a homelike occupied 
 air to the newly-bedecked rooms at once. She it was who, 
 walking about from room to room, gave that subtle adjust- 
 ment to the curtains which professional hands had failed in 
 giving, and which caused them to look like the draperies they 
 were intended to be, instead of the mere so many yards of 
 damask or silk they had appeared before. She it was who 
 put the couches and easy chairs and tables into position. 
 She it was who ordained and insisted upon the right tone of 
 colouring being preserved in each room. She it was who de 
 
90 Walter Goring. 
 
 creed and enforced the decree, that there should be no over- 
 crowding even of things of beauty. " When outline was lost 
 beauty was lost," she argued ; so, thanks to her taste and 
 iirmness, everything had its outline, and was in due and pro- 
 per proportion to everything else in Walter Goring's recep- 
 tion rooms. In short, in less than a month, through the 
 agency of those two irresistible powers woman and wealth 
 Goring Place was in the most perfect order. But Daisy 
 had stood aloof, and had pointedly forborne much to her 
 cousin's annoyance to take a share in the discussions or an 
 interest in the ordering. Mrs Walsh's taste and Daisy's had 
 clashed at first, and Daisy had withdrawn all interest, or, at 
 at any rate, withheld all expression of it, with a promptitude 
 that was almost insolent. Mrs Walsh inclined to the cold 
 and classical and perfectly pure her own beauty could stand 
 such tests ! Daisy, on the other hand, inclined to the warm, 
 the luxurious, the lavish the sensuous, in fact. So it cam* 
 to pass that there was little intercourse and less sympathy be' 
 tween the two ladies. 
 
 They generally sat together of a morning in Daisy's sitting- 
 room, principally because that was the only room which waa 
 not liable to raids from painters and grainers, and others oj 
 that ilk. Here they would sit : beautiful Mrs Walsh with 
 some graceful sort of work in her hands, or some book before 
 her, always apparently at her grand ease, never desirous of 
 anything further, so far as Daisy could see, happy and at 
 peace in her own stateliness ; while Daisy, when she was not 
 singing would be in one lithe fidget unable to read, unwill- 
 ing to work, unhappy in being these things ; wishing for any 
 sort of break in the monotony of this companionship with a 
 woman to whose beauty she had grown accustomed, and 
 more bored than ever when the break would come in the 
 shape of Walter coming in to read some portion of his novel 
 to them. For then, though for the sake of seeming pleasant 
 in the eyes of the only man present, she would assume a little 
 air and look of interest, poor Daisy could not follow him 
 through sheer inability. In truth, it must be acknowledged 
 that it was not intellectual, but purely animal excitement, 
 which this poor carelessly-grown Daisy craved. The mis- 
 fortune was that, blinded by the expression of her face, 
 thrown off the track as it were by her intense dramatic 
 
Getting in Order at Goring Place. 9 1 
 
 power, Walter Goring accredited her with more sense and 
 more sensibility than she possessed. But even Walter Gor- 
 ing felt, despite that well-sustained look of interest on his 
 cousin Daisy's face, that the honours of these literary morn- 
 ings were with Mrs Walsh. 
 
 However, on some other mornings they were with Daisy, 
 for the master of Goring Place did not suffer his intention of 
 teaching his ward to ride, to sleep. For the first time or 
 two he took her out on a steady-going old pony, that had 
 belonged to her father ; but Daisy's equestrian powers throve 
 so well under his management, that he speedily promoted her 
 to the chestnut. It occurred to him at length that the skill 
 she displayed was a singular thing indeed, if this was her 
 first experience of riding, so he asked her one morning, 
 
 " Had you ever been on horseback before I took you out 
 on the old pony the other day, Daisy ? " and she answered, 
 
 " Never at Goring Place." 
 
 " I asked if you had ever been on horseback ? " 
 
 " Yes," she replied ; " back in the life I want to forget, if 
 you will let me, I used to ride." 
 
 This was one of the speeches that, taken in conjunction 
 with that look of suppressed power and restrained feeling in 
 her face, led him into the error of sometimes believing her to 
 be a far cleverer girl than she was in reality. He fancied 
 that it betokened a fixed determination to live down some 
 black memories ; whereas, in all probability it meant nothing 
 more than a childish, pettish aversion to being reminded of 
 what had been less agreeable and flattering to her vanity 
 than the present. Moreover,' she had discovered that this 
 reticence of hers interested and puzzled him. Therefore she 
 maintained it. 
 
 During these long rides he tried hard to draw her into 
 conversation, and find out what she had in her, and she 
 baffled him. She had a knack of saying bright, pert things, of 
 so wording an allusion to some personal peculiarity, or some 
 habit of expression in another, that it might almost pass for 
 wit. In fact, she had the art of so phrasing her little super- 
 ficial observations, that it was not until afterwards that it 
 dawned upon the hearer how very superficial they were in 
 reality. But whenever Walter left off talking about persons 
 or events, and tried to lead the conversation up a step or 
 
92 Walter Goring. 
 
 two, Daisy lapsed into silence. True, she listened beautifully, 
 but she said never a word ; and at last he came to wish 
 heartily, either that she were younger, or he himself older 
 and more patient, in order that he might, without outraging 
 propriety, keep this strange girl with him, and educate her 
 himself. 
 
 But this he knew he could not do ; and, as he said to Mrs 
 Walsh, she " was past being sent to school in every way." 
 Still he knew very well that in a few years it was ordain e<l 
 that she should occupy a prominent position in society, and 
 he felt that the onus was on him, her guardian, of fitting her 
 to sustain it gracefully. She had been through the usual 
 wretched boarding-school routine, but of everything beyond 
 it she was hopelessly ignorant. Even the lighter literature 
 of her own country, on which the majority of young girla 
 feed with voracity, was a sealed book to her. On the whole, 
 Walter did not so much regret this latter fact ; he said some- 
 thing to himself about her mind being " like a sheet of un- 
 sullied paper, fitted to receive any impression," and he set 
 himself seriously to consider the best means of causing it to 
 take only good ones. 
 
 Mrs Walsh was not a particularly useful coadjutor at this 
 juncture. When he asked her to make him out a list of 
 books that it would be well to get Daisy to glance at, even if 
 she couldn't be persuaded to read them thoroughly, Mrs 
 Walsh could only shake her head and look handsome. 
 
 " What a shame of you, a clever man like you, to come to 
 me to devise an educational code ! If I were you, I should 
 send her to one of those highly respectable ladies, who are 
 always advertising their willingness to undertake the educa- 
 tion of neglected adults," she suggested. 
 
 " That won't do at all," he replied ; " where in the world 
 she can have been to have had such first-rate musical instruc- 
 tion, and to have remained in such profound ignorance of all 
 other things, I can't imagine." 
 
 " With professionals, perhaps ? " 
 
 " Perhaps so ; certainly the training her voice has had is 
 excellent ; but I doubt her ever having read a line beyond the 
 songs she sings." 
 
 " And I doubt her reading even them with understanding, 
 for all she sings them so faultlessly," Mrs Walsh replied. 
 
Getting in Order at Goring Place. 93 
 
 Shortly after this, one morning when Walter Goring and 
 his charge were out riding together, he saw, or thought he 
 saw, a good opportunity of stating some of his intentions. 
 They had been having a brisk gallop over the turf, through a 
 bewildering glade, and Walter, being only a man, was feeling 
 rather more interested in her than usual, for 
 
 " As she fled fast thro' sun and shade 
 The happy winds about her play'd, 
 Blowing the ringlet from the braid. 
 She look'd so lovely as she sway'd 
 
 The rein with dainty finger tips, 
 A man had given all other bliss, 
 And all his worldly worth for this, 
 To waste his whole heart in one kiss 
 
 Upon her perfect lips." 
 
 At least if a man had not, being willing to do so, he might 
 have been forgiven the willingness ; and so Walter may be 
 forgiven for feeling a little more warmly than was usual with 
 him about the fair young girl galloping along at his side, 
 seeming so very fresh and fair, and fond of him. Suddenly 
 he exclaimed, 
 
 " Daisy, will you give up an hour every morning to reading 
 with me, while we 're at Goring Place together ? " 
 
 "Will Mrs Walsh sit arid listen to us?" she asked. 
 
 " No, I think not. I want to brush up my own reading a 
 bit, and I want to speak to you about my favourite books ; 
 the best way of managing this is for us to read them together, 
 isn't it ? " 
 
 She looked keenly at him for an instant or two, and then 
 replied 
 
 " I told you once I would do whatever you liked, Walter.'* 
 
 "Then you 11 do this?" 
 
 She blushed a little. 
 
 "Yes, if you think I had better." 
 
 " Daisy, dear, don't you care to do it ? " 
 
 " Yes, if it pleases you.' ; 
 
 '< But apart from that ? " 
 
 '* Not a bit," she replied, quietly. 
 
 " But, my dear child," he began, trying very hard to be 
 paternal, " you wouldn't like to feel yourself behind the con- 
 versation, you wouldn't like to feel left out, as it were, 
 when you're in society? I don't want you to go into 
 
94 Walter Goring. 
 
 the world with the notion in your head that women have only 
 to look pretty and graceful in order to pass muster." 
 
 " Does Mrs Walsh do much more ? " she asked, quietly. 
 
 " She does a great deal more ; she appreciates mental 
 worth in others," he replied, somewhat conceitedly ; " and in 
 order to appreciate mental worth, you must have some know- 
 ledge of the various ways in which it has been made manifest 
 to the world at divers periods : do you follow me ? " 
 
 She nodded her head. 
 
 " And in order to gain this knowledge, you must read and 
 think, Daisy ; the art of appreciating them in some degree, 
 however slight, is the art men most prize in women ; you can- 
 not arrive at this without making some effort to understand : 
 will you make the effort ? " 
 
 He touched the right chord there her vanity. 
 
 "Yes," she replied, "I'll try: but look here, Walter. 
 Don't you think that if other ladies leave me behind when 
 they 're talking, that I shall leave most of them behind when 
 I sing ? " 
 
 " You won't be able to sing all your life, Daisy," he said, 
 laughing. 
 
 " No ; nor to talk about your wearisome books all my life 
 either ; I don't want to be a blue." 
 
 " Don't alarm yourself, Daisy, dear ; you 're not likely to 
 be that." Then he remembered the barely indicated aspira- 
 tions of the girl he had met some weeks since at a dinner at 
 Mrs Walsh's, and asked, " Supposing you were very clever in 
 one thing, Daisy, and could make a name for yourself, or 
 might hope to do so in time, would you try ? " 
 
 " Yes ; on the stage." 
 
 " Only on the stage ? " 
 
 11 Oh, yes ; in any other way, if I could be famous at once ; 
 but on the stage I would work. Do you know, Walter, I 
 think it 's the only thing worth living for almost, to have 
 your name called till your ears ring with it ; and then to 
 come forward before the lights, and get all the applause and 
 praise to your face. I should love my voice," she continued, 
 with almost a coo, "if I thought that it would ever bring me that." 
 
 It was not at all the sort of ambition which, according to 
 Walter Goring's idea, should have animated the breast of a 
 would-be artist. It lacked all the true artist-feeling in fact, 
 
Getting in Order at Goring Place. 9*1 
 
 regarding as it did the gift merely as a means of attaining an 
 end. Consequently he said, rather coldly 
 
 " It shall never bring you that with, rny consent, Daisy. 
 Come, let us canter now, here's a good bit of turf, and we'll have 
 a talk about these readings which I propose some other day/' 
 
 Daisy's outward answer was a smile and a nod ; her inward 
 one was, "I hope to gracious not." Better the idle, dull 
 mornings in her own room with Mrs Walsh, than a couple of 
 hours over some book, on which she felt sure beforehand she 
 should not be able to concentrate her attention, with a man 
 who never made the slightest approach to love to her. 
 
 But Walter Goring had not the least intention of giving up 
 his idea; he was only uncertain as to the best manner of 
 carrying it out. To take a girl of nearly eighteen, and begin 
 at the very beginning, was not at all according to the dictates 
 of his taste ; and yet, if he did not begin at the very beginning 
 it would be merely giving her a thin coat of varnish, liable to 
 crack at any moment. Nothing would have been more con- 
 genial to his present feelings than to have taught this charge 
 of his Latin, and made her read " Horace " with him. But 
 this would have been requiring her to run before she could 
 walk, since she was absolutely unacquainted with even the 
 names of our English classics. 
 
 He went into the library and walked round it, looking at 
 the backs of the books, in vague expectation of the title of 
 one suggesting, if not the perusal of itself, at least the perusal 
 of some other, on which the Daisy's mind might begin to ex- 
 pand with something like advantage. His object was to get 
 something that would at the same amuse her and refer her to 
 something else ; something good in itself, but fraught with 
 allusions to still better things. This being his object, it may 
 be doubted whether he could have done better than to put into 
 Miss Daisy's hands Byron's " Bards and Reviewers," or 
 a series of leading articles from the Daily Telegraph. 
 
 Walter passed by that portion of the shelf on which 
 " History " stood in stolid stoutness. Gibbon was too grandi- 
 ose and Hume too heavy for the purpose. " I wonder how 
 she would take to Macaulay and Carlyle ? " he thought, and 
 he sent up to town at once for their works complete. When 
 the books came, Daisy took charmingly to Macaulay's " Lays," 
 but to Carlyle not at all. 
 
96 Walter Goring. 
 
 Day after day the young man, who could have been amus- 
 ing himself ever so much better, induced the girl for whose 
 future he was accountable to go into his study, and sit and 
 read with him, and hear him speak about what they had 
 been reading. Sometimes he fondly hoped that they really 
 were making a little headway; that Daisy comprehended 
 and was interested, not alone in the matter, but in the man- 
 ner in which the matter was put forth. He endeavoured to 
 make her feel the beauty of style as he did, and as Daisy had 
 a marvellous ear, she did experience a certain sense of 
 pleasure in reading sentences that rose and fell harmoniously, 
 and whose rhythm was perfect. He was as rigorous in putting 
 only such works before her as though he had been training 
 her to become a writer herself ; and sometimes, when all his 
 efforts fell flat, when she sighed over Sterne, grew sleepy 
 over Swift, and allowed herself to appear intensely bored 
 over Addison and others of that matchless band of essayists 
 who made the eighteenth century golden sometimes, when 
 these things were, he did wish within himself that since Fate 
 had made him responsible for a young woman's well-being, it 
 had been for such a one as Charlie St John. " Called to this 
 work by dulness, Jove, and Fate," he pursued it steadily for 
 a time, till at last it dawned upon him that Daisy knew no 
 more of a book when she had finished it than when she began, 
 and this not from stupidity, but from careless indifference to 
 everything that did not offer her the physical excitement 
 which she craved. When this fact did dawn upon him, he 
 gave up his self-imposed task, and told Mrs Walsh that he 
 believed a woman's hand would be more efficacious in direct- 
 ing Daisy's studies ; and commissioned his friend to look out 
 for some place where Daisy could be put under the charge of 
 some unimpeachable people, who would look after and care- 
 fully improve her. 
 
 CHAPTER XIIL 
 
 A BEAUTY MAN. 
 
 MEANWHILE other guests had arrived at Goring Place: a 
 Mrs Levinge and her two daughters, old friends of Walter's, 
 
A Beauty Man. 97 
 
 who had been kind to him in Rome long before he was a 
 man of property and could suspect them of having designs 
 upon him. Not that he was addicted to this form of conceit 
 even now that he was a man of property, but then he had 
 married lady friends without daughters who were. Mrs 
 Walsh endured the Levinges gracefully, but she did not par- 
 ticularly like them. The elder of the two daughters, Mary, 
 had worked laboriously, and with some not utterly unimpor- 
 tant results, in a sculptor's studio for the last ten years. 
 She adored her art, and thought that there was nothing of 
 any worth in comparison with it ; constant association with 
 men, who saw in her the artist more than the woman, had 
 rendered her a little more free and outspoken, and gentle- 
 manly altogether, than Mrs Walsh found good. Not that 
 Mary Levinge was what is called a fast girl or woman rather, for 
 girlhood was past with her ; but she was a frank, independent- 
 minded, and mannered woman ; a little too concentrated on 
 her art to give time or thought to the cultivation and display 
 of the more purely feminine characteristics. Yet withal not a 
 hard woman ; only a bold-hearted, earnest, clear-thinking 
 one, w r ho had found in work a panacea for an early woe a 
 quickly dispelled illusion which had been so deeply felt and 
 mourned at the time that it had left her incapable of ever so 
 feeling and mourning again. Love was over for her, in fact, 
 but life was not ; and so she heartily enjoyed the latter and 
 her art, and the warm friendship of many men, after a bonny 
 bright fashion that Mrs Walsh declared " was not at all femi- 
 nine." 
 
 The second daughter was endured by the majority of 
 people for the sake of the gentle mother and the " thorough" 
 elder sister. Truth to tell, Miss Sybil Levinge was held to 
 be, " a great humbug" generally. She, too, " had her line," 
 and she pursued it eagerly. She was a " woman's rights 
 woman," a correspondent of all the " Social Science" jour- 
 nals, and a terrible person altogether. She regarded her 
 sister as a waster of good marble and time ; she preached a 
 crusade against the love of beauty, avowing it to be an en- 
 feebling, enervating thing ; and parted her hair on one side, 
 and wore a jacket and stand-up collar like a man's, in order 
 to avoid all risk of enfeebling and enervating so much of the 
 world as looked upon her. Some people averred that the 
 
 Q 
 
98 Walter Goring. 
 
 precaution was an utterly unnecessary one; but this may 
 have been dictated by mere spleen. However this may be ; 
 Sybil Levinge was not popular, either with men or women. 
 To Mrs Walsh she was simply repulsive ; while to Daisy she 
 was a being before whom it was nice, for the sake of effects 
 of contrast, to be very gentle and feminine, and delicately 
 graceful in all her movements. As for Walter, he regarded 
 her as the one drawback to Mary's society, that was all. 
 
 There was a brother of the Levinges somewhere in the back- 
 ground. A man of whom his own family apparently knew 
 very little. Walter Goring had seen him once in the old 
 days in Rome, when he (the brother) had come to his mother's 
 house ; and all the inhabitants thereof had knelt down and 
 worshipped him. All at least but Mary, who had laughed 
 good-lmmouredly at the grand airs he gave himself, and de- 
 clared him to be "a good fellow enough, but incorrigibly 
 lazy." " His handsome face and a commission in the army 
 which he was promised, and never got, poor boy, has been 
 his bane," she had said once to Walter ; "he always declares 
 his career was spoilt, and so won't do anything: as if a 
 man had any chance of a ' career ' in the army in these pip- 
 ing times of peace," she had continued, contemptuously. 
 
 In the days in which she had said this to him, Walter 
 Goring La.l . ; retimes found it a difficult matter to live like 
 a gentleman; therefore the question had risen naturally to 
 his lips, 
 
 " What does he do, then ? how does he manage ? Eav- 
 ing against a blight in one's career doesn't feed and clothe a 
 man in these days." 
 
 " I don't know how he manages sometimes," she replied 
 gravely ; " very hardly very badly, I 'm afraid. He has 
 about three hundred a year, and with that he contrives to 
 quiet his creditors. It 's very sad to think about, Walter ; 
 for my brother Laurence had the 'elements of something 
 widely different to what he is in him." 
 
 From the day of this conversation with the light-hearted, 
 honest, out-spoken woman, who found " enough in life " in 
 chipping out her own fair ideas in marble, to the date of the 
 Levinge's coming to visit him at Goring Place, Walter had 
 never given a thought to this brother. But when he saw the 
 mother and her daughters there, he remembered the missing 
 
A Beauty Man. 99 
 
 link ; and asked Mrs Levinge " where her son was ; arid if 
 she thought he would join them." 
 
 " He's at Baden-Baden now he's rather out of health," 
 the mother replied. 
 
 " He will come fast enough if you ask him ; but perhaps 
 it will be better to leave him at Baden-Baden, in order that 
 his health may be thoroughly re-established," Mary said, 
 significantly. 
 
 Then Mrs Levinge sighed. 
 
 " We have not seen each other for a long time." 
 
 And that sigh decided Walter. 
 
 " I '11 write and invite him at once/' he said ; and the 
 smiles of the old lady, who had been like a mother to him in 
 Rome, blinded him to the expression of regret on the face of 
 the daughter. 
 
 Those were very pleasant days at Goring Place. Septem- 
 ber was upon them by the time things were tolerably in order ; 
 and September in dear old Norfolk is passing fair. The 
 master of Goring Place was a man of mark in that county- 
 side, let him be what he might individually. But Walter had 
 the elements of popularity, more than that of being well 
 liked and highly thought of, in his own person and character; 
 and so he was a man of great mark, indeed ; and the county 
 distinguished him greatly, and sought him much. He brought 
 a breath of new life amongst them ; for he was a man who 
 had won a name, and created for himself interests in a vastly 
 different sphere. His house promised to be the resort of 
 more amusing people than ever the majority of his brother 
 county magnates had witnessed gathered together in the 
 country before. Moreover he was young, sufficiently hand- 
 some, wealthy, and in a capital position. No wonder the 
 county thought kind things of him, for in that land were 
 many daughters. 
 
 When September set in, and with it shooting-parties, the 
 day life of some of the lady-guests at Goring Place was a 
 trine duller than before. Waiter was an enthusiastic sports- 
 man, and the game had been well preserved ; so that he was 
 about in the stubble and turnip fields of the home-farm and 
 land adjoining for many hours every day. During these 
 hours Daisy practised singing assiduously, away from all the 
 rest, in her own sitting-room; and Mrs Walsh and Mary 
 
IOO Walter Goring. 
 
 Levinge drove about in a little pony chaise, and were 
 dull. 
 
 But the evenings made up for the comparative barrenness 
 of the days. The gardens had always been kept up well ; 
 and now, under the new rule, they seemed to be in fuller per- 
 fection than before. The croquet-ground was a marvellous 
 croquet-ground, considering how new it was ; and they 
 always found two or three good players amongst the men who 
 came home to dine at Goring Place, after shooting with its 
 owner all day. When, darkness fell, and croquet could be 
 no longer played, it was always agreeable to two or three of 
 the party at least to wander about in the gardens ; and for 
 the rest, who preferred the lounges in the drawing-room, 
 there was Daisy's voice. 
 
 It was even more agreeable when Laurence Levinge came. 
 He had not at all the air of a man addicted to reviling his 
 fate, or indeed of thinking it anything save a particularly 
 enviable and agreeable one. He came straight away from 
 Baden-Baden, immediately on receipt of Walter's letter, in 
 a most accommodating way ; and they were all save perhaps 
 his sister Mary uncommonly glad that he did so, for he in- 
 fused new life and interest into the gathering. 
 
 He was as handsome as a star. Wonderfully handsome, 
 with wavy golden hair, dark-grey eyes fringed with long 
 black lashes, and a face that might have been cut in a cameo, 
 it was so classically correct. A marvellous face, in its tender 
 grace and perfect beauty : a face that expressed such worlds 
 of feeling, eyes that spoke such volumes of passion, even when 
 their owner was but asking for a cup of tea. 
 
 He was an idle, but withal an accomplished, young Apollo. 
 He despised his sisters, and his sisters' work gracefully 
 deriding the elder one for not having demolished Miss 
 Hosmer, and the younger one for not having distinguished 
 herself as much as Miss Faithful. He had no sympathy with 
 women who tried to " do anything save look pretty and 
 dress tastefully, and sing," he said; and Daisy heard him 
 say it, and Daisy liked him for the speech. 
 
 He had a voice, and a guitar, the former is frequently a 
 curse to a man, and the latter to his friends. But neither 
 was considered in the light of other than a boon at Goring 
 Place. Daisy and he sang together constantly, and the 
 
A Beauty Man. 101 
 
 evenings were pleasanter than ever for all parties; for the in- 
 cidentals improved their minds with the two Levinges, and 
 Walter's hands not being so full, he had more time at his 
 disposal and that of his sympathetic-souled goddess. Alto- 
 gether the evenings were pleasanter even than those which 
 they had passed before Laurence Levinge left Baden-Baden. 
 
 Soon a change was wrought in the morning's programme. 
 Mr Levinge paid great court to the grand beauty, and told 
 her it was a great mistake, and worthy of awkward-souled 
 Englishmen, to remove themselves -from female influence, 
 and go after the partridges, as they did for hours alone 
 daily. 
 
 " If you can propose a remedy we will try it," she replied, 
 graciously ; " but bear one thing in mind, it must not be at 
 the cost of giving up your sport. Men in the house all day 
 are a bore." 
 
 " But couldn't you come and reward our feats of prowess, 
 and skill by bringing us our luncheon ? I '11 arrange it. 
 Mary and you shall drive down to some sylvan glade, near to 
 the scene of our last shots, before one o'clock each day : by 
 that means we shall combine pic-nic and partridge-shooting, 
 the sole out-door amusements that are indigenous to the 
 land of my birth." 
 
 " I agree to it, Mr Levinge ; and you shall sing to us under 
 green trees, if you will." 
 
 But he had an aversion to making himself ridiculous ; so, 
 feeling that a guitar and a shooting-jacket did not go well 
 together, he declined pleasuring her in this one particular. 
 Then she said, 
 
 "You have provided for Miss Levinge and myself; how 
 about your sister Sybil and Miss Goring ? " 
 
 "My sister Sybil is out of place in any fresh or natural 
 situation ; let her sit at home and pour out her desires for 
 her sex making itself odious at five shillings a column. As 
 for Miss Daisy, can't she come with you on horseback, if she 
 mustn't be left behind ? " 
 
 'You know she never is left behind/' Mrs Walsh replied, 
 joldly ; " Mr Goring makes his ward of due account." 
 
 " Or undue account ! Well, it 's his whim to do so ; there- 
 fore I suppose we may take it for granted that the Daisy 
 must not be left out in any of our small schemes. At any 
 
IO2 Walter Goring. 
 
 rate you '11 heip me to bear the burden and heat of the days 
 that are to come in the turnip-fields, won't you ? " 
 
 " If Mr Goring finds the plan good I shall see no objection 
 to it ; I have nothing else to do all the mornings," she re- 
 plied. She meant to make the concession to grant the 
 favour he asked of her ; but she did not want to make it too 
 flattering to him. He was agreeable enough, and had a great 
 air of devotion. But she knew that Walter Goring was 
 worth a hundred of Laurence Levinge. 
 
 For a while, it was late one afternoon when this conver- 
 sation took place, he lounged on a rug at the feet of his 
 sister Mary and Mrs Walsh. He reclined with his hands 
 clasped under his head arid his face upturned towards them. 
 It was a wonderful face ! His sister felt the wonderful 
 beauty of it, and took mental notes concerning it notes 
 which she resolved to turn to account when she got back to 
 the dear old studio in Rome. And Mrs Walsh looked down 
 into it also, and thought that, even were she free, that was 
 not the face which she should care to see bowing before her 
 shrine ! But she sat in a very easy chair, and he misunder- 
 stood her. When he rose, it was to saunter into the conser- 
 vatory and get a pale buff rose, which Miss Goring wore at 
 dinner. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 A STORM AT GORING PLACE. 
 
 ALL this time there had been no communication worth men- 
 tioning between the inhabitants of The Hurst and Goring 
 Place. About a fortnight after Walter had come down with 
 the Walshes a gentleman had ridden up, and, hearing that 
 " master was out," had left a stalwart card bearing the name 
 of " Mr H. Omry Fellowes ; " and three days after this, 
 Walter had ridden over to The Hurst and left his card. 
 But there intercourse had ended. . 
 
 Mr H. Omry Fellowes's visit proved one thing, and thai 
 was, that the right-of-way question, which had been a vexed 
 
A Storm at Goring Place. 103 
 
 one with the last generation, was not going to stand in the 
 way of his friendship with the new-comer. Mr Goring was 
 very glad of this, when he thought of it at all, for all men's 
 tongues wagged in praise of "Fellowes of the Hurst." " He 
 was a thoroughly good fellow," everybody said ; "it was on'y 
 a pity that he didn't marry, and send things along a bit 
 faster at The Hurst than he could do under the supervision 
 of his mother and maiden sister," both of whom were sternly 
 set against innovation of every sort, and were consequently 
 not reputed lively. At last Walter Goring wrote and asked 
 his neighbour at The Hurst to give them the pleasure of his 
 company at a battue they were going to have in a certain 
 famous cover on the Goring Place estate. For answer he 
 received a message from Miss Fellowes to the effect that 
 "her brother was staying at Brighton." 
 
 Walter's efforts to educate and improve Daisy had ceased 
 utterly. For his own part he would have been well content 
 to take her as she was socially he found her very charm- 
 ing ; but he felt strongly that something must be done for 
 her, or his conscience would not acquit him of having, in a 
 measure, been false to the important trust which his uncle 
 had reposed in him. In fact, he made up his mind that, 
 when this party broke up, Daisy must be sent somewhere to 
 be guarded safe and sure for four years. Then ! God only 
 knew what would become of her and him. 
 
 The guest, Laurence Levinge, was but a very little way be- 
 hind the host in popular opinion. For all his delicate 
 beauty, and, at first sight, rather slight and effeminate ap- 
 pearance, he was a keen sportsman a splendid shot a 
 daring rider a first-rate cricketer. At first, when the 
 country gentlemen met him in Walter Goring' s drawing- 
 room ; when they saw him lounging about on big rugs like 
 a lazy boy of the south, and heard him singing impassioned 
 songs in a language they could not understand to the tink- 
 ling of a guitar : when they saw and heard these things, at 
 first they were tempted to despise him. But when they saw 
 the manner in which he brought his birds down; when they 
 marked that no number of turnip-fields fatigued him ; above 
 all, when they saw the way in which he handled a refractory 
 colt, to the purchase of which Walter had committed him- 
 self, they altered their opinion of Laurence Levinge, Alto- 
 
IO4 Walter Goring". 
 
 gether, what with his singing and his shooting, and his style 
 in general, as exhibited both to men and women, Mr Levinge 
 was in excellent repute in and around Goring Place. 
 
 At last one morning, when Walter was in the gun-room, 
 with his belt on his shoulder and his pointers at his feet, 
 waiting for Laurence to come and pick up his piece and go 
 out with him, Mary Levinge came into the room. 
 
 " "Where 's Laurence ? " she asked. 
 
 " I don't know ; I 'm waiting for him." 
 
 " Walter," "she began, quietly, "you and I have always 
 talked to one another as two human beings, unhampered by 
 the reflection that they are of opposite sexes may talk. I 
 hardly know why I have hesitated to say to you before that 
 I 'm sorry you asked my brother here, but I have hesitated ; 
 he 's an unscrupulous man, I fear, about women." 
 
 " What makes you say this to me, now ? " he asked, hur- 
 riedly. 
 
 " This : he sings too often and too sweetly to your ward, 
 
 and " she paused, and her frank face was flooded with 
 
 colour as she went on, "and he would never marry her 
 under any circumstances ; therefore his songs are bad for 
 her." 
 
 " But, Mary, she sees nothing of him save when Mrs 
 Walsh and you are with her ; and as to his songs," he pro- 
 ceeded, with a little twinge of jealousy, " they 're principally 
 directed to Mrs Walsh." 
 
 Miss Levinge shook her head. 
 
 " In reality, I do observe these things so very little," she 
 said, earnestly ; " but I had a feeling against Laurence coming 
 here from the first. It seems a bad thing to say, for his 
 presence always gives my poor mother the purest pleasure. 
 Young girls are not given to over caution, remember ; and 
 Laurence is not one to be tender to carelessness. My brother 
 has a very winning exterior, and a very cold heart ; don't 
 test Daisy too hard. Here he comes." 
 
 Almost as she spoke, Laurence sauntered into the gun-room. 
 He smiled with his eyes a little superciliously when he saw 
 his sister, and asked, 
 
 " What, Mary ! has your stay at Goring Place revived your 
 old taste for fire-arms ? " 
 
 She looked at him steadily, not scornfully at all ; but down 
 
A Storm at Goring Place. 105 
 
 upon him, as though he were something infinitely weaker 
 than herself. 
 
 " Had I ever the taste ? I 'd forgotten it." 
 
 " What brought you here, then ? Goring, you don't seem 
 to have a corner in the house that 's sacred from the women 
 at least, from those who have emancipated themselves. Mrs 
 Walsh and your cousin do know when we have had enough 
 of them." 
 
 " Scarcely civil to your sister," Mary said, laughing. Then 
 she left them, and went in search of Mrs Walsh, whom she 
 found alone in the drawing-room. 
 
 " Has Laurence been here, Mrs Walsh? " she asked; and 
 Mrs Walsh replied, 
 
 " No ; I think he has been out all the morning with Mr 
 Goring : " and Mary Levinge was strengthened in her convic- 
 tion. 
 
 That night Walter broached the subject to Mrs Walsh. 
 
 ." Have you observed anything with Daisy and Levinge ?'' 
 
 " With Daisy and Levinge ? " she repeated after him, in 
 unfeigned surprise. " No." 
 
 " Mary was speaking to me about them this morning." 
 
 " Rather premature and uncalled-for interference on her 
 part, I think," Mrs Walsh remarked. " What did she say ? " 
 
 " Oh ! she only fancied that he was rather attentive to 
 Daisy. I hardly know what she said, but the drift of her 
 observations was, that I had been injudicious in bringing them 
 together." 
 
 Mrs Walsh laughed ; it did seem very absurd to her that Mr 
 Levinge should be accused of breathing or meaning soft no- 
 things to Daisy Goring. 
 
 " He never pays her the slightest attention," she said, 
 decidedly ; and Walter whispered, 
 
 " He makes up for it then by paying plenty of it to you ; 
 doesn't he now, confess ? " and in his anxiety to get a con- 
 fession from Mrs Walsh, he forgot Daisy for a time. 
 
 The usual arrangement when they want out for long drives 
 was, that Mrs Walsh was seated in front with Walter, and 
 Daisy and Laurence Levinge were perched on behind to- 
 gether. But it was a very luxurious kind of trap a phaeton 
 dog-cart in fact and Laurence was accustomed to lounge in 
 it "with much ease and grace; with rather too much ease 
 
106 Walter Got ing. 
 
 Walter thought sometimes, for Mr Levinge made it convenient 
 to lean over and monopolise a larger share of Mrs Walsh's 
 attention than belonged to him by right. On these occasions, 
 however, it was satisfactory to observe that Daisy was very 
 blithe and self-possessed, quite as much so as when her 
 cavalier returned to his allegiance. On the whole, Walter 
 felt that dear honest Mary had been mistaken. 
 
 They made themselves tolerably well acquainted with the 
 county in this way, driving long distances in the afternoon, 
 dining, and returning in the cool of the evening. Occasionally 
 the dinners that they got under these circumstances were 
 terrible mistakes, country inns, as might be expected, falling 
 very far short of the Goring Place cuisine. But the drives 
 home in the cool evenings more than compensated for this ; 
 they one and all agreed that " there was no mistake about the 
 drives." 
 
 It was a lazy, beautiful time. The women and the weather 
 were both so fair, that no wonder Walter declared that aftei 
 each return he felt as if he had finished another canto of a 
 poem. How Mr Walsh and the Levinges felt was not men- 
 tioned. Equally satisfied, perhaps, for they had, as Laurence 
 said, " a great pull on the others in the matter of dinners." 
 It was a happy, lazy, beautiful time ; quite an operatic air 
 was thrown over it frequently, by Daisy's and Mr Levinge's 
 voices, as they drove rapidly along at night through some oi 
 those solitary, unfrequented Norfolk roads. Visitors in 
 country houses, that stood a little way back from the road, 
 and were unseen in the darkness, often rubbed their eyes and 
 fancied they must be dreaming, when bits of Faust came 
 floating upon their ears, sung in a style that was a staggering 
 surprise down there.' Daisy gloried in the " jewel song ; " to 
 tell the truth, she was much given to singing it before her 
 glass, and going through all the business in a way that closely 
 resembled Adelina Patti's. Mr Levinge told her that no 
 Faust not even Mephistopheles himself would have left her, 
 had she been the Marguerite; and Daisy listened to the 
 flattery and sang the song over again more joyously than 
 before. 
 
 At last Mary Levinge told Walter that she had heard of a 
 lady at Brighton, the widow of a clergyman, who would be 
 glad to take charge of Daisy. The lady was a Mrs Osborne, 
 
A Storm at Goring Place. 107 
 
 and she had a daughter about Daisy's age, who would share 
 Daisy's studies. They were people of assured respectability, 
 and, Miss Leviuge added, "from what I gather from the 
 friend who writes to me about it, Daisy won't be dull there, 
 and will be safe." 
 
 "It's all very delightful, and you're a dear good creature, 
 Mary," Walter replied ; " the only drawback to it is the tell- 
 ing her that she's to go." 
 
 "She knows very well that she can't stay here when Mrs 
 Walsh and the rest of us leave ; therefore, the sooner she 
 knows when she ; s to go and where she 's to go, the better," 
 Mary urged. 
 
 " No doubt all the same, the telling her won't be pleasant," 
 Walter replied, and he was right; the telling her was far from 
 pleasant. f 
 
 He deferred the evil day until there was a talk one morning 
 of the Walshes being compelled to return to town for a short 
 time ; then he took the plunge. He followed Daisy straight 
 away from the breakfast-table to her own sitting-room, and 
 when she looked up at him in surprise at his presence there 
 at that hour, he commenced at once. 
 
 " Daisy, can you be ready to start with Mrs Walsh if she 
 goes the day after to-morrow, do you think ? I want to take 
 you to Brighton for a time, and i't will be better for us to go 
 up as far as London with the Walshes." 
 
 " Yes. I can be ready ; but you don't mean to leave 
 
 me at Brighton by myself, do you ? " 
 
 " Certainly not. You '11 be with some very nice people 
 the Osbornes and I shall see you often." 
 
 She heaved a great sigh, and sat half round on her chair, 
 clasping her arms over the back of it, and leaning her face 
 down upon them. 
 
 " Daisy, you 're not crying ? " 
 
 There was no answer, but he knew that she was crying ; 
 and a malefactor's sensations are agreeable in comparison 
 with his, as he felt himself the cause of those tears. 
 
 " You must see, dear, that this must be," he said, tenderly 
 In spite of his clear-sightedness as to her follies and short- 
 comings, he was getting very fond of this girl. Of what 
 nature the fondness was he could not determine yet; but he was 
 conscious that it was an in creasing fondness and a genuine one. 
 
ToS Walter Goring: 
 
 " I don't see that it must be at all," she sobbed ; " here at 
 my age to be sent away from my only home and my only 
 friend to some old woman, who '11 drive me mad. I thought 
 wards always lived with their guardians. I thought guardians 
 were the proper people to look after their wards." 
 
 " If I were older " he began, but she interrupted him 
 
 to say, 
 
 " Oh, stuff and nonsense, Walter. If you were older very 
 likely I shouldn't care to stay. As it is, if you are to be like 
 a brother to me, as you once said you would be, there can 
 be no place so proper for me as Goring Place. If I 'rn ever 
 to feel that you 're my brother and best friend and guardian, 
 you mustn't try to teach me that there can be any harm in 
 my staying here with you alone." 
 
 " That 's not the point, you little casuist. There would be 
 no harm in it, Heaven knows ; but I can't have it questioned 
 even. Don't think all the pain of parting will be on your 
 side. I shall miss you, Daisy." 
 
 He spoke very tenderly, but she only gnawed abstractedly 
 at the back of her hand, as it rested upon the chair, and 
 gazed steadfastly at the floor. He repeated the last part of 
 his sentence, 
 
 " Don't you think I shall miss you, Daisy ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes ! I dare say I mean yes, dear Walter ; but you 
 won't hurry me off, just because Mrs Walsh is going. Let 
 me wait till the party breaks up." 
 
 " The Levinges are going soon. No, no, it will be better 
 for you to travel up with Mrs Walsh." 
 
 " I feel as if you were turning me out. I never wanted to 
 be brought here : it's too hard that I should be turned out." 
 
 " Now you talk like a child," he said, gravely. 
 
 " Walter," she lifted her head and spoke very rapidly, " if 
 there are only two or three dull women at this place where 
 you 're going to put me, I shall go mad." 
 
 " Nonsense ! You shall have the chestnut, Daisy. When 
 you feel the blue devils coming on, try a gallop on the downs." 
 
 " But in the house in the house with dull women, after 
 having been so happy here. Walter, how can you do it ? " 
 
 She began to sob aloud now, raining her tears down in 
 big clear drops, as a child does. Once more he was op- 
 pressed with the malefactor's sensations. 
 
A Storm at Goring Place. 109 
 
 " Daisy, you distress me cruelly, and I know the whole 
 time that I 'm almost as childish as yourself to be distressed 
 by such folly." 
 
 " It 's your Mrs Walsh has made you do this. I know 
 it ; she hates me." 
 
 " You know very well that Mrs Walsh has nothing what- 
 ever to do with it," he said, angrily. He began to feel that as 
 a guardian he was in a very undignified position ; his ward 
 was putting him on his defence in a most extraordinary 
 way. 
 
 "Then it's his sister." 
 
 -' Whose sister?" 
 
 " It 's that Miss Levinge : she hates me too." 
 
 " Feeling that they all hate you, I wonder that you caro 
 to stay with them any longer." 
 
 Daisy cleared up and laughed. 
 
 " I rather like it, for I know the reason why," she said 
 simply. " Mrs Walsh isn't so anxious to see rne safely out 
 of this house from pure love of me ; there, dear cousin Walter 
 don't be angry with me I 'm only vexed with her because 
 I'm afraid you like her better than you do me." 
 
 She got up and clasped her hands over his shoulder, and 
 bent her head down till it rested on his breast : and it would 
 Lave been difficult to decide whether it was pure friendship, 
 or brotherly love, or something else, which made him press 
 her closely to him for an instant, touch her forehead with his 
 lips, and then put her away from him hastily as he an- 
 swered, 
 
 " If I didn't like you so well, my darling, perhaps 1 
 shouldn't be so anxious to send you away from me." 
 
 Whatever the feeling which had actuated the speech and 
 gesture, certain it is that his heart had throbbed violently 
 while making them ; that he had been unable to suppress, 
 but every other sign of emotion he had sedulously hidden 
 from her. 
 
 When he left her, he took two or three turns by himself 
 in the corridor before he rejoined his frends below. He 
 needed a little time to himself, in order to take a careful sur- 
 vey of the dangers against which it most behoved him to bo 
 on guard, should another storm arise. For, though Daisy 
 had not been so tempestuous as he had anticipated she would 
 
no Walter Goring. 
 
 have been, he was conscious that there had been a storm at 
 Goring Place. 
 
 " By Jove, I mustn't get fond of the girl ; yet," he mut- 
 tered to himself, u for her own sake and mine too, I shall be 
 glad when she 's gone, for she has a fascination, though my 
 goddess can't see it. Mary must have been mistaken about 
 her brother : the Daisy could never play a double part." 
 
 The Daisy meanwhile was crouching on her sofa, sobbing 
 and crying as if her heart would break. The poor, fair, little 
 girl's grief was genuine enough, whatever the cause of it. 
 There seemed to be no light in heaven or earth for her. She 
 was going away from all the joy of her life to Brighton and 
 black misery. 
 
 " Just a little longer if Walter would only let me stay a 
 little longer, it would be all right," she moaned aloud. " It's 
 that Mrs Walsh, I know. Won't I make her smart going 
 up." 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 A TURNING POINT IN THE ROAD ! 
 
 THERE was.no reprieve for Daisy. The Walshes were obliged 
 to go up to town two days after Walter had mooted the 
 Brighton plan to his cousin. They were obliged to go up, 
 but they intended returning shortly ; which fact no one 
 thought worth mentioning to Miss Goring. 
 
 Those two last days were very miserable ones. Daisy 
 adopted an air of injured rectitude and resignation to wrong 
 that shook Walter's faith in the wisdom of his own design 
 several times. There was a lack of broad human justice, he 
 half believed, in his banishing this young girl from what she 
 had herself piteously declared to be her only home and her 
 only friend. 
 
 The morning came, and the hour for starting arrived. 
 They had sat longer than usual at the breakfast-table, because 
 it was not worth while to rise up and seek for something 
 fresh to do before the carriage came round. So they were 
 
A Turning Point in the Road ! 1 1 1 
 
 still seated at the wrecks of the morning feast when the 
 crunching of wheels in front of the house announced that 
 the hour was come. 
 
 Mrs Walsh got up and handed one light travelling cloak 
 to her husband, and a black Russian leather bag to Walter, 
 and then proceeded to take leave. She shook hands with 
 Mrs and the Misses Levinge as the majority of women do 
 shake hands with the majority of their own sex ; and then 
 she turned and extended her hand to Laurence Levinge as a 
 boon or a blessing, and he took it and bent over it as a 
 devotee over a relic, a mother over her child, or any one over 
 anything that is most loved and valued. If this woman was 
 a flirt at all, she was a Queen of Flirts, and she never came 
 off her throne for any man save her husband and my hero. 
 
 It was Daisy's turn next. She looked like a white rabbit 
 with her pale face and her red eyes, as she went the round 
 rapidly, just saying " Good-by," and hastily extending a slim 
 hand to each, which, as soon as it was touched, she even 
 more hastily withdrew. At least she strove to make this the 
 whole of her farewells ; but some maternal instinct animated 
 Mrs Levinge, and she drew the sorrowful, angry, pale face 
 down, and Tcissed it with a " God bless you, my child ! " 
 
 While his mother had been doing this, Mr Levinge moved 
 into the doorway ; so it was in passing out into the hall that 
 Daisy took her leave of him, and no one saw it. Then he 
 went out and helped both ladies into the carriage, and spoke 
 a few words to Walter about using the horses while the latter 
 was a\vay ; but his eyes never met Daisy's once, and Daisy 
 looked both sad and savage. 
 
 When the carriage drove off, Laurence Levinge returned to 
 the dining-room, and joined his mother and sisters at the 
 window. Suddenly, as the turn in the drive concealed the 
 ones who were going from their view, he laid his hand on 
 Mary's arm and whispered to her alone 
 
 " It 's much better that she should go. I don't know what 
 I might have been let in for if she had stayed." 
 
 " Do you mean that ? Are you speaking the truth ? " she 
 replied. 
 
 " Yes, on my honour I am," he answered ; and he was at 
 the time. Despite his long grey eyes, his idleness, and his 
 exceeding beauty, it was not the business of hia life to look 
 
112 Walter Goring. 
 
 about seeking whom he might devour. When he wrought 
 evil, he wrought it as most men do in real life unpremedi- 
 tatingly : in fact, " 'twas want of thought " the old story ! 
 
 The fresh morning air, combined with the utter inability 
 youth has of being very miserable for long about anything, 
 told on Daisy before they had been an hour in the train ; and 
 then she began to put her plan of making Mrs Walsh smart 
 into execution. They had the carriage to themselves, which 
 circumstance favoured her considerably. First, she com- 
 menced a light fire of allusions to what Walter had said to 
 her " the other day, you know, when you came and sat with 
 me in the morning." Now Mrs Walsh had not heard of this 
 visit to Daisy's special domain which Walter had paid ; there- 
 fore, at the first mention of it, she did prick up her ears. 
 This Daisy observed, and, fired by her success, she made 
 some bolder strokes. " Dear Walter, when did you say you 'd 
 come to Brighton ? " 
 
 " I don't think I fixed any time," Walter replied. He 
 could not remember having said anything about it ; but Daisy 
 seemed to think he had, and to find pleasure in the thought. 
 
 " Oh ! you did, Walter ; Mrs Walsh, isn't it a shame that 
 those Miss Levinges should have more of him than you and 
 I ? " She put her beautiful, flexible, intelligent-looking hand 
 on his arm as she spoke ; and Walter, though he knew Mrs 
 Walsh would strongly disapprove of it all, could not do other 
 than take the hand in his, and press it kindly. In answer 
 to Daisy's remark, Mrs Walsh merely moved her head round 
 slowly one half inch, in order to look more fully at her 
 audacious interrogator. Daisy was feeling almost happy by 
 this time ; she put her head back a little, and met Mrs 
 Walsh's bright cold eyes defiantly with her own impertinent 
 ones of cobalt blue. 
 
 " Shall we keep him between us, Mrs Walsh keep him 
 constantly at Roehampton and Brighton ? Let me see, how 
 much of him shall I graciously give up to you ? " 
 
 " You silly child," Walter muttered and yet, though he 
 c'Jled her " silly," he was not ill pleased. 
 
 <: No, I 'm not," Daisy replied ; " you 're to be everything 
 to me, you know. Remember our compact." 
 
 When she said that, she had the felicity of seeing Mrs 
 Walsh give Walter a reproachful, almost an indignant, loot- 
 
A Turning Point in the Road ! 113 
 
 Daisy did not know how this might act upon him, so she de- 
 termined to retire gracefully from the contest while there 
 could be no doubt as to her being victor. Accordingly she 
 took her hand away from his, and turned round to look for 
 a land-mark in the country they were passing through, 
 so that when she came back she might know every now 
 and then exactly how far she was from dear old Goring 
 Place. 
 
 They parted at the Shoreditch Station : the Walshes were 
 bound for home, Walter and his charge for Brighton. 
 
 "You'll stay at Brighton to-night, I suppose?" Mrs 
 Walsh said to him when he was shaking hands with her. 
 
 1 Probably." 
 
 ' But you '11 be up to-morrow ? " 
 
 ' Yes, most assuredly." 
 
 ' Then come to us, won't you ? " 
 
 ' I will, and I hope to find that Kalph will be free to go 
 back to Goring Place at once." 
 
 She bent her head forward a little. 
 
 " You know how truly I am your friend. Are you in love 
 with your cousin or not ? " 
 
 "No I don't know," he said, laughing. "Time enough 
 to think of that." 
 
 "There's not time enough; she hasn't a particle of real 
 feeling ; she will love one man as soon as another. In fact, 
 she '11 never care for any one but herself ; but she '11 make 
 you think she cares for you in a very short time. Now do 
 be careful, sir," and she held up a warning finger to him, 
 partly in sport, but a great deal more in earnest. 
 
 " She 's generally right, and she 's always the dearest crea- 
 ture in the world/' Walter thought when they had separated, 
 and he was alone with his cousin ; " but I think she's wrong 
 about the Daisy." 
 
 The Daisy and he had not at all a bad time of it going 
 down to Brighton. She was very sisterly and very sweet ; 
 she gave way to no expressions of pettishness or wilfulness. 
 She promised to " make the best of things at the Osbornes'." 
 She adored him verbally for having given her the chest- 
 nut. She took a most astounding turn, and declared Mrs 
 Walsh to be " as nice as she was beautiful." She spoke of 
 her dead father in an altered strain that touched Walter im- 
 
 l? 
 
1 14 Walter Goring. 
 
 mensely. "I've been so much better about him. I've 
 thought so much more kindly of him since I knew you, 
 Walter," she said " I was a little fiend that night you came 
 to me first. But then I had no one to love, and no one to 
 love me. 1 have found some one since," she added, in almost 
 a whisper. Finally, as they were nearing Brighton, she 
 startled him by asking suddenly, " And what is to become of 
 me when I can't stay at these Osbornes' any longer ? It isn't 
 to be my home for life, I suppose ? Where am I to go next ? " 
 
 " I can't tell you yet, Daisy. I must not tell you yet. 
 Your home for life ? No, no ! " 
 
 " For how many years, then ? Oh ! do tell me." 
 
 " Perhaps for two or three perhaps for a little longer. 
 I can't tell you, dear, don't ask me." 
 
 " For two or three years ! " she cried ; " I shall never 
 stand it." And then she lapsed into tears and declarations 
 of perfect indifference as to what became of her, if she was to 
 be left with " odious women for two or three years." 
 
 It was in vain that Walter placed before her the possibility 
 of their not being odious ; equally in vain was it to point out 
 to her the admiration excited by " her own horse," when the 
 chestnut was taken out at the station. Daisy wept herself into 
 the semblance of a white rabbit, and refused to be comforted. 
 
 Mrs Osborne lived in a detached villa just out of the town 
 a pretty house, with clematis, and jasmine, and rose-bushes, 
 and earwigs climbing all over it. She and her daughter re- 
 ceived Daisy warmly and kindly ; and Daisy eyed them re- 
 sentfully and somewhat scornfully, as became their respec- 
 tive positions. The elder lady satisfied Walter thoroughly as 
 to her entire fitness for the task she had taken upon herself ; 
 and he satisfied her thoroughly as to the manner in which 
 he would recompense her for her trouble. And while the 
 elders were arranging matters, the daughter of the housa 
 strove to ingratiate herself with Daisy, and failed ignominiously 
 in doing so. 
 
 When Walter Goring was going away, Daisy made her 
 last request. 
 
 " You '11 come and see me to-morrow, Walter ? " 
 
 " Yes, for half-an-hour, dear. I must be in town by two 
 o'clock." 
 
 " Oh, Walter! no, don't; if you'll only stay and ride with me 
 
A Turning Point in the Road ! 115 
 
 to-morrow evening, I will settle beautifully ; but I won't 
 else!" 
 
 She felt convinced that Mrs Walsh had asked him to go 
 back, and she did sigh to show Mrs Walsh that she too had 
 a little influence. 
 
 " Daisy, dear, I want to see my publisher to-morrow ; I 
 can't stay till the evening. Go for your ride ; you 11 enjoy it 
 just as much without me." 
 
 She clasped her hands over his shoulders as she had done 
 the other morning at Goring Place. He did not press her to 
 his heart this time, because Mrs and Miss Osborne were in 
 the room trying not to look at them- -but he felt strongly 
 inclined to do so. 
 
 " It 's only one day I ask you to give me, Walter; do, do, do." 
 
 She bent her head down for one moment, and let it touch 
 his shoulder as she made her plea. He could have made no 
 other answer than he did. 
 
 " I will, my darling." 
 
 Then he said good-bye, and walked away hastily, thinking 
 to himself as he walked, " The little witch nearly sends my 
 resolutions to the devil when she seems so fond of me ; if she 
 is really and remains so it will be all right in the end ! I 
 have only to see a little more of her to settle my business." 
 
 The next morning he spent partly in the villa garden with 
 Daisy, and partly in Mrs Osborne's drawing-room, where 
 Daisy sang to him ; and in the evening he got the best horse 
 a livery-stable could supply, and went for a ride with his 
 cousin. They started about half an hour before Mr Fellowes 
 and Charlie St John went out for that ride in the middle of 
 which we left them several chapters back. 
 
 It will be remembered that when we parted from them, 
 Mr Fellowes had just taken the dangerous leap which all 
 men must take sooner or later, however averse they may be 
 to it. He had asked a girl to be his wife ; and the girl was 
 on the point of giving her answer. Perhaps, though, excep- 
 tion will be taken to this statement. The hypercritical may 
 aver that he had not asked her to be his wife ; that he had, 
 in fact, only asked her to give him permission to indulge 
 in the sketchy pleasure of loving her all his life. But 
 this with him meant everything, and she knew it. To 
 all intents and purposes he had asked her to marry him. 
 
n6 Walter Goring. 
 
 But she paused, being doubtful not of him or of his mean- 
 ing, but of herself ; and he, thinking that he had not made 
 himself sufficiently clear, went on. 
 
 " Don't you think I should make you happy, Charlie ? 
 Before Heaven, if you only take me, I '11 try all my life with 
 all my heart ; I may not have shown the love I have for you as 
 many men would ; but no man could love you better, my pet." 
 
 His hand was on her wrist still ; strong and stalwart as he 
 was, his touch was tender as a woman's : it must have been 
 a very good love that so softened him. She felt that it must 
 be this ; she remembered the arid life that was before her if 
 she refused the hopeless prospect ; she remembered his con- 
 stant care of her his kindness. There was the genuine 
 ring of the metal about his pleading now. All these things 
 flashed through her mind in a moment, and she said 
 
 " If you think I shall make you happy I '11 try." 
 
 " God bless you, my darling ! " he whispered, but he did 
 not seal the compact after the manner of lovers who take the 
 leap in a drawing-room \vhen no one is near ; and she thanked 
 the kind star of her destiny that he did not do so, for before 
 his whispered thanks were well uttered they turned into a 
 lovely little bit of road, and there she saw What ? 
 
 Such a picture such a scene. She never forgot it. Its 
 beauty, its painfulness, its mystery, its poetry, were all 
 stamped in indelible colours on her mind in the first mo- 
 ment in which she looked upon it. That undefinable sensa- 
 sation of having seen all this and felt all this before, either 
 in a dream or in a pre-existent state came over her, as Mr 
 Fellowes moved his hand from her wrist, and they rode on 
 and looked upon this scene. 
 
 High overhead the trees met in a grand natural arch, 
 shutting out nearly all view of the sky for a considerable 
 length of road, all view of the sky, but not of the sun. 
 To the west the trees were flooded as it were with light; 
 each leaf seemed tipped with radiance, and golden fragments 
 fell down shimmering on the ground with every movement 
 of the branches overhead. While towards them from the 
 other end of this nave of nature, over the rich yellow loamy 
 road on which the fragments of gold fell shimmering in the 
 fullest light that the setting sun could throw upon them 
 there came another pair of riders : and the one was a fair 
 
A Proud Captive. 117 
 
 yellow-haired girl on a splendid chestnut horse, whose every 
 movement brought out some graceful curve in her figure ; 
 and the man was the same who some weeks before had told 
 Charlie St John, that even for women there were paths to be 
 trodden and goals to be gained that were well worth treading 
 and gaining. And her heart sank down with a dull thud as 
 she bent her head in acknowledgment of Walter Goring's 
 bow, and remembered fully and clearly, and for the first 
 time since her fever, all Walter Goring's suggestions and 
 advice. There had been another life for her, had she sought it. 
 There had been a means of escape from the mean monotony 
 which so sorely weighted her. But she had been oblivious of 
 them ; and now ! now it was too late ! 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 A PKOUD CAPTIVE. 
 
 "Do you know that man? Who is he?" Mr Fellowes asked, 
 as soon as they were past. 
 
 "I just know him; it's Mr Walter Goring, the author 
 of" 
 
 " Is it ? " he interrupted eagerly. " Why, he 's just come 
 into a fine property down close to my place. I never saw 
 him before" and Mr Fellowes turned round and leant his 
 hand on his horse's haunch in order the better to have another 
 look at his unknown neighbour. 
 
 " Good-looking fellow?" he observed, interrogatively, when 
 he came round again ; and Charlie replied dreamily, 
 
 "Is he?" 
 
 He looked at her anxiously. They were out of the shade 
 of the trees by this time ; and in the light he saw that her 
 face was very pale, and that a shade had come over her eyes. 
 
 "What is it, Charlie?" he asked pathetically. "You 
 
 don't regret " he stopped, and gave a gulp. It was very 
 
 much to this man that the girl to whom he had told his love 
 should love him in return. 
 
 " No, no ; please don't say that to me again," she said, 
 quickly turning her face towards him. " I '11 tell you what 
 
i 1 8 Walter Goring. 
 
 it was, though it's almost too intangible to tell at all," she 
 went on in a low voice, half to herself. 
 
 " Do tell me, Charlie ; you must tell me everything that 
 troubles 3'ou* now, my pet." 
 
 She looked kindly and gratefully at him. At the same 
 time she rather doubted her own capability of doing this. 
 He was not the type of man to whom a woman can carry 
 every trouble. However, she said now, 
 
 " It is nothing that troubles me ; it only set me thinking. 
 I 'rn sure that I have been through that bit of road, and seen 
 the same people, and heard the same words, and spoken the 
 same before." 
 
 " I hope not," he said seriously. He could not help 
 thinking that it would be rather awkward for him if she had 
 done so. An accepted rival, and that rival a duplicate of 
 himself, might prove disagreeable. 
 
 She laughed. " Oh, it must have been in a dream, or in 
 some other life," she said; " it gives you a very queer feeling 
 when it comes over you you don't know what is and what 
 is not." 
 
 " It 's the fever has left you weak," he said, encouragingly. 
 He was very matter-of-fact. Without having precisely what 
 Mr Sala calls "beef on the brain," he had too much solidity 
 there for there to be any room for metaphysical speculations. 
 He meant most kindly towards Charlie by this suggestion of 
 his. Kindly ? he meant it most fondly and lovingly ; but 
 at the moment she would have preferred a silent sympathy, 
 anything, anything, rather than this sort of solution of her 
 dreamy difficulty. However, she said, 
 
 " I suppose it is that I am very weak indeed; so weak 
 that I really don't think I can stand Robert and Ellen's 
 speeches to-night ; will you mind not saying anything about 
 it till to-morrow?" 
 
 But, unlike the majority of men, he did mind deferring the 
 annunciation of the bliss that had befallen him till the 
 morrow. He did mind it very much indeed. He wanted to 
 make his full rights apparent at once, in order that he might 
 claim them without fear and without reproach. So he said 
 that he thought that it would be more honourable to make 
 Mr Prescott acquainted with what had passed without any 
 unnecessary delay. To which Charlie assented with a certain 
 
A Proud Captive. 119 
 
 feeling that was not exactly soreness, but that certainly was 
 not pleasure, that she belonged rather less to herself than she 
 had done an hour before. 
 
 Unquestionably it was not the courtship possibly it would 
 not be the marriage of which the girl had dreamed. We 
 all do dream about our futures ; and if they fall very far short 
 of our dreamings, we cannot help coming down to their level 
 with a pang. Young womanhood, too, often inclines to the 
 dangerous and dubious, rather than to the man who proposes 
 an alliance through all time to her after knowing her for 
 three weeks, and leaves her not a single doubt as to the 
 honourableness of his intentions. The creature in the clouds 
 never too certain of himself holds her against the man 
 who comes to the fore, and tells her in language about which 
 there can be no mistake, that he wants her to be his wife and 
 the manager of his household, and the legal recipient of all 
 his ill humours. 
 
 During the ride home, Mr Fellowes made minute jokes 
 against himself ; and that feeling of being no longer her own 
 " goods and chattels " came over Charlie more strongly than 
 before. She felt herself constrained to smile at what he said, 
 whether cause for smiling were patent to her or not. She 
 also felt that he was watching her, as she before now had 
 watched a kitten or a puppy. Further, she reminded herself 
 that henceforth all chance of anything different to that which 
 she now had was over for her. That this man's life and 
 interests and her own were one and indivisible through all 
 time from this hour. That in future to sigh for novelty 
 would be half a crime, and more than half a folly. That shj 
 was " engaged" to fulfil every atom of a woman's self-abne- 
 gating part. That she had shut herself off from all chance 
 of change, and so had better make the best of it. 
 
 She came back from her reverie a reverie in which she 
 had heard without heeding many of his speeches just as 
 they were about to re-enter the town. She felt that ho 
 deserved something different from the inattention of the last 
 fifteen minutes before he went in and told her brother-in-law 
 that he desired the great boon of herself. 
 
 " Look here," she said, reining her horse a little closer to 
 his, " as a matter of form, I suppose you will tell Robert 
 Prescott what you have told me; but I want you to understand 
 
I2O Walter Goring. 
 
 that all the Kobert Prescotts in the world couldn't alter my 
 decision." 
 
 If he could but have feigned to accept the womanly gracious- 
 ness of the avowal ? But he could not feign ; the graceful 
 gift of doing so was not his. He opened his honest blue eyes 
 at her, and said, 
 
 " Why, my dear Charlie, he wishes you to marry me. I 
 know that very well." 
 
 Then she took the " Major " sharply on the curb, with a 
 miserable feeling that he (Mr Fellowes, not the " Major ") 
 never would understand her. 
 
 Mr Fellowes carried himself bravely even through that 
 awful ordeal a first evening in the bosom of the family of 
 his betrothed. One cannot repress a feeling of reverential 
 admiration for the wild gallantry which carries any man 
 along to this point. The preliminary passages are pleasant 
 enough ; all things are made so easy to him by the family 
 while he is only looking much and saying nothing that can 
 be taken hold of. But from the moment that he has shown 
 that he knows how to offer his paw, he is expected to per- 
 form perpetually, and if one of the long roll of an engaged 
 man's tricks is got through tamely, he is commented upon in 
 no very tender spirit by the watchful band of anxious 
 friends. A woman's part of the business is not fraught with 
 too much bliss ; but a man's must be maddening. 
 
 The Prescotts were very kind odiously kind. They 
 averted their eyes whenever he went near her, and (Ellen 
 especially) could not restrain their looks of disappointment 
 when he failed to avail himself in any marked manner of the 
 opportunity thus given. Mrs Prescott told her children to 
 call him " Uncle Henry" from the moment the announce- 
 ment was made. So that when Charlie came down after 
 taking off her habit, she found him domesticated in a manner 
 that was disgusting to her. Moreover, Mr Fellowes looked 
 too rosy under his happiness, and smiled too much for good 
 taste. That he should have been hungry at supper-time was 
 all right enough, and quite in accordance with her own 
 sentiments. But he made a merit of his appetite, as if it 
 were something surprising under the circumstances a sort 
 of thing worthy of remark. He grew communicative about 
 a spoilt marriage scheme of his sister's ; he made jokes about 
 
A Proud Captive. 1 2 1 
 
 the proverb he had become for being " very hard to hit " down 
 in his own county. He gave himself little airs of ownership 
 with respect to Charlie, telling her what she "should" do on 
 the following day, instead of asking her what she "would" 
 do. Finally, he adverted to that fact of having met Walter 
 Goring out riding, which has been already chronicled. "And 
 he had a remarkably pretty girl with him," he said, magnani- 
 mously. " I daresay we shall soon have her for a neighbour 
 at Goring Place, Charlie ! " There is no doubt about it, that 
 when love makes a man hilarious, he should be shut up for 
 a time in the dark. The risk he runs of making himself 
 ridiculous in the light of lamps and love is too great. 
 
 As soon as he was gone that night, Charlie said good- 
 night hurriedly, and rushed up to her room. She wanted to 
 think about what she had done before the remarks of any 
 third person had put the deed before her in an evil light. 
 She wanted to think about what she had done. She sadly 
 wanted to get some assurance from herself that she had done 
 well. She hoped that she had ; she prayed that she had ; 
 she thought that she had ; but she did not know. 
 
 From the commercial point of view, she knew that it 
 would be a very good marriage for her. She knew very 
 well that man (or woman, for that matter) does not live by 
 bread alone, in the station of life to which she had been 
 born. She knew very well that she should be a better, a 
 brighter, and more contented wife to a man who had the 
 wherewithal to keep all sordid cares from her than she 
 should be to one who had to struggle and strive to do it, and 
 who must even then fail. She had no romantic notions 
 about love in a cottage, and a platter of potato peelings 
 being all-sufficient, if partaken of in company with the 
 husband of her heart. She knew very well that this was a 
 style of thing which would shortly have sapped the founda- 
 tions of any love she might ever have felt. But at the same 
 time that she knew all this, she did wonder whether " The 
 Hurst " and a plentiful supply of the good things of this life 
 would be all-sufficient for her through the long years that, 
 in the order of things, were yet to be passed by her in Henry 
 Fellowes's company. Would these be enough for her if 
 Henry Fellowes never got nearer to her heart than he had 
 yet succeeded in doing ? " But he 's so good and kind, he 
 
122 Walter Goring. 
 
 must" she said to herself; and then she thought, "What a 
 life Mr Goring's wife will have?" for she fell into the error 
 of fancying that this man was more in his books than he 
 was, and his books never palled upon her. 
 
 Just then a voice asked from the outside of her door, 
 
 " May I come in for two minutes, Charlie?" 
 
 "Yes, for just two minutes;" and then the door was 
 thrown open impatiently, and Miss Charlie stood before her 
 gentle, fair, placid sister, with streaming damp hair, and a 
 troubled expression of countenance. 
 
 " I thought I would just come and speak to you before I 
 went to bed," Mrs Prescott said, composedly walking on 
 into the room without giving so much as a g'ance at the 
 troubled face of the girl who had admitted her. 
 
 " What have you to say at this hour of the night, Ellen ? 
 You, who generally crush all my conversational efforts after 
 ten o'clock and it 's past midnight now." 
 
 " Robert and I have been talking about you." 
 
 "Naturally," the girl interrupted, pettishly; "but put off 
 the recapitulation of what you 've said till to-morrow do, 
 please." She paused for a moment or two, and then she 
 went on. " If you only knew how tired I am to-night, and 
 how my head burns " 
 
 " Does it ? La !" her sister said, pityingly. 
 
 "Does it?" the girl cried, leaning her arms and face 
 down upon the toilet- table, and upsetting a scent-bottle 
 as she did so; "does it? it does; and my heart and soul 
 are burning too. Now don't say anything, or you '11 make 
 me worse." 
 
 Mrs Prescott gazed for a moment or two at this unruly 
 member of her household ; then she glanced up at the gas ; 
 the latter was flaring extravagantly, so she paused to turn it 
 down before she said, 
 
 " What have you been doing to make your hair in such a 
 state?" 
 
 " Dipping my head in water," her sister replied, jumping 
 to her feet as she spoke. "Come, Ellen, time's up; you 
 said for two minutes." 
 
 " But, Charlie, do listen ; you know how sincerely Robert 
 and I have your good at heart; he says you have been a 
 great flirt, you know, but that now he hopes you will alter, 
 
Six o Clock. 123 
 
 and and give Mr Fellowes no reason to repent his very 
 hasty ofter." 
 
 Charlie gave an impatient movement of the shoulders. 
 
 " Yes. I have been what 's called a flirt, I suppose ; that 
 
 is to say there, don't talk to me to-night don't, Ellen, 
 
 don t." 
 
 She put her arms round her sister's neck as she pleaded 
 thus; she pressed her hot crimson cheek against the fair, 
 round, cool one which was never defaced by angry passions. 
 She was very much in earnest in her appeal; but what 
 chance does impassioned earnestness ever stand against 
 dogged determination ? Mrs Prescott was one of those 
 sweetly-amiable women who invariably contrive to have the 
 last word. 
 
 "That is to say what, Charlie?" 
 
 " Why, you and Robert have both applied the term to me, 
 and you're always right; but do drop the past now. What 
 is the use of making me feel myself a miserable sinner ? Mr 
 Fellowes is so good and kind and all that to me, that of 
 course I shah 1 be the same to him." 
 
 "I hope so, Charlie," the married sister replied; "but 
 you '11 have to alter in many things, dear." 
 
 " I 'm too old a dog to learn new tricks," Charlie said, 
 laughing wearily. " Come, dear, go now, or Robert will be 
 sending to know why we couldn't say what we had to say to 
 each other down in the dining-room ; and on this occasion I 
 echo his sentiments/' 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 six O'CLOCK 
 
 WOMEN'S demands almost invariably grow in proportion to 
 the concessions made to them. Daisy having succeeded in 
 keeping her cousin one day longer at Brighton than he had 
 intended remaining, now felt or feigned that life would be 
 dark to her if he did not come up and " sit for an hour or 
 two in the garden with her the following morning." 
 
124 Walter Goring. 
 
 " But, Daisy, you forget my guests at Goring Place. I 
 must get back to them." 
 
 " You 're not going back there, straight ? You '11 stay in 
 London ? " 
 
 " Only to see my publishers." 
 
 "You'll go to Roehampton ; now, won't you ? " 
 
 " Well, just to see the Walshes ; yes." 
 
 " Now, a few hours can't make any difference, Walter ; 
 think how long it will be before I see you again perhaps, and 
 do come and sit for an hour or two under that weeping elm 
 to-morrow morning ; it will make me like the place better. 
 I shall go there and think of you whenever I feel too tired to 
 stand the Osbornes." 
 
 " Well, I suppose I must stay ; but mind, Daisy, I shall 
 be obliged to leave by the two o'clock train." 
 
 "Then come to me at eleven. How can you think so 
 much, about your book now ? You needn't write now you 
 don't want the money. I can't imagine how you can care 
 to bother yourself." 
 
 He laughed. " You sordid-minded Daisy ; perhaps you're 
 right after all ; it may be that the game isn 't worth the 
 candle. Well, I '11 come at eleven. Good-night, young lady." 
 
 Before he went to her the following morning he strolled 
 down on to the pier, and stood at the extreme end, looking 
 out over the sea for a time. There was that dark slaty-blue 
 tint over it which it frequently has in September, especially 
 just before a thunderstorm. u Not that we are likely to have 
 one now," he thought, looking up at the clear cloudless sky. 
 But though the sky was bright and cloudless, there was a 
 something oppressively sultry in the air. " Soda-water and 
 sherry will be pleasant under that weeping elm," he thought. 
 " I wonder if the old lady will be shocked if I suggest it." 
 
 He turned round now, and leaned his back against the 
 wood-work, and looked round lazily over the numerous 
 groups of girls who were scattered about on the benches. 
 They were of all orders of British beauty ; and the majority 
 of them were immersed in literature, and had their long damp 
 hair unbound and hanging loosely over their shoulders, in 
 order that it might derive the fullest benefit from the sea air, 
 and be seen in all the bravery of its luxuriance by any chance 
 beholder. But pretty, or at least pleasing-looking, as the 
 
Six o'Clock. 125 
 
 most of them undoubtedly were, there was not one so attrac- 
 tive in his eyes as either of those two girls who had met on 
 horseback the night before in the shaded road near Portslade. 
 
 It is a useful lesson to a novelist to go and stand on the 
 pier at Brighton during the season. He or she is almost sure 
 to come away sadder and humbler, if not wiser, for the ex- 
 periment. In some fair hand or other you are sure to see 
 one of your own works perhaps your cherished one the 
 one at which you laboured the hardest the one into which, 
 you put your best the one in which you flattered yourself 
 that the various shades of character were delineated delicately 
 and sharply the one that, in the exquisite phraseology of re- 
 viewers, you felt persuaded must be perused with unabated 
 interest from the lirst page to the last. Go to Brighton pier, 
 deluded one, and give your pride a fall. Mark the lassitude 
 with which the pages are turned ; observe the colossal skip- 
 ping that goes on ; see and shiver at the supine indifference 
 with which the first volume is laid down, and the second 
 never taken up. Constrain yourself to listen to a few of the 
 verbal ingenuous criticisms that are passed upon your offspring 
 by a brace of pretty girls. It may do you good to hear that 
 your " last was dull enough, but this is ever-so-much worse " 
 it may do you good eventually ;' but if it does not give you 
 creepy sensations at the moment, you are not made of the 
 ordinary fiction- writer's flesh. You may come out of it puri- 
 fied and refined ; but there is no question about its being 
 a very fiery furnace of an ordeal. 
 
 But the great law of compensation works even under these 
 humiliating circumstances. You can always analyse your 
 most inglorious sensations, and get something good, or at 
 least useful, out of them. At least, men may do this ; wo- 
 men, unfortunately, are rarely gifted with the analytical mind. 
 
 At any rate, Walter Goring redeemed the time this morn- 
 ing, by thinking out an essay on the subject of the numberless 
 little rifts which make all music mute in the heart of man 
 veiy often. No matter how noble, exalted, heaven-born, the 
 motive of the music may be, there comes a moment when 
 some fragment of the earth earthy strikes upon the life lute, 
 and produces discord surely perhaps silence. 
 
 As he stood there thinking something to the effect of the 
 foregoing passage, he saw advancing towards him that pair 
 
126 Walter Goring. 
 
 whom Daisy and himself had met the night before. Charlie 
 at the same moment caught sight of him, and her face 
 brightened visibly, and he, marking the pleasure that she 
 showed so freely, went forward to meet her. 
 
 Even in the few seconds that were employed in gaining 
 them, Walter Goring had time to see clearly "how things 
 were." There was an unmistakable air of being engaged 
 about the tall, handsome, heaithly-looking gentleman who 
 walked by Miss St John's side, glancing down upon her with 
 unfeigned pride and pleasure, and unmistakable proprietor- 
 ship. Charlie had a yachting dress on, and her hands were 
 in the pockets thereof, and she kept her face set steadily 
 straight before her. But the man by her side kept on bend- 
 ing his head, and looking down into her eyes in a way that 
 left no room for doubt. 
 
 Miss St John was one who, if she desired to speak to a 
 man, never hesitated an instant about doing so. Therefore, 
 when she saw Walter Goring coming to meet her, she 
 quickened her pace a little, took her hand out of her pocket, 
 and held it out to him with a hearty 
 
 " Mr Goring, I am so glad to see you again." 
 
 " And I 'm delighted to see you better ; I heard of your 
 illness from Mrs Walsh." 
 
 "Yes; I've had a fever, but I'm not infectious at all 
 now." Then she turneda little to wards Mr Fellowes, and added, 
 "Allow me to introduce you and Mr Fellowes to each other." 
 
 " We ought to have known something of each other before," 
 Mr Fellowes said, cordially holding out his hand, and Walter 
 Goring too.v it as cordially, saying, 
 
 " My Norfolk neighbour then, I presume ; we have been 
 unfortunate in finding each other out, Mr Fellowes." 
 
 " Yes, very ; my sister forwarded me your note about the 
 battue only yesterday, or I should have replied to it. How 
 do you find the game on your land this year ? " 
 
 Then the two men got talking the usual sporting talk, and 
 Charlie stood by and listened. 
 
 After a while they strolled up and down. The mere fact 
 of their lands adjoining gave these men much, in common at 
 their first meeting even, more especially as one was desirous 
 of giving all the local information in his power, and the other 
 of receiving it. 
 
Six o'Clock. 127 
 
 " You were not much at Goring Place in your uncle's 
 lifetime ? " 
 
 " Very rarely never since I was a boy ; we were very 
 good friends, you know, but he never asked me, so I never 
 went ; did you see much of him ? ; ' 
 
 " Why, no ; the fact is, there had been some sort of dispute 
 about a right of way between my father and him, and Mr 
 Goring couldn't forget it; I daresay you have heard the 
 story." 
 
 " Clarke told me something about it ; we must open up 
 the lane again, for it 's a short cut from The Hurst to Goring 
 Place," Walter said, looking at Charlie. 
 
 " Is Goring Place so near The Hurst ? " she asked. 
 
 " Yes, Miss St John." 
 
 " She '11 see for herself soon how near it is, I hope," Mr 
 Fellowes put in buoyantly ; and then Charlie saw that Mr 
 Goring looked at her steadily again, and she could not keep 
 down a blush. 
 
 " I 'm delighted to hear it," he was beginning, when she 
 stopped him. 
 
 " When are you going to write another novel, Mr Gor- 
 ing?" 
 
 " I have just finished one it will soon be out, and I shall 
 have the honour of presenting it to you." 
 
 " You won't have much time for writing now," Mr Fel- 
 lowes remarked. 
 
 " Shall I not ? It seems to me that if I stay at Goring 
 Place I shall have little to do save write." 
 
 " The hounds meet three times a week, close to us ; you '11 
 join the Hunt of course ? " 
 
 " Undoubtedly." 
 
 " I often thought it a pity that your uncle didn't keep up 
 the kennels ; you know your grandfather hunted a pack of 
 foxhounds for years. I wish you 'd start them again ! " 
 
 '* Don't do it, Mr Goring, if it will take up all your time," 
 Charlie said, shaking her head and half laughing. 
 
 " I submit to your decree ; I shall not do it," he said, 
 lifting his hat as he spoke ; " and now I must say good-bye, 
 I fear. I have an appointment with my cousin, Miss Goring, 
 to whom I trust I may shortly have the honour of introduc- 
 ing you, Miss St John." 
 
128 Walter Goring. 
 
 " Ah ! your uncle left a daughter, didn't he ? " Mr Fel- 
 lowes asked. 
 
 " Yes," Walter answered ; " the lady I was riding with 
 last night ; I am left her guardian, so you see I have plenty 
 to do without starting a pack of foxhounds/' 
 
 " I shall like to know her very much/' Charlie said, look- 
 ing away out over the sea, half abstractedly ; "it was like a 
 poem last night, I thought, and she was the sweetest rhyme 
 in it," 
 
 Walter made no answer ; he understood her fully, though 
 her sentence had not been too coherently worded. Mr Fel- 
 lowes looked perplexed, then it appeared to strike him that 
 it was his part to explain away anything that seemed strange 
 in Charlie. 
 
 " Miss St John has got it into her head that we had all 
 met in that road, in that way before, either in a dream, or 
 or before the Deluge, I think she says ; I tell her it 's the 
 effects of the fever/' 
 
 " I think so too," Walter replied, and his answer might 
 have been an agreement to either proposition. Mr Fellowes 
 held that it was complete coincidence with his fever theory, 
 and was satisfied ; but Charlie met his eyes, and was satisfied 
 too. Then once more they said " good-bye " and parted. 
 
 " He seems to be a splendid fellow," Mr Fellowes remarked 
 enthusiastically, as soon as Walter was out of ear-shot. " I 'm 
 very glad that we shall have him for our neighbour." 
 
 This identification of her with himself was immediate per- 
 haps, considering that he had only proposed to her the pre- 
 vious night. But Charlie did not object to it at all. She 
 did not notice it, in fact, for she had thrown herself into the 
 future, and was employed in wondering what her life would 
 be like down in that place of which the two men had been 
 fcpeaking so familiarly, the place of which she was to be the 
 mistress. 
 
 Meanwhile Walter was slowly walking up to keep his ap- 
 pointment with Daisy. It has been said that he saw " how 
 it was " at the first glance he gave to Mr Fellowes and Charlie. 
 And during their interview his first impression had received 
 confirmation strong. " Evidently she 's going to marry him," 
 he thought ; "he seems a capital fellow, but scarcely the 
 sort of husband for her I should fancy." Then he went on 
 
Six o'Clock. 129 
 
 pondering over the consistent inconsistency which nearly 
 every woman displays. He recalled to his mind her little 
 brief hursts of ambitious enthusiasm, that night he had met 
 her at the Walshes. He remembered those strong though 
 vague aspirations, those mental hungerings and thirstings 
 after more satisfying sustenance than had yet fallen to her 
 share, to which she had given vent. He reminded himself 
 of the promise she had given, half to him and half to herself, 
 about fixing upon an aim, and making an object for herself 
 in life. All these things he remembered, as he walked along, 
 and he laughed almost bitterly as he thought, " And it has all 
 ended in this that she is going to marry the first fellow 
 who has asked her ! Well, she ; 11 be a good friend for Daisy, 
 when Daisy comes to Goring Place." 
 
 He could not help speculating a good deal about Miss St 
 John. He found himself marvelling how she would stand 
 life, day after day, all the year round, at that red house which 
 he could see from his drawing-room windows. There was 
 something to him absolutely incongruous in this girl settling 
 down in such a way ; he wondered what she would do with 
 herself. He never thought of the possibility of her employ- 
 ing herself in household matters. She was an essentially 
 feminine-looking woman, small and delicately made, and 
 eminently graceful in gait and figure ; but he could not 
 imagine her subsiding into the purely domestic animal. 
 " Women are fearfully and wonderfully constituted, and no 
 mistake," he thought to himself ; " to think that a girl like 
 that should go and voluntarily vow to remain with a good 
 fellow enough, but one who palpably hasn't an idea in com- 
 mon with herself, for the whole term of her natural life ; it 's 
 almost monstrous, that because this ghastly, incongruous 
 sacrifice is made under the name of marriage, girls should 
 make it without reproach." 
 
 He could not restrain his thoughts from running ahead 
 about her. For a few years she would be a young and very 
 interesting Mrs Fellowes, despite that " As the husband is, 
 the wife is " creed in which he had belief. But how about 
 her as a middle-aged Mrs Fellowes? Would that curious 
 something which there was about her, and which made her 
 a more interesting and exciting study than the mass of girls, 
 though of little beauty would this something gradually ebb 
 
130 Walter Goring. 
 
 away and leave her a mere sonsy matron, with sharp words 
 on her tongue for rebellious children, and a keen eye for the 
 peccadilloes of her maids? Would she in time come to 
 dress with delight for a dull dinner-party down there, a 
 dinner-party wanting in even those elements of amusements 
 and interest which she had found insufficient at the Walshes? 
 Would she tone down into a tame Lady Bountiful ? Would 
 she come to look upon art and literature with the hazy gaze 
 those do bestow upon them who know themselves to be a 
 long way off, and have no desire to come any nearer ? Above 
 all, would she ever learn to train her looks, and guard them, 
 and not seem to give them gladly and freely to a man even 
 a stranger who could read them aright ? "I am glad The 
 Hurst is so near to Goring Place, for I shall like to see how 
 she goes on," he thought, as he turned into the garden where 
 Daisy, gracefully posed under the elm, sat awaiting him. 
 Psychologically then, these two girls were almost of equal 
 interest to him ; but he read what Charlie's life had been 
 through her acts and words, more clearly than he read 
 Daisy's. Naturally, therefore, Daisy at present commanded 
 more of his thoughts, and had a larger portion of his specu- 
 lative interest. 
 
 Daisy presented herself this morning under a different 
 aspect to any in which he had hitherto seen her. In the 
 first place, she " took him more for granted," in a way that 
 he could not have denned, but that he felt keenly. On 
 former occasions, when she had made appeals to his fraternal 
 affection and complaisance, she had done it in such a way 
 that he could but remember that he was not her brother, 
 and feel that she remembered it too. But this morning, 
 some fine, almost imperceptible, but most telling change had 
 come over her. She was very nice, very graceful and girlish, 
 and amiable. But she did not make herself lithe and willowy 
 at him ; she did not appeal to him ; she was in fact an 
 utterly different Daisy from the one who had laid her nand 
 on his shoulder and her head on his breast but the other 
 day. She called him Walter, without the slightest attempt 
 at a plaintive. intonation. She volunteered a promise to stay 
 and make the best of things at Brighton for as long a time 
 as he liked. She told him that she was quite alive to the 
 impossibility of her living at Goring Place until he was 
 
Six o'Clock. 131 
 
 married. " And I do hope you will marry soon, Walter ; it 
 will be so much better for me in every way when you are 
 married if your wife will only like me." On the whole, 
 despite the amiability of this speech, Walter would rather 
 that she had not made it. 
 
 Then she went on to tell him why she had been so de- 
 sirous of seeing him this morning. It had been with no 
 romantic notion of having a few soothing " last moments " 
 with him that was clear. 
 
 " There are two or three points that you had better settle 
 with her," she nodded towards the house, indicating thus 
 that she was alluding to Mrs Osborne, " before you go foi 
 of course you won't come to Brighton again for a long time 
 there 's really nothing to bring you." 
 
 " To see you, Daisy ; but what are the points ?" 
 "Oh! as to seeing me, that's understood. We shall 
 always be glad to see each other, that 's of course. What I 
 want you to tell her is, that I am not to be expected to ride 
 out with her daughter ; Miss Osborne goes out with a troop 
 and a riding-master, and I won't do it." 
 
 " I should think not ; I '11 see about a steady groom being 
 at your disposal before I leave. I meant to do it, even if 
 you hadn't spoken : don't think me regardless of your com- 
 fort, Daisy?" 
 
 He spoke almost tenderly ; it was not exactly pleasant to 
 
 him to be put off from his former position in this way. But 
 
 she would not respond to the tenderness at all. She only said, 
 
 " That 's so good of you, Walter ; and I 'm to go out when 
 
 I please?" 
 
 ''My dear girl, you're not in a prison." 
 " I know that very well ; but it had better be understood 
 that I do as I like in this matter. To-day, when I was 
 coming out here, she began, ' Oh ! Miss Goring, you '11 find 
 it too hot in the garden, I think.' I told her that was my 
 look-out, and she didn't seem to like it ; now if she doesn't 
 want me to speak to her in that way, she had better not 
 interfere with me." 
 
 " Well, Daisy, I will try to meet your views," he said ; 
 and Daisy put her yellow head against the back of the 
 garden bench and thanked him, and apparently had nothing 
 further to say. 
 
132 Walter Goring. 
 
 Before he left, he told her about meeting Miss St John on 
 the pier, and of the almost certainty he felt that Miss St 
 John would be their neighbour eventually. 
 
 "Your neighbour, you mean. I should be wretched if 
 I thought Goring Place was to be my home for ever and 
 ever." 
 
 He was disgusted with himself for suffering himself to be 
 mortified by the expression of this girl's fickleness and in- 
 difference. Nevertheless, he was mortified. He sat in 
 silence, waiting for her to speak ; when she did so at last, it 
 was only to say, 
 
 " When am I to have the three thousand pounds that my 
 father left me?" 
 
 ''You may have it when you like. What do you want 
 with it?" 
 
 " I want nothing, but I fancy a dozen things. Let me 
 have five hundred of it may I ? or a thousand may I ?" 
 
 " My dear child, for what ?" 
 
 "Why, to spend to be sure," she replied quickly; "to 
 spend in any way I please, and not to have to give an 
 account of it ; for that I won't do." 
 
 "You shall have it, if you will," he answered. The 
 thought struck him that she might want it for some of those 
 people with whom she had been brought up. Perhaps even 
 for her mother ! But he would not question her. 
 
 " You shall have it, Daisy," he repeated. Then he stood 
 up and bid her " good-bye ; " and she gave him her hand in 
 farewell, coolly and collectedly, and was no more like the 
 Daisy who had warmed him with her touch, and melted him 
 by her tears the other day, than snow is like fire. He went 
 away, feeling very sorry for this change in her this change, 
 of which he had really no right to complain. He went 
 away, feeling very sorry, but more puzzled. "What can 
 have come over the girl," he thought ; " she can't be such a 
 false-hearted little cat as to dislike me after her manner even 
 yesterday." He thought about her a good deal till the 
 train stopped at the Victoria station, in fact. Then he got 
 out, and hailed a cab, and began to think about what terms 
 he should ask for his book as he was driven to his publisher's. 
 His heart was very much set on this work making a con- 
 spicuous success, for his last had been reviled by more than 
 
Six o'Clock. 133 
 
 one of the literary journals ; and he had smarted and been 
 very sore as the stoutest are wont to be when their tender 
 spots are lashed, however vigorously they may deny the soft 
 impeachment. He had smarted and been very sore, and had 
 striven earnestly to amend. Now he wanted to see the fruits 
 of the castigations and the consideration he had given them 
 made public. So, now that it had come to the point of 
 transacting the immediate preliminary business, previous to 
 publication, his mind was very much engaged upon his book 
 to the exclusion of all other considerations. 
 
 The interview was agreeable, not to say exhilarating. No 
 matter whether a man be a large landed proprietor, and in 
 possession of a good yearly income or not, the satisfaction of 
 knowing that the work of his brain is of sufficiently well- 
 known and recognised merit to command a good price, is in- 
 tense. " Mr Goring's last book had not been a success ; " of 
 that his publisher mildly but firmly reminded him. But 
 this one, which it was proposed should come out at a more 
 auspicious season and which, no doubt, was free from the 
 trifling defects of style which, more than the adverse criti- 
 cism, had over-ridden the last, might be safely prophesied 
 to " go." The end of it was that the book was to be an- 
 nounced immediately, as "ready on the 2d of November," 
 and the copyright for three years was made over to the firm 
 for the sum of 800. It is well to reward authors liberally 
 at least in fiction. 
 
 " Now for Roehampton," he said to himself when he came 
 out of the publishing office ; " how glad they '11 be to find it 
 all done. I believe if she hadn't urged me on, I should 
 never have made the requisite effort to finish it, after finding 
 myself master of Goring Place ; as for old Ralph, he ; 11 be 
 better pleased than if all his own pictures get well hung next 
 year." 
 
 There was great pleasure to the young man in this assured 
 feeling which he had of receiving a warm welcome from them 
 at Roehampton. He had a good many friends, for he was 
 well liked by most men and women ; but there was the bond 
 of many years' good fellowship (if such an expression may be 
 permitted, where there is a lady concerned), between the 
 Walshes and himself. He recalled now, as he drove down 
 to their house, the frantic zeal which Raich had displayed 
 
134 Walter Goring. 
 
 when his (Walter's) first book had come out, and stormed 
 fame. He remembered well the chagrin the kind-hearted 
 fellow had been unable to conceal when the last had been 
 reviled ! While, as for her, few men, he felt persuaded, had 
 such a friend as he had in " his goddess." 
 
 The day was very bright when he leapt out of the cab at 
 the door of the Eoehamptom house. The garden was gorge- 
 ous with those glories of the autumn, the gladiolus and 
 dahlia. Eich beds of bloom lay scattered about, breaking 
 the expanse of deep green turf every here and there ; and the 
 light came down from the setting sun, and relieved the inten- 
 sity of colour of those masses of crimson and of scarlet 
 which would otherwise have made the eyes throb to look 
 upon them. The dying day was very fair; bright as a 
 child's smile a dialogue by Shirley Brooks or Walter 
 Goring's own prospects, as they were known to the world. 
 
 There was a great air of hush and quiet over the house 
 when he turned to it, after surveying this brightness for a 
 few moments. The hall door stood open, as was usual in 
 that hospitable mansion in the summer, but all the blinds 
 were drawn down, and there was no sound of voices and 
 Daughter from the drawing-room, where voices and laughter 
 were to be heard at most times. " I hope they 're not gone 
 out," he thought ; " she 's quite capable of getting enraged 
 with me for not being here before, and going for a drive ; the 
 goddess is only a woman." Then he went into the hall, and 
 was about to shout out, " Ralph ! " when a servant came 
 upon him suddenly from the back regions a girl, with a 
 sace all blurred with tears and blanched with fear, and said 
 to him, before he could ask her " What's the matter ? " 
 
 " Oh, sir ! poor master is dead ! " 
 
 It was like a blow on the chest to him. His heart bounded 
 with a sudden spasm of pain, to recover which he had to 
 gasp for breath almost as a woman might have done. He 
 was utterly unnerved by the tidings by the thought of this 
 good, valued, old friend, called with such ghastly celerity to 
 his last account. No homily, however eloquent, from the 
 lips of the grandest elocutionist comes home to the heart 
 with the terrible force of the one the heart reads to itself in 
 the first moment of hearing of that from which we all 
 pray to be delivered sudden death. 
 
Six o'Clock. 135 
 
 His first question was, "Where is she your mistress, I 
 mean ? Let her know I 'm here." 
 
 " Master's brother's wife is here, sir," she answered ; and as 
 she said this, a lady come out from one of the rooms with an 
 arranged look of grief on her face, and a good deal of hand- 
 kerchief in her hand. He introduced himself hurriedly. 
 
 " I am Mr Goring, an old friend of" , he could not 
 
 say " Ealph's," the tears in his throat would not let him 
 utter it ; so he paused, and made an effort to swallow his 
 emotion. 
 
 The lady made some remark to the effect of its being an 
 awful calamity, and what we all must prepare for and sub- 
 mit to ; her remarks were not original. He cut them short 
 
 " I have sent to tell Mrs Walsh that I am here," he said. 
 The British matron bridled without delay. 
 
 " It is impossible that my sister-in-law can see you," she 
 said, " utterly impossible ; but of course you are aware of 
 that " 
 
 " She will see me," Walter interrupted ; " whom should 
 she see ? Of course, I shall go to her as I should have gone 
 to Ralph, had she died and left him ; I have lost too valued 
 a friend not to go at once to the other one who loved him 
 best." 
 
 He passed her as he spoke, and made his way upstairs ; 
 on the landing he was met by the servant whom he had sent 
 to tell her mistress that he had come, and he. stopped to ask 
 " how and when it happened ? " " He died last night about 
 six o'clock," the girl told him ; " he had a terrible shock in 
 town in the morning; he went up in the carriage, and one of 
 the horses took fright and ran right into an omnibus-pole, 
 and was staked in the chest and killed. Master didn't say 
 much at the time, but it gave him a shock, and the doctors 
 say it was heart complaint." 
 
 " Six o'clock," he thought, as he went on to the room in 
 which he was told he would find her. " Six o'clock ! just 
 the hour when I met that girl and her lover under the trees ; 
 it was all brightness and beauty and peace about me, and she 
 was in such sorrow, poor thing ! " then he opened the door 
 and found himself in the presence of the widow. 
 
 She was leaning back in an easy chair. There were no 
 tears in hex eyes, and there was no white emblem of woe in 
 
136 Walter Goring. 
 
 her hand. She looked calm and composed as usual, but her 
 face was very pale. He went up and took her hand, and as 
 soon as she felt his clasp, her tears and words flowed together. 
 It was a thoroughly womanly plaint that she made. 
 
 " If you had been up in town with him, perhaps it wouldn't 
 have happened." And he answered, 
 
 " God knows ! but I shall never forgive myself for beiny 
 away from you last night." 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 THE WEDDING TOUR. 
 
 THE autumnal tints were fading fast. Warmth and colour 
 were waning from off the earth. There were storm-clouds in 
 the sky. Fogs and fires had set in. There were more leaves 
 dead and rotting on the ground than there were on the trees. 
 In short, it was dreary, dark November when the threads of 
 the story are taken up again. 
 
 Miss St John was no more ; she was merged in Mrs 
 Fellowes, and she was coming home to The Hurst, her hus- 
 band's house, to-night. 
 
 They had been married about the middle of October. Mr 
 Fellowes was no friend to unnecessary delay, and Charlie not 
 finding the engagement ideally pleasant, was glad enough to 
 shorten it. She was impatient, in truth, to see how r she and 
 the life she had promised to live agreed with one another. 
 Therefore, there had been no hesitation on either side in the 
 matter, and they were married in October. 
 
 There had been little said about any member of his family 
 coming to his wedding, and not one of them had come. 
 He had only a mother and a sister, and the one was too 
 averse to railway travelling, and the other too averse to festi- 
 vities of any sort to come up to London to a wedding, he 
 had told them. Their non-appearance was taken quite as a 
 matter of course by Charlie; she had not regarded it as a 
 sign of any special antagonism to herself. 
 
The Wedding Tour. 137 
 
 Immediately after their marriage they had gone to Paris, 
 and had not enjoyed themselves at all. The bridegroom 
 knew nothing of either the pleasures or pitfalls of that city, 
 consequently he moved as one in the dark, and Charlie grew 
 impatient. When they had been to the opera and two or 
 three of the theatres, he recommended quiet strenuously, not 
 knowing where the ice was thin on that glittering surface 
 which stretched before him. But Charlie had not married 
 Mr Fellowes and come to Paris to be quiet. She could have 
 gone on being that in the dull Bayswater Square. Therefore 
 she urged him to " find out, if he didn't know, about places," 
 and he found out many things, and wished himself back at 
 The Hurst. On the whole, it was unfortunate that he should 
 have taken her at first to a place where he could not move 
 freely, and as one who was sure of himself. He looked happy 
 enough always, but she fancied that there was the expression 
 on his face of being very much obliged to any one who would 
 put him right. Altogether the wedding tour was a mistake. 
 Charlie had dreamt of Paris had longed for it with the 
 feverish longing one has for it and the East, after hearing 
 much about them. When she gained it at last, there was 
 little for her to do, save to sit down and weep over illusion 
 the th dispelled. 
 
 He was very kind and gentle to her, very patient and for- 
 bearing, no matter how her spirits ran down. He was always 
 heaping presents upon her, and wanting her to eat. His care 
 t>f her was prodigious, not to say oppressive. She had the 
 feeling of being liable to break upon her, whenever she went 
 out with him. On the whole, she would willingly have 
 bartered away a considerable portion of this care and atten- 
 tion in exchange for the man she had married being able to 
 impart one single idea that she couldn't get out of Bradshaw 
 relating to the place to which he had brought her. Whether 
 this was an idle longing or not, it certainly was not gratified. 
 She was not sorry when he said, as he did when they had 
 been there three weeks, " After all, Charlie, this place isn't 
 half as gay as they say. What do you think about going 
 home?" 
 
 " I think it would be the best thing we can do," she replied, 
 and she did not add that she thought perhaps other people 
 set about finding Paris pleasant in another way. 
 
1 38 Walter Goring. 
 
 However, they did not go straight back to The Hurst; from 
 Paris. They branched off to the Isle of Wight, and spent a 
 fortnight there, during which fortnight they were very happy, 
 and explored the island thoroughly, Charlie on a rough pony 
 and Mr Fellowes on foot. Mrs Fellowes had never experienced 
 such happiness in her life as she felt the whole of this fort- 
 night. It was very patent to her that she was as the apple 
 of his eye to this man that she was precious to him beyond 
 price. He showed his devotion to, and appreciation of, her 
 in a way that was clear without being cloying. His wishes 
 always marched with hers ; whither she went he was only too 
 happy to follow, not in blind submission, but with a frank 
 air of finding that which she thought good, the best, most 
 beautiful, and politic path. A strong feeling of friendship 
 sprang up between them in addition to the warm passion he 
 felt for her, and the genuine though weaker love she had for 
 him. They learnt to know each other well, so she believed ; 
 to know and to have such reliance on each other that " no 
 future small discrepancies in the conduct of either would have 
 the power to shake the foundation of that trust which was 
 being laid between them in these days." This she told her- 
 self, and grew glad and grateful. Her woman's heart and 
 pride were both entirely carried by the devotion he displayed. 
 Literally, he was always at her side ; metaphorically, he was 
 very much at her feet ; and she who had never been the re- 
 cipient of such unswerving, open attentions before, was a 
 rarely gracious sovereign to this her loving vassal. She 
 seemed to be re-juvenated and to grow prettier daily his 
 tenderness for her youth and admiration for the good looks 
 she possessed were so evident and inspiring. In short, he 
 was so proud of his wife that she grew fondly proud of him, 
 and showed that she was so openly, in a way that frequently 
 brought a flash of pleasure to his face, and something like 
 tears in his eyes, as he looked down upon her riding along on 
 the little pony by his side. The handsome, manly bridegroom 
 and the graceful intellectual bride were very pleasant to be- 
 hold altogether. At last they put an end to the joyous period, 
 and went home to The Hurst, reaching it about six o'clock 
 one damp, dismal November evening. 
 
 Mrs Fellowes was very eager to see her future home as 
 soon as she found herself fairly on her road to iv. Very 
 
The Wedding Tour. 139 
 
 eager to see it, and very curious on the subject of it. Hither- 
 to she had asked but very few questions respecting either it 
 or his friends and relations ; and he, for the same reason as 
 she had refrained from asking, had refrained from telling 
 anything namely, he had not thought of doing so. But 
 when, at about ten minutes to six on the evening of their re- 
 turn, he looked out of the railway carriage window into the 
 drizzle, and said, 
 
 " Charlie, dear, if it wasn't for this mist you'd see The 
 Hurst down there between those trees ; we shall be there 
 directly, 
 
 She exclaimed " I J m so impatient to see it. I J m long- 
 ing to be the mistress of your house, Harry ; I will be such 
 a nice one, and such a nice wife, darling. Oh ! when shall I 
 see your mother arid sister ? I ; d " 
 
 She was going to say she " had forgotten them," but it oc- 
 curred to her that it would be perhaps just as well that she 
 should not go into residence in the palace of truth in this 
 way, therefore she checked herself on the brink of the speech. 
 
 " You will see them to-night. A ' nice wife ! ' I. know 
 you will be that, my pet. ' Nice ! ' you '11 be the dearest and 
 sweetest in the world." 
 
 " They live near us, then ? Is their house in the village ? " 
 
 She really did not care where their house was, or where 
 they lived, but she wanted to please her husband by appear- 
 ing interested about his relatives, although they had abstained 
 from any ardent expression of interest about her. She was 
 the triumphant one, the reigning star of his affections, the 
 pivot on which each one of his thoughts turned ; she could 
 afford to be generous. 
 
 " Near us ! Why, they live at The Hurst ; didn't you 
 know that ? " he answered ; and the train stopping at the 
 moment, she had no time to say more than 
 
 " Know it ; how should I, when you have never told me, 
 Harry?" 
 
 There was no time to say more about them, or to think 
 more about them, from that moment until they reached The 
 Hurst. Then they were brought before her prominently, and 
 she could not avoid giving them due consideration. 
 
 Perhaps they were right. Maybe they had some sort of 
 reason and -Justice on their side. It is very hard to say whe- 
 
140 Walter Goring. 
 
 ther they were or not ; it is always, in fact, hard nay, more, 
 impossible, to judge justly of the acts of another, so many 
 motives sway them of which we are ignorant ; they are in- 
 fluenced by so many reasons of which we never so much as 
 heard ; they have their own thoughts about things ; they are 
 so much more to themselves, and consequently so much more 
 alive to all that concerns themselves, than they are to us. All 
 these causes, and a dozen others, combine to render it a hard 
 matter indeed for any one to judge any one else with perfect 
 equity and justice. 
 
 Therefore it is a difficult matter to say whether or not old 
 Mrs Fellowes and her daughter were right, in regarding the 
 wife of their son and brother as an interloper from the first. 
 That they did so regard her there can be no manner of 
 doubt ; but whether or not they were wholly wrong in doing 
 so, remains an open question. 
 
 Henry Fellowes had brought the infliction of this aggrieved 
 ill-will upon himself, or rather upon his wife, by his own in- 
 judicious conduct from his earliest manhood. The yoke of 
 his mother had never been easy, and the burden of his sister 
 had never been light ; but he had fitted his neck to the one, 
 and adjusted the latter to his back for a great many years, as 
 if he had rather liked them than not. Now he was to reap 
 his reward. 
 
 With a quiet persistence that had been almost a beautiful 
 thing in itself from its unvarying uniformity, Mrs Fellowes 
 had detected flaws and blemishes in every girl who had come 
 under her son's notice, from the time of his becoming a mar- 
 riageable man up to the present moment. The boldest laid 
 down their arms before her, and said to the ambition which 
 might have been theirs for a brief period to become mistress 
 of The Hurst, "Avaunt, foul fiend!" The clear-sighted 
 manner in which she saw whatever was not perfect in them, 
 and the admirably lucid way in which she pointed out their 
 imperfections to her son, had become a proverb in their part 
 of the county. She was charmingly consistent in seeing 
 nought but guile in any young woman who might possibly 
 succeed her at The Hurst. She always remembered the 
 faults of each one with just such a personal attribute or mental 
 quality as Henry chanced to find pleasing or good. If a girl 
 seemed kind to him, then his mother shook her head in 
 
The Wedding Tour. 141 
 
 Borrow and anger, and quoted a sweet distich, to the effect of 
 a pear that would drop without shaking the tree. Did young- 
 ladyhood seem cool and self-possessed, and not at all con- 
 scious of the claims of Mr Fellowes of The Hurst, then Mrs 
 Fell owes was sorry to see it, and sorry to say it ; but that 
 prudish manner was the very last she should desire to see in 
 the wife of a son of hers. In fact, she hedged him in and 
 about with doubt, distrust, and dread, with such full effect, 
 that he passed through that garden of beauty and never gave 
 so much as a thought after he was twenty-two to plucking 
 one of the blooms for himself. Norfolk is a rare place for 
 pretty women, its witches will not even yield the palm to 
 those of Lancashire; but Mr Henry Fellowes passed un- 
 scathed through their ranks, because his mother bid him 
 do so. 
 
 Norfolk is a rare place for pretty women. What a fair 
 sisterhood that was from which I gained my first childish im- 
 pressions of loveliness and grace. What a pleasant light 
 that loveliness threw over the tiny sea-side village in which 
 they, the far-famed beauties of West Norfolk, dwelt. Some 
 of them have pretty daughters of their own now, and are as 
 charming perhaps in their brilliant matronhood as they were 
 in their fresh blooming girlhood. That past prettiness de- 
 serves to be commemorated, though it was so marvellously 
 bright a thing. 
 
 Whatever the cause, the result is this : that the purely- 
 bred Norfolk women combine form and colour in their 
 greatest perfection, in an almost exceptional manner. The 
 women of the western counties are fair and luxuriant, but 
 they are wanting in that symmetry of limb which is a dis- 
 tinguishing characteristic of their Norfolk sisters, whose 
 small, well-shaped feet and hands add to their look of race. 
 Whether or not there was a strong Southern dash in their 
 Scandinavian progenitors, I am not sufficiently well up in 
 the history of my favourite county to determine; but this 
 much is certain, that they possess, in addition to the skin of 
 the North, the subtle charm of shape which belongs of right 
 to the South. Nevertheless, maternal instincts had guided 
 Henry Fellowes safe and sure through the ranks of the 
 daughters of the land for many years, and now all her 
 precautions were proved idler than a dream, for he had gone 
 
142 Walter Goring. 
 
 out and married a stranger without a penny. Charlie little 
 knew what she was going to face when she passed quickly 
 under the portals of The Hurst by her husband's side. 
 There was not the slightest doubt in her heart as she raised 
 her eyes to his face, and smiled brightly in response to his 
 hearty 
 
 "God bless you, my darling, and make you happy here ! " 
 
 He led her straight through the ball into a large, sombre, 
 insufficiently lighted room, which they discovered to be void of 
 all human furniture immediately on entering it. Charlie made 
 for the fire at once, and as she stood over it warming her 
 hands, and looking round her half-curiously, half- doubtfully, 
 (the room and all in it were so uncompromisingly square,) 
 Mr Fellowes turned to the servant who had followed them, 
 and said, 
 
 " Go and let your mistress my mother know that Mrs 
 Fellowes and I are here." 
 
 "My mistress and Miss Dinah are in the dining-room, 
 sir," the man replied ; and Henry Fellowes was beginning to 
 mutter something in an annoyed tone, when Charlie turned 
 to him with a brighter flash on her face than the fire would 
 have had the power to fling. 
 
 " Shall we go to them, Harry ? Yes, come." 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 A CHILLING RECEPTION. 
 
 THEY went out of the square drawing-room across the hall, 
 and into another room where crimson curtains and a blazing 
 fire and plenty of glass and gleaming silver on a well-arranged 
 dining- table, gave them a pleasant sense of warmth and com- 
 fort. In an arm-chair on one side of the fire-place an old 
 lady, with a face rendered still paler than was natural to it 
 by the severe contrast of a dead-black front, and a little half- 
 square shawl pinned with severe exactitude over her 
 shoulders, sat rigidly awaiting them. Opposite to her, in the 
 
A Chilling Reception. 143 
 
 other arm-chair, was a middle-aged womrtn, tall and large, 
 and as square, Charlie thought, at the first glance, as the 
 drawing-room from whence they had just come. 
 
 The newly-married pair came on into the room, and as 
 they did so Miss Dinah rose, but the old lady kept her seat. 
 Almost unconsciously Charlie came to a stand-still; she 
 could not go on to them ; there was no welcome from either 
 of those women for her. 
 
 Henry Fellowes went over and kissed his mother, then 
 turned and held one hand out to his sister, the other to his 
 wife. " Well, mother, I have brought you home a new 
 daughter at last, you see," he said, with a poor attempt at a 
 laugh ; and she replied, 
 
 " I see you have, Henry ; " and then rose up for an instant 
 and held out a straight hand with rigid fingers to Charlie, 
 and added, 
 
 "I'm afraid you have had a wet journey, Mrs Henry; 
 your train was a little late ; I am afraid the dinner won't be 
 the better for waiting." 
 
 Charlie took the rigid fingers and did not know what to do 
 with them. It was impossible to get up spurious enthusiasm, 
 and make the least attempt to press the hand of an old wo- 
 man who evidently would not have offered it at all if she 
 could have avoided doing so. Therefore Charlie took it for 
 an instant', and then let it go, saying, with a brighter light in 
 her eyes than Henry Fellowes had ever seen there before, 
 
 " Perhaps I had better go and get ready for dinner, Harry, 
 and not keep it waiting any longer." 
 
 " Perhaps you had, dear ; here, 1 11 come up with you 
 when Dinah's spoken to you." 
 
 He put his hands on his wife's shoulders, and made her 
 face round immediately in front of his tall, gaunt sister. " 1 
 hope you '11 find everything comfortable in your room, Mrs 
 Henry," the latter said hurriedly. The laughing face that 
 was brought under Miss Dinah's notice looked so thoroughly 
 cognisant of her dislike, and so defiant of it in a way, that 
 Miss Fellowes lost her self-possession. 
 
 When Charlie reached her own room she could not con- 
 scientiously say that she did find everything comfortable in 
 it. There was no fire, and no hot water, and no sofa, and no 
 chair. There were abundant signs of wealth in hand 
 
144 Walter Goring. 
 
 some carved mahogany bed-posts, and wardrobes, and dressing- 
 tables, but there was neither comfort, according to the modern 
 luxurious acceptation of the word, or beauty. In fact, it was 
 not at all the sort of room to meet the views of a bride with 
 aesthetic proclivities. 
 
 "Never mind, I'll freeze to-night," she said laughingly, 
 when her husband looked blank at the empty stove and the 
 cold water. " You go down, or to your dressing-room, and 
 I '11 astonish them by being ready so quickly, Harry." Then, 
 when she had banished him, she knelt down before one of 
 her trunks and took out some of her toilet paraphernalia and 
 wondered whether they were going to have the grace to send 
 any one to assist l\er in case she needed assistance. 
 
 Not that in reaiity she needed any, but she was the mistress 
 of the house, and as such it ought to have been at her com- 
 mand, she felt. However, modern costume has done away 
 with a great deal of female incapacity ; if need were, Charlie 
 could have dressed for a ball unaided and alone. So now, 
 when she had brushed out her short bright brown hair, and 
 put on fresh cuffs and a collar, she was ready ; and as soon as 
 she was ready, she went to look for her husband. 
 
 She had said to him " Go down, or into your dressing- 
 room," and she now looked for a dressing-room in which to 
 find him. In her own room were numerous big heavy doors, 
 but they all led into large commodious dark closets ; there 
 was no egress to any smaller room, and with a most natural 
 scoff at the awkwardness of old-fashioned arrangements, she 
 resolved to go down and face them by herself, since she could 
 not find her husband. 
 
 He meanwhile had run down into the dining-room again, 
 to do what a man should never do with women, temporise. 
 He had known all along, that marry when or whom he would, 
 his mother and his sister would be antagonistic to his wife. 
 But after meeting and falling in love with Charlie St John, 
 he had put all thoughts of maternal wrath away from him, 
 until now that it was brought vividly before him, and un- 
 pleasantly before Charlie. 
 
 "When he went back alone, leaving Charlie kneeling before 
 her black trunk, he began at once eagerly to his mother, 
 
 " Don't you think I have done well, mother ? She '11 make 
 things as pleasant as possible, if you'll only meet her half- 
 
A Chilling Reception. 145 
 
 way ; you know she couldn't help the train being late, and 
 now she 's hurrying herself tremendously, in order not, to keep 
 you waiting ; but I say, Dinah, things should have been ar- 
 ranged a little better in our room, I think ! " 
 
 " I have had the best room prepared for your wife, Henry," 
 Miss Dinah replied, in tones that would have led a stranger to 
 suppose that The Hurst was hers, and not her brother's. 
 
 " And from what you had said, we did not expect a fine 
 lady," his mother chimed in. 
 
 " Mother, she isn't that," he said deprecatingly. He was 
 such a big boy, and such a big booby, in his honest affection 
 for the three women to whom he was nearest and dearest. 
 He wanted all things to be so pleasant, without having the 
 faintest idea how to make them so. Then he went over to 
 his mother and leant upon the back of her chair, and asked 
 very fondly, but almost too humbly, 
 
 " Do seem a little glad to see her when she comes down ! 
 She is the dearest girl much too good for such a rough as 
 I am ; don't let her think you didn't want her here." 
 
 Mrs Fellowes, senior, commenced working her lips and 
 blinking her eyes. She loved her son, loved him dearly. But 
 it was with a narrow-minded, grasping, jealous, suspicious 
 love, that would have denied him any other all his life. 
 Whatever wife he had won to himself, his mother would not 
 have loved her. But a wife without money his mother could 
 not even seem to like. So now she said, in measured tones 
 that came out from between lips of iron, 
 
 " What I like or what I don't like is of little consequence, 
 I am well aware. I 'm an incumbrance and old, and not wouth 
 consulting ; I know all that ; but still I do own to feeling 
 hurt that my son should have gone away and married a 
 stranger, without even giving his mother the opportunity of 
 cautioning him ; of course I know I 've no right to speak : 
 you always would do as you liked ; but it would have been 
 better for us all, perhaps, if you had let me see this young 
 lady before you brought her here as your wife." 
 
 " How could I have let you see her ? " he asked gently ; 
 " after telling her how I loved her I couldn't have asked her 
 to come and show herself to you, and see whether you liked 
 her for my wife or not." He laughed as he said this, and 
 moved away from his mother's chair in order to lean upon 
 
 K 
 
146 Walter Goring. 
 
 the mantelpiece. Mrs Fellowes saw that he glanced impa- 
 tiently .towards the door also, as though he was anxious for 
 the appearance of this bone of contention ; altogether he was 
 more independent about the matter than seemed good to 
 her. There was a world of reproach for he did not know 
 what, in the way in which she replied, 
 
 " I know I am getting old, but we are told by Him to 
 honour our parents; however, I say no more; I only hope" 
 here Mrs Fellowes paused and shook her head, and Dinah 
 kindly put in, 
 
 " Henry might make some allowance for our natural feel- 
 ings to-night ; but he makes none ; none at all." 
 
 " Natural feelings ! " he asked impatiently, "have you any 
 for her, Dinah ? do remember that she isn't here on suffer- 
 ance ! " 
 
 No sooner had he said it than he would have given much 
 of his worldly wealth to have been able to recall and obliterate 
 the memory of his words. His mother put herself into a 
 bolt upright position in her chair, as though she knew that 
 even comfort was grudged her in that house ; and Miss 
 Dinah bridled and shook her head, and began to weep. 
 
 "For mercy's sake, don't cry, old girl," he said affec- 
 tionately ; " what is the matter now ? " 
 
 " Oh nothing, nothing ; we shall have to learn to bear it," 
 Mrs Fellowes replied, solemnly shaking her head. 
 
 " To bear what, mother ?" 
 
 " To bear that we are here on sufferance," and then mother 
 and daughter both howled, until the harassed master of the 
 house spoke more sharply. 
 
 " If you don't want my wife to hate her home and her 
 husband, do make an end of this. If my happiness is any- 
 thing to you, mother, don't try to wreck it, as you will if 
 you go on in this way." Saying this, he walked away out 
 of the room, and met Charlie descending the stairs. 
 
 " Haven't I been quick ? " she asked, and his eyes bright- 
 ened and his brow smoothed as she leant her arms over his 
 shoulders, as he stood a step or two below her. 
 
 " Are you not exactly what you ought to be always ? " he 
 replied fondly. " Come back with me, pet ; dinner isn't on 
 the table yet." 
 
 " Yes, I will," she said, turning and running up before 
 
A Chilling Reception. 147 
 
 him. " Nice old house it seems, Harry ; \ve '11 soon have it 
 lovely ; this lobby with a Persian rug or two, and some 
 divans covered with that Oriental patterned stuff, will be per- 
 fection ; may I have it so ? " 
 
 " You may do what you like." 
 
 " Well, I won't do much till Ellen comes to stay with me ; 
 we work capitally together, for she 's more practical than I 
 am. I know exactly what I want, and she knows how to 
 set about achieving it. What a shame that there is no 
 dressing-room to this room, Harry ! " 
 
 "Awful, isn't it?" 
 
 " No, but awkward ; we will alter that, won't we ? Do 
 you know, my boy, I mean to have my house cited for being 
 both well-ordered and elegant? There's a bell; that's 
 dinner. Shall I do ?" 
 
 She got up and stood before her husband for inspection 
 the brightest, most beautiful thing in his eyes that had ever 
 illumined the old Hurst since he had known it. " Do ! " 
 he answered, taking her in his arms, and kissing her fore- 
 head. " By Jove, Charlie, I 'm so proud of you, my darling, 
 that I only wonder what I had to live for before I married 
 you." Then they went down to dinner together, and when 
 they were half across the hall, he whispered, " Don't mind 
 the old lady much, she 's rather cranky to-night ; but when 
 
 she knows you " He did not add what might be expected 
 
 to occur then, but he left Charlie free to infer that it would 
 be something more agreeable on the whole than had trans- 
 pired yet. 
 
 The young mistress of The Hurst found, on entering the 
 dining-room, that the soup was on the table, and that Mrs 
 Fellowes, senior, was at the head of the same. There was a 
 place for Charlie at the side opposite to Miss Dinah. Per- 
 haps, in reality, it was an unimportant thing, not worthy a 
 second thought. But Charlie gave a second thought to it as 
 she took the place assigned to her, and wondered whether her 
 husband saw that she was as nothing at his table. 
 
 However, she would not suffer herself to feel aggrieved or 
 look depressed, so she strove to accomplish that most thank- 
 less of tasks, to amuse a couple of women who were not dis- 
 posed to be amused by her. She talked to the mother and 
 sister merrily of the days she had spent in the Isle of Wight ; 
 
148 Walter Goring. 
 
 she laughed and was glad, apparently to such a degree that 
 waves of triumph at the brightness of this wife whom he had 
 won, surged up into her husband's throat, and checked both 
 his appetite and utterance, even though he saw that his 
 mother was groaning in spirit, and his sister unmoved by the 
 
 Old Mrs Fellowes was thinking all the time that Charlie 
 was striving to please and render herself agreeable. " The 
 money he must have spent in gadding about in such a way, 
 and she without a penny of her own ! without a penny ! 
 and to travel in that dress ! " 
 
 Dinner was over at last, and they went away into the 
 square drawing-room. "I hope you don't find it at all damp, 
 Mrs Henry ? " Dinah asked, with something of an injured 
 look, when Charlie could not repress a shiver. 
 
 " Oh, no, thank you/' Charlie replied. 
 
 "We don't often use this room," Mrs Fellowes conde- 
 scended to explain. " We generally prefer remaining in the 
 dining-room; furniture so soon gets spoilt if it is in constant 
 use." 
 
 Charlie said nothing in reply to this speech, but she looked 
 about her. The furniture was covered with a large-patterned 
 flaring chintz, on which roses the size of cauliflowers bloomed 
 in vulgar luxuriance. What was under this she did not 
 know; but she felt that she could not long suffer that chintz. 
 Presently her husband came in, and said to her, 
 
 " It 's too late to show you the house to-night, Charlie ; 
 but what do you think of this room ? Can you make any- 
 thing of it, eh ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes ! " Charlie replied, cheerfully ; and Mrs Fellowes 
 struck in, " Make anything of it ; in what way, Henry ? " 
 
 " Oh ! with new furniture and fittings-up, I suppose, 
 mother. Now that Charlie is in it, I see how shabby it all 
 looks." 
 
 " I shall consider it the most shameful and foolish extra- 
 vagance if you do have new furniture," Mrs Fellowes replied 
 with severity ; " but, there I'm old, and not worth consult- 
 ing, I know that." 
 
 Poor Charlie! 
 
Vety Strange ! 149 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 VERY STRANGE ! 
 
 YOUNG Mrs Fellowes had a very tender conscience. Hard 
 as it may be for those who never go wrong through impulse 
 to believe it, the impulsive people get a goodly portion of 
 their punishment upon earth. Remorse is very apt to set in 
 with them even before that for which they feel remorseful is 
 fairly accomplished. Consequently they have not so much 
 pleasure even as an undivided interest in their current fault 
 or folly might give them. 
 
 Charlie was no exception to this hapless general rule. Her 
 first evening's experience of The Hurst was a bitter one. It 
 was made as miserable to her as a brace of captious, jealous, 
 narrow-minded women, who yet have a certain amount of 
 right on their side, alone can make it. They meant her to 
 feel sundry things, and she felt them forthwith as fully as 
 they could desire. They intended her to remember that she 
 had gained much, and given nothing in this marriage; that 
 she had brought no grist to the mill; that they had been 
 happy before she came, and were not happy now that she 
 was there ; that they had the first right to the allegiance of 
 their son and brother ! All these things Mrs Fellowes and 
 Miss Dinah thought it well that Charlie should feel at once ; 
 and all these things she felt without the smallest hesitation 
 under their efficient treatment. 
 
 Her first night in her new home was as hopeless, sleepless, 
 miserable a one as she ever remembered to have passed. Her 
 nerves and her conscience had it all their own way with her. 
 She raked up all the meaner motives by which she had been 
 actuated in this marriage, and reviewed them sternly, and 
 wept in her soul, owning that Nemesis had overtaken her 
 justly. She knew that she had accepted this man's love 
 because it had opened to her a means of escape from a weary, 
 tedious, joyless home. She knew that it was the desiie to 
 have an establishment and a stand-point of her own which 
 had led her to say " Yes," when Henry Fellowes offered her 
 his honest, unselfish love. He had put his whole capital into 
 the firm, and she had come forward with a false promissory 
 
150 Walter Goring. 
 
 note, knowing that it was just a toss-up whether or not it 
 would be eventually dishonoured. She had thought of the 
 home she would have of the position she would fill of the 
 taste she would be free to exercise as the idolised wife of a 
 rich man. Now Nemesis had overtaken her. She was dis- 
 trusted and disliked by his nearest relatives, and she owned 
 to herself that had they known the truth concerning her 
 motives in marrying him, their dislike and distrust would 
 have been founded on good grounds. She was made to feel 
 herself a mere cipher in the house where she had meant to 
 rule a little queen. She was doomed to uncongenial com- 
 panionship, from which she had not the smallest prospect of 
 Escaping ; and she knew that she deserved it all, and acknow- 
 ledged, that though hard, these things were but just ; for she 
 had come to like her husband now, and so understood the 
 nature of the sin she had sinned against him in marrying him 
 merely for the furtherance of her own social aims. 
 
 She resolved sensibly enough that he should remain in 
 ignorance of the lax regard she had had for him in those first 
 days when he had been brimming over with love for her. 
 The knowledge of it could do him no good might possibly 
 do him harm, in that it might render him a prey to suspicions 
 of her all his life. Praiseworthy as it is to cry mea culpa, it 
 is perhaps just as well to say it in a still small voice to one's 
 self alone. To utter it aloud is noble, but rash. He should 
 remain in ignorance of that early lax regard, and for the 
 future his happiness and his honour should be all in all to 
 her. She would concentrate all her energies in furthering 
 the former and redounding to the latter. She would bear 
 and forbear for his sake bow the neck gracefully to his 
 mother, and suffer his sister with meek smiles. She would 
 be as nothing in The Hurst The Hurst ! to be mistress of 
 which she had married him. So, eventually, Nemesis might 
 be appeased, and the mercenary motive of her marriage for- 
 given her. 
 
 It was easy to come to these resolutions, and to feel 
 humble, not to say abject, in the night, when she was worn 
 out with remorse, sleeplessness, and disappointment. But 
 Charlie was a high-spirited girl, full of vitality and impatient 
 of control, stupidity, injustice, and other wearisome things. Sho 
 knew herself, though she did make these resolutions, and vow 
 
Very Strange ! 151 
 
 to adhere to them, that she would be subjected to a thousand 
 temptations to break or fling them aside; and she could not 
 go to her husband to strengthen and aid her ! For she knew 
 that a recital of the resolutions might possibly lead to conjec- 
 tures as to the reason for forming them. High-spirited as 
 Charlie was, she did shrink from placing the fact before her 
 husband that when she married him he was little more to 
 her than a necessary but uncoveted appendage to The Hurst. 
 The heart of a man is delicate ground to travel over. He 
 might not find all-sufficient compensation for this fact in the 
 one that now she had grown to regard and estimate him 
 properly. 
 
 It was easy to come to these resolutions in the night ; but 
 uncommonly hard to hold to them in the daytime. Henry 
 Fellowes left his wife very much to her own devices the day 
 after his return home. He farmed his own land, and he had 
 been away from it for some time, therefore he was naturally 
 desirous of seeing how things had gone upon it as soon as 
 possible. Consequently directly after breakfast he went out, 
 and Charlie was left to herself. 
 
 She had asked him before he left, "If he would show her 
 the house ? " and he had replied, " Oh yes ! or Dinah will, 
 won't you, Dinah ? " which was not at all the same kind of 
 thing. However, when her brother was fairly off, Miss 
 Dinah bore down upon her sister-in-law with a big basket of 
 keys in her hand, and told Mrs Fellowes, junior, that if she 
 wanted to see The Hurst she must do so at once. 
 
 " Perhaps I could find my way about by myself," Charlie 
 answered, unwarily, "I don't want to trouble you." To 
 which Miss Dinah replied, that "they didn't like to have 
 people running in and out of the rooms, and therefore thej 
 kept them locked." Hearing this, Charlie subsided into 
 silence, and followed the gaunt creature, feeling very sorry 
 for herself. 
 
 It was a dreary progress that they made. The majority of 
 the bedrooms were locked, and when they were opened they 
 smelt and looked like sepulchres. They had all been fur- 
 nished solemnly, and then? shutters were all closed. In addi- 
 tion to this lively treatment, they were, one and all, the shrine 
 for huge funereal urns, in which the corpses of roses and 
 9ther flowers, that had once been sweet and fab:, were buried 
 
152 Walter Goring. 
 
 with bits of bay salt. Charlie could not help lowering her 
 voice in these rooms, and feeling more wretched than ever. 
 Anything more subduing than the spectacle of the bed and 
 window curtains, all done up in pale holland shrouds, it is 
 difficult to imagine. 
 
 " Are they never used ? " Charlie asked, when they came 
 out of the fourth deserted room. 
 
 " Never ; but they are swept every week," Miss Dinah re- 
 plied. " We are very particular about that ; and as I always 
 keep the doors locked, no one can go in, so the furniture 
 keeps beautifully. If one isn't very careful, things soon go 
 to rack and ruin in housekeeping." 
 
 Charlie tried to look wise on the subject. 
 
 " So my sister found," she said. "Ellen has been married 
 eight years, and she has furnished her drawing-room twice." 
 
 " Rather extravagant, unless her husband got a fortune 
 with her, I think," Miss Dinah replied, fixing Charlie severely 
 with her maiden eye. "Well, you have seen all the up- 
 stairs rooms now, with the exception of my mother's and 
 mine. I suppose you don't want to see them ? " 
 
 " No, thank you," Charlie replied hurriedly, " I'll go down 
 into the drawing-room. I'm so much obliged to you for 
 having shown me the house." 
 
 " Won't you find it cold in the drawing-room ?" Miss Dinah 
 asked. She had been on the point of walking away, but she 
 turned round and looked at Charlie as she asked this. 
 
 " Oh, no ! I '11 have a good fire made up, thank you." 
 
 " We never have a fire in the drawing-room in the morn- 
 ing," Miss Dinah said, decidedly. "The dining-room is well 
 warmed and much more comfortable, we think ; besides, my 
 brother Henry is accustomed to find us there when he comes 
 in at eleven, and .he won't like any change made." She 
 walked off when she had said this, and Charlie stood gazing 
 after her in a half -bewildered way. " I don't like to ask 
 him he will think me so inquisitive, as he has never told 
 me ; but the place must belong as much to them as it does 
 to my husband. Why on earth did he bring me here to be 
 nothing ! " 
 
 For about an hour Charlie went and sat in her dull, ugly 
 bed-room. " It. might be made so pretty ! " she thought, as 
 she looked at the big bay window, which it had in common 
 
Very Strange ! 153 
 
 with many another room in The Hurst " it might be made 
 so pretty ! And then in the summer I should have some 
 place in which I could sit, without feeling uncomfortable. I 
 wonder if there 's a library ! " She started up as she thought 
 this, and ran down-stairs. In the hall she saw a servant on 
 her knees, sweeping up dust that was not there. " Where 's 
 the library, or study ? there is one ? " she asked ; and the 
 girl replied, 
 
 " That 's the door down at the end of that passage, ma'am ; 
 shall I get the key from Miss Dinah ? " 
 
 " Oh, no ! " Charlie answered. She felt intuitively that 
 the library would not be worth the key ; besides, she was 
 chilled and dispirited by her long sojourn up-stairs. So she 
 walked into the dining-room, and seated herself in a chair 
 by the fire, and tried not to see Mrs Fell owes' irritating ex- 
 pression of being hard at work mending stockings. 
 
 The old lady had taken no notice of her daughter-in-law on 
 her entrance. She had gone on darning the stockings with- 
 out even so much as looking up ; but Charlie had seen the 
 ungracious look deepen on her face, and once more my 
 heroine's tender conscience smote her keenly. " Supposing 
 some instinct should have taught her that I married Harry 
 without caring a bit for him?" she thought. "No wonder 
 she hates me I hate myself." Then she sat and watched 
 Mrs Fellowes' grim face till its intense unpleasantness goaded 
 her into speech. 
 
 " Are you not feeling well this morning ? " she asked as 
 gently as she could. 
 
 " Quite as well as I ever can expect to feel, thank you," 
 Mrs Fellowes answered, tartly. " I have not much in this 
 world to make me feel well, or look well," she added, as 
 though she rather expected to be rewarded by looking robust 
 when she was disembodied. The reply not being framed in 
 such a way as to make a continuance of that subject plea- 
 sant, Charlie tried another. 
 
 " I like the house very much what I have seen of it.' 
 
 "Do you?" 
 
 " Yes, very much. When my husband comes in, I shall 
 make him take me into the library, and round to the stables 
 and gardens. I want to know all about my hpme as soon aa 
 I can. I wish he would make haste in ! " 
 
154 Walter Goring. 
 
 " Don't you think it would be better if you employed your- 
 self with something useful, Mrs Henry, instead of idling 
 about, as you have been, all the morning ? When your hus- 
 band comes in, he will be better pleased to see you with some 
 work in your hands, than to have you wanting to run about 
 in the damp." 
 
 " He won't see me with any work in my hands," Charlie 
 replied, laughing. "Needles are things I never interfere 
 with by any chance." 
 
 " I 'm only glad," Mrs Fellowes rejoined, with snappish 
 emphasis, " that you have always been so well able to afford 
 to pay people to do your work for you ; in this family we 're 
 obliged to do many things that we don't quite like." 
 
 Charlie rose quickly, and got herself away out of the room. 
 " I can't stand it another morning ! " she thought, as she 
 ran up for her hat and shawl. " I would rather get frost- 
 bitten than sit in the room with that horrid grim old woman. 
 How shall I live through it, if my husband means always to 
 be out of the house?" Then she went out, and walked 
 about in the damp November air, because there was no 
 corner in her husband's home where she could be at peace. 
 There was no unkind feeling towards the man she had 
 married, in her heart; nevertheless, she did think within 
 herself, " It would have been better for me to have tried the 
 other path the path that Walter Goring pointed out. I 
 shall get blighted here God help me ! " 
 
 Her sensations were rather curious than agreeable as she 
 walked along over the land of which her husband was lord 
 walked along it for the first time. There was none of the 
 usual womanly elation of heart at being the wife of a man 
 who had a stake in the country. On the contrary, there 
 was considerable depression. The sense of her own insigni- 
 ficance came over her strongly as she sauntered slowly over 
 the soil, and felt, " All this is his ! and I can't have a fire 
 when I want it ! and am told by an old woman, whom I 
 never saw till yesterday, that I ought to be ashamed of my- 
 self because I 'm not fond of darning stockings ! I know it 
 would be better for us all in the end if I only stood up, and 
 asserted myself ; but" 
 
 " But " conscience makes cowards of us all. She could 
 not stand up and assert herself to the mother of the man 
 
Very Strange ! 155 
 
 whom she had used as a ladder a thing by means of which 
 she had hoped to climb out of obscurity. Perhaps a better 
 woman than Charlie St John would never have done this ; 
 but, unquestionably, no woman, however good in deed, could 
 have more bitterly more humbly repented herself of the 
 error. She was far too sensitive to be a successful sinner. 
 She suffered too surely and too sharply to make the game 
 worth the candle. 
 
 Perhaps no bride has ever felt more aggrieved than did 
 this girl as she walked about The Hurst grounds the day 
 after that " coming home," which is usually a bright era in a 
 woman's life. Had she been left uninterruptedly to herself, 
 she would have beguiled the period of her husband's absence 
 by bright thoughts of his coming back in making herself at 
 home and manifest in the house, as it were. But she was 
 not left to herself. She was left to a couple of hard, honest, 
 narrow-minded women, who were perfectly justified, from 
 their rigorous point of view, in being unpleasant to her. All 
 her hopes had been dashed in a sudden and unexpected way, 
 that was in itself subversive of many of her best intentions. 
 She could not carry her grievance to her husband, for reasons 
 that have been given before, and she knew that none other 
 than her husband could help her in this strait. Altogether, 
 she felt very miserable, and very much as if she were left to 
 herself to perish, as she walked along under the trees through 
 which the wind came moaning on that November morning. 
 
 To have come to this pass at her age. She could not help 
 it ; loving wife as she was now, or would have been had she 
 been let, she had a feeling of having done so poorly with her 
 life. To have brought her wonderful capacity for both pain 
 and pleasure into such a commonplace market as this pro- 
 mised to be ! To have put herself, with her capabilities, into 
 a position where she would be liable to such very little things 
 in the way of troubles and annoyances. She pictured herself 
 growing middle-aged in this companionship which she knew 
 would grow more and more loathsome to her daily. Middle- 
 aged under the auspices of the grim woman with the three- 
 cornered shawl ! Old under the eyes of the sister who carried 
 the keys of every room into which she (Charlie) desired to go, 
 and who went by the name of Dinah ! To be helpless before 
 them ; to have nothing beyond them j to have to trim her 
 
156 Walter Goring. 
 
 sails to the wind that suited them ; to learn to tolerate the 
 life they liked ! She felt that she had wrapped up her talent 
 in a napkin with a vengeance, as she thought over these 
 things, and knew them to be partly deserved, for had she 
 not married solely and wholly for the sake of being free, un- 
 fettered, well-placed, and well-established? The future of 
 nothingness that had loomed before her in Eobert Prescott's 
 house had not been so dark a thing as this ; for this was 
 clearly a judgment on the lightness with which she had 
 suffered herself to be wooed and won without an atom of love 
 on her part. 
 
 After a time she reached the entrance to a little grass- 
 grown lane, guarded by a little wicket-gate. She turned 
 into it, and walked on scarcely heeding where she was going, 
 till she came to a wall that was built across the road and into 
 the meadows on either side. Suddenly she remembered the 
 right of way question between old Mr Goring and old Mr 
 Fellowes, of which her husband had told her, and she knew 
 that she must be on the border of the Goring Place estate. 
 
 The thought brought back very pleasant memories of the 
 man who now owned it, of the man who had once on a time 
 ah ! how long ago it seemed now ! fired her ambition in 
 that drawing-room at Roehampton, and since then had said 
 a few frank friendly words to her in a soft tone on the pier 
 at Brighton. Their intercourse had been but a brief thing, 
 but somehow or other it was very deeply graven on her 
 mind. It had been but a brief slight thing, but she felt that 
 it had been one of the sweetest, most graceful experiences of 
 her life, and so she was grateful to the man who had given it 
 to her. Is it a fact, that " women's hearts are made for 
 minstrels' hands alone," and that they do lack half their tone 
 when played by other fingers ? Certain it is that we, none 
 of us, think that lady ill-endowed to whom nature " gave 
 sense, good humour, and a poet," and the latter does not 
 rank as the lesser good. 
 
 Thinking of him, and thinking of him kindly, the forlorn 
 young bride, who was so left to herself, was seized with a 
 great desire to see a bit of Goring Place. For a few minutes 
 she seriously thought of trying to scale the wall ; but she 
 gave up that idea quickly, for the wall was slippery with 
 November damp. Then she leant against the partition that 
 
Very Strange ! 157 
 
 nad been made in ill-temper, and went into a day-dream, 
 wherein she saw herself altered and aged, and still a mere 
 nothing at The Hurst ; and that yellow-haired girl whom she 
 had met in the road near Portslade on the night of her own 
 engagement the mistress of Walter Goring's home and 
 heart. " And there will be no mother and sister to keep her 
 out of either/' she thought with a sore feeling ; " and if there 
 were, no mother or sister could choke the way to Walter 
 Goring's heart." Then she pulled her hat a little lower over 
 her eyes, and drew her shawl more closely around her, and 
 set off back through the drift that was worse than rain, in 
 that there was more want of purpose about it, to regain The 
 Hurst, and, she hoped, have some luncheon. 
 
 Meanwhile Henry Fellowes had come in, well pleased with 
 the way in which all things had gone during his absence, and 
 anxious to communicate his good pleasure to his wife. 
 
 " Where 's Charlie ? " he asked, the instant he opened the 
 door of the dining-room, where his mother still sat darning 
 stockings in a way that was enough to make a man hate the 
 loom in which they were made. 
 
 " Mrs Henry is gone out most imprudently," the old lady 
 replied, looking up at her son over her spectacles. 
 
 " Gone out walking ? " 
 
 " Yes ; I told her that you would be more pleased to find 
 her in with some work in her hands when you came back ; 
 but Mrs Henry does not like work, and does, I am sorry to 
 see, like to have her own way." 
 
 " Well, mother, and why not ? I can't have her walking 
 about in this weather after that illness of hers, though," he 
 continued, going to the window, and looking for his wife on 
 the grass plot. " Why do you call her 'Mrs Henry ' always, 
 mother ? " 
 
 " It is difficult to know what to call her, Henry," his 
 mother replied ; " her head is like a boy's, and she has a boy's 
 name, by which I cannot bring myself to address her. If 
 you wish it, and she wishes it, I do not mind calling her 
 Charlotte, which is what her godfathers and godmothers 
 meant to be her name, if she ever had any." 
 
 Mrs Fellowes had commenced her speech with much calm 
 deliberation, but she wound it up with a degree of vicious 
 haste and excitement that was bad for her needle. That im- 
 
158 Walter Goring. 
 
 plement broke snapt off short and Mrs Fellowes sought 
 for its fellow with tears in her eyes, and a trembling through- 
 out her frame caused by righteous resentment. 
 
 " Don't call her Charlotte ; she doesn't like it," he said 
 carelessly, as he walked towards the door. He was exceed- 
 ingly unobservant of feminine tempers and tremblings and 
 troubles. " I '11 go and look for her. I have some news 
 that will please her, I think ; and, mother, see that luncheon 
 is on the table by half-past one, will you ? " 
 
 The old lady sighed assent. 
 
 " You wish to dine late then, Henry ? " 
 
 " Yes ; at six or half -past, I don't care." Then he went 
 into the hall and found an old cap, and went out into the 
 garden to search for his wife. 
 
 When he was gone his mother summoned the cook, and 
 that functionary agreed with her to her heart's content as to 
 the shamefulness of altering hours that had been held to be 
 the only good and proper ones at which to feed in that house 
 for more years than could be easily counted. " However 
 we '11 dine at half-past six for the future, cook ; and when 
 I 'm dead, perhaps Mr Henry will remember that years ago 
 Doctor Oldfield said, ' My dear lady, I won't answer for your 
 life if you don't dine punctually at two o'clock constantly.' 
 Those were his words, cook not that I should wish Mr 
 Henry to think of them for a moment ; of course I 'm no- 
 thing." 
 
 " I Ve no patience with such ways," the sympathetic cook 
 rejoined. 
 
 " Ah ! " Mrs Fellowes resumed, bitterly, " young people 
 are very different now, very different indeed, to what they 
 were fifty years ago ; then we dined when it suited our 
 fathers and mothers." 
 
 " Well, there, ma'am, don't take on ; Mr Henry will know 
 better some day." 
 
 " I sincerely hope he never may know, cook. I 'm only an 
 old woman hastening to my grave. I don't want my son's 
 conscience to be burdened with the thought that his folly 
 made his mother's last days miserable. Yes ; haricot beans 
 and Jerusalem artichokes and celery will be vegetables enough, 
 I think ; but there, I can hardly think at all to-day." 
 
 " Ah, ma'am master would find the difference if he hadn't 
 
Very Strange ! 
 
 you to think for him. The young lady seems, by what they 
 tell me, to be very nice spoken and likely, but no more he.-id 
 than nothing for housekeeping, I should say." 
 
 In reply to which Mrs Fellowes gave a fierce little " Ah ! " 
 and then a lachrymose groan, and then dropped a few tears 
 in amongst the darning cotton. As she uttered no words, 
 however, Cook was obliged to feel herself dismissed ; but she 
 had a pretty little tale to carry back to the kitchen. 
 
 In about five minutes from the moment of Henry Fellowes 
 leaving the house he met his wife, and the way in which she 
 sprang to meet him caused him straightway to forget any 
 small annoyance his mother might have caused him. In 
 fact, this loyal-hearted honest gentleman was just as much to 
 blame as all the rest. Being gifted with a certain thickness 
 of skin, he did regard things that were dagger-blows and 
 spear-thrusts to another as mere pin-pricks. He was not 
 readily annoyed, and he was very quick to forget annoyances. 
 He could always walk out into the fresh air and forget any 
 number of feminine frowns. He had been used to his mother 
 being disagreeable, and his sister unsympathetic, for so many 
 years, that he regarded their being so as quite in the order of 
 nature. He did not heed them ; they were powerless to ruffle 
 him, and he forgot how sorely his sensitive young wife must 
 suffer through them. 
 
 " I am so glad to see you, Harry ; I have had such a 
 wretched morning," she cried ; and had he responded in any 
 way, the whole story, despite her resolutions, would have 
 come out then. But he did not respond ; he only tucked 
 her hand into his arm, and replied, 
 
 " Yes ; you shouldn't have come out in the rain, my 
 darling. I shall be having you laid up. 1 find everything 
 has gone on capitally on the farm, Charlie. My bailiff is a 
 brick." 
 
 " I wish you had taken me over the farm with you. I 
 have been down to the end of a lane trying to peer over at 
 Goring Place." 
 
 " By the way, I have some news for you, Charlie. I met 
 Goring out riding, and he wants me to let a house a very 
 pretty cottage I have in the village to a friend of his, a 
 widow lady, who wishes to come and live here; another 
 neighbour for you." 
 
160 Walter Goring. 
 
 " Mrs Walsh ? " Charlie cried, interrogatively. 
 " Yes ; that 's the name. Do you know her ? " 
 " Slightly yes ; it was at her house that I first met 
 Walter Goring. She 's a widow, I know, now ; and so she 
 wants to come and live here ? how very, very strange ! " 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 THE BRIDE AT HOME. 
 
 THE neighbourhood about Deneham was generally spoken 
 of by its inhabitants as a remarkably lively and sociable one. 
 It was not too thickly studded with county magnates. 
 Walter Goring was the sole large landed proprietor with 
 the exception of Lord Harrocoats in the vicinity; and 
 Lord Harrocoats cannot be said to count, since he was 
 rarely visible to the eyes of the profane in that part of the 
 world. Society in those regions was composed chiefly of the 
 families of men who had "places," and farmed their own 
 land, but who had no land beyond that which they kept in 
 their own hands ; and of gentlemen-farmers who rented so 
 many acres that they were of more power, parochially and 
 locally, than the men of small estates. 
 
 Henry Fellowes was one of the latter class. The Hurst 
 was a mansion, and the land surrounding it was his own. 
 But he farmed the whole of it himself, having no superfluous 
 acres to let, and soar by these means into the dignity of a 
 landed gentleman, with gentlemen-tenants under him. In 
 fact, he was a yeoman not a county magnate, and he was 
 one of many about Deneham. 
 
 There was rather a clannish atmosphere about the neigh- 
 bourhood. For the last two or three generations, it ap- 
 peared as if every one within a radius of fifty miles of 
 Deneham, had had large families with tender feelings 
 towards each other. They had in truth so married and 
 intermarried, that it behoved the stranger in the land to be 
 very careful how he spoke welL or ill, or at all about one to 
 
1 lie Bride at Home. 1 6 1 
 
 the other. It was a neighbourhood that lunched, arid dined, 
 and took tea incessantly with, and was liable to raids from, 
 any other portion of itself at any moment, in fact. On the 
 whole, a very social, charming neighbourhood. A trifle too 
 much given to conversing about its own affairs with wild 
 interest for the aforesaid stranger to feel at ease at all times 
 but very social and charming, and intimate nevertheless. 
 
 It accorded Mrs Fellowes, the bride, a week to get into 
 place before it came to call upon her. It was very impatient 
 to see her, but it curbed its impatience, and took it out in 
 calling frantically about upon itself, and reporting all that 
 had oozed out respecting her. This was very little, but it 
 was appetising. It disapproved of the way in which she 
 had entrapped Mr Fellowes, but would say nothing more 
 about that, since he had married her ; but it " must say, that 
 it was a pity that she should wear her hair short so 
 masculine." It forbore to add, that it was reputed be- 
 coming, and that a fever had forced her into the reprehended 
 fashion. 
 
 When the week expired, she was "at home" in the 
 square drawing-room, and the ceremony set in with severity. 
 Old Mrs Fellowes undertook the organisation of it, and 
 assisted at it in a new three-cornered shawl. She insisted 
 on her son's staying in for long hours during several dreary 
 days, to hear people congratulate and sip sherry, and eat 
 cake at him. 
 
 The old lady grew gracious to her daughter-in-law during 
 those days. Playing a prominent part in it herself, she 
 tolerated Charlie as an essential portion of the pageant. 
 She liked to hear her son's wife reminded by old family 
 Mends, that she (Charlie) possessed an inestimable blessing 
 and privilege in having a mother-in-law and sister who 
 would doubtless save her all housekeeping trouble and re- 
 sponsibility. They patronised the young wife in a semi- 
 playful way, as a thing to be gradually ripened and improved, 
 and rendered fit for Deneham and its environs. Mrs 
 Fellowes, senior, enjoyed this manner of theirs. She en- 
 joyed their parting whispers also. Many of them kindly 
 stated their belief, that "in time she will do very well oh ! 
 very well indeed; you'll be here to correct any little folly 
 you see ; at present she does give herself airs ; ah ! it is hard, 
 
 L 
 
1 62 Walter Goring. 
 
 no doubt, when you think of how your son might have 
 married." The last clause of the sentence was generally 
 called forth by some few brief words from Mrs Fellowes, to 
 the effect that Charlie " hadn't a penny and was as helpless 
 as an infant." The statement that Charlie "gave herself 
 airs," was simply a fiction, which grew out of the fact that 
 she did not appear to be impressed with the airs of those 
 who came to see her. 
 
 On one occasion she came to the front, and did battle 
 valiantly for a woman whom she did not like. Mr Goring 
 had come in and stayed for ten minutes, and during those 
 ten minutes he had talked exclusively to Henry Fellowes and 
 Charlie, and so had aggrieved the rest. As soon as he left, 
 Mrs Travers said sketchily, that " it could have been wished 
 that things were different at Goring Place," and Charlie, on 
 whom the rectoress was beaming for the first time, looked an 
 eager, " why and how," though she said nothing. 
 
 "Ah!" Mrs Fellowes struck in, "it's in the blood; I 
 always said so." She did not say what was in the blood, or 
 what she had always said. But mystery invariably makes 
 its mark. Mrs Travers, a tall, thin lady, with a high sharp 
 nose, only shook her head by way of replying to this, and 
 assumed that air of sorrow for the sins of one's neighbours, 
 which is OT of the easiest, most agreeable, and effective 
 forms of Glu-ibtiaiiity. 
 
 "What is in the blood? talent?" Charlie asked. 
 
 Old Mrs Fellowes shook her head. In all sincerity she 
 did believe that talent and genius were only more uncommon 
 forms of depravity and recklessness. Her chief ideas on the 
 subject were gleaned from stray readings of the memoirs of 
 Byron, Beau Brummel, and others, who had distinguished 
 themselves either in cantos or cravats. Therefore, when 
 Charlie asked, if "it was talent in the blood?" she shook 
 lier head, and moralised in her heart on the decay of " dread 
 of evil " in the modern day. 
 
 " It was a pity, a great pity," Mrs Travers resumed, "that 
 Mr Goring should have kept open house and plunged into 
 gaiety immediately after his uncle's death ; it does not do for 
 young people to disregard the world ; we called, and I wanted 
 Mr Travers to speak to him ; but there it is," turning to Mrs 
 Fellowes, senior, " Mr Travers never will." Mrs Travel's 
 
The Bride at Home. 1 63 
 
 stopped, shook her head, and looked sorry for Mr T ravers 
 and the world in general. 
 
 "What did you want Mr Travers to speak about?" 
 Charlie asked, laughingly. She was not sufficiently im- 
 pressed with these people and their power she dared to 
 look 'glad when they looked glum. 
 
 " It was enough to make one's hair stand on end, to hear 
 of their goings on," old Mrs Fellowes said, sharply. 
 
 " Oh ! it was the worst taste/' Mrs Travers replied, with a 
 bland delight in the badness of it that was most refreshing 
 to witness. " I was willing to countenance the girl, pitying 
 her, poor thing! and feeling, that grossly as her parents 
 have sinned, we are not called upon to judge ; but oh, no ; 
 she preferred the laxity of manners at Goring Place, and so 
 kept away from me." 
 
 " Ah ! it's in the blood," Mrs Fellowes said savagely. 
 
 " She 's a pretty girl, that cousin of his," Henry Fellowes 
 put in hurriedly, hoping to avert the storm of feminine invec- 
 tive against feminine evil-doing, which he saw was ready to 
 break ; " she was riding with Goring that night we met him, 
 if you remember, Charlie ? " 
 
 Did she not remember it ? Ay, and every shade of the 
 light, and every nicker of the leaves, under which they met ! 
 Some things get burnt into the memory, and, till the end 
 comes, who can tell whether they are burnt in for a purpose 
 or not. 
 
 " She 's a very impertinent, under-bred girl," Mrs Travers 
 said, severely ; " I assure you, the way she talked to Mr 
 Travers made his blood run cold cold." 
 
 "Well, well," Henry Fellowes said, persuasively, "we can't 
 hold young Goring accountable for her, you know ; he's done 
 the best thing he can do about her, I think, sent her to live 
 with a clergyman's widow, near Brighton ; he couldn't help 
 her being there when he came." 
 
 "But .he might have helped having the extraordinary 
 people he had down there, so indecorously soon after his 
 uncle's death ; it was outrageous, I assure you, Mr Fellowes 
 positively outrageous." 
 
 " What did they do ? " Charlie asked sharply. She saw 
 her husband looking at her imploringly, but she had lost all 
 desire to keep the peace. 
 
164 Walter Goring. 
 
 " Oh ! tearing all over the county they were professionals, 
 you know all professionals ; there was a man who painted, 
 I believe, and another man who sang, and their wives and 
 sisters ; very respectable people in their way, but not the sort 
 of people we are accustomed to receive." 
 
 " No ; I should think not," Charlie replied. With a mind 
 given, as hers was, to the glorification of intellect and cultiva- 
 tion, this sort of talk was absolutely painful to her. She 
 ached as she sat and listened to it ; she would far rather have 
 been subjected for hours to the cruder observations of her 
 cook. Mrs Travers, however, mistook the feeling which 
 dictated Charlie's speech, and said in answer to it, 
 
 " Mr Goring may have been obliged to associate with such 
 people while he was writing for his living as I really under- 
 stand he did ! but now that he occupies such a very different 
 position, he ought not to make so much of his Walshes and 
 Levinges ; he might be friendly with them but he should be 
 careful how he brings them here." 
 
 " He should indeed," Charlie said, looking steadily at her 
 guest, " for Mrs Walsh is one of the most fastidious women 
 in London." 
 
 " A set of atheists if that's what you call talent, and 
 genius, and fastidiousness," Mrs Fellowes said sharply ; 
 " they never could go to church in the morning, any of them. 
 Oh ! no, it was too hot ; but they could sit out on the lawn 
 and read their trashy books, and drink their trashy claret 
 from morning till night. I call it loose loose, that's what I 
 call it." 
 
 " Well ; we will hope the best," Mrs Travers said, energeti- 
 cally, so energetically, that all who heard her, immediately 
 thought the very blackest things that were possible of the 
 master of Goring Place and his late guests. Then she rose 
 up, and prepared to take her leave ; and Henry Fellowes 
 made her departure pleasant by saying to her, 
 
 " We are all likely to know more of Mrs Walsh she is 
 coming to be my tenant." 
 
 " Your tenant ! where ? " 
 
 " Brook-green Cottage ; she has taken it for three years!" 
 
 " She 's a person who will be no acquisition to the village," 
 Mrs Travers said, severely; and Charlie answered, mali- 
 ciously, 
 
The Bride at Home. 165 
 
 " Oh ! I hope she may be induced not to hold herself en- 
 tirely aloof from us ! " 
 
 "Aloof from us! aloof from us, indeed!" Mrs Travers 
 retorted ; but she would not trust herself to say more just 
 then ; and in the midst of her discomfiture there was this 
 balm namely, that the bride would be made to pay a severe 
 penalty for her audacity as soon as she should be left alone 
 in the bosom of her husband's family. 
 
 Women can make one another miserable in such infini- 
 tesimally small ways, that a man can rarely be brought to 
 comprehend how the business is managed. A sentence, 
 uttered in all suavity, acts frequently like a blister on the ears 
 feminine on which it falls, while the contemporaneous male 
 auditor thinks it merely foolish or friendly, as the case may 
 be. Young Mrs Fellowes had made a foe of the wife of her 
 spiritual pastor and master by the way she uttered, what 
 sounded to Henry Fellowes merely a natural, kind speech, 
 expressive of a desire for future intercourse with Mrs Walsh. 
 He merely saw in it a further illustration of that insanity 
 which prompts women to pant to see more of a sight which 
 rarely gives them pleasure each other, namely. Mrs Travers 
 saw in it an insult to herself. " Her manner of vindicating 
 the goings on at Goring Place was disgusting." Mrs Travers 
 told her husband, when she got back to him, after her visit to 
 the bride, " No religious principles evidently, and'a very, very 
 lax idea of what is due to the world. I suppose we must ask 
 them to dinner ? What day shall it be ? " 
 
 " Well ; we had better give them long notice say Tuesday 
 week ; we must ask Goring to meet them." 
 
 "Yes, of course; I hope nothing will prevent his coming," 
 Mrs Travers replied, earnestly. Despite the irreligious ten- 
 dencies she had discovered in these people, she was very 
 anxious that they should meet, and be amused under her 
 roof. In the intervals between her dinner-parties, she was, 
 as became a Christian, ready enough to consign the denizens 
 of Goring Place and The Hurst to perdition ; but when she 
 did invest fabulous sums in venison and melons, she was 
 desirous, as became a good housewife, that the "best people" 
 in the neighbourhood should refresh themselves at her table. 
 
1 66 Walter Goring. 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 MRS FELLOWES, SENIOR, ON PROPRIETY. 
 
 WALTER GORING had only stayed a few minutes when ho 
 came to make the bridal call at The Hurst. He disliked 
 being sat upon a chair in the society of old Mrs Fellowes and 
 her daughter, and expected to talk polite conversation all 
 round. He had nothing to say to them, and they had nothing 
 to say to him that he cared to hea} ; and their atmosphere 
 was a depressing one to him. Henry Fellowes, too, was un- 
 like himself at this period. No man can be expected to be at 
 his best when all his friends are sipping wine and eating 
 cake, that will assuredly disagree with them, towards his long 
 life and conjugal happiness. Walter Goring felt himself to 
 be guilty of a piece of society-sham on his first visit to The 
 Hurst ; therefore he made the call as short as possible, and 
 promised himself that he would soon come again and see 
 them under more natural and auspicious circumstances. 
 
 Accordingly, about ten days after his first call, he made 
 another at The Hurst. He rode over about twelve o'clock, 
 meaning to go in, in the orthodox country neighbour fashion, 
 and have a talk with Fellowes and his wife, and stay to lun- 
 cheon with them. He liked both Charlie and her husband ; 
 she interested him still, though she had in a measure disap- 
 pointed him. He recognised the latent power, and liked it, 
 though it might never come forward now ; still, it was there, 
 he knew, and he liked and sympathised with it. Above all, 
 he liked her for that most human of all reasons because he 
 saw that she liked him. 
 
 His book was out, and he carried a copy of it over with 
 him in order to present it, according to the promise given on 
 the Brighton pier to Mrs Fellowes. As he rode along, he 
 rather looked forward to a pleasant morning's gossip with 
 .her about the novel, and with her husband about the next 
 " meet," and what was doing on their land, and various other 
 subjects of mutual interest to them. It was disappointing, 
 therefore, when he arrived, to be shown into the room where 
 old Mrs Fellowes and Miss Dinah wero sitting with Charlie. 
 
 "I didn't bargain for this," he thought, when the first 
 
Mrs Fellowes, Senior, on Propriety. 167 
 
 silence fell as it was inevitable it should fall almost imme- 
 diately after his entrance. He had really nothing to say to 
 Charlie that he could not, with the most perfect credit and 
 propriety, have cried aloud in the market-place. But he 
 could not say it glibly and comfortably before these t\vo 
 women. Again, the feeling of being sat upon a chair, and 
 expected to say right things respecting the weather and the 
 world in general, came over him. His young hostess, too, 
 was not at her ease that was plainly visible to him. A 
 good deal of her brightness was gone ; a good deal of her 
 quick appreciation of his brightness was gone. He had the 
 feeling that it was horribly ill-bred to exclude the two elder 
 ladies from the conversation, and horribly unpleasant, to say 
 nothing of its being morally impossible, to include them in it. 
 He was weighted with the conviction that they would not 
 follow what he said, unless he added explanatory notes. In 
 short, he was thoroughly bored and put out by their presence, 
 by their silence, by their speaking by everything about 
 them. 
 
 He made one or two futile attempts to be as he had been 
 before. Handing his volumes to Charlie, he began 
 
 " I have kept my promise, you see. I have brought you 
 * The Cost of a Cure.' You really have a right to it, for 
 I was stuck in the middle of the second volume, when I met 
 you first, for want of a character to enact certain parts you 
 suggested one to me." 
 
 "Did I, really?" Charlie replied, hastily, taking the books 
 from his hand. As she did so, he saw her glance quickly at 
 Mrs Fellowes, who was looking at her with that sagacious 
 look over the spectacles which is sufficient in itself to drive 
 the one on whom it is brought to bear into gibbering idiotcy. 
 His allusion recalled to Charlie's mind the way in which she 
 had girded at her fate on that night; the glance towards 
 Mrs Fellowes was dictated by another prick of conscience 
 it was dislike to facing that fate, she knew, which had led 
 her on to marry that lady's son. This was the true interpre- 
 tation of her shy, deprecating glance ; but Mrs Fellowes gave 
 it another meaning. " So they 've been talking some of the 
 sickly twaddle that's put in books, have they?" she thought; 
 " and after it she had the face to go and cajole my poor in- 
 fatuated SOD ! " 
 
1 68 Walter Goring. 
 
 " Will you be a true critic, and tell me what you think of 
 it point out some of its faults to me when you have read 
 it ? " he asked, presently. 
 
 " I will try ; but I 'm not likely to fix upon any. I tell 
 you honestly beforehand." 
 
 " Why not ? there are plenty." 
 
 " Probably ; but I " She stopped. The sagacious 
 
 glance was being levelled at her again. 
 
 " The opinion of young ladies about a work that 's worth 
 anything is not of much value, I should imagine," Miss 
 Dinah said, with severity. " For my own part, I do not 
 pretend to be a judge. I do not approve of novels ; and I 
 have found that, if I did my duty, I have never had the time 
 to waste in reading them/' 
 
 Walter Goring was leaning forward, tracing the carpet 
 pattern with the lash of his whip while Miss Dinah spoke. 
 He just lifted his eyes to Charlie's when the speech was con- 
 cluded, and smiled in a way that dispersed Charlie's quickly 
 accumulating wrath. " I have no doubt that you are right," 
 he replied, gravely, with perfect politeness ; then he went on, 
 addressing Charlie alone, 
 
 " You have not given me your reason yet, Mrs Fell owes 
 why will you not be able to fix upon my faults the faults of 
 this book, at least ? " 
 
 " Because I have not been tested, certainly, before but 
 I think I should lose judgment in the case of a person I 
 liked." He looked rather flattered, and she added, quickly, 
 " And I shall be sure to over-rate your novel, because you 're 
 tha only novelist I know." 
 
 " And if that 's the way she talks to them, I hope she may 
 never know another ! " was her mother-in-law's inward com- 
 ment on Charlie's rash declaration. 
 
 " Then aid and improve me by criticising. Poor Walsh 
 and his wife used to be invaluable to me in that way, as in 
 many another. Were you not sorry to hear of his death ? " 
 he asked, heartily. 
 
 " Very sorry. My husband is gone to the village this 
 morning, to see how the repairs are going on at Brook-green 
 Cottage." 
 
 "Which didn't want repairing," old Mrs Fellowes re- 
 marked. 
 
Mrs Fe Howes, Senior, on Propriety. 169 
 
 " Do you know that he died that night I met you out 
 riding near Brighton ? " Walter asked, ignoring Mrs Fellowes' 
 opinions as to the repairs of the Brook-green Cottage. 
 
 " I didn't know that it was that night ; I knew that i'o 
 was about that time. What a pretty girl your cousin is, Mr 
 Goring. When is she coming back to Goring Place ? " 
 
 " I want to have a talk to you about her one day," he re- 
 plied, meditatively. " I don't know when she will be at 
 Goring Place when I can get some matrons to honour my 
 bachelor abode with their presence, I suppose. I shall try 
 to get Mr Fellowes and you to favour me with a visit soon, 
 Mrs Fellowes. I want you to see the place." 
 
 " I shall like to see it. I haven't" she checked her- 
 self she was going to add, " I haven't seen anything I like 
 since I have been down here ; " but she changed her sentence, 
 and said, " I haven't asked you if you dine at the Eectory to- 
 morrow ? " 
 
 Yes do you ? " 
 
 " Yes," she said. And then he rose up, and said he would 
 go down and look for Mr Fellowes at the Cottage, and was 
 gone before he had said half he had to say to Charlie, or had 
 heard half she had to say to him. Amongst other things 
 she had much wished to ask him what was going to bring 
 the beautiful widow down to dull Deneham ? but she never 
 got a good opening for the question. 
 
 "Why in the world does she sit with the tribe?" he 
 thought to himself as he rode away. " There 's an end to 
 my calling at The Hurst, if I am always to be had in with 
 those women, who neither talk nor look well. If she 'doesn't 
 take care, she will get even as they are ; it 's telling on her 
 already ; she 's a shade less graceful, through constraint, than 
 when I met her at poor Ralph's." 
 
 He found Mr Fellowes down superintending the workmen 
 at the cottage ; in other words, standing about, and being 
 very much in their way. " My wife is coming down to- 
 morrow morning, to select papers and to decide on the colour- 
 ing for the walls," Henry Fellowes explained, when Walter 
 made some remark to the effect of how well the house would 
 look when finished. " She has excellent taste, and she is 
 taking a great interest in having it all as trim as possible for 
 Mrs Walsh." 
 
I7O Walter Goring. 
 
 "That's really very kind of her," Walter replied. He 
 was rather touched by the unobtrusive kindness and fore- 
 thought so displayed by Mrs Fellowes for his friend. She 
 was doing all she could to make things pleasant, and she had 
 refrained from vaunting her exertions before him. " That 's 
 really very kind of her," ho repeated. " May I look in here 
 to-morrow morning, and assist in the selection ? " 
 
 On Mr Fellowes saying " Certainly," with effusion, Walter 
 made another request, " And then couldn't you and Mrs 
 Fellowes come on and lunch with me ? " 
 
 " Yes, thank you ; a capital arrangement ; it will 
 strengthen us for old Travers' party in the evening: we'll 
 come with pleasure." And though nothing more was said, 
 each man knew that the other was very glad that the im- 
 promptu nature of the invitation did away with the necessity 
 for including old Mrs Fellowes and Miss Dinah in it. 
 
 " That audacious puppy has been here," were the first 
 words Henry Fellowes heard from his mother, when he saw 
 her alone. 
 
 "Which?" 
 
 " Why, that young man from Goring Place." 
 
 " Oh ah ! so he told me," he replied, carelessly. 
 
 " Did you know he was such a very old and intimate friend 
 of your wife's, Henry ? " 
 
 "No is he?" the happy-hearted gentleman replied, 
 jovially. 
 
 " So it appears ; ah-a-a ! better he 'd stay at home and 
 employ himself usefully on his own land than come here talk- 
 ing his nonsense. He sat here this morning till Dinah and 
 I were quite tired of hearing his folly not but that he was 
 much too great a man to talk to us." 
 
 "Why, mother, he's one of Ilie best fellows we ever had 
 down here/' Henry Fellowes remonstrated. He was getting 
 tired long-suffering as he was of every man or woman 
 whom he liked being ruthlessly pulled to pieces, and pro- 
 nounced wanting in this way. Then he went upstairs, and 
 found Charlie sitting in her own rooja, reading. 
 
 " My darling pet, why do you come up in the cold ? " he 
 asked, affectionately so affectionately that she could not 
 bear to wound him by telling him that it was because hia 
 mother and sister made the warm room intolerable to her. 
 
Master and Pupil, 171 
 
 They had picked up the second and third volumes of the 
 " Cost of a Cure,'' and made little sounds expressive of shock, 
 with their lips, before the author was well out of the house ; 
 and they had fervently requested her even if she " would per- 
 sist in reading such things herself, to keep them under lock 
 and key, as they held themselves not entirely free from all 
 responsibility in the matter of the virtue and morality of 
 their servants/' Altogether, they jarred her nerves,- so she 
 fled from them. But she would utter no complaint on the 
 subject to the husband who was so good to her. 
 
 CHAPTEE XXIII. 
 
 MASTER AND PUPIL. 
 
 " I WILL drive you down to the Cottage in the trap, Charlie," 
 Mr Fellowes said to his wife the following morning, before 
 he left the dining-room after breakfast ; " twelve o'clock 
 will be time enough for you, eh ? " 
 
 She told him, "Yes," she would be ready to go by 
 twelve. Even this little break in the daily monotony of life 
 at The Hurst was hailed rapturously by her. Since their re- 
 turn home her husband had been so absorbed in various busi- 
 ness matters that he had never even so much as offered to 
 take her for a drive. She was his first, his only thought 
 when he was in the house ; but when he was out of doors he 
 almost forgot her. He fell back into his old habits of riding 
 vigorously about from one end of his land to the other, and 
 of actively superintending whatever works might be in pro- 
 gress. He imagined that he had no time for mere pleasure 
 drives and walks during the day, and the November evenings 
 were not calculated to show the country off to advantage. 
 
 So he had suffered day after day to go by without ever 
 thinking of taking her beyond The Hurst garden : that gar- 
 den, which was not kept up sufficiently well to make it " a 
 thing of beauty " and a " joy for ever." 
 
 Now, when she agreed to go out with him in the trap 
 at twelve o'clock, he reminded himself of this habit he had of 
 
172 Walter Goring. 
 
 always being desperately busy as soon as he got upon his 
 farm. " I may be detained a little ; but, I tell you what, 
 Charlie, if I 'm not in by twelve, have Moore drive you down 
 to the Cottage, and I will either join you there, or meet you 
 at Goring Place at half-past one." 
 
 " Very well," she replied ; but she felt disappointed. She 
 would much rather that her tall, handsome husband had 
 driven her through Deneham in his dashing trap, than that 
 his groom should do so. The bloom was off the plum at once 
 as he made the proviso. 
 
 " Are you going to Goring Place ? I heard nothing of 
 that ? " Mrs Fellowes, senior, asked of Charlie when they were 
 alone. 
 
 " Yes. Mr Goring has asked us there to luncheon this 
 morning." 
 
 " Has he had the civility to include my daughter in the 
 invitation ? " 
 
 " He didn't send any message by me ; if he has invited her 
 he has written to her, I suppose," Charlie answered, with a 
 smile at the improbability of Walter Goring bringing Dinah 
 upon himself in any such way. 
 
 Mrs Fellowes drew her little shawl more primly over 
 her shoulders, and then drawing the workstand, with the 
 eternal stockings upon it, nearer to her, she said, 
 
 " If Henry does not join you at the Cottage, of course you 
 will not think of going up to Goring Place alone ? " 
 
 " Why, Mrs Fellowes ? You heard my husband tell me 
 to go." Charlie was desperately indignant at the suggestion, 
 and desperately afraid that she might be driven to act upon 
 it, and so be deprived of this hour or two in Walter Goring's 
 house to which she had looked forward. 
 
 " Of course he takes it for granted that his sister will 
 accompany you," Mrs Fellowes said, coldly ; "no one but 
 you would have thought, for an instant, of going up there 
 alone setting the world at defiance; Dinah will go with 
 you." 
 
 Charlie almost groaned. Not only was the bloom brushed 
 off, but all sweetness was extracted from the plum by this un- 
 looked-for arrangement. It made her very sick at heart as 
 she contrasted what this episode in her existence would be 
 now, with what it might have been. 
 
Master and Pupil. 1 7 3 
 
 It is not too much to say that Charlie cordially hated Miss 
 Dinah when even the half-past twelve bell rang and her 
 husband did not appear, but in his place there came his 
 angular sister. She cordially hated Miss Dinah, and she did 
 hope, heartily, that Miss Dinah would drink of the waters of 
 bitterness, and be much bored. Her sister-in-law's appear- 
 ance was an outrage to her in every way. Miss Fellowes was 
 one of those women who array themselves in garments of 
 price on state occasions only, and then look rather more 
 awkward and out of place than they do in their ordinary 
 habiliments. She was a woman who would have her dresses 
 made what she called a " nice walking length," short enough 
 in fact to offer a free view of feet and ankles that were not 
 pretty. Her skirts and her whole drapery had a square 
 effect, there was not a curve or a graceful line about her. 
 Charlie hated her as she clambered up, wrong foot foremost, 
 to the back of the trap, and felt that the harmony would be 
 marred by the presence of this duenna whom she was taking. 
 
 They found Walter Goring at the Cottage, and there was 
 comfort to Charlie in the way his face fell when he saw Miss 
 Dinah. " What did you bring her for, Mrs Fellowes ? " he 
 asked, dolefully ; for Miss Dinah commenced leaping about 
 among the repairs and repairers at once, in a way that left 
 her companions unfettered. 
 
 " What did I bring her for ? " Charlie answered, hastily. 
 " Don't pretend to think that I brought her ; my husband 
 couldn 't join me here, but he is going to meet us at your 
 place that arrangement didn't please them, however; so, 
 as soon as Harry was gone out, they altered it, and Miss 
 Fellowes took possession of me/' She laughed, as she spoke, 
 but in a way that showed him she was very nearly crying. 
 
 " What an impertinence to your husband, and what a bore 
 for us all,'' he said, quietly. " Of course I should be delighted 
 to receive Miss Fellowes whenever she deigned to honour me 
 with her presence, but just to-day she is superfluous. I had 
 so much to say to you that I can't say under her auspices." 
 
 "I felt stultified by them yesterday, and so did you," 
 Charlie replied, quickly. 
 
 " Why do you receive your guests in full family conclave 
 in that way, then ? " 
 
 "Oh! I can't help myself; if I gave orders that every one 
 
Walter Goring. 
 
 who asked for me should be shown into the drawing-room, 
 Mrs and Miss Fellowes would march in with me, or before 
 me, and sit and look stiff, and do nothing/' 
 
 " What a strange girl you are I beg your pardon, Mrs 
 Fellowes, really, but it was only the other day that I knew 
 you as Miss St John, you see ! " 
 
 " In what way am I strange ? Quick ! here she comes." 
 
 " Why, you are affecting now to think that you will bear 
 this mute inglorious slavery for so long as they may please to 
 make it last. You won't, you know ! You can't, in fact, if 
 you 're ever going to do anything/' 
 
 " What should I do, now ? there 's nothing " 
 
 " I have heard all that before," he interrupted, laughing. 
 " You 're going to tell me that you ( lack incentive ' again ; 
 now I will give you one it will give you an unassailable 
 position in your home." 
 
 "Whenever my husband is out of the house I feel so 
 powerless," she said, in a low tone. Then she remembered 
 that this man was nearly a stranger to her, for all that sym- 
 pathy which existed between them, and once more her con- 
 science goaded her for having been led on to make so much 
 of a confidence as she had made to him., and she crimsoned, 
 and lowered her head a little. 
 
 " T understand you so well, Mrs Fellowes," he said, softly. 
 " I don't think that you are one to be ever bored by your 
 own society ; but you will get very weary and worn-out if 
 it 's compulsory upon you to be constantly in the society of 
 others. Ensconce yourself in the library at The Hurst, and 
 have it understood from the first that it is your sanctuary 
 then you will be free to read, and think, and write during 
 those hours of your husband's absence which now hang so 
 heavily. Forgive me for speaking in this way to you ; forget 
 that I have not known you long and remember only that 
 we know each other well." 
 
 She looked up at him gratefully. (All this time these 
 two had been standing in the cottage garden ; they had suf- 
 fered Miss Dinah's impatience to see the full extent of her 
 brother's extravagance in the matter of repairing this house 
 to carry her away from them.) Charlie looked up at her 
 companion gratefully, and her face seemed brighter and 
 younger than it had been a few minutes before. 
 
Master and Pupil. 175 
 
 *' If I do that, will you sometimes come and see ine, and 
 help me ? " she asked. 
 
 " I will come as often as you will admit me." 
 
 "Because if I haven't some one to urge me on and en- 
 courage me, I shall break down." 
 
 " Well, we will encourage each other to work ; is this to 
 be a compact ? " 
 
 He took her hand as he asked it, and she, not answering, 
 but looking away restlessly into the distance, suffered it to 
 remain in his clasp. She was thinking that probably her 
 husband would not care one atom whether she worked or 
 was idle, failed or succeeded. Her ambition the ambition 
 to do something with the power she had would make no 
 appeal to him. She knew this, and the knowledge was dis- 
 piriting. Nevertheless, the old yearning to do and be a 
 something more than she was, to make for herself a motive 
 for living, to have an interest beyond those domestic ones, 
 which were insufficient to fill her nature, ran along her veins 
 like fire. As she stood there thinking thus, still with her 
 hand in his, Miss Dinah came out, and bore down upon 
 them. 
 
 "You're a long time taking leave of Mr Goring, Mrs 
 Henry; you commenced shaking hands with him when I 
 was at that bedroom window." 
 
 "Did I?" Charlie replied, with the utmost composure. 
 " Yes, Mr Goring, this is to be a compact." Then she with- 
 drew her hand after giving his the promissory clasp, and they 
 went in to choose the papers. 
 
 " Of all the bare-faced flirtations I ever saw, this is the 
 worst ! " Miss Dinah said to herself, as she followed them 
 closely ; " their hand-shaking, and their compacts, and their 
 goings-on altogether : I 've no patience with it ! " 
 
 Deneham did not distinguish itself as far as the papers 
 were concerned. They were flaring, large-patterned, coarse 
 in colour. Mrs Fellowes found them all wanting, and made 
 out a list of others to be sent for. She revelled in being 
 able to exercise her taste, more especially as she was power- 
 less to do it in her own home. " I want Mrs Walsh to find 
 that I haven't forgotten some of her likes and dislikes," 
 Charlie said animatedly to Walter ; " let us order one sitting- 
 room to be hung with white-watered paper, with the tiniest 
 
176 Walter Goring. 
 
 of gilt mouldings, and that bit of a room with pale green 
 pictures hang so well on it. 5 ' 
 
 "Do you like Mrs Walsh?" he asked. 
 
 " I am not quite sure that I do. I don't think she likes 
 me, does she?" 
 
 "You will probably get very intimate when she comes 
 down here/' he replied, evasively. 
 
 She shook her head. "What brings her here?" she 
 asked, and then she saw that Walter Goring looked rather 
 embarrassed. 
 
 " Oh ! couldn't keep up the Roehampton House, and 
 and liked this neighbourhood when she was staying down 
 here with me. Very likely she won't stay here long : I fancy 
 she will travel." 
 
 "'What a glorious beauty she is!" Charlie cried, irrele- 
 vantly ; " if I were a man, how I should adore her." 
 
 " You see men are wiser," he replied. 
 
 " I don't know, I can't judge. I have seen so few with 
 her." 
 
 " You have seen me with her, for instance." 
 
 " At a party, where your adoration would have been com- 
 promising," she said, laughing. 
 
 " That would have been her look out. I certainly should 
 have expressed the adoration if I had felt it ; it would have 
 been altogether her affair whether she accepted it or not." 
 He forgot, as he spoke, that he had been in the habit of 
 calling her "his goddess;" honestly he only thought of her 
 as a dear old friend. There was a very warm feeling in his 
 heart for each one of these three women whom Fate had 
 thrown in his way, and made congenial in some respect to 
 him. But he was not in love with either of them yet; and 
 the one who had the most in her, the one who possessed the 
 subtlest charm for him, though he scarcely knew it yet, was 
 a wife the wife of a man who left her to find out that a 
 new name and a ring on the third finger are not sufficiently 
 absorbing and interesting things in themselves to keep the 
 thoughts at home. "Fellowes is a thoroughly good fellow," 
 Walter Goring thought, as he watched the brilliant, but far 
 from beautiful, face of Fellowes' wife ; " but I wish that girl 
 hadn't married him ; there 's too much fire in that face for a 
 man who is not its master not to be its slave. How the 
 
Master and Pupil. 1 77 
 
 Daisy and she will hate each other ! Apparently they re- 
 semble one another in one or two things, but in reality it is 
 in those very things that they most differ, I imagine." Then 
 she lifted her eyes and found that he was watching her, and 
 she turned away impatiently, when she saw that Miss Dinah 
 observed it too. " I don't like to tell him not to stare at 
 me," she thought, " or he will think that I think a great 
 deal more than I do about it ; but I 'm sure that Dinah's 
 thoughts on the subject are not the kindest that might be 
 recorded." She was right in this : Dinah's thoughts on the 
 subject interfered with her balance, and nearly caused her to 
 tumble off the back of the trap as they drove over to Goring 
 Place, where they found luncheon and Henry Fellowes await- 
 ing them. 
 
 Henry Fellowes' undisguised astonishment, and his admir- 
 ably disguised pleasure at seeing his sister, did not restore 
 that lady to equanimity. " I have come unasked," she said 
 to him in a low tone ; " I know that very well, and not 
 wanted either ; but I could not let your wife come here alone, 
 Henry." 
 
 " All right, all right, Dinah ; your coming makes it all the 
 better : the more the merrier, you know." 
 
 "No, Henry; I am aware that I shall not add to the 
 merriment ; merriment and I parted company a long time 
 ago, as I think you might remember; but your wife is 
 frivolous and young, and I feel it to be my duty to keep her 
 right while I can, even if she does regard me as a restraint 
 and an encumbrance." 
 
 Henry Fellowes laughed, and then proceeded to look 
 penitent for having done so. He, too, had intended being 
 very happy at Goring Place this day, and his sister's pre- 
 sence interfered with his scheme. He could bear them at 
 home, this mother and sister of his, but he really could 
 liardty bear them away from home. They were as part of 
 The Hurst to him ; it never occurred to him to think that 
 The Hurst would be a much more agreeable residence with- 
 out them. He was used to them, and accepted them as 
 " facts " (almost after the manner of a woman) while they 
 remained in their own sphere. But even he recognised the 
 existence of something beyond and above them as soon as 
 they drifted out of it. Henry Fellowes felt strongly this 
 
 M 
 
178 Walter Goring. 
 
 morning at Goring Place that his sister was a " restraint and 
 an encumbrance/' and that they would have got on ever so 
 much better without her. He was sorry to feel this about 
 his own, for he was a man who had correct notions, and 
 believed in natural affection to the very verge of belief but 
 he did feel it, and he saw that Charlie felt it too. Miss 
 Dinah had been over-zealous in the good cause of keeping 
 watch and ward over her brother's wife ; she was liable to be 
 checkmated at any moment from the time he perceived that 
 his cherished, trusted, loved, young wife felt her to be what 
 she had called herself, " a restraint and an encumbrance." 
 He told himself angrily that Dinah had had no right to come 
 for the avowed purpose of mounting guard over his wife ; 
 the doing so was an offence to him and to Charlie especially 
 to him. It was calling in question his capability for looking 
 after his own honour, it was a slur on his judgment of the 
 woman whom he had thought fit to entrust with that and 
 his name ; it was casting a doubt on his having inspired the 
 girl he loved with a guarding warm love for him in return ! 
 It was everything that was most offensive and irritating to 
 a man, in fact, and Henry Fellowes felt offended and irri- 
 tated about it. "What if Charlie had known and liked 
 Walter Goring before she married him?" he asked himself, 
 as he sat at Walter Goring's table that morning ; "it had. 
 been but a girlish preference ; or if it had been more, it was 
 now as though it had never been to his honest-hearted 
 Charlie." 
 
 He longed to show them both how r trustful and magnani- 
 mous he was. Almost unconsciously to himself the seeds of 
 doubt were sown in his breast, but he would not let them 
 grow. Of " doubt," did I say ? Scarcely that. He would 
 not doubt or fear, or regret, the "something" that he still 
 could not prevent himself from feeling might have been be- 
 tween them. " I 'd trust her with him or any other man 
 through the world while she seemed to love me," he thought, 
 with a swelling heart. " The poor pet ! perhaps it was want 
 of money that came between them; but she had got over it 
 before she took me." He little knew that her heart had 
 never given one throb for Walter Goring that she had never 
 had a feeling to " get over " concerning him that he was, or 
 had been, to her only the author of certain pages v.'hich had 
 
Master and Pupil. 1 79 
 
 strung her up and given her new ideas that he was, in fact, 
 but a little lower than the angels and Dickens and Bulwer to 
 her. Hero-worship (more especially if the worshipper and 
 worshipped be not both well-stricken in years) is apt to mis- 
 lead beholders : some of its salient points bear a strong re- 
 semblance to love. There is the same blind belief and wild 
 anxiety, and tenderness to the shortcomings of the object 
 the same pleasure in the mere fact of its presence the same 
 jealousy of the grand creature coming off its pedestal for 
 another the same humble, foolish, futile, identification of 
 one's-self with its triumphs and failures, its hopes and despairs, 
 and aspirations and defeats. Above all, there is the same 
 sufficiency, for the time it lasts, about it. Nothing else is 
 sought, nothing else is needed. The true devotee kneels with 
 his back to the world, and sees and cares for only the 
 shrine. 
 
 As a rule, the hero-worshipper who would keep the faith 
 should flee from the possibility of personal intercourse with 
 the man or woman he has come to love in type. The aesthetic 
 poet comes before you in the flesh a rubicund, rotund, flabby 
 man, loose in attire, looser in address, and all his music is 
 mute in your soul when you see him, and you marvel how 
 honest nature can be guilty of such gross mistakes such 
 fearful misfittings of matter to mind. 
 
 Or, in the course of the march of life, you come suddenly 
 upon one of your favourite novelists, and find that all his wit 
 and all his good manners and geniality are reserved for his 
 writings. Or you find her who pours out pathos by the page 
 pathos so terribly true that you are plunged into low spirits 
 for a week after reading it you find her a brawny, badly- 
 dressed, badly-bred woman, void of all those tender tricks, 
 those furtive fascinations, with which she endows her heroines. 
 The man who has made refinement a religion to you, strikes 
 at the foundation of that religion by showing how coarse he, 
 its high priest, can be. The lady whose language almost 
 leaps, it has such spirit, rush, and freshness about it, is of the 
 earth, earthy broadly material, in a way that makes you 
 wish, with Sydney Smith, that you had the power of " read- 
 ing the riot-act and dispersing her." Heavy in step, heavy 
 in style, the memory of her comes upon you as a nightmare 
 ever after as you read her stories, and you sigh for your hours 
 
l8o Walter Goring. 
 
 of belief in, and hero-worship for, the unseen. But when the 
 real comes up to the ideal, then it is all up with the possi- 
 bility of proving a renegade to a faith at once so soothing 
 and exciting. A religion more of the soul than the heart, 
 and more of the head than either, its trammels are not to be 
 thrown off lightly, and the vacuum that is felt, should the 
 emptiness of it be proved, may not easily be filled up. Was 
 I right in saying just now, that some of the salient points of 
 hero-worship bore so strong a resemblance to love as to be 
 liable to mislead beholders ? 
 
 They went over the house after luncheon, and then into 
 the study, and despite Miss Dinah's square presence, it was 
 a very pleasant time. Charlie lounging along through the 
 corridor on her husband's arm, had felt equal to the nervous 
 task of telling him that she wanted to have the library at The 
 Hurst to herself, that she was going to write. 
 
 " Yes, dear," he had replied, with prompt acquiescence. 
 " What do you want to write about ? " 
 
 This had been staggering, not to say crushing. " I hardly 
 know yet," Charlie had replied ; " but I really wish to try, 
 Harry. I have heaps of stories in my head, if I can only 
 find the language to tell them in." Then they had gone on 
 to Walter Goring's study, the walls of which were lined with 
 books. The bindings gave all the tone and colour to the 
 room, and it was not lacking. 
 
 " I believe that even I could write here," Charlie said, in 
 a discontented tone, going up to his writing-table. " Why, 
 you can't look to the right or left without having a thousand 
 ideas put into your head, and having had a classical educa- 
 tion, it would be a shame if you couldn't express them. 
 There 's a view ! " and she pointed to the window. " What a 
 lot that view ought to do for you, Mr Goring ! You can 
 plant your hero and heroine in half-a-dozen capital scenes ia 
 that one view." 
 
 " You have the same from the other end. Look, there is 
 The Hurst," lie replied. 
 
 " It would never look the same to me from The Hurst," 
 she said, almost angrily. 
 
 " Then come here and work," he said, laughing. " Fellowes, 
 what do you say to coming here and staying until Mrs 
 Fellowes has exhausted the view. Seriously, though, my 
 
Master and PupiL 1 8 1 
 
 library is at your service. You will find many books of re- 
 ference here that may be useful to you." 
 
 " Thank you." This was uttered gratefully and gladly. 
 Then her face fell and her eyes clouded over as she added, 
 "What is the use of it, though, to me ; I don't know enough 
 about any one thing to refer about it to anything else." She 
 went over and took a book from the shelf as she spoke, and 
 seated herself in a low chair by the fire. 
 
 " If you are going to talk literature, Dinah and I will go 
 and look at the gardens," Henry Fellowes said, cheerfully. 
 The opportunity for showing Dinah what " he thought about 
 it " had come, and he seized upon it with avidity. His sister 
 was obliged to follow him since no one asked her to stay 
 where she was ; but she followed, reviling his blindness in 
 her heart. Not that even she doubted the perfect integrity 
 of her brother's wife and her brother's friend, but it was an- 
 tagonistic to all her notions that a penniless woman should 
 come into a family and enjoy herself in any but a severe, 
 sober way. As soon as Miss Dinah's shadonv vanished, the 
 two whom she had left behind breathed more freely. Then 
 Charlie, still holding the book in her hand, looked up and 
 said, half laughing and half sadly, 
 
 " I told my husband of my vague intentions just now, and 
 he sent me down again by asking me ' what I was going to 
 write about ? ' >: 
 
 " I was on the point of asking you the very same question, 
 Mrs Fellowes." 
 
 " Well, I will tell you what I told him I have heaps of 
 stories in my head." 
 
 " Then think one out, and write it out, and let me be your 
 first reviewer. I won't be so kind as you were tc me yester- 
 day. I will not promise not to see any faults in what you 
 do. You ; 11 take my criticism as kindly as it will be offered, 
 won't you ? " 
 
 " Yes, that shall be in the compact too," she replied ; and 
 then he came over and looked at the book she was holding. 
 
 " Ah, read that," he said, handing it back to her ; " and 
 then read it again, and then read its brethren till you know 
 them all by heart, if you can. I got my little wayward 
 cousin to wade half through this essay of Actdison's. By the 
 way, she was the last young lady who was in this study," 
 
1 82 Walter Goring. 
 
 " She read with you, I suppose ? " 
 
 " I tried to make her read with me." 
 
 " How nice for her." 
 
 " She thought it quite the reverse of nice, I assure you, 
 ' Mrs Fellowes. She has first-rate musical ability, but very 
 little mental power, I imagine ; that is to say, she is bright 
 and sharp and quick-witted, but she is incapable of continued 
 or earnest thought. I shall send over a batch of those Spec- 
 tators and Tatlers for you, and come over and see what is 
 wanting in The Hurst library. You '11 allow me to lend you 
 books?" 
 
 " Oh, Mr Goring, it will be so good of you. Send me a 
 lot of poetry." 
 
 " I will send you Keats and Shelley, and so gradually lead 
 you back, or rather forward, to Chaucer and Spenser." 
 
 "I don't think I shall care for their 'quaint conceits ;' let 
 me have that big Byron up there, and " 
 
 " Scott's rhymes, I suppose. No, no ; all they have said 
 is well enough, in their verse ; but you would be sure to be 
 struck by the magnitude and prodigious originality of their 
 ideas, and to fancy they would stand reproducing in prose. 
 No, no ; don't read such poetry as theirs, Mrs Fellowes. Do 
 you know anything of Keats, the man ' who was cradled into 
 poetry by wrong who learnt in suffering what he taught in 
 song?'" 
 
 He took down a small volume, as he asked it, and com- 
 menced turning over the leaves, with the touch of one who 
 knew and loved them well. 
 
 " All I know of Keats is Shelley's ' Adonais.' " 
 
 "And Shelley's 'Adonais ' did not make you seek to know 
 more of Keats ? Well, I wonder at that. Before you read 
 his poems, though, you must know a little about him. Shall 
 I tell you ? Do I bore you ? " 
 
 She looked up at him, and smiled ; and he knew that he 
 was not boring her. 
 
 Nevertheless, it is possible that his sketch, brief as he 
 made it, of that psychological wonder the young surgeon- 
 poet might bore the reader. Therefore, it shall only be said 
 here, that he did tell her of Keats' dismal life, and desperate 
 love for the woman who " had the beauty of a leopardess ; " 
 the woman who " kept him awake one night as a tune of 
 
A Little Cloud. 183 
 
 Mozart's might do ; " the woman whose "name was ever on 
 his lip, but never on his tongue ; " and for whom, in short, 
 his life ebbed itself away in mere passionate feeling. He 
 talked to her till her cheeks flushed with pity for the young 
 genius who died so soon, and so sadly ; and who, humbled by 
 his bitter conflict with destiny, asked only that the words, 
 " Here lies one whose name was writ in water," should be 
 placed over his grave. He read hei? a few lines the few last 
 plaintive lines of " The Pot of Basil," and some portions of 
 that " Stretched Metre of an Antique Song," which is in- 
 scribed to his hapless parallel, Chatterton the god-gifted 
 boy, who was even more tired of life than Keats himself. 
 And when he had finished, she heaved a sigh that was neither 
 one of pleasure nor of pain, but that was rather one of in- 
 tense satisfaction at hearing things that were so delicately 
 attuned to her own sympathies, spoken of in a manner that 
 was the same. 
 
 " He was a poet, and a lover too. Ah, Mr Goring, I feel 
 now .that it is sheer reckless presumption which made me 
 think for a while that I could ever hope to do more than 
 appreciate from below." 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 A LITTLE CLOUD. 
 
 WALTER GORING'S visitors stayed with him until it was time 
 to go home and dress for the Travers' dinner-party. The 
 walk in the gardens which Mr Fellowes had proposed to his 
 sister had not been a very long one, for Miss Fellowes proved 
 a morose and dreary companion on the occasion ; therefore 
 her brother suffered himself to stray back into the library 
 sooner than he otherwise would have done. Then they looked 
 through some volumes of rare old line engravings; and Wal- 
 ter inoculated Mrs Fellowes with some crude bibliomania] 
 notions respecting quaint and curious bindings ; and the two 
 gentlemen effected some new combinations of the lighter 
 movable furniture, under Charlie's auspices. Altogether, the 
 
184 Walter Goring. 
 
 three chief dramatis persona? were very happy, and Miss 
 Dinah thought it all as imbecile a wasting of time as she had 
 ever heard of, much less witnessed. At last somebody 
 found out that it was past five o'clock; and then they 
 hurried away to the melody of Miss Dinah's declaration, that 
 they had no time to lose, for the Traverses dined at seven, 
 and were punctuality itself. 
 
 As they were driving home, Charlie mooted that plan 
 which Walter Goring had proposed about The Hurst library 
 to her husband. 
 
 " I want it to be held sacred," she said ; " no one must 
 come in without knocking ; perfect peace is essential while 
 one is in the agonies of composition, Mr Goring says." 
 
 " May I not come in ? " 
 
 " Oh yes, you Harry ; but no one else. Do take me there 
 to morrow morning, and instal me." 
 
 " Are you speaking of the library ? " Miss Fellowes croaked 
 from behind. 
 
 " Yes/' Charlie replied, looking affably over her shoulder 
 at her sister-in-law. She was much more tolerant to Miss 
 Dinah's presence than she had been while going to Goring 
 Place ; for the day had not been spoilt. 
 
 " My mother has never liked to have that room used in com- 
 mon since my poor dear father died ; you know that, Henry?" 
 
 Charlie's head came round swiftly. Her husband stole an 
 imploring look at her face ; he could only see her profile, but 
 she was biting her under-lip. 
 
 u My mother won't mind your using the room, darling ! " 
 he whispered. 
 
 But his wife did not respond. She was bitterly offended 
 at the perpetual placing of small stumbling-blocks in her 
 path ; and bitterly wounded that her husband did not sweep 
 them away with a strong hand at once as would become a 
 man. So she made no response to his conciliatory whispers ; 
 and looked neither to the right nor left until they drew up 
 at the door of The Hurst. Then she jumped down from the 
 trap before he could get round to assist her, and ran up at 
 once to her own bed-room, declaring to herself that she could 
 " not bear it any longer." "He sees me snubbed, and treated 
 as a nobody," she thought, angrily ; " his love for me is of 
 the lowest the very lowest kind ; he has no pride for me, 
 
A Little Cloud. 185 
 
 no consideration for me, his mother, and his sister, and 
 their senseless prejudices and fancies, are more to him than 
 his wife." 
 
 Her feelings rushed like a torrent from one extreme to 
 the other. Up to the present juncture she had kept down 
 all doubt of his devotion to her in fact, however tamely he 
 suffered small disagreeables to assail her in seeming. But 
 now she forgot all those manifestations of affection of his, by 
 the thought of which she had heretofore strengthened herself 
 to bear and forbear ; she forgot all these, and declared to 
 herself that his love was not such a love as a woman may 
 glory and trust in. 
 
 He, meanwhile, \vas going to work his own way to make 
 things smooth for them all. It was not a determined, 
 masterly way ; but it was manly enough after all, and very 
 kind. He went in and sat down by his mother's chair, and 
 began giving her little details of the day, till she relaxed a 
 little from the austerity she had assumed, immediately she 
 heard of their arrival. " I think your wife might have had 
 the civility to come in and speak to me after having been 
 away all these hours ; I did expect that certainly, otherwise 
 I should have sent these letters that have come for her up to 
 her bedroom." 
 
 " She hasn't much time to dress, you know ? I '11 take 
 the letters ; where are they ? oh ! here. She will come and 
 show herself to you in her finery presently, mother," he con- 
 tinued, bending over the old lady and kissing her. Then he 
 added, " I want the library well aired and put in order, 
 mother dear; will you give orders about it to-morrow? " 
 
 " It is always in good order, Henry," she said, gravely. 
 
 " Too damp to sit in, isn't it ? " 
 
 '' What do you want to sit in it for ? " 
 
 " Well, mother dear, this for one reason. You have not 
 been accustomed to have young people with you constantly, 
 and I think it would be pleasanter if my wife and you were 
 n,ot always together, perhaps ; the library shall be our room, 
 and then when we come either here, or to the drawing-ioom 
 in the evening, it will be a change for her, and you will be 
 glad to see her ; it must be so tiresome to women to be to- 
 gether all day. Will you give orders about it to-morrow, 
 mother dear ? " 
 
1 86 Walter Goring. 
 
 " Yes," she replied at once ; and she said no word regard- 
 ing her disinclination to seeing the hallowed spot invaded. 
 Then he took his wife's correspondence, and walked up tc 
 her room. 
 
 She was sitting down already dressed, and still feeling and 
 looking wrathful. When he came in, looking smiling and 
 light-hearted, fuel was cast on the fire of her indignation at 
 the indifference and injustice that was displayed towards her, 
 and she turned her head away and gave him no glance of 
 welcome. 
 
 " What ! ready, my darling ! Now you look charming. I 
 have promised my mother that you will go down and show 
 yourself in your finery to her ; here are a lot of letters for 
 you." 
 
 She took the letters from his hand, with a cold " Thank 
 you." 
 
 " What is it, Charlie?" he asked fondly, putting his hand 
 on the back of her chair and leaning over her. She moved 
 her shoulder away from him. His tenderness was repugnant 
 to her at the moment. She told herself that it never caused 
 him to stave off any annoyance from her. 
 
 " There ; s nothing the matter. Let me get up, please ; I 
 want to read my letters." 
 
 He stood upright, and let her get up and pass him. Then 
 he followed her, and put his arm round her waist, and shg 
 wriggled herself free from him. 
 
 " Charlie ! you're not angry still about what Dinah said?" 
 
 " Angry ; no, not a bit." 
 
 " I have been talking to my mother, and she 's going to 
 have the library put all right to-morrow morning ; and you '11 
 let me come in and smoke my cigar there in the morning, 
 won't you, dear." 
 
 " Let ! as if I had a word to say about anything in this 
 house. You had better go and dress, Harry, if we are going 
 to this dinner-party." 
 
 He obeyed her, and walked rather sadly away to his own 
 dressing-room, thinking what a pity it was that all women 
 were so touchy. " I suppose she wanted me to make a row 
 about it," he thought; " women never will see that it's just 
 as well to take things quietly." 
 
 Presently, before he was quite ready, he heard the bedroom 
 
A Little Cloud. 187 
 
 open, and a rushing as of silk draperies towards his 
 door. Then there was a knock, and Charlie, looking flushed 
 and tearful, burst into the room with an open letter in her 
 hand. "My brother Frank," she began, and then she 
 stopped, panting with anger and sorrow ; and when he asked, 
 eagerly, " What is it, my darling?" she buried her face in 
 her hands, and sobbed out, 
 
 " Dismissed the service for nothing? 
 
 It was useless entreating her not to cry, or attempting to 
 get a coherent statement from her. 
 
 The news was contained in a windy effusion from Ellen, to 
 whose husband it had been communicated in what Ellen 
 characterised as "a shamefully thoughtless letter," from 
 Frank himself. His delinquencies were not of a very black 
 dye. He had gone on shore in opposition to his captain's 
 orders, and he had remained on shore, making sketches of 
 scenery that pleased him much, long enough for the whole of 
 his boat's crew to get intoxicated, and for one to desert. This 
 was the head and front of his offending, but it had been 
 sufficient to procure his dismissal and consequent disgrace. 
 Mr Prescott was evidently very hard upon him. " His 
 sketches were intended for a work he has been writing," Ellen 
 added. " ' Serving off some place or other,' he calls it ; and 
 he had the coolness to say he would come and stay with us 
 till he can get it published. Robert won't see him." ("Ask 
 him here," Henry Fellowes interrupted, when Charlie read 
 that portion of her sister's letter to him : " I want to know 
 your brother, Charlie, and this will be a good opportunity ; 
 ask him here, of course, dear.") Then Charlie brightened up 
 and beamed again, and hung about her husband's neck, 
 reproaching herself in very hard terms for " having been cold 
 to him just now," according to her nature. But though she 
 brightened up, and though she went down and displayed her- 
 self with much amiability to her mother-in-law, her heart was 
 heavy about this blight that had come upon her brother. 
 She had been imbued in her childhood with many of the 
 traditions of the navy ; she had been taught to regard it with 
 a mixture of awe and affection as a great institution ; the 
 men of her family had been steeped in salt water, so to say, 
 for three generations. Altogether, though she brightened up 
 at the prospect of seeing her brother immediately of wel- 
 
1 88 Walter Goring. 
 
 coming him to her husband's house, and though she was 
 affable to old Mrs Fellowes, and sufficiently agreeable at the 
 Traverses to enlist the rector under her banner at once and 
 for ever though all these things were her heart was filled 
 with sad retrospective memories. 
 
 She had not seen her brother Frank for years never since 
 she had been grown up ; but she remembered him as such a 
 gallant-looking boy. 
 
 She recalled his first going to sea. It was fifteen or sixteen 
 years ago, and yet how vividly she remembered the scene. It 
 was a fair July morning, and the sun was shining with a 
 brilliancy which she had never seen equalled since. There 
 was flash from a sword, and dazzle from much gold lace ; and 
 a cerulean blue over all things, reflected this last from the 
 new naval uniform of the boy who was going away that day 
 to join his ship at Sheerness going away in the first flush of 
 his pride at being a cadet in Her Majesty's service going 
 away under the escort of his father, a veteran who had drawn 
 his sword (the same sword whose flashing had been so 
 glorious a thing in her eyes) in twenty causes, and gained 
 nought save evanescent glory and lasting wounds in any ot 
 them. 
 
 It came back to her vividly as she sat and ate Mr Travers' 
 venison that scene and hour in which pride and pain were 
 so strangely mingled. The tears and prayers and cautions 
 of the mother, who was seeing her eldest the boy of boys 
 the flower of the flock, depart that day into the world of 
 temptations and dangers, never again to be a home-bird 
 never again to kneel at her feet and pour out his prayers and 
 tell his boyish sins and sorrows never again to be entirely 
 her own, in fact, from this moment of his first flight from 
 the home of which he had been the star. 
 
 What a hero the handsome bold-faced boy was that day ! 
 How his little sister worshipped him ; at first from afar, but 
 gradually, as she grew accustomed to the bright dirk and blue 
 jacket from the summit of his knee, whither she had climbed 
 to pat his cheek with admiring love, and touch his dirk with 
 tremulous pride ! What a hero he was ! Not that he had 
 done anything yet beyond looking defiant and frank and 
 fearless ; but these qualities were no bad foundation on which 
 to build up a fair fabric of bright hopes and expectations re 
 
A Little Cloud. 189 
 
 Bpecting his future career ! How her father had alternated 
 between nervous cautions, as to the demeanour it would be- 
 hove the boy to observe, and exultant prognostications of the 
 success the early promotion that assuredly awaited him, 
 provided only that he did his duty, and never forgot the 
 respect due to others, and himself ! How the servants ran 
 about deliriously, wiping their eyes with their aprons, and 
 murmuring to each other, " Don't Master Frank look beau- 
 tiful quite the man ? " How the dogs leapt about their old 
 playfellow, regardless of his newly-donned splendour, chorus- 
 ing each other's entreaties that he would take them once 
 more to a certain stack where rats did dwell ! How fast the 
 last hour slipped away ! How well she remembered all these 
 things will be realised by any one who has witnessed the 
 first start in life of a boy who is held dear ! 
 
 Her thoughts travelled on. The home scene was over, and 
 the mother was left to pray away her bitter sense of barren- 
 ness, if she could to bear it if she must. But then had 
 come the triumphal progress through the village ! There 
 were eight or nine old men-of-war's-men, belonging to the 
 coast-guard station, and these came to wish him God-speed 
 and good-bye, and to hope, as they gripped his delicate 
 young hand, that he would be "as line an officer as his 
 father." Rough old sailors, some of them, but they had 
 tears in their eyes as the boy whom they had carried on 
 their shoulders many a time, and taught to detect a sail 
 in the offing, and the difference of rig between a schooner 
 and a barque, went out to face the dangers of that ocean 
 which they had lauded to him. 
 
 Then there had been friends and neighbours standing about 
 at window and gate to see the last of him. Kisses on the 
 brow from matrons whose sons had been his schoolfellows 
 gentle reminders from pretty little girls, his sisters' allies, as 
 to monkey-skins and elephants' tusks which he had promised 
 to bring them home. Hearty hand-shakings from the men 
 who recognised his recently-established claim to manhood 
 by refraining from patting him on the head. And then it 
 was all over, and he was driven away to the railway station ; 
 and out of his mind nearly with elation at hearing himself in- 
 cluded in a porter's obsequious mention of "two naval officers." 
 
 What gala-days those were on which his letters used to 
 
190 Walter Goring. 
 
 arrive, ! How eagerly they were read how religiously they 
 were listened to how liberally lavished upon all inquiring 
 friends ! He was the grand topic for at least a week in the 
 neighbourhood, after the receipt of one of those transparent 
 effusions which always commenced "My Dear Parents," 
 and wound up with a gratuitous assurance of his naval in- 
 structor's complete satisfaction with the progress he was making 
 in navigation and the art of seamanship. The fact of a letter 
 having been received from Master Frank had a habit of 
 spreading like wildfire. The dawning of the days on which 
 they were due always saw his mother's cheek very pale, and 
 his father's manner very restless. They knew the trials arid 
 temptations to which young blood is subjected, and they 
 dreaded the boy "forgetting to write." But for years the 
 gala-days came very regularly ; Charlie remembered the dread 
 was unfulfilled in the life-time of either parent. 
 
 Then again she remembered a date when their section of 
 the world had reeled, and caressed its own judgment in 
 having thought very high things of him. Frank's name was 
 on the "list;" he was mated; he had been given the com- 
 mand of a slaver, and had quelled something small in muti- 
 nies, and been reported to "the Board" as "a highly 
 deserving young officer." When the glorious news came 
 home it made such a heaven there, that surely it was placed 
 to his account and remembered, though dark days had fallen 
 on him now ! 
 
 How they had all delighted in him, and rejoiced in oppor- 
 tunities of talking about him ! He had shown himself to be 
 the two best tilings a man can be gallant and determined; 
 and, in addition to these, he was so successful ! The bright 
 young fellow was positively adored in the home circle ! 
 Fortune seemed to smile upon him ! The glow of pride had 
 not cooled upon the cheeks of those who loved him, after the 
 receipt of the first good news, when other and even better 
 tidings were heard. At the risk of 'm's own he had saved a 
 brother officer's life by jumping overboard he had led on a 
 boat attack on a slaver he was motioned specially in the 
 captain's report, and he was to have his lieutenancy. 
 
 What paeans of pride they sang when that news reached 
 them ! Early success is always so much more glorious a 
 thing than that which is long waited for and hardly won. 
 
A Little Cloud. 191 
 
 He, the young lieutenant of nineteen, was very successful 
 was a star, in fact and he was prized accordingly. He had 
 been in the first flush of this fame when their father died, 
 nd since that time they had known little of each other. To 
 Charlie, especially, he lived only as the bright-faced bold lad, 
 who had left them in blue-and-gold one July morning ; for 
 ..he had been down in the fever when he came home to 
 show himself last. It was very, very hard for her to think 
 of him as under a cloud now, as these reminiscences flooded 
 her mind. She felt that she should be shy and abashed 
 before him if he did accept her husband's invitation and 
 come to The Hurst, depressed and as one who came on suf- 
 ferance. There is something horribly crushing to a woman 
 in the thought that the head of a man who is dear to her 
 may be down at ever so slight an angle. 
 
 There was a deficiency, too, of the power of diversion at 
 the Travers'. The dinner was quite correct, and so were the 
 people who were bidden to eat it correct, but not at all 
 exhilarating. The majority of the guests were clergymen 
 and their help-mates men who were clergymen because 
 rich livings had been in the gift of their fathers or uncles- 
 men of family, in fact, who served God in good style, and 
 who were as mighty lords temporal in their respective neigh- 
 bourhoods, as they were lords spiritual men, who, from 
 being absolute monarchs of all they surveyed in their several 
 spheres, had a correct estimate of the social status and im- 
 portance of their fellows, and a slightly erroneous one of the 
 social status and importance of all such as were not sons of 
 the Church, or masters of many square acres of the soil men 
 of classical attainments, of good breeding, and of profound 
 propriety ; but concentred on themselves in a way that ren- 
 dered them wearisome to the stranger within their gates, who 
 had a smaller interest, and consequently faith, in conservatism 
 than they themselves. 
 
 The talk during dinner had all been about " their schools," 
 and "their poor." It had been of an unexciting nature, 
 that was not calculated to interfere with the more serious 
 operation for which they had assembled in fact. But after 
 dinner, when the ladies had drifted away into the drawing- 
 room, the men drew their chairs closer together, and a sub- 
 ject that was of solemn ioterest to several of them was 
 
192 Walter Goring. 
 
 mooted Ly a gentle-looking, gray-haired old man, a patri- 
 arch among the priests of East Anglia. 
 
 " I heard a report to-day from one of my .churchwardens, 
 that Brett's affairs are not in quite such perfect order as we 
 could desire." 
 
 He mentioned one of the most important and oldest of the 
 local banks ; and there was a slight, quickly-subdued sensa- 
 tion amongst those who heard him. Walter Goring was the 
 first to speak. 
 
 " I am nearly a stranger among you as yet," he said. " I 
 trust, however, that this news does not concern any of those 
 here present more than it does myself. I heard the report 
 to-day from Mr Wilfred, one of the Goring Place tenants. 
 He is a depositor; safe enough therefore, I presume. Is it 
 limited liability?" 
 
 " No unlimited," Henry Fellowes said. 
 
 And then the pent-up stream of feeling broke forth. 
 They talked the subject over long and earnestly even 
 angrily ; for the majority of those present were large share- 
 holders : and in the moment of the first panic they felt as 
 though they stood on shifting sands. 
 
 " Let us pray to Heaven that it may be only a temporary 
 tightness, and that the rumour of it won't get whispered 
 amongst the depositors," Henry Fellowes said at last. " I 
 hope my wife won't hear a word of it, poor girl," he added to 
 Walter Goring, as they crossed the hall together. 
 
 And when Goring asked him " Why not ? " 
 
 He replied " Because if she began questioning me as to 
 how far I was interested in its tiding over this difficulty, or 
 breaking completely, I should tell her everything I couldn't 
 help myself. And I want her to be happy while she can. 
 God knows where the demands on us may stop. It 's a 
 company concern, you know. Brett's name was kept on as 
 a tower of strength ; but it has been in the hands of a com- 
 pany for years." 
 
 Henry Fellowes spoke nervously and hurriedly; and, 
 judging from this what great interests his friend had at 
 stake, Walter Goring had not the heart to say what he had 
 heard from Wilfred, namely, that there would be a tremen- 
 dous run on Brett's the following day, when any business 
 conduct on the part of directors or secretary that was not 
 
A Little Cloud. 193 
 
 absolutely above suspicion would be exploded. The alarm 
 had been sounded in truth ; and the luckless shareholders 
 were walking over mined ground. No wonder that the 
 Travers' social gathering lacked the elements of diversion for 
 one who knew nought of these fears and doubts. 
 
 " If that 's a specimen of a country dinner-party, I shall 
 never wish to go to another, Harry/' Charlie said to her hus- 
 band, as soon as she was out of the Travers' garden, and 
 fairly on her way home that night. And he, remembering 
 only that she might soon drift away out of the sphere of such 
 things and then regret them, forgave the pettishness or 
 rather gave no thought to it, and clasped her warmly to the 
 heart that was doing a grievous penance of dread, for the love 
 which had prompted him to bring such a woman to such a pass. 
 
 The next day a letter was despatched to Frank, inviting 
 him to The Hurst : and scarcely had she written it, before 
 fresh doubt and anxiety assailed Charlie's mind. In a fit of 
 temporary aberration of intellect, on her own wedding-day, 
 she had enthusiastically and unwisely bestowed a pressing 
 invitation on Robert Prescott and his wife to come and stay 
 with her at The Hurst as soon as they could, and as long a& 
 they could. It was only meet and right, and her bounden 
 duty, considering all the circumstances by which she and 
 they were united, that she should do this. But she acknow- 
 ledged to herself that she had been unwary in so doing, after 
 a brief sojourn in the Fellowes' tent. " There will not be 
 open war," she said to herself, " but there will be worse. 
 Miss Dinah will make Ellen wretched; and Robert will 
 offend old Mrs Fellowes at every turn ; and they will unite 
 in hating him." She had thought that, after having been 
 half an hour in their society ; but still, with her sex's aver- 
 sion to taking any decided step, she had refrained from say- 
 ing aught to the Prescotts that could hinder their coming. 
 Now that the missive was posted to Frank, she remembered 
 that Robert and Ellen were likely to come to them in a short 
 time. " If they fight among themselves, it will be awful," 
 she thought, dejectedly; "and I know what Ellen is, she 
 will be constantly asking me for explanations of things that 
 don't concern her, and that make me miserable, and that I 
 won't have Ellen or any one else speaking to me about, for 
 all that." 
 
IQ4 Walter Goring. 
 
 The more she felt oppressed by the shadow of coming dis- 
 comfort from her own people, the more she felt inclined to 
 conciliate Mrs Fellowes, senior. She wished that she had 
 not asked for the library at this special juncture. She was 
 conscious of having made rather a parade about the necessity 
 of having a room entirely to herself. She had demanded it 
 for a specially signified purpose, and now that the room was 
 hers to have and to use as she saw fit, she did begin to enter- 
 tain grave doubts as to her capability of ever carrying that 
 purpose out. She walked about till her feet ached, arrang- 
 ing and re-arranging the room and the writing-table, putting 
 books, which she had hazy notions she might " want to refer 
 to," within easy distance of the chair she intended to occupy, 
 and rather losing sight, to tell the truth, of the end she had 
 had in view, and towards which she had obtained possession 
 of this room, peace, and a quantity of paper and pens. 
 About one o'clock the appearance of her hardly-gained terri- 
 tory satisfied her, and she sat down to rest from her labours 
 and to wonder where her husband could be. It was the 
 first day since he had brought his bride to The Hurst that 
 he had not come in at twelve. " I wish he would come," 
 Charlie thought. " I shall not be able to settle to anything 
 while I know I am liable to his coming in at any moment 
 and disturbing me." Then she altered the position of several 
 things once more, and then she made a beginning. That is 
 to say, she wrote, " Chapter the First. Page 1," on the first 
 page of a quire of most wonderful cream-laid letter paper, 
 and then stopped to admire the faultless commencement, and 
 wonder whether she should make her first effort in three 
 volumes or one. Having at length decided in favour of the 
 latter, she went a step further, and inserted the words, " A 
 Tale," at the top of Chapter the First. " A Tale " appeared 
 to her a modest designation, at which none could possibly 
 cavil. On further consideration, she felt, however, that this 
 might be deemed vague, and be held also to evince a want of 
 purpose in its composition, which she was certain of being 
 very far from feeling " when once she was fairly started." 
 There was a slight difficulty about the starting, though ; so 
 she gave up literary labour for that day, and read a Spectator 
 paper instead. 
 
Frank! 195 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 FRANK . 
 
 NOVEMBER was drawing to a close. Frank, whom Charlie 
 only remembered as the bold, bright, gallant-looking boy, 
 all blue-and-gold, had come down to The Hurst, and 
 dawned upon his delighted sister a bolder, brighter, more 
 gallant-looking man. In the intense pleasure young Mrs 
 Fellowes had in Frank's society a pleasure that was com- 
 posed partly of natural affection and partly of the great 
 liking she had for novelty, Henry Fellowes's gradually 
 deepening and ill-concealed anxiety passed unobserved by 
 his wife. The rumour as to Brett's was but too well founded. 
 Dull sickening dread reigned at present, but there was 
 shortly to be a call made upon the shareholders, and to many 
 of them it would be a call to ruin. 
 
 Charlie was in blissful ignorance of the dire evil that was 
 coming that had come upon this land in which her tent 
 had been so recently pitched. In consideration of her being 
 a stranger amongst them, and a little because she was so 
 young a wife, no one made mention of Brett's before her. 
 At the few dinner parties which people still had the heart to 
 give while they were awaiting the crash, pity for Charlie in- 
 duced silence, and the all-absorbing topic, though " ever on 
 men's lips, was never on their tongues." Therefore, as she 
 never read the local papers, she remained in ignorance of the 
 colossal local wrong that had but just culminated. 
 
 Henry Fellowes blessed his brother-in-law for coming to 
 them at this time. It seemed to him impossible that he 
 could have kept the sorrowful secret from Charlie, had 
 Charlie been unemployed and unamused. As it was, Frank 
 was a breath of new life to her, in the which she rejoiced ex- 
 ceedingly : and she loved him all the better for his not being 
 one whit cast down by what she had deemed to be a misfor- 
 tune when she first heard of it. He was facing his 
 difficulties like a light-hearted lion, she thought, or rather 
 like a man, bearing them blithely, and yet with no bravado. 
 
 In truth he was not the kind of man to be cast down by 
 
196 Walter Goring. 
 
 any such misfortunes as had befallen him. The sum total 
 of human happiness and honours were not contained in 
 H.M. Royal Navy for him. He had not done anything of 
 which he was ashamed, therefore he neither looked nor felt 
 cast down. Consequently, Mrs Fellowes and Miss Dinah, 
 who regarded him in the light of a burglar, a poacher, or 
 other breaker of the law, declared him to be hardened. 
 Nevertheless, though they felt him to be this, they went 
 with the rest of the world in liking and admiring ard 
 believing him to be a superior creature. 
 
 Surely there never lived a man more fitted to inspire and 
 retain that warm, blind regard which makes one shut one'a 
 eyes to all the faults and follies of the object, and see only 
 its brightness and bravery. He was the type of a Saxon 
 gentleman tall, stalwart, blue-eyed, with fair hair, soft and 
 fine as a woman's; and he had a marvellous wealth of 
 vitality, and a debonnaire bearing that could yet be wori- 
 drously deferential to women. He was frank too, as his 
 name, and was altogether such a brother as a sister might 
 reasonably be very proud of possessing. 
 
 He had not been in the house two days before Henry 
 Fellowes confided the coming crash to him. Frank was the 
 most agreeable of confidants in such a case as this want of 
 money in the future was a thing he could not and did not 
 attempt to realise, so long as he had money enough in the 
 present. " I dare say you will find it all come right in the 
 end, Fellowes," he said, when Fellowes had finished the 
 doleful story. " Don't move for a moment, there 's a good 
 fellow." He was engaged in making a caricature likeness of 
 his brother-in-law, which he presently handed over to that 
 gentleman in the most honest manner possible. 
 
 " You don't quite see the business, Frank," Mr Fellowes 
 said dolefully. 
 
 " Perhaps not do you ? " Frank replied, taking the 
 sketch back and carefully adding a few finishing touches. 
 In reality he was f ar y from being indifferent as to the ultimate 
 comfort and welfare of his sister and her husband ; but it 
 was not in his nature to go into preliminary pain and anxiety 
 on account of any human being himself not excepted. His 
 brightness was contagious in this instance. Mr Fellowes 
 immediately expressed himself to the effect of feeling that 
 
Frank! 197 
 
 " though the first pull on him would be a heavy one, keeping 
 things close at The Hurst for a year or two would set him 
 all straight again, and there might be no further calls ; at 
 any rate, it was no use thinking of it yet ; would Frank ride 
 round the farm with him ? " 
 
 They rode round the farm together, and came home by the 
 Brook- Green Cottage. A huge van stood at the door, and 
 Mr Goring sat on his horse at a short distance, superintend- 
 ing the removal of furniture from the same into the house. 
 He rode up to the two men as soon as they appeared, and 
 when he had been introduced to Frank, he said in rather an 
 annoyed tone to Mr Fellowes, 
 
 " I have had a note from your new tenant, Mrs Walsh, 
 this morning, Fellowes ; she says that she sent off her furni- 
 ture yesterday, and ' will I see that some one puts it in place 
 in the house, as she means to be down to-night.' I sent 
 over a troop of my servants, but they don't seem to get on ; 
 she can't go into the house to-night, you know, all the 
 furniture they have come across yet is drawing-room furni- 
 ture and kettles." 
 
 " And they won't make her comfortable to-night, clearly/' 
 Henry Fellowes replied, with ready sympathy. " I '11 speak 
 to my wife about it ; she shall come and see what can be 
 done ; or perhaps she had better send a note here, asking 
 Mrs Walsh to stay with us at The Hurst until her own 
 house is ready. They are old friends, I believe ? " 
 
 Walter Goring's mouth twitched as he answered, 
 
 " They know each other very well, and it would be doing me 
 a great kindness as well as Mrs Walsh. She has thrown the 
 whole responsibility upon me, forgetting that I am a bachelor. 
 I would place Goring Place at her absolute disposal, but she 
 wouldn't come there." 
 
 " Come up and put the case to my sister yourself," Frank 
 suggested. " I left her copying out some manuscript, and she 
 will be glad of the interruption." 
 
 " Mrs Fellowes has really got so far as to have something 
 to copy out ? that 's well," Walter Goring said, as he turned 
 his horse's head and rode along by Frank's side. 
 
 ' Got so far in what?" 
 
 " In a charming story, I have no doubt." 
 
 Frank laughed. 
 
198 Walter Goring. 
 
 " It's a work of mine that Charlie is copying out from tne 
 rough scraps of paper on which I wrote it first. I have 
 never had the courage to tackle the task myself, but my sister 
 seems to like it." 
 
 "It's a bad plan writing on anything that necessitates 
 copying out again," Walter Goring said, sagaciously ; " going 
 over it a second time shows you the weak places so clearly, 
 that the end of it is generally to be torn up. I read and re- 
 vise as thoroughly as I can, but to sit down and copy out in 
 cold blood is beyond me." 
 
 Then the fact of the established authorship of the one being 
 alluded to, and the incipient authorship of the other made 
 manifest^ the two men went on with that talk of the craft 
 which is pleasant enough to those engaged in it, when suc- 
 cessful, but rather tedious to the outsider. Frank asked 
 Goring to recommend him a publisher, and Goring, with 
 beautiful impartiality, recommended six on the spot, carefully 
 refraining from all mention of his own from obvious reasons. 
 Frank's views were rather large, but really looking at him as 
 he rode along the cold November sun gleaming on his fair 
 bright hair, and his handsome haughty pale face uplifted, he 
 seemed to be justified in entertaining the largest, Walter 
 Goring thought. { * '.There 's a look of power about that 
 fellow," the master of Goring Place said to himself ; " he will 
 probably do anything he tries to do. The worst of it is he 
 will try too many things for a time." Even as he thought 
 it, Frank said, 
 
 " I don't expect my first work to bring me much. I have 
 illustrated it very fully, and it will cost a good deal to get it 
 out ; therefore I shall agree to publish on that wretched half- 
 profit plan ; but I have got the plot of a long serial story, 
 which I shall also illustrate myself, in my head, and I ought 
 to do a good deal with that don't you think so ? " 
 
 " We have known the experiment fail ' 
 
 "Simply because he couldn't draw," Frank interrupted. 
 " My own belief is, that the educated draughtsman has the 
 power of expressing his ideas in more or less picturesque 
 language ; and that the imaginative, and at the same time 
 careful and correct writer, could draw if he tried. In 
 doing both he may never attain to that eminence in one 
 which he might have attained had he left tho other untouched ; 
 
Frank! 199 
 
 but that the artistic feeling, which is the germ of either fruit, 
 can be made to bear more than one kind, there can be no 
 manner of doubt." 
 
 " I have an idea that the result will be greater if that 
 artistic power be concentrated." 
 
 " Possibly it may be more paying, but I was not looking 
 at it from that point of view," Frank replied, standing 
 stoutly to his theory. " I believe that we hold a certain 
 amount of intellectual imaginative power in the hollow of 
 our hands, and that it rests with ourselves in what direction, 
 or in how many directions, we make it work." 
 
 " Well. I don't agree with you at present/' Walter Goring 
 said, as they rode up to The Hurst ; " but I have no doubt 
 but that you will practically illustrate your own views in a 
 short time, and confound me." 
 
 Then they went in and found Charlie, very much flushed 
 as to the face and inked as to the fingers, still hard at work 
 copying, from leaves of note-books, backs of envelopes, and 
 other " rough scraps," her brother's MS. work. 
 
 She rose up laughing, and pushing her hair back as the 
 men came in, said, " I am serving my apprenticeship, you 
 see, Mr Goring. Frank, I have nearly done half of it, I 
 think." 
 
 " You will write original matter with all the greater zest 
 after this labour, Mrs Fellowes." 
 
 " I am afraid not, after Frank's my own sentences seem to 
 flounder about so loosely after reading his. Now, in the 
 opening chapters of my story I have been trying to get a 
 man out of a room gracefully ; it seems a little thing to do, 
 but I couldn't ' speed the parting guest.' " 
 
 "Cultivate that vein, and you'll end by being epigram- 
 matic," Frank laughed. 
 
 " Perhaps you liked him too well, Mrs Fellowes. I know 
 I often cling on to companionship with one of my characters, 
 partly out of liking for them, and " 
 
 " Partly because you are not certain which string it will 
 be wise to pull next," Frank interrupted, "Take my 
 advice, Charlie, and whenever you find yourself in a similar 
 dilemma toss up for it ; if your young man makes an unto- 
 ward appearance by the means, or your young lady seems to 
 lavish herself rather too freely on your readers, they will still 
 
2OO Walter Goring 
 
 comfort themselves under the circumstances by declaring 
 that you have much surprised them, or that your design haa 
 marched with their anticipations." 
 
 " I 'm sure if I were in Charlie's place, I wouldn't bother 
 myself about anything of the sort," Henry Fellowes struck 
 in, rather sadly. It did seem to him a matter of very small 
 importance, indeed, whether or not an ideal creature could 
 be conceived and carried out of the room. Everything 
 seemed to him of small importance, poor fellow ! save 
 broken banks, and blighted homes, and blasted honours. 
 His remark was natural enough under the circumstances, 
 but Charlie knew nothing of the circumstances, therefore 
 she, quite naturally too, resented the remark as being of the 
 wet-blanket order. 
 
 " It would bother me if I thought I shouldn't succeed in 
 time, Harry ; if real hard work would do it, I would work 
 like a galley slave, but it 's a game in which something else 
 must be staked besides honest toil." 
 
 "Bravo, little woman !" Frank said, rising up and kissing 
 his sister as she stood her momentary enthusiasm over 
 with bent head and downcast eyes, looking very much 
 ashamed of herself. 
 
 " You have the right sort of coin, I think," Mr Goring 
 added. " But to cease from shop, I have come to ask you a 
 favour." 
 
 " Which I shall grant, of course, no ! stop though, on 
 
 this condition, write my name in the book you gave me the 
 other day." She handed the first volume of his novel to him,, 
 and he wrote in it 
 
 " Mrs H. Omry Fellowes, 
 
 " With the kindest regards of her fellow-labourer, 
 " The Author." 
 
 She took it back and read it her eyes flashing as she did 
 so. " Her fellow-labourer." In this way he plainly indicated 
 his recognition of her as one of them ; as one at least who 
 might be of them of that great band before whom she bent 
 the knees of her heart ! The phrase strung her up ; it 
 nerved her to bear much in order that she might deserve it. 
 She never forgot it. In doubt, in disappointment, in the 
 hours of toil and the hours of triumph, she always saw that 
 golden legend, and was grateful and hopeful. God bless the 
 
Against ike Grain. 201 
 
 men who give the aspirants for a canter on Pegasus a hand 
 up! 
 
 "And now for your favour?" she asked, putting down 
 the book ; and her eyes and the tone of her voice thanked 
 him more than any words could have done for that which he 
 had written. 
 
 " Teach me to introduce comfort into chaos. Mrs Walsh 
 comes to-night, and must recline upon walnut-wood cabinets 
 and fire-irons, unless you help me." 
 
 " I suggest that you ask her here until the cottage is 
 ready, Charlie dear," her husband remarked, " and " 
 
 " How can I without your mother's leave ?" she answered; 
 " get that for me, and I will be the medium of invitation 
 with pleasure." 
 
 But though she said this, Walter Goring could not avoid 
 seeing that there was small pleasure to Mrs Fellowes in the 
 thought of welcoming Mrs Walsh. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 AGAINST THE GRAIN. 
 
 OF course that was an awkward speech which Charlie had 
 made, relative to old Mrs Fellowes' leave as a necessary pre- 
 liminary to the invitation. It was an awkward speech, and 
 no one felt the full awkwardness of it so keenly as Charlie 
 herself did the instant she had made it. It was another 
 example of her nerves being too close to her skin. The 
 instant she felt aggrieved, in ever so slight a degree, she 
 showed herself to be aggrieved after her unwise nature. 
 Her husband's remark had irritated her, in that it appeared 
 to underrate her current great object. And she had not been 
 given time to notice the jarred chords before Mrs Walsh was 
 mentioned to her as one to whom she ought to show careful 
 consideration and attention. The thing seemed to be ex- 
 pected of her by her husband and Walter Goring, "who 
 ought to have known better," she said angrily to herself; 
 
2O2 Walter Goring. 
 
 though why he should have known better she would have 
 found it hard to decide, had she been called upon to do so. 
 She was ready and willing to go down and heap coals of fire 
 on the head of the beautiful widow. But she did not quite 
 like it, that Walter Goring should seem to think it only in 
 the order of things that she should put herself out in minor 
 domestic matters, for a woman whom she had only known 
 as the magnificent goddess of a bright metropolitan circle. 
 Young Mrs Fellowes foamed in her inner self with indigna- 
 tion against the woman who was so " unblushingly following 
 him up ; " and was for the moment most irrationally enraged 
 against the supine satisfaction of the man so followed. " He 
 ought to be disgusted with her," she thought ; " and her 
 husband only died the other day. I was in hopes that he 
 would have fallen in love with that pretty girl I met him 
 with that night." Poor Charlie ! She was only deceiving 
 herself. She would have found flaws in the motives of even 
 that pretty girl, it is to be feared. 
 
 " I will answer for Mrs Fellowes being delighted," Frank 
 put in, good temperedly. " I ; 11 go and ask her," he added, 
 getting himself out of the room as fast as he could. Accus- 
 tomed as he was to the ever-changing deep, troublous domes- 
 tic waters were odious to him. He was very fond of his 
 sister Charlie ; she amused and interested and touched him 
 greatly, by her admiring love for himself ; but "she shouldn't 
 have flung out in that way, because it does no good," he 
 said to himself, with a man's practical clearsightedness in 
 such matters, as he made his way over to Mrs Fellowes, 
 senior's, domain. 
 
 Her own son would have been a far less efficient envoy on 
 this delicate mission. Mrs Fellowes always looked with 
 lenient eyes upon any request made to her by the brother of 
 the daughter-in-law whom she disliked. Frank had a won- 
 derful way with women ; young and old, they succumbed to 
 it and liked it. He had the knack of coming down and 
 being very gentle to them, not as though they needed his 
 gentleness by reason of their own weakness, but he showed 
 that he knew they could claim it from him, as a queen might 
 claim it from a churl. 
 
 Old Mrs Fellowes was knitting away for dear life when he 
 made his appearance before her this morning. She knew of 
 
Against the Grain. 203 
 
 the dark cloud that was hanging over her son and her son's 
 house, and though she was safe herself, her own little 
 annual income being invested in something surer than Brett's 
 bank, her heart was very sore. She was of that order of 
 womankind which grows harder and grimmer under a sorrow. 
 Frank could not help regarding her as a very unpleasant 
 piece of granite as he entered, and she glued lier lips more 
 tightly together by way of noticing the fact. 
 
 " I have been round the farm with Fellowes, and we have 
 brought Mr Goring back with us," he commenced, gaily. He 
 always would take it for granted that people were interested 
 in what he had been doing, and what he was going to do. 
 It was very hard to remain indifferent to aught that concerned 
 him in his presence. 
 
 " Mr Goring is no friend of mine," Mrs Fellowes replied, 
 rigidly. She could not forget, and she could not forgive, the 
 /vay in which he had come down, and dared to enjoy himself 
 with his own set, before the county had taken him up. " Mr 
 Goring is no friend of mine. I suppose it 's he is keeping 
 my son away from me now, when I am naturally anxious to 
 know if he has heard anything fresh about this dreadful 
 business ? " 
 
 Frank shook his head. " I can tell you that he has heard 
 nothing to-day ; it's an awful time for you all," he continued, 
 kindly. " I hope, however*, that things will turn out to be 
 better than they seem." 
 
 " You must perceive, Mr St John, that my son's principal 
 anxiety indeed, hard as it is for his mother to say it, his 
 only anxiety is about your sister. I really believe," she 
 continued, with tears of vexation in her eyes, "that if he 
 had not just brought home a wife, he would bear this terrible 
 trial much better than he does." 
 
 " I have no doubt he would," Frank replied, calmly; "any- 
 fellow would feel the same. Naturally a man would rather 
 cut his throat than get a girl into such a scrape." 
 
 "And your sister is not the one to make the best of priva- 
 tions. She can't put her hand to a single thing " 
 
 " Oh ! can't she ? " Frank interrupted. " You don't know 
 her, my dear madam. I fancy she would behave beautifully 
 in rough water. By the way, do you know that Fellowes' 
 new tenant comes down to-night ? " 
 
2O4 Walter Goring. 
 
 " To Goring Place, I suppose ? " Mrs Fellowes asked, with 
 a severe sneer. 
 
 " Not a bit of it ; to an empty house, or worse, unless you 
 can induce Charlie to do what she doesn't seem at all in- 
 clined to do invite her here. Let me be the bearer of your 
 commands to Charlie, that the right thing be done. This 
 lady must not be made to feel that her comfort is of no ac- 
 count among you all at the outset." 
 
 " My commands ! Ah, Mr St John ! My commands 
 would be the very last your sister would listen to; if she 
 does not see for herself that this civility is no more than she, 
 as the wife of the landlord, ought to pay to an incoming 
 tenant a widow, too ! my opinion will weigh but little 
 with her. I suppose the truth is," she continued, severely, 
 " that she is afraid Mr Goring will not be able to devote so 
 much of his time and attention and tomfoolery to her now 
 his old friend is coming ? " 
 
 " I don't know about that/' Frank replied, carelessly ; " but 
 I shall just go and tell Charlie that you say it is to be done, 
 and leave her no further excuse for not doing it." Then he 
 returned to the library, and threw up his cap as he entered, 
 exclaiming, " The mother-in-law greeting ! Mrs Walsh is to 
 be implored not to repose upon the frying-pans, but to honour 
 the poor abode of The Hurst with her presence till such time 
 as the cottage can be made comfortable." And Walter 
 Goring, as he saw Mrs Fellowes sit down to write her note, 
 had the uncomfortable feeling of one who fears that a great 
 fuss has been made about the obtaining of a boon, which the 
 one to be benefited may, perchance, refuse when it is offered. 
 " She may resent it as impertinent interference on Mrs Fel- 
 lowes' part, and blow me up to the sky about it," he thought; 
 '"women are such rum animals, addicted so invariably to 
 being fierce in the wrong place." However, the deed was 
 done now ; so he only thanked Charlie with great politeness 
 for her " prompt partizanship with himself," when the letter 
 was written and sent off to the station to meet Mrs Walsh 
 whenever it should please that fiery brand to arrive. 
 
 " And now," Charlie said, with the air of one who was 
 midway through a disagreeable task, and required refresh- 
 ment, "we'll go into luncheon, if you please." They went 
 in accordingly, carrying Mr Goring along with them, which 
 
Against the Grain. 205 
 
 extravagance caused Mrs Fellowes to refuse butter with her 
 cheese, and prefer beer to wine. " She must ask all the 
 neighbourhood to stay with her and to luncheon, and her 
 husband on the very brink of ruin," the old lady cried pit- 
 eously to her daughter that afternooon. " I 'm sure it makes 
 my blood run cold to hear her laughing and going on, and 
 Henry won't have a word said to her. Oh no I she 's too 
 precious to hear the truth." 
 
 " She '11 hear it soon enough," Miss Dinah said, with a cer- 
 tain air of sublime satisfaction in poetical justice. 
 
 " Soon enough ! Yes, when he can't keep it from her any 
 longer. His folly about her is past all bounds, and exceeds 
 belief. Mrs Travers said to me only yesterday, ' It exceeds 
 belief, Mrs Fellowes, I assure you that it does.' " 
 
 There was something absolutely beautiful in Mrs Fellowes' 
 profound reliance on Mrs Travers' assurance that the folly 
 of the master of The Hurst in this matter " exceeded all be- 
 lief." The thing had been said, therefore it must be. The 
 word of her neighbour ranked next in order of indisputable- 
 ness and infallibility to the Word of God with Mrs Fellowes. 
 
 " If I could only see her sit down with her needle, or take 
 to doing something, no matter how little, about the house, I 
 should be better satisfied as to what will become of her," 
 Mrs Fellowes resumed solemnly. She was of that order of 
 mind which would have advised keeping the bed of the Atlantic 
 nice and dry by means of a bucket. 
 
 " Ah ! " Miss Dinah replied sententiously, " it must be a 
 good needle to mend Brett's business; if it comes to the 
 worst she will have to do a little more than she bargained for 
 when she married my poor brother." 
 
 " The worst day's work he ever did," his mother struck in 
 pathetically. A stranger might have been forgiven for 
 imagining that Charlie had wrought all the evil they up- 
 braided her so for having been brought into it. 
 
 " I shouldn't at all wonder if she wants to go back to her 
 own people, if they will have her," Miss Dinah remarked. 
 
 " Nor should I, if they '11 have her; but her brother-in-law 
 has a family, and cannot be expected to maintain other men's 
 wives. Ah! if Henry had married as I wished him to marry, 
 there would have been ready money enough to satisfy all de- 
 mands. There was Miss Hughes worshipped the ground he 
 
206 Walter Goring-. 
 
 trod upon, and Miss Walker would have jumped at him 
 yes, jumped at him." 
 
 " You know you never let Henry look at either of them 
 twice, mother," Miss Dinah said, bluntly. 
 
 " Only because I didn't want him to marry without due 
 consideration; you see what the^ result of his going off and 
 relying on his own judgment entirely is ? " Mrs Fellowes 
 replied triumphantly. 
 
 " She didn't break the bank anyway," Miss Dinah replied. 
 stolidly. She was a good, hearty hater ; she would dislike 
 and show her dislike without the shadow of a cause. But 
 she would not condescend to the meanness of getting up a 
 false cause of hatred. When her daughter said that, Mrs 
 Fellowes declared " that she knew herself to be only an old 
 woman, who had no business to speak, and that in future 
 she would never open her lips about anything" after the 
 manner of ill-tempered, illogical old women who find them- 
 selves conversationally worsted. 
 
 Meanwhile Charlie and her brother and Mr Goring had 
 gone out for a walk, and the subject which the two men had 
 been discussing in the morning was once more broached. 
 Charlie said, rather deprecatingly, that she must either be the 
 exception to Frank's rule, or that she had no artistic feeling. 
 " I can write I have ideas to express, and words at com- 
 mand to express them but I can't draw a line," she said, 
 pathetically. 
 
 " Don't regret it, Mrs Fellowes ; your brother and you will 
 work all the better for it. Bring all the talent of the family 
 to bear upon one work ; you do the letterpress, and let him 
 illustrate it." 
 
 " A sort of ' Week on the Waters,' or ' Month on the 
 Mountains,' or ' Days in the Dales' business ?" Frank asked. 
 
 " Heaven forbid ! No, we have had enough gentlemanly 
 guide books for this generation. No; a serial story illustrated 
 ought to sell well, now that none of the giants are in the 
 field with one. Is the tale you have commenced sufficiently 
 elastic for the purpose, Mrs Fellowes ? " 
 
 " I am afraid not. It 's the story of a childish love which 
 grows with their growth, and at last ripens into an engagement." 
 
 " Of course ; but lengthen it by making him jilt her, or 
 her jilt him its immaterial which, so long as one does it." 
 
A Painful Meeting. 207 
 
 "She couldnt, with her character," Charlie replied sincerely; 
 "but he does jilt her. and then when Nemesis overtakes him 
 the story is over." 
 
 " Is it indeed ? The majority of jilted young ladies would 
 hardly thank you for taking that for granted, I 'm thinking. 
 Well, hold Nemesis in with a tight hand for a time ; reward 
 your hero for the evil he has done very gradually ; violent 
 poetical justice rarely does overtake people in real life, you 
 know." 
 
 " Would it not be almost truer to nature to let them go 
 unpunished, as they do in real life very often ? " she asked. 
 
 " It might be good nature, but carried too far it would be 
 crude art. In real life we don't see the Nemesis that over- 
 takes our fellow sinners ; but in a work of iiction the hell 
 that a man has made for himself should be painted ; if the 
 sinner goes on smiling and seeming serene through nine hun- 
 dred pages " 
 
 " One naturally imbibes the idea that in the eyes of the 
 writer it 's rather a fine thing to be a sinner, and it won't do 
 for you to give colour to that idea, young lady ; that is what 
 Mr Goring means, I think. At any rate I do," Frank said, 
 taking his sister's hand and drawing it through his arm ; 
 " however, we will start the story the first spare day we have ; 
 and I shall revise you thoroughly as you go along." 
 
 " I will be a more impartial critic ; let me undertake that 
 part of the affair," Walter Goring asked. So the three were 
 united in the work of the future. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIL 
 
 A PAINFUL MEETING. 
 
 IF it were stated that Daisy got on well with the Osbornes, 
 the statement would not stand investigation. She stayed 
 with them ; she slept under the same roof with them, and 
 partook of viands with them, and sat in the same pew on 
 Sundays with them. But for all this similarity of pursuit 
 she did not get on well with them. 
 
2o8 Walter Goring. 
 
 She was too old and too perverse for the place. Mrs 
 Osborne would have been angelically good and kind to her 
 had she accepted the goodness and kindness in a feeling 
 spirit ; but this she could not do. Mrs Osborne wanted to 
 order her outgoings and incomings or at least to appear to 
 order them and even against so much exercise of the autho- 
 rity which Walter had vested in the lady of the house Daisy 
 girded. " It isn't that I suspect you of going anywhere, or 
 seeing any one where you shouldn't go and whom you shouldn't 
 see," the duenna would urge ; to which Daisy would reply, 
 
 " And it is not that I want to go anywhere or see any one 
 in particular, but I hate to be suspected. My guardian said 
 I wasn't a prisoner, and I won't be treated as though I were 
 one." 
 
 She was in truth a wayward young lady, an awful charge, 
 an odious responsibility. Mrs Osborne would have suffered 
 much to be well and decently rid of her. Miss Daisy was 
 the heaviest cross a limited income had yet laid upon that 
 estimable woman. " When Miss Goring had been under my 
 roof for a whole month, I knew no more about her than 1 
 did the day she came," the matron lady would say to inquir- 
 ing friends in after-days, when Daisy Goring was of the past. 
 Not that Daisy maintained a cold or even an apparently re- 
 served demeanour with Mrs Osborne. On the contrary, the 
 young lady, for the first eight weeks of her residence in the 
 detached villa, was remarkably loquacious and lively. It is 
 true, however, that her loquacity and liveliness never led her 
 on to say a word which Mrs Osborne could use as evidence 
 of her charge's antecedents and family history. 
 
 Her education did not progress very rapidly, nor did the 
 desire to emulate Miss Osborne possess her in the slightest 
 degree. It was in vain that the fond mother strove to make 
 maternal vanity serve a good end by perpetually citing 
 Alice's achievements to Daisy. Daisy would listen to the 
 well-meant vaunts with careless civility, and graciously ob- 
 serve, when they were concluded, that " Alice certainly had 
 a wonderful power of plodding." So far, however, from 
 being excited to parallel plodding herself, she refused the 
 singing lessons which Mrs Osborne put in her path, saying, 
 that the lady whom they used as an instrument "had a bad 
 method." " A bad method I when she gives the first lessons 
 
A Painful Meeting. 209 
 
 in tlie neighbourhood," Mrs Osborne said in indignant com- 
 ment ; " such a self-sufficient young lady as Miss Goring it 
 has never been my fate to meet." 
 
 Nor was there much sympathy between Daisy and her 
 companion Alice Osborne. The latter had suffered herself to 
 be dazzled, and, as it were, put in an inferior position from 
 the very first. Daisy's gift of seeming had imposed upon the 
 substantial mind that believed honestly that to do anything 
 well one must understand it thoroughly. Alice Osborne was 
 good and sound and true herself; therefore when Daisy 
 talked bright nonsense, she dazzled the girl, who had yet to 
 learn that the language of exaggeration covereth a multitude 
 of ignorances very often. 
 
 Having lived a simple, solitary life with her mother from 
 her infancy, Alice was rather inclined to sentimentalism 
 sentimentalism of the safer sort, be it understood, of the 
 Helen and Hermia order. But when she proposed this alli- 
 ance to Daisy, Daisy derided the idea. " How delightful it 
 will be for us to read and work together in the garden," 
 Alice said. "Mamma has given me ' Wordsworth' for my 
 birthday this year, and last year she gave me 'Cowper;' 
 we '11 go through them together." 
 
 " Isn't Cowper the man who hopped about his room with 
 hares ? " Daisy asked. 
 
 " Oh, lovely lines he wrote to them." 
 
 " I daresay he did ; but I don't care to read them, you 
 see," Daisy replied frankly, and Alice felt herself rebuffed. 
 
 Day after day, as Miss Goring's own riding-horse and 
 groom came round to the villa, did Mrs Osborne persistently 
 remark, " It 's a pity Alice isn't going with you, so much 
 pleasanter for you than going alone ; but it 's too late to send 
 for a horse for her to-day ; " and Daisy as persistently re- 
 plied, " I assure you I don't at all mind riding alone." It 
 had been an understood thing before Walter left that com- 
 panionship in her rides was never to be forced upon Miss 
 Goring; but Mrs Osborne was determined that her charge 
 should be given every chance of coming round gracefully into 
 a proper state of mind on the matter. 
 
 Judging from the time she stayed out, Miss Goring must 
 have ridden long distances; she always brought her horse 
 home in a lather too ; it was certain, therefore, that the time 
 
 o 
 
2io Walter Goring. 
 
 had not been spent in quiet riding. The trusty groom, when 
 questioned on this subject, as he was sometimes by the house- 
 maid while he was waiting for his young mistress at the door, 
 was frank and disarming to a degree. " Where ? Why, all 
 over them downs, at a splitting pace. I never saw a young 
 lady so fond of hard riding in my life." 
 
 " And always alone too ? " the housemaid would say sug- 
 gestively, to which proposition the trusty groom would give 
 a prompt and intelligent assent. " Yes, always alone ; it 'a 
 my belief she couldn't hold that chestnut in if any one rode 
 with her." It was evident, on indisputable authority, that 
 Daisy was justified in preferring to take her eager steed out 
 by herself. 
 
 The 1000 which she had asked her cousin Walter to let 
 her have, and not to question her about, had been placed to 
 her account at a Brighton bank. The day after it had been 
 paid in, she drew out 400 of it, made the notes up into a 
 square packet, on which she wrote, "With Daisy's love," and 
 directed them to 
 
 " MRS FITZGIBBON, 
 " Clare Cottage, 
 
 " Brompton Lane, W." 
 
 This packet she registered and posted herself, and that 
 night she awoke from a dream of a fair, sad-looking woman, 
 like herself, but much older and prettier, kissing and blessing 
 her. She awoke from this dream, sobbing and crying, " Mo- 
 ther, mother ! " There was no sign, save the post-mark, given 
 of Daisy's own place of abode on that packet of wealth ; con- 
 sequently, Mrs Fitzgibbon, of Clare Cottage, never acknow- 
 ledged the receipt of it. 
 
 She wrote to, and heard from her guardian regularly about 
 once a fortnight, and as she did not hold a fluent pen, this 
 was the most serious occupation of her life. The false starts 
 she made were a caution to Mrs Osborne not to leave too 
 many quires of note-paper about, as Daisy had a habit of 
 commencing " Dear Cousin Walter " on eight or nine sheets 
 before she could determine within herself what to say next. 
 These sheets Mrs Osborne had more than once taken up, and 
 written state effusions on the fair portion of them to the 
 finest of her friends, oblivious of the fact of Miss Daisy's 
 failure on the other side. Letter-writing was clearly not a 
 
A Painful Meeting. 2 1 r 
 
 speciality of Miss Goring, or else she imagined that Waller 
 would be far more critical about her performances than he 
 was in reality. Utter prostration of spirit was sure to be her 
 portion when the day came round for her Goring Place letter, 
 and she would gnash the teeth of her soul at Mrs Osborne, 
 when that lady kindly reminded her of the fact, as she rarely 
 failed to do at breakfast. The sole comfort she had under 
 the infliction was, that Walter wrote her such short letters 
 that he couldn't possibly expect long ones from her in re- 
 turn. 
 
 One day she was surprised it almost appeared, indeed, as 
 if she was horribly startled by a visit from Mary Levinge. 
 She was up in her own room when the lady's name was an- 
 nounced to her, and in her first excitement she condescended 
 to seek aid from the gentle and systematically-repulsed Alice. 
 " Tell Miss Osborne I want her," she said to the servant who 
 had told her of Miss Levinge's arrival. Then she followed 
 the servant out on to the landing, and corrected herself 
 meekly : " Ask Miss Osborne if she will be kind enough to 
 come to me, I mean." 
 
 Alice went to her at once, and found her with her yellow 
 hair hanging loosely over her shoulders ; her face was 
 flushed, and her eyes sparkling, and she altogether looking 
 very pretty. " Isn 't it unfortunate," she began quickly, as 
 Alice came into the room, " the first time a visitor comes for 
 me, I 'm not ready to see her. Will you go down and 
 and do the pretty and polite to her, and then let me know 
 what she wants ? " 
 
 Alice was amiable, accommodating and meek, but she was 
 also conscientious : she was in the middle of an Italian lesson, 
 and she felt that neither her master's time nor her mother's 
 money might be wasted. Her future was chalked out for 
 her. She was being " educated for a governess." 
 
 " I can't, dear. I am only half through my lesson, and 
 Mr Gatti must go in ten minutes ; you can always do your 
 hair in half a minute, you know ! " 
 
 " Very well ; don't trouble yourself and waste your time in 
 giving me advice," Daisy replied, sharply. Then as Alice 
 left the room, Daisy sat down before the glass, and put her 
 yellow locks up with trembling fingers. The tears rushed 
 up into her eyes too, and her lips quivered visibly. " What 
 
212 Walter Goring. 
 
 a fool I am," she cried angrily, at last, struggling to compose 
 herself, hut she did not succeed very well. Her face was 
 piteous to hehold, from its mingled expression of nervousness 
 and anxiety, when she finally presented herself before Miss 
 Levinge. 
 
 That lady's hack was towards the door when Daisy en- 
 tered. Miss Levinge was standing before a Parian cast of 
 Ariadne on her panther, surveying it critically. She turned 
 round, smiling heartily when she heard the door open, and 
 greeted Daisy with outstretched hand, and the words, 
 
 " Are you very much astonished to see me ?" 
 
 The smile had completely reassured Daisy ; in a moment 
 she regained her self-possession ; the old look of almost im- 
 pertinent indifference overspread her face, and banished the 
 anxious expression of an instant before, as she answered, 
 
 " Yes ; rather. I thought you were in Rome." 
 
 " No ; we were prevented going when we had intended in 
 October, so now we mean to wait till after Christmas. My 
 mother and I return alone ; and I tell you what, Daisy" 
 she rose, and placed her arm on Daisy's arm as she spoke 
 " I wish you would go there with us for a time : it would be 
 a new life for you ; you would like it." 
 
 Daisy drew a deep breath. 
 
 " Go to Rome, with you ! why ? " 
 
 " Why ; because I think you would be happy with us ; 
 and the change would do you good." Mary Levinge 'slightly 
 tightened her clasp on Daisy's arm as she spoke, and Daisy 
 blushed a little; then she laughed her bird-like laugh and 
 shook her head. 
 
 " I don't know what my guardian would say to this plan ; 
 and I don't want to be done good to. But you are very kind 
 very kind indeed to have thought of me." 
 
 She got up as she spoke, and put her arms suddenly 
 round Miss Levinge's neck, and her lips on Miss Levinge's 
 cheek. It was a sudden impulse with her, and when she had 
 done it she drew back half abashed. 
 
 " We often think of you, dear Daisy," Mary Levinge said, 
 heartily; "are you sure that a change wouldn't be good for 
 you are you quite sure that you are well and happy ? " 
 
 She asked the question in a peculiarly impressive tone; 
 and once more Daisy blushed as she replied, 
 
A Painful Meeting. 213 
 
 " Yes ; quite sure.** 
 
 " As to what your guardian would say to the plan I pro- 
 pose," Mary Levinge went on, " I am quite sure that Walter 
 Goring would consent to it, and think it a good one. I have 
 not said anything to him yet, because I wanted to know if 
 you would like it yourself. I wish you would like it, Daisy ? " 
 
 Daisy moved restlessly in her chair. 
 
 " I think it so kind of you," she said earnestly " you 
 don't know how kind I think it of you ; it seems ungrateful 
 to say that I shouldn't like it, but I don't think I should, 
 really. What should I do there ? " 
 
 " Do ? do the same and better things there than you do 
 here, Daisy; for example, get more correct notions as to 
 beauty and art than you will gain from that rubbish, for 
 instance," and she nodded her head as she spoke towards 
 Ariadne. 
 
 " They would be no use to me if I got them. How's your 
 sister?" 
 
 " She is very well, she is going to be married ; that is the 
 reason we stayed in England so long, and that my mother 
 and I go home alone. She 's going to be married to a young 
 clergyman just fancy it ! You don't inquire for Laurence ? " 
 
 " How is he ? I was going to ask," Daisy said hurriedly. 
 
 " He 's as well as an idle man with little to live upon can 
 be," Mary Levinge replied slowly ; " and he 's as happy as a 
 man whose great aim in life is heiress-hunting deserves to be. 
 Thank God, child, that he is not your brother, and that you 
 need not have anything to do with him." 
 
 It was not a sisterly speech. Mary Levinge must have 
 had strong reasons indeed for uttering it. The girl she ad- 
 dressed thought her hard, cruel, hatefully unjust; but she 
 was none of these things. She only strove to save. 
 
 " Are you going to Goring Place again before you leave 
 England ? " Daisy asked, abruptly turning the conversation. 
 
 " I am afraid that we shall have no time ; the fact is, Sybil 
 is so absorbed in her love's young dream, that she leaves all 
 the arrangements for her marriage entirely in our hands ; 
 you know that Mrs Walsh has gone to live in Deneham ? " 
 
 " Gone down to marry Walter, I believe." Daisy laughed ; 
 then she added warmly, " Well, he is a darling fellow, and 
 he deserves the best and most beautiful wife in the world." 
 
21,1 Walter Goring. 
 
 While she was saying this, Mrs Osborne sailed in, and 
 asked Miss Goring's guest to stay to luncheon. Mary Lo- 
 vinge remained for an hour or two longer, but though shn 
 put the Roman plan as pleasantly as she could before Daisy 
 several times, Daisy persisted in utterly negativing it, and 
 Mary Levinge departed at last, baffled in her good intent. 
 " I warned Walter, and I have tried to put him on his 
 guard as well as I could," she thought with a sigh, as she 
 drove away to the station ; " but while I have nothing but 
 vague suspicions, and my knowledge of Laurence to act upon, 
 I can do nothing." 
 
 During the next few weeks after Miss Levinge's visit, Daisy 
 was unprecedently acquiescent in all the Osborne arrange- 
 ments. She took gentle exercise on the pier with the mother 
 and daughter from twelve till one daily. She wearied her 
 brains under Mr Gatti's auspices. She herself made honour- 
 able mention of a certain little black mare named * Ada ' 
 which was reported to carry a lady admirably, and which 
 the chestnut had fraternised with to such a degree in the 
 stable, that Daisy thought Miss Osborne might accompany 
 her in her rides with safety, not to say pleasure. She made 
 herself agreeable according to her lights in fact, and seemed 
 to be trying to forget something and live in the passing hours 
 alone. 
 
 But this sunny period was not destined to last. One chill 
 clear morning the horses and the Italian master were simul- 
 taneously announced. Alice could not go out with Daisy, so 
 Daisy went out alone. 
 
 She seemed to be tired of exploring the Sussex downs and 
 lanes. She rode for a couple of miles or so inland this morn- 
 ing, and then she came back and cantered slowly up and 
 down the parade for a time. Cantered up and down in an 
 obviously purposeless way. There was no pleasure to her in 
 riding in this place, and she knew none of the people. 
 
 Presently she brought the mare up sharply, and seemed to 
 the observant eyes of the trusty groom to reel in her saddle. 
 The garish nature-forsaken landscape, and the glaring sea- 
 view seemed to quiver and rock before her eyes as she drew 
 rein for an instant in tender hope, and slackened it .the next 
 in terrible humiliation. 
 
 At about the distance of five yards from her a little group 
 
A Painful Meeting. 215 
 
 were pausing to listen to the strains of a German band. 
 The group consisted of a sickly, sad, pretty looking woman 
 in a bath chair, a middle-aged gentleman, and a young girl 
 of fourteen. The lady, when Daisy caught sight of her first, 
 was leaning her pretty wasted cheek on her hand, and look- 
 ing away into vacancy ; the gentleman was bending over the 
 side of her chair, speaking to her apparently as though he 
 desired to arouse her interest. 
 
 Presently the invalid looked up and saw the young girl on 
 the chestnut horse on the outside of the railings. Daisy was 
 leaning slightly forward, with a wofully piteous, wildly loving 
 look in her eyes. She had drawn her reins tightly by this 
 time, and the fine-mouthed horse was settling back on its 
 haunches in a way that would have done no discredit to the 
 steed of a circus-queen, and his rider was leaning forward, 
 looking, with all her heart in her eyes, at the little group I 
 have described. 
 
 Instantly the gentleman looked round, following the direc- 
 tion that the invalid lady's eyes took, and his glance fell on 
 the young equestrian. He looked coldly at her, past her, 
 through her, as it seemed to her, and she heard him say to 
 the chairman " Go home at once." Then the chair was 
 pushed on ; the little group was gone, and Daisy was left 
 alone to quiet the horse whose mouth she had so sorely 
 worried for nothing. 
 
 There was no word spoken by any member of that little 
 group until they reached their hotel. Then, when the lady 
 had been sedulously helped up to her own room by her hus- 
 band, he began, 
 
 " Was this the reason of your anxiety to come to Brighton, 
 Marguerite ? " 
 
 " Don't be so hard when you see how ill I am," she 
 answered, piteously. She looked such a frail, delicate woman 
 is she sat there trembling in a chair at the foot of the bed, 
 against which she seemed striving to steady herself. 
 
 " Why try to put yourself in the way of meeting her when 
 you know my resolution ? Why pain yourself and insult 
 me?" 
 
 He was not the style of man whose appearance would 
 command respect for any resolution he might issue. A 
 flabby loose-looking man, with watery heavy blue eyes, he 
 
216 Walter Goring". 
 
 was one whom the superficial observer might imagine could 
 be moulded easily. But his wife was no superficial observer ; 
 she knew his inflexibility of purpose only too well. 
 
 " You took the money she sent, my poor girl ! " she 
 
 said, shivering as she spoke. "I thought after that if I did 
 chance to meet her alone you would have let me." 
 
 She stopped and began to sob, covering her face with her 
 hands, like the poor broken creature she was. 
 
 Her husband gave vent to an impatient exclamation, and 
 commenced walking up and down the room ; suddenly he 
 paused right in front of her. 
 
 " The money was taken for your comfort, Marguerite ; be 
 just to me ; remember that never a penny of it have I spent 
 on myself!" 
 
 She moved her hand towards him deprecatingly, and her 
 sob almost swelled into a wail as he went on. 
 
 " I forgave the deception you practised on me for fifteen 
 years in calling your daughter your niece ; when the ghastly 
 truth came out, I asked you to choose between our poor 
 little children and myself, and that child of sin and 
 shame " 
 
 " Don't ! " she gasped, feebly. 
 
 "What?" 
 
 " Don't say any more now." It had been her bane and 
 weakness through all her life that she would put things off. 
 She shrank from saying or hearing hard truths, the poor 
 irresolute unhappy creature. Respited for an hour, she would 
 take a full pleasure in life, and almost forget. So now she 
 pleaded with lip and eye, and imploring gesture of the hand, 
 that he would say " nothing more just now." 
 
 She had been such a pretty woman, this poor mother of 
 Daisy's. Even now her little delicate-featured face and soft 
 blue eyes, and pale brown hair, were almost lovely when she 
 was not frightened, in spite of those years of secret suffering 
 and remorse, and the last few months of open shame. 
 
 She was the first to speak after she had asked him to give 
 her quarter ; he had ceased from his reproaches with a little 
 grunt, for he knew well that if he continued them she would 
 speedily bring her heart complaint to bear upon him, and 
 then some strange doctor would be called in, and the eternal 
 caution, " My dear sir, you must $ake care that Mrs Fitz- 
 
Hostess and Guest. 217 
 
 gibbon is not agitated/' would be poured into his ears. So 
 when he saw the preliminary signs, he ceased from his re- 
 proaches with an ill-used grunt. Presently she resumed. 
 
 " And as for forgiving, you 're always telling me of it." 
 
 " Perhaps we had better not go into the subject again, Mar- 
 guerite/' he said, temperately. She thought she had gained 
 a slight vantage, and i that it would be well to pursue it. 
 
 " And it 's scarcely manly of you* considering that I threw 
 myself upon your mercy, and " 
 
 He cut the sentence short by going out and slamming the 
 door, and when her nerves recovered the shock, she languidly 
 put off her bonnet and shawl, and knelt down crying wearily, 
 and praying wildly for Daisy and for death. 
 
 At the same hour Daisy, locked in her own room at Mrs 
 Osborne's, was packing up a few of her clothes and trinkets, 
 labouring away at her task with hands that were too tremu- 
 lous to do very efficient work. She scarcely saw the thing? 
 that were before her, her eyes were burning so fiercely with 
 the hot tears which she would not let fall as she recalled 
 every line of the face and figure, worn thin by suffering long 
 and harsh, which she had seen on the parade. And her 
 heart meanwhile ached horribly with pity for the mother 
 whom she loved the more for their mutual wrong. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 HOSTESS AND GUEST. 
 
 THE jiovv tenant of the Brook-Green Cottage had arrived. At 
 first when she read Mrs Fellowes' note of invitation, which 
 was awaiting her at the station, she said, " Very civil of her; 
 but I shall prefer going to my own house at once." But 
 presently she grew more acquiescent to the scheme, for Mr 
 Goring who had been careful to meet her also backed 
 Charlie's note very judiciously. 
 
 "I wouldn't say a word in favour of your going there -or 
 anywhere else where you didn't care to go," he said ; " but 
 just now there ; s a cloud over The Hurst/' Then he told 
 her what the cloud was, and described the state of the 
 
2 1 8 Walter Goring. 
 
 cottage ; and she looked and felt very sorry. Like a true 
 woman, however, she would not even give Charlie full credit 
 for all the misery that might possibly come upon her. The 
 same feeling which prompted Cleopatra to ask of Antony, 
 " Can Fulvia die ? " made Mrs Walsh say, 
 
 " Her brother-in-law that odious man with the mile of 
 upper lip is a clever lawyer enough. Probably he looked 
 i.fter her settlements." 'Then she took Walter's arm, and 
 walked away to the carriage, which he had waiting for her. 
 
 " It all goes, I fear he had settled so many shares upon 
 her," he answered, as he handed her in. Then he took off 
 his hat, and she found that he was not going to accompany 
 her. She leant forward hastily, as he closed the door, 
 
 " Walter ! you are coming with me ? " 
 
 "'To-night after your journey ! " (it was about eight 
 o'clock). " You will be too tired to care for more than the 
 family circle. By the way, collect your impressions of old Mrs 
 Fellowes and Miss Dinah, and give them to me to-morrow." 
 
 " A resident mother and sister-in-law ' too ! Poor girl ! 
 how very uncomfortable she must have been as Miss St John 
 it makes one think ! Well, if you won't come, Mr Goring, 
 tell him to take me to this place, wherever it may be." Then 
 she drew back her face encircled with the widow's bonnet-cap, 
 and Walter gave the word for her to be driven to The Hurst. 
 
 The whole family, with the exception of Frank, were 
 drawn up in the drawing-room to receive her. Frank had 
 declined to make one of them on the occasion. " I would 
 rather first dawn upon her dazzled vision at the breakfast- 
 table in my fresh bloom," he said, in reply to his sister's re- 
 quest that he " would be there and make himself agreeable." 
 The fact is, Frank had no very clear notions respecting Mrs 
 Walsh. He knew that this meeting would be the first that 
 had taken place between Mrs Walsh and Charlie since the 
 death of the former's husband. It occurred to him, as being 
 within the bounds of possibility, that Mrs Walsh might cry, 
 or, at least, look bereft. Therefore he determined on keep 
 ing out of the way until the earlier emotion had subsided. 
 
 Moreover, he was engaged upon a very pleasant and con- 
 genial task, and he had just got into the fling of it, as it 
 were. This was none other than a poem in heroic measure, 
 enlivened by comic drawings, illustrative of the respective 
 
Hostess and Guest. 219 
 
 careers of Mra Fellowes and Miss Dinah. He had just 
 arrived at that part of it where Mrs Fellowes first discovered 
 herself to be the mother of a marriageable son. The stern 
 rectitude expressed in her little shawl, and the maternal 
 solicitude in her face, as the daughters of the land approached 
 him immediately after the discovery, " deserved careful study, 
 and an evening's uninterrupted work," he declared. Accord- 
 ingly, he had retired to the library, where he sat happily, 
 smoking and drawing, and occasionally singing short scraps 
 of song, or whistling favourite melodies, leaving Charlie to 
 lace her guest alone. 
 
 For Charlie was terribly alone when left with the Fel- 
 loweses every one of them in these days. Her husband, 
 oppressed with anxiety for her principally, was more gloomy 
 and depressed when with her alone than he was with any one 
 else. He lived in constant dread of her questioning him as 
 to the cause of this change, and yet he could not, for the life 
 of him, be as he had been of yore. Truth to tell, Charlie 
 gave very little thought to the matter. She felt that there 
 was a change in her husband, but she had no desire to 
 analyse the cause of it, and no particular sorrow in its con- 
 tinuance. That feeling of having made a terrible bungle of 
 the threads of her life was still her paramount one ; and she 
 lacked the heart and the motive to strive to unravel those 
 threads just yet. 
 
 Regularly at intervals of about ten minutes from the mo- 
 ment the clock struck seven this evening, poor Charlie had 
 to listen to ejaculations of surprise from either Mrs Fellowes 
 or Miss Dinah as to the non-appearance of the guest. It 
 was useless reminding them that there would not be another 
 down-train till eight. They chose to believe that Mrs 
 Walsh had arrived at some earlier hour, and 'was walking 
 about in the wet, or sitting on the railway platform, for the 
 sake of keeping them expectant. 
 
 "Ah! it's always the way," the old lady observed: "you 
 go and interfere in what doesn't concern you, and this is the 
 return you get ! " 
 
 " It does show one the folly of running after strangers ! " 
 Miss Dinah said, decisively. 
 
 "Especially strangers who have shown beforehand that 
 they don't at all regard the usages of society." 
 
22O Walter Goring. 
 
 " I call it using the house as if it were an hotel. It's like 
 saying, ' I shall come in when I like, and I don't care whether 
 you sit up for me, or not.' " 
 
 " Such impertinence ! 'tis exactly like it ! I shouldn't 
 wonder when she does come, if she brings her Mr Goring 
 with her, and the two sit up and carouse ! " 
 
 Charlie had merely marked her observance of this conver- 
 sation by moving from a "chair to a sofa, lying down upon 
 the latter restlessly for a minute, and then getting up again, 
 and resuming her chair. But when Mrs Fellowes culminated 
 in the last remark, Charlie laughed. She checked herself al- 
 most immediately, saying, as they both looked angrily at her, 
 
 " I really beg your pardon, Mrs Fellowes. But there was 
 
 something so funny in the notion that I couldn't help " 
 
 She stopped, and laughed again, as she thought how Frank- 
 would enjoy it when she told him. 
 
 " Funny ! " Mrs Fellowes ejaculated, in holy horror 
 " something so funny in a widow, whose poor dear husband 
 is hardly cold in his grave, putting a whole household out in 
 this way, and making herself town-talk with a young man ! " 
 
 " She hasn't done it yet, remember, mother ! " Miss Dinah 
 put in ; " and Mrs Henry only meant that your idea was 
 funny not that Mrs Walsh's doing it would be so." 
 
 " I wish to Heaven she had not been asked, if there is 
 going to be all this fuss about it," Henry Fellowes exclaimed, 
 suddenly. Those about him had imagined that he had been 
 giving no heed to the conversation that he had not been 
 listening ; but he had, and loathing it all as men do loathe 
 the puerile in presence of a painful reality. 
 
 Charlie went over, and knelt down, leaning on the arm of 
 her husband's chair, when he brought himself into the con- 
 versation in this way. She bent her head towards him 
 it was not nearly so much like a boy's as when he had married 
 her, and said, 
 
 " I wish it, too, dear ; but let us make the best of things, 
 Harry." 
 
 He put one hand down upon her wavy curls, and with the 
 other turned her face up towards him. He looked at her 
 long and earnestly, and it seemed to him that there was so 
 much in her face to which he had no clue. Her bright fit- 
 ful glances, the ever-varying expression of her mouth, the 
 
Hostess and Guest. 221 
 
 shade on her forehead, which deepened or decreased each mo- 
 ment all these were so many sealed books to him ; and half 
 unconsciously he recognised them to be so. An undefined 
 jealous dread of some one reading them and understanding 
 them while he still stayed in the dark, seized him, and he re- 
 leased his hold of her with an abruptness that almost seemed 
 to tell her to stand off. 
 
 "What is it, Harry ?" she asked, anxiously, clasping her 
 arms over his knees, and leaning upon him with an air of 
 reliance that was the offspring of the mute appeal against his 
 dawning doubt ; and he replied : 
 
 " I don't know ; get up ; don't be foolish, Charlie ; get up ; 
 I hear wheels." 
 
 She sprang to her feet on the instant, and she vowed, while 
 doing so, that never in that way would she be foolish again. 
 
 Mrs Walsh was announced almost immediately. She came 
 in stately and collected as usual, but with an uncomfortable 
 feeling in her inner self, composed of the half suspicion she 
 had that Charlie did not like her, and the half certainty that 
 she did not like Charlie. The knowledge that evil days were 
 coming upon young Mrs Fellowes was the salvation of that 
 meeting between the two ladies. Had it not been for that, 
 and the womanly pity it engendered in her heart, Mrs Walsh 
 would have been uncommonly disagreeable in her frigid beauty. 
 As it was, she almost thawed to Charlie, and so caused that 
 impressionable being to feel very much ashamed of herself 
 for that she had not been better inclined towards her guest. 
 
 Mrs Walsh spared Charlie all trouble in the matter of in- 
 troduction. After shaking hands with her young hostess, 
 who was striving hard to say something civil, and failing by 
 reason of some old memories surging up, Mrs Walsh held out 
 her hand to Mr Fellowes with the words, 
 
 " We will dispense with any formal introduction, will we 
 not ? " And there was a cordial tone about these words, 
 and such a gracious smile accompanied them, that Henry 
 Fellowes thought : " Call that woman stupid or cold ! she 's 
 the most charming creature I ever met." There was a name- 
 less something in her manner that made him feel that she 
 had heard and that she believed all manner of good things 
 of him ; and his was such a thorough honest, kindly 
 nature, that it gloried and rejoiced exceeding in being 
 
222 Walter Gorin 
 
 <v 
 
 thought well of by every one not from vanity this, be it; 
 understood, but because it was his nature to like and think 
 well of every one, and he craved some small return in kind. 
 
 " Mrs and Miss Fellowes I know by sight already," Mrs 
 Walsh continued, shaking hands with them in rapid succes- 
 sion almost as she named them. " I used to see you at Dene- 
 ham Church when I was staying at Goring Place." 
 
 "Yes, I believe you were there once/' Miss Dinah said, 
 looking steadily at the guest - 
 
 " And that was when I saw you," Mrs Walsh replied 
 affably. Then she turned to Charlie and said, 
 
 " How more than good of you to take me in, Mrs Fellowes. 
 Mr Goring tells me that there is not a decent hotel in the 
 place ; what should I have done to-night had it not been for 
 your consideration ? for they have been shamefully lazy at 
 the cottage there 's nothing in order.' 
 
 " So she has seen him already," Charlie thought. " He 
 never said a word about going to meet her to-night." 
 
 Old Mrs Fellowes replied aloud to Mrs Walsh's remark. 
 " There are two most respectable inns in Deneham hotels I 
 believe are not often found in small country places, but the 
 Red Lion is kept by an old servant of my own, who 's so 
 honest that you might leave untold gold about and he 'd 
 never touch it, and so clean that you might eat off his floors." 
 
 " Being neither a Croesus nor a pig," Mrs Walsh was about 
 to say ; but she checked herself, and Charlie asked her if she 
 " wouldn't like to go to her own room ? " When they were 
 gone away together, Mrs Fellowes, senior, commenced, 
 
 " I wonder whether she wears widows' caps with, decent 
 close borders, or only one of those fly-away things with a 
 point on the forehead ? " 
 
 " I wonder whether she wears one at all, in the house," 
 Miss Dinah replied. " I have my doubts ; did you see that 
 she had a seal-skin jacket on, mother ? " 
 
 Mrs Fellowes smiled and elevated her eyebrows. " I saw/' 
 she said; " that's what men who go and marry fine ladies 
 may expect." 
 
 " Why, she was all in black, mother," Henry Fellowes in- 
 terposed ; " uncommonly fine woman she is, to be sure." 
 
 " Oh ! uncommonly fine, and she knows it," Mrs Fellowes 
 replied with solemn emphasis, as though there were some- 
 
Hostess and Guest. 223 
 
 thing dark and dangerous in such knowledge, " pretty man- 
 ners, too ! " 
 
 " Her manners are much like Mrs Henry's, I think," 
 Dinah said , and there was a wealth of sisterly kindness in 
 the saying, considering what had gone before. 
 
 "Very like indeed," Mrs Fellowes replied. "What is 
 the day of the month, the 20th, isn't it ? " 
 
 " Yes, the 20th of December," Henry Fellowes said cheer- 
 fully ; on the whole he was glad that the tone of the conver- 
 sation was about to be changed as he thought. 
 
 "Yes 20th of December/' Mrs Fellowes resumed; "and 
 take my word for it, that before the 20th of May she will 
 have married that young man at Goring Place ; she '11 never 
 be content with a poor dear husband in his grave, not she ; 
 she hasn't the look nor the manners to be it." 
 
 Meanwhile Charlie had accompanied her visitor to the 
 state, that is, the most sepulchral, chamber, and while they 
 were waiting for Mrs Walsh's maid to make her appearance, 
 the two ladies interchanged a few detective civilities. 
 
 "It's rather a dismal old house this, isn't it?" Charlie 
 began. " I think you will find it rather a dismal neighbour- 
 hood too, unless you have some very intimate friends near 
 here." 
 
 Mrs Walsh removed her bonnet, and raised a pair of 
 candles aloft, in order to see her hair the better before she 
 answered. 
 
 "It's the want of gas makes it seem dark to us. Intimate 
 friends ? No only Mr Goring. Do you see much of him ?" 
 
 "Yes no that is, not half so much as I could wish," 
 Charlie replied; "if there was a lady at Goring Place if he 
 only does marry his pretty cousin, we should be something 
 like neighbours I think." 
 
 "For your sake then, I can only hope that that remark- 
 ably auspicious event may come off," Mrs Walsh replied, 
 calmly completing her survey of her hair, and not disfigur- 
 ing it according as old Mrs Fellowes had hoped. Then sho 
 turned and looked at Charlie, thinking, " It is evident that 
 she knows nothing of this banking business, poor thing, or 
 she could not speak about what may occur in that way." 
 As she stood looking down at Charlie, the latter suddenly 
 glanced up and met her eyes. 
 
224 Walter Goring. 
 
 " What were you thinking just then, Mrs "Walsh?" she 
 asked abruptly. 
 
 "Of you/' ' 
 
 " And I of you, or at least of that evening when we met 
 last." 
 
 "That evening when you first met Mr Goring, do you 
 mean?" Mrs Walsh interrupted. 
 
 " Yes," Charlie answered ; and then she thought to her- 
 self, " Mrs Walsh will imagine that fact is rather too strongly 
 impressed upon me unless I tell her my reasons for thinking 
 about it," so she added: "I always recall that evening 
 pleasantly, because an idea was put into my head then which 
 I hope to turn to good account in the future. I have always 
 wished to write, and Mr Goring says it won't be very idiotic 
 of me to try." 
 
 "That's immensely encouraging on Mr Goring's part," 
 Mrs Walsh replied, laughing. " Well, I can only say that 
 I have been thrown in the way of hearing a good deal about 
 literary life, and therefore I tell you as a friend, that a 
 woman had better avoid it. If you succeed, you have a 
 dangerous pre-eminence ; if you fail, so many are mortified 
 for you and through you, mortified as one never can be 
 about a man." 
 
 Charlie winced by way of reply, and Mrs Walsh went on : 
 
 " I see you don't quite like and don't quite believe what I 
 am saying ; in direct contradiction to Mr Goring's advice, 
 too, how can I hope that mine will be taken ? But I know 
 that I am right in saying to a woman, Eschew that path if 
 you would not drink of the waters of bitterness ; and when 
 once you have smarted under the lash of public criticism you 
 will know that I am right. Walter Goring is no friend to 
 you in urging you on to this, and I shall tell him so." Mrs 
 Walsh spoke quite warmly for Mrs Walsh. She had no in- 
 tention of suffering Mrs Fellowes to come nearer to Walter 
 Goring through that strange sympathy which fellow-craftship 
 engenders, than she herself stood. 
 
 Charlie laughed. " I 'in ashamed to say that I 'm wafted 
 about with every wind of doctrine a proof that my heart is 
 not in anything I undertake, I suppose; you have quite 
 crushed the dawning ambition ; now, will you come down 
 flud have some supper?" 
 
A Walk to the Cottage. 225 
 
 TLat night, before she went to bed, Mrs Fellowes, with 
 the stealthy step of a thief, made her way into the library 
 ..ill tore her first story into very minute scraps. She did it 
 with many a sigh and many a pang, for indeed she had 
 thought the very best things that could have been thought 
 of that, her earliest literary labour. But she supported and 
 strengthened herself by the thought, " She shall never have 
 the satisfaction of laughing at me with him, and of saying, 
 ' I told you so/ " 
 
 She felt very much as if she had been cutting the throats 
 of some near relatives or dear friends as she crept up to bed. 
 When she reached her room, this giving up of her aim 
 seemed to her like the abnegation of the only interest in life 
 which could enable her to support through long years the 
 eternal presence of Mrs Fellowes, the little shawl, and Miss 
 Dinah. By the time she was ready to lay her head on the 
 pillow, she had determined that in future she would not 
 make much ado about nothing, but that she would write and 
 publish under a feigned name, and win much money and 
 more fame, and here her ideas became confused by the ap- 
 proach of slumber. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 A WALK TO THE COTTAGE. 
 
 WALTER GORING was over at the Hurst the following morn- 
 ing before the Felloweses had finished breakfast. Mrs Walsh 
 had not made her appearance yet, and for once Charlie's 
 opinion coincided with the opinions of her mother-in-law 
 and Miss Dinah that is to say, she felt glad that Mr Goring 
 should be disappointed, and considered his haste to see his 
 beautiful widow friend almost indecent, and decidedly absurd. 
 "I came over early," he explained, looking almost foolish as 
 he offered the explanation, " because I thought that perhaps 
 Mrs Walsh and you would walk or drive out, or something 
 of the sort, this morning, and I was afraid I should miss yon." 
 " I don't know what Mrs Walsh -will want to do yet," 
 Charlie replied; "if she's going to the cottage, I think I 
 
 P 
 
226 Walter Goring. 
 
 shall leave her in your charge, Mr Goring; I'm nr? ory 
 fond of standing about in damp unfurnished houses/' 
 
 "You didn't seem to mind it the first time you went *"3 
 the cottage," Miss Dinah remarked, considerately. 
 
 "It was a hard frost that day/' Henry Fellowes said, 
 rather touchily ; " of course she didn't mind the damp when 
 there was no damp to mind, Dinah." 
 
 " Charlie embodies the idea of progress, to my mind," 
 Frank put in, partly for the sake of soothing Miss Dinah, 
 who was palpably ruffled by her brother's rebuke, and partly 
 for the sake of doing away with the personal nature of the 
 conversation by introducing an abstract proposition, "she 
 is always ready to let go an old liking, or old belief, or an 
 old opinion for a new and a better one ; are you not, Char- 
 lie?" 
 
 " Am I really ? I didn't know I was so enlightened ; but, 
 as brothers are not generally addicted to flattering their sis- 
 ters fulsomely, I will think you mean it, Frank." 
 
 " Well," old Mrs Fellowes interposed, " in my young days 
 we should not have thought it a compliment to be told that 
 we were always ready to let go our old likings and old be- 
 liefs." 
 
 " Probably you all started with better ones," Frank replied. 
 "I'm snro ?.">*/ did, for instance." 
 
 "I only ,.;.u that things are done and defended now that 
 we should have shuddered at when I was young; but then 
 I 'm old, and had better hold my tongue. Mrs Travers was 
 saying only yesterday, ' Call thu a high state of civilisation, 
 talk of this as an enlightened and advanced age; it would be 
 well, I 'm sure, for one's morals if we could go back a few 
 centuries." 
 
 "I would skip the Commonwealth, and pull up in the 
 second Charles's time, if I had the management of the retro- 
 grade movement," Frank said; "and then I would be a 
 courtier, and partake of those pure delights which Mrs Traverf 
 so much regrets." 
 
 " I think I would go farther back, and be one of the 
 Queen's Maries, before Darnley made things disagreeable," 
 Charlie added. 
 
 " One of the Queen's Maries ! Surely, under the delight' 
 ful circumstances of freedom of choice which we are imaiii- 
 
A Walk to the Cottage. 227 
 
 fag, yon would be the Queen herself, Mrs Fellowes ? " Walter 
 Goring said, rising from his chair as he spoke, and seating 
 himself on a low ottoman that was near to Charlie. 
 
 " Of course she would, with the absolute command over 
 the music and melodies of both Blzzio and Chastelard," 
 Frank was saying, when the door opened, and Mrs Walsh 
 came in, and marked the scene, and remembered clearly a 
 day when Walter Goring had so bowed over her hand as to 
 suggest a scene from Scottish history the sweetest and most 
 sentimental portion of it to her husband, when she had 
 been sketched for Mary Stuart, and Walter Goring for Chas- 
 lelard. 
 
 " I am glad you have come down, Mrs Walsh," Mr Fel- 
 lowes said, when they had all greeted her ; " they are talking 
 the greatest nonsense." 
 
 Mrs Walsh looked at them indifferently. "They must 
 return to sense then, now that I have come, for I want some 
 very practical information. Which is the last train that I 
 can return to town by to-day ? " 
 
 " Return to town ! " they all exclaimed. " Yes," she said, 
 coolly ; " I have only come down to store my household goods 
 and settle my two old servants in the cottage. I must have 
 some place for them, poor things ; but for my own part. I 
 shall not settle anywhere for a year or two." 
 
 " Isn't this rather a sudden resolution ? " Walter Goring 
 asked ; and for the life of him he could not help infusing a 
 shade of reproach into his tone. He wanted Mrs Walsh to 
 believe that this announcement of a change in what he had 
 thought to be her fixed intention was a disappointing thing 
 to him as disappointing as those Dead-Sea fruits which 
 tempt the eye and turn to ashes on the lips. 
 
 " No," she replied, quietly ; " why should you think it so ? 
 I always avoid explaining my intentions far ahead it makes 
 so much talk, and gives so much trouble." 
 
 She spoke with a great air of veracity; in a cool sort of 
 matter-of-course way that deceived every one of them save 
 Charlie. But Charlie read the riddle aright, and knew as 
 well as Mrs Walsh did that the resolution to go away at once 
 was born in that moment of opening the door and coming 
 upon the scene which has been described. Charlie had 
 marked a momentary shade of trouble on the proud, beauti- 
 
228 Walter Goring. 
 
 ful face of her guest, and she thought, " She 's fearful of get- 
 ting fond of him too soon or she's annoyed with herself to 
 find that she 's fond of him already ; one doesn't get touchy 
 about one's mere friends." 
 
 About an hour after breakfast the party of four set off to 
 walk to the cottage, Charlie having suddenly and obligingly 
 waived all objection to damp and unfurnished houses. In 
 fact, Mrs Fellowes was feeling almost warmly disposed 
 towards Mrs Walsh by this time ; she thought it very good 
 taste on the part of the widow to beat a timely retreat. 
 
 Until they were clear of the Hurst-grounds, the whole 
 party kept together, but a small pool of water, and some 
 such trifle as a cart-wheel ruck, at which the ladies paused, 
 divided them when they reached the road. " This lane is 
 like a morass for some little distance," Walter Goring said, 
 turning to Mrs Walsh ; " take my hand, and then you can 
 walk along that strip of footpath by the hedge without slip- 
 ping." Then she took his hand as he desired, and thus they 
 were separated from the brother and sister. Frank marked 
 his appreciation of Mr Goring's manner of turning the posi- 
 tion to account by a laugh, and the words " that was neatly 
 done." 
 
 " What was neatly done ? " Charlie asked, rather crossly. 
 There was no beauty in the manoeuvre in her eyes ; she was 
 left to struggle along the strip of footpath and get her boots 
 splashed without the slightest assistance, therefore the ad- 
 mirable nature of the precautions that were taken towards 
 another woman's easy progress did not impress her favourably. 
 
 " Why, that last movement of Goring's," Frank replied, 
 slackening his pace. " What a magnificent woman she is," 
 he continued, in a low tone ; " an abbreviated, revised, and 
 improved Cleopatra." 
 
 " Good gracious, Frank! what are your ideas of Cleopatra? 
 She is as cold as ice ; she wouldn't let anything alter the ex- 
 pression of her face for the world when she has once arranged 
 it for the day." 
 
 " I suppose you 're rather put out because she is not going 
 to remain and lighten our darkness ? " 
 
 " I really care very little about it, Frank." 
 
 " Well, I don't think that Goring emulates your indiffer 
 ence he 's very hard hit." 
 
A Walk to the Cottage. 229 
 
 " I don't believe it ; I think she likes him immensely, and 
 that flatter" him. But I don't believe she is at all the sort of 
 woman he would fall in love with ; she 's so statuesque, and 
 he's so sympathetic." 
 
 " Your theory is faultless nevertheless his practice gives 
 the lie to it," Frank said, laughing. " Come, Charlie, cheer 
 up ; your little yellow-haired friend stands no chance what- 
 ever against this one." 
 
 " Friend ! she 's no friend of mine, Frank ; I only saw her 
 that once out riding. I have told you about it, haven't I ? " 
 
 " Fifteen times exactly," Frank replied. 
 
 "Well, perhaps I have, for she made a great impression 
 upon me," Charlie replied, flushing ; " at any rate she is not 
 years and years older than Mr Goring." 
 
 " But Mrs Walsh is one of those whom 'age cannot wither 
 or custom tame,' I should think." 
 
 "Age doesn't wither any one in these days, you know, 
 Frank," Charlie said ; and she tried to say it sarcastically. 
 
 " Go it, gentle woman ; you would like me to look out for 
 cracks in Mrs Walsh's veneering." 
 
 " I never said she painted now, because I know she 
 doesn't ; but I do say, that if an old woman does not look 
 withered, that she must varnish herself. Now, Frank, don't 
 laugh at me ; if I am a little spiteful about Mrs Walsh, it 's 
 because she disheartened rne last night ; " and Charlie really 
 believed herself that this was the sole reason. 
 
 " How did she dishearten you ?" her brother asked ; and 
 then Charlie told him about her destroyed hopes and MS., 
 and he listened, and was sympathetic, and cheered her on to 
 fresh attempts, until her fainting spirits rose and she felt 
 ready to spoil any number of reams of paper without delay. 
 
 In the meantime, the pair in advance had not been conver- 
 sing so freely and easily by any means. Walter Goring was 
 not at all certain how he stood with the widow. More than 
 this, he was not at all certain how he desired to stand with 
 her. He had been accustomed for so many years to re- 
 gard her as something set apart and utterly unattainable; 
 and now, by a violent throe of nature, her position was altered, 
 and he did not know how to reconcile himself to it, even in 
 his own heart, much less to adapt himself to it outwardly. 
 For years there had existed between these two people a coj> 
 
230 Walter Gating. 
 
 diality and regard so open, warm, and (on his part) demon- 
 strative, that any cessation from it must of necessity be very 
 painful. But, on the other hand, a continuance of it might 
 be prejudicial to her, and to him also. The union had been 
 shared in and sanctioned by her husband; it had all been fair 
 and above-board ; in the blameless sense of the phrase, she 
 had been more than kind to him, though less than kin. He 
 was bound to her by a hundred associations bound to her 
 especially by that not-to-be-broken chain of feeling, that she 
 Jiked him better, perhaps, than she did any one else. But he 
 was far from feeling sure that he was in love with her, and 
 equally far from imagining her to be in love with him. His 
 sensations about her were of precisely the same nature as they 
 had been when Ealph Walsh was alive. Whether hers had 
 developed into anything more tender may not be known yet. 
 
 " What makes you rush away to-day ? " he began, as 
 soon as the party divided in the manner indicated above ; 
 " it was like a blow in the chest to me when you said you 
 were going." 
 
 " I shall come back again some time or other, I suppose," 
 she answered, " but at present I feel too restless to make a 
 settled home anywhere ; you didn't imagine that I was going 
 to put myself down at Deneham at once, did you ? " 
 
 " I did, indeed and now I 'm plunged in cold water ; 
 don't expect me to applaud your resolve after having in- 
 dulged myself with such different anticipations for some time." 
 
 He spoke almost complainingly. It did seem to him 
 rather heartless of her to go away before he had come to any 
 determination respecting what his feelings were or might be 
 about her. 
 
 " It is better that I should go," she said, in a low tone. 
 
 " Of course it is, if it seems good to you." Almost in- 
 voluntarily he was taking an aggrieved tone. 
 
 " It is far better that I should go," she repeated, resolutely ; 
 " so many things that seemed firmly fixed have been thrown 
 into new forms by Ralph's death, that I had better not at- 
 tempt to settle down and take up my old life again until I 
 have had time to think about tilings as they are, and to get 
 accustomed to them." 
 
 " What single thing is thrown into new form ? " he 
 asked. 
 
A Walk to the Cottage. 231 
 
 " Oh, several things ! " 
 
 " Name one," he persisted. 
 
 " Well, my relations with people," she said, hesitatingly. 
 
 " It 's your own fault if you suffer them to be altered," he 
 replied, putting his hands in his pocket, and looking straight 
 away at the landscape in front of them. 
 
 " It is inevitable that they should be altered." 
 
 " Why," he looked down at her now as she walked along 
 
 by his side. " Why, if you " the sight of her deep 
 
 mourning checked him in whatever he had been going to say, 
 and he added after a moment's pause, " Perhaps you are 
 right ; you always are right -my goddess." He had never 
 called her that since her husband's death, and the tone in 
 which he said it now made her tremble for a moment. Then 
 the old phrase seemed to put her more on her old terms with 
 him, for she looked at him very kindly, and said, 
 
 " Will you promise not to make a shadow of mistake 
 about something I am going to say to you ? " 
 
 " Could I ever be so blind or besotted as to make mistakes 
 about you ? " 
 
 " I don't know. I hope not, I heartily hope not ; I think 
 our friendship is founded on a rock ; but this is a point on 
 which you might resent interference from your nearest and 
 dearest relatives even ; I want to speak to you about that 
 daughter of your uncle's, and Mrs Fellowes." 
 
 " My cousin Daisy, and Mrs Fellowes ! What of them ?" 
 
 " Don't call her your cousin, Walter. I cannot bear to 
 think of her as nearly connected with you in any way. I 
 have heard a rumour of your being sufficiently attracted by 
 her to think of making her your wife ; this cannot be true." 
 
 " Certainly not/' he replied, laughing ; " but for all that, 
 you must not underrate the Daisy ; she will be a person of 
 consequence." 
 
 "How?" 
 
 " I can only tell you a portion of the case, and you must 
 respect my confidence religiously ; she will be the mistress of 
 Goring Place in her own right, if a certain condition, which 
 I shall not confide to you, remains unfulfilled when she is 
 twenty-one." 
 
 " And that condition," Mrs Walsh had grown very pale, 
 and she seemed to have a slight difficulty in speaking, her 
 
232 Walter Goring. 
 
 voice was so very faint and low, " and that condition 
 that you marry her." 
 
 " I have told you all I can tell you," he replied, gently ; 
 and she thought she had never seen him look so handsome, 
 so manly, so capable of bearing the utmost reverses, as he 
 did now, when speaking of his probable resignation of the 
 great estate into which he had so recently come. " And 
 what about Mrs Fellowes ? " he asked ; " you had something 
 to say to me about her too." 
 
 " It is this. She is surrounded by Argus eyes, and she is 
 vory frank and unguarded ; you see I do her all justice. Do 
 not let that appear in your manner to her which may pos- 
 sibly mislead people and get her lightly spoken of." 
 
 " Am I likely to behave like such a scoundrel ?" he asked, 
 coldly. 
 
 " Walter, I begged you not to misunderstand me." 
 
 " Nor will I forgive me," he said, imploringly. He was 
 farther than ever from knowing which of these three women 
 he regarded the most warmly, but unquestionably Mrs Walsh's 
 watchful interest was far from unpleasant to him just now. 
 
 " Your manner is softer, more devotional and nattering 
 than she has ever been accustomed to. It is entirely for her 
 sake that I speak ; I am not afraid for you." 
 
 " That 's very good of you," he said, half laughing. 
 
 " But those semi-facetious, semi-sentimental conversations 
 imagining yourselves to be all sorts of odious bygone 
 people, and things of that sort are imprudent and foolish. 
 She was also a dreadful flirt, too, as Miss St John ; there is no 
 particular credit in fanning the smouldering. embers of a sort 
 of romance which she has brought to bear on many men be^. 
 fore she knew you." 
 
 " Believe me, I have no desire to do anything of the sort, 
 or to read any passages from the back numbers of her life," he 
 said, indifferently ; but he thought " how hardly women 
 handle each other, to be sure when there is nothing to be 
 gained by it either." 
 
 Mrs Walsh was inexorable in her resolve to go back to 
 town this same day ; therefore when they had looked at the 
 cottage, and the new mistress had settled with some village 
 dame of decent repute to remain in charge of it until the two 
 old servants of whom she had made mention should arrive. 
 
A Walk to the Cottage. 233 
 
 when these things had been done it was time to go back 
 to the Hurst and prepare for the start. They formed an un- 
 broken company all the way home, so there was no further 
 confidential converse between Walter and Mrs Walsh. But 
 when he was putting her into the carriage that was to take her 
 away to the station, he bent forward under pretence of adjust- 
 ing some of her wraps and travelling-bags, and as he did so he 
 touched her hand with his lips. She did not withdraw it ; 
 on the contrary, it seemed to him that his pressure was re- 
 turned. He looked up at her suddenly, and his eyes glowed 
 with an admiration which he could not subdue as he whis- 
 pered, " I shall see you scon good-bye for a short time 
 though." 
 
 She did not speak, but she held her hand out to him and 
 smiled her own smile the smile that said so much more 
 than her lips ever did upon him. Then be drew back, and 
 the carriage drove off, and she looking through the window saw 
 him standing bare-headed watching her. " I am quite right 
 to leave," she said to herself, " for several reasons he might 
 come to a conclusion too soon if I stayed, or he might never 
 come to one at all if he saw much of me." Then she took 
 herself to task for suffering such thoughts to grow so soon 
 after her husband's death : and then forgave herself on the 
 plea that she " had known Walter's value so long and 
 thoroughly." 
 
 He meanwhile had gone back in to the library to smoke a 
 cigar with Frank. Charlie had received a pressing invita- 
 tion from her brother to retire to that haunt with them, and 
 save them from so beclouding their faculties at that early 
 hour, but she had excused herself why, she scarcely knew. 
 
 Young Mrs Fellowes was in truth feeling put out in a 
 vague, unsatisfactory sort of way. Her day was broken 
 in upon and destroyed through the untoward departure of 
 her guest ; but perhaps she might have been resigned to that, 
 had an incident of that departure not been recounted to her 
 by Miss Dinah. " I was up at the staircase window," that 
 ruthless virgin said to her composedly, "when Mr Goring 
 handed Mrs Walsh into the carriage ; I 'm sure heartless 
 as it may seem I hope he is engaged to her, for the way ho 
 kissed her hand and she never saying a word against it 
 was unblushing, if he isn't." 
 
234 Walter Goring. 
 
 " I really can't pretend to care whether Mr Goring kissed 
 her hand or not," Charlie replied. 
 
 " No, my dear. You needn't ' pretend,' " old Mrs Fellowea 
 struck in with the level look over the spectacles. "Well, all 
 I say is, give me old times and old manners ; in my young 
 day a modest woman behaved herself as such." 
 
 " Please remember that I didn't stand sponsor for Mrs 
 Walsh," Charlie cried. She was sorry, and sick, and tired 
 of it all ; a sudden and unaccountable accession of weariness 
 had set in ; everybody's future looked so much brighter than 
 her own. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 FRESH RESOLUTIONS. 
 
 WHEN Walter Goring went into the library after seeing Mrs 
 Walsh off, he found Frank St John leaning on his sister's 
 writing-table making a hasty sketch. "Look here!" he ex- 
 claimed, "how's that? " and Walter looked and saw a rough 
 but bold and perfect likeness of Mrs Walsh. 
 
 " It's very good, it's admirable, in fact." 
 
 Frank sat down and gave it a few more touches. 
 
 " I '11 make something of it, if I can only come across an- 
 other face that I want ; I got an idea from an attitude and 
 expression of Mrs Walsh's this morning, that if I can only 
 curry it out will be " he stopped, and did not say what it 
 would be, but began to whistle softly in a well-pleased 
 manner as he sketched in another figure. Mr Goring leant 
 over his chair watching his work. 
 
 "You don't mean that you will give us another version of 
 the bowl-and-dagger business if you can only find a face fair 
 enough for Rosamond's, do you ? Poor Ralph took her for 
 his model of Eleanor only two years ago/' 
 
 Nothing so hackneyed no ; how about this study 
 though ? I wish she had stayed another day : I would have 
 made another of her." 
 
 " I tell you I think it admirable," Walter Goring replied. 
 " But how do you propose turning it to account ? " he 
 
Fresh Resolutions. 235 
 
 added, lounging over to a couch, and from thence lazily 
 watching Frank through the smoke of his cigar. 
 
 "I'll paint that scene from Elaine where Guinevere plays 
 the imperial vixen about the diamonds; don't you remember?" 
 Goring nodded : 
 
 " ' hers, not mine 
 Nay, by the mother of our Lord himself, 
 Or hers or mine, mine now to work my will 
 She shall not have them." 
 
 Do you mean those lines ? " 
 
 " Yes ; and 1 '11 paint Mrs Walsh in the act of pitching 
 the diamonds into the river as Elaine floats past dead. I 'm 
 in earnest about this ; I can make something of a picture of 
 it : she's inspired me.'' 
 
 "I'm delighted to hear it; she's inspired a good many 
 men," Walter Goring said; then he added, laughing, "you 
 wouldn 5 t make a bad Lancelot yourself, St John, if you did 
 yourself justice." 
 
 " I won't rely upon myself ; I '11 be off to town to-morrow, 
 and look out for a Lancelot and an Elaine in the ranks of the 
 regular models. By Jove ! I 'm very glad I am out of the 
 "service. I shall take up painting as a profession, and work 
 at it." He went on drawing vigorously the whole time he 
 was speaking. 
 
 " But you can't get the whole thing in effectively in one 
 picture," Walter Goring urged ; " divide your canvas, and 
 have one view of the barge with the dead body of the ' Lily 
 Maid ' upon it, and another of the balcony with the queen 
 and the knight ? " 
 
 " Not a bit of it. See," and Frank rose up and went over 
 to show his companion the sketch he had made. " I shall 
 have a strong light falling across Guinevere's face down on 
 to the upturned one of the girl ; Lancelot is a minor con- 
 sideration in this scene he plays rather a pitiful part ; all 
 the passion and interest is with the women." 
 
 There was a vigour, a grace, and a suggestiveness about 
 this first rough, hurried study which fully justified Frank's 
 expectations of "making something fine of it." Walter 
 Goring felt that there was this, and he said cordially, as he 
 handed the paper back to the artist, 
 
 " If you really mean work, and are going back to town, I 
 
236 Walter Goring. 
 
 shall be glad to introduce you to a number of men who will 
 be happy to help you if they can.'' 
 
 " Mean work ? I mean it, and no mistake," Frank re- 
 plied, " and I shall be much obliged to you for the introduc- 
 tions." 
 
 " You will not easily get a face fair enough and strong 
 enough for Elaine ; your sister, Mrs Fellowes, has the ex- 
 pression of mingled softness and strength which we suppose 
 to have been the characteristics of the girl who died of love, 
 but" 
 
 " She hasn't the fair beauty," Frank interrupted ; " no, to 
 match the Guinevere will be my difficulty." 
 
 "And I doubt your matching her among the regular 
 models ; it 's a certain condition of being a regular model 
 that a something which Elaine must possess should have 
 vanished." 
 
 " If I fail in finding an Elaine, my whole picture will go 
 to smash," Frank said, rather dejectedly. 
 
 " My dear fellow ! couldn't you, in that case, turn that 
 study you have made of Mrs Walsh to account in some other 
 way ? Anna Boleyn dashing the portrait of Henry to pieces 
 when she finds Jane Seymour looking at it, or Cassandra 
 asking of the heavens where Troy's hope, Hector, is? or 
 something of that sort." 
 
 " No," Frank said, holding his sketch away from him, in 
 order to judge of the effect afresh : " if I can't carry this out 
 for years for want of that special face, I will not destroy the 
 idea by distorting it ; if Charlie had the colouring, she would 
 do ; but she has only the expression, and I want a touch of 
 truth in each detail." 
 
 " Shall you get to work on this before you bring out your 
 book ?" Walter Goring asked. 
 
 u Yes ; I '11 leave Charlie to put that in order, and I '11 
 send the proofs to her ; she likes doing anything for me, and 
 it will be good practice for her. I shall not suffer anything 
 
 to interfere with this if I can only find" Again he 
 
 paused, and began whistling thoughtfully, and Walter Goring 
 suggested, 
 
 " An Elaine and a Lancelot ? " 
 
 " Yes," he replied ; " by Jove ! if I can do that, I '11 make 
 tny name with this picture; it paints itself as I think about it. 7 ' 
 
Fresh Resolutions. 237 
 
 " Don't be off before Christmas, at any rate," Walter Go- 
 ring urged. 
 
 "Christmas won't be a remarkably hilarious season in tl:i.? 
 house, I 'm afraid," Frank replied, shaking his head ; " poor 
 Fellowes's affairs are in an awful mess of that there's r,o 
 doubt ; he even spoke to me to-day about letting The Hurst 
 and the land, and getting ' something to do ' himself, poor 
 fellow. I wish he would have the pluck to tell my sister ; but 
 he won't, and I have no right to interfere." 
 
 " That marriage was a bitter bad business," Walter Goring 
 exclaimed, starting up as he spoke, and commencing to walk 
 up and down the room. 
 
 "As it has turned out," Frank replied, quietly, going over 
 to the fireplace and lighting his cigar. 
 
 " In any event, there is something incongruous in it, ac- 
 cording to my idea." 
 
 " I don't agree with you," Frank said ; " at any rate, now 
 that he's under a cloud isn't exactly the time I should select 
 for finding out all that is not most auspicious in the affair. 
 Fellowes is worth a hundred of the white-livered liouci who 
 married my other sister. I only wish I could get him to be- 
 lieve that he feels the business more acutely than Charlie 
 will ; he fears that she 's going to be ' alienated,' and all sorts 
 of extraordinary things \ she 's much too good a girl." 
 
 " In fact, good fellow as he is, his wife is beyond him be- 
 yond 'him ! she 's as far above him as the stars in heaven," 
 Walter Goring said ; and for this panegyric on his pet sister 
 Frank had no words of reproof. Cordially as he liked, and 
 heartily as he sympathised with his brother-in-law, he yet 
 felt that there was much truth in Walter Goring's estimate 
 of the relative altitudes of husband and wife. 
 
 In the meantime Charlie was being tested. After Mrs 
 Walsh's departure, she had, as has been seen, been seized 
 upon by Miss Dinah, and compelled to listen to the tale of 
 how tenderly Mr Goring had taken leave of the widow. 
 Then old Mrs Fellowes had delivered a short homily on the 
 subject, and Charlie had resented the idea of being inte- 
 rested in, or responsible for, Mrs Walsh's divergence from 
 the path of propriety. Then she had sought for her husband, 
 and entreated him to take her out for a ride. 
 
 "It will be dark soon," he said. 
 
238 Walter Got ing. 
 
 " Never mind ; let us go out till it is dark ; I 'm unsettled 
 to-day, and I should like a canter on old Major." 
 
 So old Major was had round, and she went out with her 
 husband on horseback for the first time since their mar- 
 riage. 
 
 Now it may be remembered that at Brighton she had been 
 contented with the old brown horse, and beautifully resigned 
 to riding him, since nothing better was to be had. But now 
 circumstances were much altered. Then she had been Miss 
 St John : now she was, as she thought, the wife of a rich 
 man, who could give her a better horse if he chose. She 
 found many faults with old Major before she had been on his 
 back ten minutes. 
 
 " How he pokes his head forward," she began. 
 
 ' Just hold him up a bit ; take him more on the curb, so." 
 
 " Then he nags, if he doesn't stop outright, Harry." 
 
 " Frank took it out of him yesterday," Mr Fellowes ex- 
 plained. 
 
 " Frank rode him round the farm, didn't he ?" 
 
 " Yes, and put him at everything he could ? " 
 
 " High-couraged horse to be tried with that. Well, Harry, 
 is he going to sleep under me or not ? " 
 
 "Touch him up; yon used to find he took you along all 
 right at Brighton." 
 
 " That is to say, as he never did anything but carry me, 
 he managed to get up a canter in the downs. He is-sweet- 
 tempered, though ; I never knew a horse take the whip so 
 kindly ; look here." She illustrated her remark by cutting 
 the Major over the near shoulder, an attention which he 
 acknowledged by whisking his tail, and breaking into a calm 
 canter. 
 
 " He 's going very well now,' Mr Fellowes remarked. 
 
 " It's just a pace I hate," Charlie replied, frowning a little ; 
 " he 's so dull." 
 
 "He's been a first-rate horse in his time." 
 
 " His time must be long past, that 's all I can say, Harry. 
 I do wish you would get me a young horse, dear one that I 
 could ride \vith pleasure ; will you ? " 
 
 He almost gulped as he answered, 
 
 " I cannot at present, my darling." He felt that it was a 
 sore task to refuse her this the first favour she had asked of 
 
Fresh Resolutions. 239 
 
 him since tlieir marriage, more especially as a new riding- 
 horse had been amongst the many things he had promised 
 her in the days of their engagement. 
 
 She pulled up and put her hand to her side. " This old 
 beast bores forward so, that I seem to be going over his head 
 every minute, Harry ; I must make up my mind, I suppose, 
 to give my habit up to the moths, for if I can't have any- 
 thing better, I will never ride the Major again." 
 
 She, too, remembered that this was the first favour she 
 had asked at her husband's hands. The first and he re- 
 fused it. Her words stung him terribly. He thought that 
 he would give her a hint just a little hint that he was well 
 off then when he married her. But we all know how diffi- 
 cult it is to pause on the warning brink of either a painful 
 or pleasant communication. 
 
 " My darling, I would give you anything in the world, if 
 I only had it to give. I didn't mean to tell you yet, Charlie ; 
 I hoped that is, I thought well, the long and the short of 
 it is, that I'm a ruined man through through" 
 
 " No fault of your own, I 'm sure," she cried, drawing her 
 horse nearer to his now, as he had done the day he asked 
 her to be his wife ; " ruined, my dear husband, and you have 
 kept it all from me you wouldn't even let me share your 
 sorrow, while I have been selfish as usual bothering about 
 my own pleasures." 
 
 She bent over and laid her hand on his, and he felt his 
 burden lightened at once. He had so dreaded the effects of this 
 communication upon her. He had so writhed under the fcnr 
 that when it was made she might drift away even further 
 from him. In fact, he had so misunderstood her, that the 
 relief he felt at this moment was indescribable. 
 
 " God bless you, Charlie God bless you, my pet," he said, 
 hoarsely, as he pressed her hand into his. There was a 
 wealth of promise in her touch, it seemed to assure him of 
 her capability of standing so much, and never finding it hard ; 
 she looked such a bright, brave woman as she leant towards? 
 him, and seemed to pledge herself anew to partisanship with 
 him in everything. " I am so much happier than I have 
 been for weeks," he added presently, as he regained com- 
 mand over his voice. 
 
 " I 'm in such a rage with myself for having been so blind 
 
240 Walter Goring. 
 
 for weeks/' she cried. " What was the use of me when I 
 didn't find out your trouble ? But you are not going to be 
 beaten down by it ? no ; are you, Harry ? " 
 
 " My trouble is more for you than myself," he said, with a 
 sob in his voice and a knot in his throat " to have brought 
 you into it to have brought you from a good home." 
 
 " Where I was simply wretched," she interrupted ; " but 
 don't you think I feel that I am the bitterest drop in your 
 cup, whatever it may be ; don't you think that I don't know 
 that you would never have let trouble or care or annoy- 
 ance of any sort come near me if you could have helped it ? 
 I do know it. Show me that you believe I know it, by let- 
 ting me see that you will be happier in having me with you 
 whatever is coming, than you would have been alone." 
 
 She spoke very earnestly, but without strain, or tears, or 
 other token of suppressed feeling. With all her faults she 
 was not a lachrymose woman ; when she sought to cheer a 
 man she neither sighed nor sobbed at him ; she spoke out 
 cheerily and heartily, as if she knew that she was speaking 
 of a very solemn thing, but not at all as if she thought it the 
 saddest thing that could have befallen her. Her husband 
 nearly worshipped her as he rode along by her side. Her 
 bright sympathy, her loving sincerity, were incomprehensible 
 things to him, coming as they did immediately after the dis- 
 play of pettish dissatisfaction with the Major. 
 
 " You don't know all the misery it may entail upon us yet, 
 my darling," he said, seriously. Then he told her the whole 
 story as they rode on and the day darkened. But there was 
 more light on his face and in his soul than there had been 
 for many a day, when he had poured the whole story out 
 and made his wife his confidante. 
 
 " I can feel for your sorrow at leaving The Hurst, if we 
 are obliged to leave it, dear," she said, when he had finished ; 
 and even as she spoke her heart gave a little glad bound at 
 the idea of being by this means entirely free from the atmos- 
 phere of his mother and sister ; " but still, think how much 
 pleasanter it will be for you to go away with me than if you 
 had been obliged to go alone." 
 
 " Charlie my pet I hardly know whether I 'm justified 
 in feeling the happiness I do in having married you and got 
 you into this scrape." 
 
Fresh Resolutions. 241 
 
 " I should rather think that you were justified," she re- 
 plied, laughing ; then she added more seriously, " Come, 
 Harry, I know it 'a a great blow a bad blow don't think 
 me stupid and incapable of appreciating the full extent of 
 your misfortune, dear ; but I can't pretend to feel crushed by 
 it. Surely between us we can" keep the wolf from the door, 
 and the striving to do so will give us plenty to do and think 
 about. Now let us have a good sharp gallop to settle our 
 emotions and give us an appetite for dinner. Does Frank 
 know of all this ? " 
 
 "Yes, Charlie." 
 
 " And he has never hinted a word of it to me ; well, you 
 all thought me a more cowardly woman than I am, that is all 
 I can say. Life 's quite as bright to me as it was an hour 
 ago, and I flatter myself that it is a little brighter to you, sir. 
 Poor boy ! it must be awful for a man to fear that his wife 
 will break down and be a burdensome nuisance just as he 
 needs her to be the helpmate he took her for." 
 
 About half an hour after this they reached The Hurst, and 
 young Mrs Fellowes, on being lifted from her horse by her 
 once more beaming husband, ran into the house and into the 
 library to look for her brother. "Look here, Charlie," he 
 commenced, as soon as he saw her, " I have made a study for 
 a picture I 'm going to astonish the world with in May," and 
 he showed his sketch and told her its subject. " I 'm off to 
 town to-morrow to work at it while my interest is young and 
 vigorous," he continued, laughing; "besides, I want to find 
 an Elaine." 
 
 " Stay over Christmas-day." 
 
 " Temptress, avaunt ! no, I will sit upon the yellow sands 
 &nd eat lotos no longer; men must work." 
 
 " I won't tempt you to idleness, trust me ; but I wanted 
 your help for a few days ; women must work too. Harry 
 has told me all about this abominable banking business. I 
 want to sketch out a novel and give it to you to strengthen 
 weak places in the framework ; will you help me ? " 
 
 " My dearest Charlie, with all my heart, but I fancy you 
 would do this whole thing better by yourself ; there 's some- 
 thing patchy, according to my ideas, about the sort of thing 
 you suggest." 
 
 The fact wan. well inclined as Frank was to help his sister, 
 
 Q 
 
242 Walter Goring. 
 
 he was very anxious to get to work at once on his own pic- 
 ture. Nevertheless, weak as the mainspring of it might 
 have been, the advice in itself was good. 
 
 "Well, I shall try without you then, Frank." 
 
 " Yes, do ; and if you need help get Goring to help you. 
 He 's a clever fellow ; he says there is more spirit in that com- 
 position of mine than in anything he has come across for a 
 long time." 
 
 " He must be a clever fellow, indeed," she replied, laughing, 
 and holding up her face to kiss her brother at the same time. 
 " I 'in delighted now that Mrs Walsh, with her ' imperial 
 moulded form and beauty such as never woman wore/ did 
 come down the sight of her has set you going. Now I 
 must get ready for dinner, or my esteemed mother-in-law 
 will either rate me directly, or reproach me by not eating 
 anything herself." 
 
 Then she went up-stairs, and told her husband about 
 Frank's picture, forcing Henry Fellowes to feel that there 
 were many things in life still in which his wife took a bright 
 interest, and expected him to take one also. This evidence 
 of " her pluck," as he called it, appealed to him more strongly 
 than any amount of tearful tenderness could have done. He 
 felt that she would be as trusty a comrade as any man could 
 have been in fighting the battle of life, and he no longer re- 
 gretted the words he had spoken under the trees through 
 which the sunbeams fell -on the night when they had met 
 Walter and Daisy Goring. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 THE PRESCOTTS AS GUESTS AT THE HURST. 
 
 FRANK ST JOHN carried his design of going away the follow- 
 ing day into execution. His sister was very sorry to lose him 
 to miss his bright companionship, and that sense of having 
 Borne one near her who was sure to be set in the same key as 
 herself, which she had had while, he remained. Nevertheless 
 she was not sorry to be entirely free from all temptation to 
 
Prescotts as Guests at the Hurst. 243 
 
 idleness ; she wanted to work and she no longer lacked the 
 incentive. 
 
 Almost immediately after Frank's departure, the Prescotts 
 announced themselves as likely to come to The Hurst on or 
 before New Year's Day. " We will give them the best wel- 
 come we can, but I had hoped to have had them down here 
 in very different style," Henry Fellowes said rather moodily, 
 as he sat twisting the letter his wife had handed him to read 
 apprising them of the visit. 
 
 " Will their coming make any material difference to you in 
 any way ? " she asked. 
 
 " No, of course not ; Prescott has had nothing to do with 
 this business." 
 
 " Then, my dear Harry, don't let the thought of them 
 afflict you in any way ; I know you would like to have made 
 an honourable fuss about any of my people, but I know 
 Robert Prescott so well, and he is not exactly the man I 
 could have wished you to waste your substance upon even ii 
 it were yours to waste ; as it is, we '11 give him of our best, 
 dear ; and if he isn't pleased, he can go away, you know." 
 
 " What will he think when he finds I am obliged to get 
 out of this after having just brought you into it ? " 
 
 She moved her head impatiently. " Think ! who cares 
 tvhat he thinks ! I can tell you, though," she continued, 
 laughing, "he'll think it a fair opportunity for smoothing 
 himself down on account of his superior prudence, and he'll 
 look out sharply to see if he can make anything by the matter." 
 
 " And you will have to hear from him that you have done 
 a foolish thing, Charlie," her husband said, tenderly. 
 
 " That I have had to hear so many times oh, so many 
 times," she replied; "I never believed him, and I shall believe 
 him less than ever now, if you 're satisfied with me." 
 
 " Satisfied with you ! " there was a world of loving confi- 
 dence in the way he echoed her words. Her face flushed, for 
 in her own heart she held herself to be scarcely worthy of such 
 absolute belief. 
 
 " At any rate," she continued hurriedly, " I am more than 
 satisfied with my lot, Harry; this isn't a bit of feeble romance, 
 remember : whatever comes I am better off than I was before 
 you knew me for now I am everything to some one, before 
 I was nothing," 
 
244 Walter Goring. 
 
 " Charlie, you don't know even yet what you are to me 
 how much more precious you grow each moment." He went 
 over and bent his head down upon her shoulders and whis- 
 pered, " I shall bless my ruin, since it has brought me thf 
 full knowledge that my wife loves me." 
 
 A tide of recollections, of doubts, of fears, or the dread of 
 loneliness, swept over her. But she checked all outward dis- 
 play of it, and answered him without a trace of trembling in 
 her tone. 
 
 "I don't think that I shall be easily put down, Harry, 
 whatsoever comes. I am rather like a cork ; " then she laughed 
 and added, "I haven't been tried yet, but I believe I am what 
 you call 'game/ like Frank. Look at Frank, doesn't he 
 bear his misfortunes nobly V " she added, enthusiastically, 
 quite forgetting that the gentleman thus honourably men- 
 tioned did not regard what had lately befallen him in the 
 light of a misfortune at all. 
 
 But though she discussed their anticipated advent thus 
 brightly and carelessly with her husband, the Prescotts hung 
 over her like a cloud. It made her head ache to think of how 
 Eobert Prescott's lip would lengthen when he had screwed 
 some of the details out of poor dejected Henry Fellowes. 
 " He '11 drop six-and-eightpenny sentiments as if they were 
 pearls ; and then I shall be insolent," she thought. " Oh, 
 dear ! deliver me from much of Robert Prescott ; and Ellen 
 don't I know exactly the sort of limp lunatic I shall feel 
 after Ellen has let fall a dozen of her Robert Prescottisms 
 upon me ? " 
 
 I think that we must all be acquainted with some woman 
 whose mission on earth it is to be her husband's wife only 
 this and nothing more. From a purely intellectual, or purely 
 social point of view, the continuance of the species is not to 
 be desired ; but from the purely moral point of view this 
 type of woman is unassailable. Her husband's people are her 
 people, and his God is her God whether she adores the man 
 himself from the bottom of her soul is an open question. 
 Indeed, the women who go into blind abject allegiance in 
 this way, seldom have any souls from the bottom of which 
 they can adore. They are capable of carrying their packs 
 and of seeming t3 adjust them gracefully and what more 
 can men who require so much care for ? 
 
The Preswtts as Guests at the Hurst. 245 
 
 Mrs Preseott was one of these women. She had the char- 
 acteristic of her order strongly marked ; her husband was 
 her sole book of reference, and she quoted him hugely. This 
 she did, not irj the manner of one who seeks to strengthen 
 the estimate of her own propounded opinions and ideas by 
 adducing corroborative sentiments from an outsider in any 
 disputed case ; but she pushed her husband's axioms on all 
 subjects to the front, and then took up a stolid position be- 
 hind them as it were. Not enlarging upon them in any 
 way she was too unimaginative to alter them, but just re- 
 iterating them until the soundest of them became abomina- 
 tions in the ears of her hearers. 
 
 The rumour of the mesh of miserable difficulties in which 
 Mr Fellowes was entangled had reached Mr Preseott, though 
 it had not been officially communicated to him by the un- 
 lucky gentleman. The prosperous lawyer had been on the 
 look-out for a country house with good grounds for some 
 time, and it occurred to him now that it would be a profit- 
 able investment of his time to go down and see The Hurst. 
 Should the need for the sale of it be as great as he believed, 
 why, he asked himself, should he not purchase the place, 
 and perchance drive a good bargain, as well as a stranger ? 
 So the Prescott's announced themselves for New Year's Day, 
 as has been said, and all the inhabitants of The Hurst were 
 excited by the announcement, according to their respective 
 degrees. 
 
 The whole family came, as Mrs Preseott was a fond mother 
 after that pattern which always desires to have her children 
 within hail should a sudden wish to see one of them arise. 
 She never took any trouble about them ; in fact, she never 
 took any trouble about anything save the fit of her dresses, 
 and this not because she was a specially vain or a specially 
 well-dressed woman, but because she had been imbued with 
 the notion that " they ought to fit " at school. But though 
 she never took any trouble about her children, she made a 
 point of telling people, " I like to have them with me every- 
 where a mother should, I think, don't you ? " And the 
 speech was spotless, and won Mrs Preseott a seat in a high 
 place in the matron-imagined maternal paradise. 
 
 Mr Fellowes had received them very cordially. It was the 
 nature of the man to be hospitable, and happy to see every 
 
46 Waller Goring. 
 
 one who came to his house. Moreover, he thought high 
 things of the Prescotts, partly "because Robert Prescott was 
 what he called " a hard-headed man," and partly because he 
 was the husband of Charlie's sister. " Why, I owe you to 
 him, don't I?" the good-natured grateful fellow said to 
 Charlie, snatching a moment from his exuberant welcome of 
 his guests to tell her so. To which Charlie replied, " Of 
 course it 's a tremendous debt, dear ; but don't pay it by 
 letting Robert Prescott badger you about your own business 
 he '11 try it on, I feel convinced." The old antagonistic 
 spirit, exorcised apparently by her intense sympathy with 
 her husband, rose up at sight of the man who had the galling 
 art of saying the most truthful things in such a way that she 
 could but cavil at them. Besides, he had greeted her with 
 the words, " Really, Charlotte, you look surprisingly well." 
 What wonder that she was very much on her defence against 
 any possible interference with herself or her husband. 
 
 The morning after their arrival, Mr Fellowes and Mi 
 Prescott went out for a ride round the farm. The round- 
 backed lawyer was not a very finished equestrian. While 
 he was in the saddle he felt a lesser man than Fellowes. 
 The uncertainty of life was very much before him as he rode 
 along on an old hunter, " who," his host assured him, 
 "would make nothing of popping over that hurdle or that 
 hedge," pointing out those objects as he spoke to Mr Prescott, 
 who felt dubious as to what the result would be should the 
 horse "pop over," as it was upon the cards he might do, 
 without consulting his rider's wishes. Unwillingly, he took 
 a military seat, and his teeth chattered, not so much with 
 fear as with the jolting, whenever they got out of a walk. 
 He knew, too, that his hat had settled farther back upon his 
 head than was becoming, and that there was a goodly portion 
 of both his legs visible to the eyes of the vulgar, who made 
 ribald jokes to one another on the subject as he passed along. 
 Nor could he remedy these defects, uncomfortably conscious 
 as he was of them. For the old hunter had a habit of pull- 
 ing, and Mr Prescott had a dark foreboding. Did he relax 
 his fervent hold witli both hands on the reins for a single 
 instant, he felt he would be borne with velocity over the very 
 hedgy and ditchy landscape, to the downfall of his dignity 
 and the detriment of his person. " He doesn't seem to be 
 
The Prescotts as Guests at the Hurst. 347 
 
 tarrying you well you don't ride easy, do you ? " Henry 
 Fellowes asked at last, becoming suddenly conscious of Mr 
 Prescott's face being of a purple hue from over-exertion. 
 
 " He has nearly twitched my arms out of their sockets," 
 that unhappy gentleman answered. 
 
 " Ah ! give him his head a bit," the other one said, cheer- 
 fully ; and Mr Prescott thought, " give a brute like this his 
 head, indeed ! not if I can help it." 
 
 "You'll get used to his way after a time or two," the 
 master of the horse went on. 
 
 " Never ! " Mr Prescott thought, emphatically ; and just 
 then they rode through a gate into a wide expanse of meadow, 
 and the old hunter gave a small bound expressive of satis- 
 faction at finding himself on spring elastic turf. One of Mr 
 Prescott's feet came out of the stirrup, and the lawyer had to 
 scramble wildly about in his steed's mane before he could 
 steady himself and get his foot in again. " I never saw such 
 an extraordinary horse in my life," he said, touchily. " What 
 did he do, then ? " "I really fancy I may be mistaken, 
 but I can't help thinking, Fellowes, that he has got the 
 meagrims, don't you call it ? " 
 
 Fellowes laughed. " You needn't be afraid of that at this 
 time of year : look here, if you have no objection, we will 
 just go over to Goring Place. I want to ask Goring to come 
 and dine with us." 
 
 " Thank Heaven ! " Mr Prescott thought, as he gave a 
 blindly eager assent. He thought that Goring Place must 
 be nearer to them now than The Hurst, and that he would 
 thus sooner gain a temporary relief. 
 
 " Then we '11 just cut across here, and over the ditch at the 
 bottom : that takes us on to Goring's land it 's a short cut," 
 Henry Fellowes said, pointing down the meadow as he spoke ; 
 and, suiting the action to the word, he went off at a sharp 
 canter, before his companion could utter a word of remon- 
 strance. It never occurred to him that Mr Prescott was in 
 difficulty, far less that he was in mortal terror. It was ap- 
 parent enough that he was not handling the horse well, but 
 that was between his conscience and the old brown hunter ; 
 and Mr Fellowes knew the old brown hunter too well to dread 
 his taking a mean advantage. 
 
 Mr Prescott had no time to utter a word of remonstrance, 
 
248 Walter Goring. 
 
 for the instant the brown horse saw his fellow start, he started 
 . too, at a steady stride that took away Mr Prescott's breath, and 
 brought him, he felt, with hideous speed along to that yawn- 
 ing ditch at the bottom which Mr Fellowes had indicated so 
 ruthlessly. His legs napped feebly against the saddle he 
 was bitterly bumped he would have given a year's income 
 to feel sure that if he threw himself off he wouldn't hurt him- 
 self. But the old horse saved him the trouble of coming to 
 a decision on this point, by taking the ditch like a bird, and 
 dropping Mr Prescott in the middle of it. 
 
 " Why, what did he do ?" Henry Fellowes asked, when he 
 had dragged Mr Prescott out of the ditch, and assisted that 
 gentleman in removing a little of the black mud and green 
 slime from his hair and whiskers. 
 
 " Do ! " the other replied, with a snarl, " why, he ' did ' 
 something with his back and legs at the same moment that 
 gave me a most fearful twist ; he 's the most diabolical horse 
 I was ever on in my life." 
 
 " What's to be done? you can't walk home in this 
 state." 
 
 " I ; 11 not trust myself upon that brown brute again. I 'm 
 the father of a family, and shouldn't be justified in doing 
 it ; married men have no right to jeopardise their lives or for- 
 tunes." Now that he was safe on the ground again, he could 
 no longer resist administering a veiled rebuke to the man by 
 whose side he had felt so helpless a thing for the last hour. 
 
 "Well, what's to be done?" Henry Fellowes repeated. 
 " I 'd change horses, but this bay mare, though she 's gentk 
 as a lamb, might lark off with you ; come, get on ; try the 
 old horse again." 
 
 " No," Mr Prescott replied. " I might take cold, you see ; 
 I '11 walk home, if you ; 11 point out the way ; but you '11 excuse 
 my leading the horse I don't like his eye." 
 
 " Very well," Henry Fellowes said, laughing ; " all right, 
 old fellow. Go out through that gate on the left, and then 
 keep along the lane ; you ; 11 soon see The Hurst. I '11 just 
 go on to Goring and ask him to dinner." 
 
 " He '11 go over and laugh at the mischief his brute of a 
 horse has done, with that young idiot who is always foisting 
 his immoral twaddle on the public," Mr Prescott thought, as 
 he walked away with faltering, uncertain step?*. He was noi 
 
The Prescotts as Guests at the Hurst. 249 
 
 broken, but he was rcost sorely bruised, and all the tendons 
 of his legs were strained in consequence of his having tried 
 to keep his feet down in stirrups which he had insisted on 
 having left much too long for him. Moreover, he was not 
 quite certain as to his nearest path to The Hurst, and he was 
 quite certain that Charlie would laugh when she saw him. 
 " She '11 be sending an account of it to that puppy, her bro- 
 ther, and he will be making a caricature of it," he thought, 
 angrily, as he walked along, dripping. 
 
 The sisters meanwhile had been getting on pleasantly 
 enough. They had not met since Charlie's wedding-day, 
 and Ellen had much to ask relative to the way in which 
 divers dresses had worn. u There 's that velvet," she had 
 said ; " have you ever had it on ? " 
 
 " No," Charlie replied ; " the dinner-parties I have been to 
 as yet haven't heen up to that mark. I Ve been out in sim- 
 plicity and silks. I reserve that velvet to come down upon 
 them with a crusher just as they think my wedding outfit is 
 exhausted." 
 
 " Robert says you won't want that velvet now." 
 
 " How wonderfully good of Robert." 
 
 " And I would take it off your hands, Charlie." 
 
 " How wonderfully good of you, dear ; but, on the whole, 
 I prefer keeping it on my hands." 
 
 " Robert says that, under these sad circumstances, people 
 would talk if you dressed too richly ; he said he was sure you 
 wouldn't wish to do it, and I said, ' Oh, no ! '" 
 
 "How nicely Ella's hair grows; there is quite a ruddy 
 tinge in it now it 's ever so much richer in colour than it 
 was before," Charlie said, carelessly. 
 
 " Yes, it is but about that dress, dear Charlie ? I can't 
 bear to think of your being burdened with it ; do you know, 
 too, that Robert is quite willing to take The Hurst off your 
 hands?" 
 
 " What ? " Charlie asked, sharply. 
 
 " Well, he says that as he has long wanted a country- 
 house, he may as well take this as any other, if" 
 
 "He can get it," Charlie interrupted, hastily; "let us 
 leave business topics to the men, at any rate, Ellen." 
 
 " Yes, of course. What do you think of doing when you 
 leave The Hurst?" 
 
250 Walter Goring". 
 
 " I haven't given my mind to the subject yet." 
 " But Robert says that you ought to think that it's quite 
 time for you to think ; you 're much worse off than if you 
 had never married, Charlie." Ellen grew quite impressive as 
 she said this " supposing you should have a family ? " 
 
 " I won't trouble you as to their maintenance, at any rate," 
 Charlie said, quickly ; " but let us speak of pleasanter pos- 
 sibilities, please. You know what a good draughtsman Frank 
 is he is going to do something with his talent that will make 
 us all very proud of him." Then she told Ellen about the 
 picture for which an Elaine was wanted, and Ellen asked 
 " if he couldn't make an Elaine out of his own head as he was 
 so clever ? " and thought rather poorly of him when she heard 
 that he distrusted his own power of doing so. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII. 
 
 TWO OFFERS. 
 
 WHEN Henry Fellowes reached home that day after inviting 
 Mr Goring to come over and dine with him, he had the im- 
 portant, eager look on his face of one who is the bearer of ex- 
 citing intelligence. " Goring's coming, Charlie," he said, 
 hurriedly entering the room where he learnt that his wife 
 would be found, " but he 's quite thrown out of gear by a 
 letter he has had." 
 
 " About what ? " Charlie asked ; then, before he could an- 
 swer, she went on laughingly, " and so is Robert Prescott 
 thrown out of gear. He came home about half an hour ago 
 looking a more wretched object than usual; he says you 
 would go steeple-chasing over land he didn't know ! that 's a 
 story, of course ; but what did you do, Harry ? " 
 
 " Tried to take him across the little ditch on to Goring's 
 land, that 's all," Henry Fellowes replied contemptuously. 
 " I never saw such a fellow in my life : he came out of the 
 saddle for nothing, and then he nearly cried." 
 
 " Poor discomfited, founa-out humbug. I knew all along 
 that he didn't know a horse's head from its tail: but you should 
 
Two Offers. 251 
 
 have heard him talk, Harry, to understand the bliss I feel in 
 knowing he has had an ignominious tumble. "What about 
 Mr Goring, though?" 
 
 " Why. he has had a letter from the governess or duenna, 
 or whatever she is, at Brighton ; his cousin has cut." 
 
 " What has she cut ? " Charlie asked, wonderingly. 
 
 " Her home her school whatever it was ; she 's gone off; 
 the old lady she was with thought she was gone to Goring 
 Place, but Goring 's heard nothing of her, and he's in an 
 awful way." 
 
 " I suppose he is very fond of her," Charlie said, gravely. 
 
 " Whether he is fond of her or not, he 's responsible for 
 her in a measure. I never saw a man so cut up as he is abo^^t 
 it. He has telegraphed to Clarke, his lawyer, and sent him 
 off to Brighton to get a clue if possible to her w r hereabouts." 
 
 " How can she cause him such trouble ? what a little 
 brute she must be," Charlie exclaimed, vehemently. " I 
 hope he won't put himself out any more about her." 
 
 " My dear Charlie, don't say that to him." 
 
 " Oh, he is coming here, then, to-night ?" 
 
 " Yes, he 's coming," Henry Fellowes replied ; and his wife 
 immediately said to herself, " then Mr Walter Goring can't 
 be so very much distressed about this missing young lady." 
 Women are always so quick to discover, so prompt to feel, 
 the slights that are offered to, and the indifference that is felt 
 for their fellow- women. 
 
 The Hurst could scarcely be described as a hall of harmony 
 at this period. The little Prescotts had the art of scattering 
 and diffusing themselves too freely to suit the views of the 
 regular residents. The gift of omnipresence which these 
 children possessed was prodigious, but not pleasant. " Baby 
 fingers waxen touches " were to be traced upon everything. 
 The bump of veneration was undeveloped in every one of 
 them as yet, so they lavished their little marks of interest as 
 liberally upon the sacred deposits of patchwork, knitting, and 
 darning in old Mrs Fellowes's basket as they did upon aught 
 else. They insulted Miss Dinah by questioning her curiously 
 as to why she had no " babies, like mamma, and no husband, 
 like Aunt Charlie ? " From being inquisitive they grew 
 reflective on these points, and " s'posed," in the most public 
 manner possible, " that she hadn't been able to get one." 
 
252 Walter Goring. 
 
 The baby Prescott aged eleven months made The Hurst 
 hideous with his howls at intervals of five minutes. There 
 was a harmless but unrefreshing perfume of tepid pap per- 
 vading everything, the voices of the children resounded in 
 every direction, the pretty London nursemaid leaving them 
 much to their own devices while she improved the shining 
 hours with a couple of impressionable grooms and one heart- 
 less deceiver in the guise of a footman. In a fit of emotion 
 on her wedding-day, Charlie had to soothe their feelings at 
 parting with her promised them that they should always do 
 as they liked in her house, and come to see her often ; so now 
 that they had come to see her they showed the tenacity of 
 their memories, and were ruthless in their rule. They were 
 what the offspring of youth and age together frequently are 
 weird children. They sorely discomposed old Mrs Fellowes, 
 causing her to hate them for being there, and their parents 
 for bringing them, and Charlie for bringing the parents. 
 Altogether, things were out of joint at The Hurst, Walter 
 Goring could not help feeling when he walked into the draw- 
 ing-room two minutes before dinner that day. 
 
 The effects of the fall were still visible in Mr Prescott's 
 temper, though not on his person. " I'm sorry you couldn't 
 manage to get across to my place to-day,'' Mr Goring said, 
 when he was shaking hands with the man in whose honour 
 he had been invited to dinner ; and Mr Prescott deemed that 
 the remark had a double meaning, and glared at the maker 
 of it vengefully. 
 
 But there had been no double meaning in Walter Goring's 
 remark, nor was he conscious of the glaring consequent upon 
 it. He was sorely distraught about his cousin, his ward, tho 
 wilful Daisy, in fact ; and though there was not actual dark- 
 ness in his soul on her account, there was anything but sun- 
 shine and a desire to make small jokes. He felt sure that 
 she had gone off to some of her mother's people, and he was 
 far from feeling sure that her mother's people's influence 
 over her would be for good. That he would be able to trace 
 her eventually he did not doubt, but this habit of hers of 
 giving recognised authorities the slip would be a sorry one to 
 combat should she grow dear, or rather continue dear to him. 
 
 " How does Frank get on ? " Walter Goring asked his 
 young hostess when they were seated at the table, and he 
 
Two Offers. 253 
 
 could speak to her without all the rest overhearing him. 
 Frank was one of those men who are quickly called by their 
 Christian names by men they like. 
 
 " He has made lots of studies, and sent them down for us 
 to see and to show you ; and he has found an Elaine and a 
 Lancelot," she answered ; u don't speak of him before Mr 
 Prescott, please, because Mr Prescott is unsympathetic on 
 the subject of Frank, and I can't stand the way he talks of 
 my brother." 
 
 " I will not; your husband has told you about my cousin?" 
 
 "Yes," she replied, and then she paused and crumbled her 
 bread. She felt embarrassed and uncertain as to what answer 
 it would be at once kind and politic to make. If she ex- 
 pressed more horror than sorrow at the enormity of the lost 
 young lady's conduct, Mr Goring might deem her more just 
 than merciful. If, on the other hand, she expressed more 
 sorrow than horror, he might think her more merciful than 
 just. In her heart she did think very hard things of Daisy's 
 .defection, and could not bring herself to look upon calls of 
 family affection which might have been made, as extenuating 
 circumstances. But she fancied, and fancied rightly, that 
 Walter Goring was judging the offender leniently already, 
 before even he knew the facts of the case. The conversation 
 was changed then, and not resumed until late in the evening, 
 when Walter Goring got a quiet corner in the drawing-room 
 with Charlie. 
 
 "It seems," he then said, "that she went five days ago 
 fancy that ! and the stupid old woman she was with has only 
 let me hear of it to-day.'"' 
 
 " How 's that ? " Charlie asked. 
 
 " Oh, she was huffed, I suppose ; she says she was ' much 
 hurt at the manner of Miss Goring's departure, and is more 
 hurt at my not having communicated with her since;' the 
 fact is, Miss Daisy told Mrs Osborne that she was coming to 
 Goring Place, and the old lady thinks that I have been show- 
 ing want of respect for her all these days in not having noti- 
 fied my ward's arrival and my consequent displeasure with 
 her." 
 
 " Then she told Mrs Osborne a story ? " 
 
 " A gray lie, evidently ; she has a deep-rooted, passionate 
 love for her mother, and I imagine that she has gone off to 
 
254 Walter Goring. 
 
 that mother, wnoever and wherever she may be. Forgive me 
 for boring you about it, but I can think of nothing else. I 
 ought not to have come to-night, but I could not resist the 
 pleasure of seeking your sympathy." 
 
 Charlie flushed a little. There was absolutely nothing in 
 his words nothing to which any one might not have given 
 utterance ; but he had a way of saying things a little more 
 impressively than other people. 
 
 " I am so sorry," she said " so sorry for you. Of course 
 
 I'm sorry that she should be" Again she stopped. 
 
 She was going to say she was sorry that Daisy should be so 
 " wickedly indiscreet," but on the whole it occurred to her 
 that she might as well leave the sentence unfinished. 
 
 " You don't know her ; if you did, you would be very 
 much interested in her, I 'm persuaded ; she resembles you in 
 many things." 
 
 " I should scarcely think that," Charlie replied, decidedly. 
 
 " Nevertheless, she does, I assure you ; not in person or in 
 mind, but in a certain sort of acquired impatience, and love 
 of novelty." 
 
 " Am I to understand that you mean I have an acquired 
 love of novelty as well as acquired impatience ? " The tone 
 in which she asked him this showed that she was vexed. 
 
 " Yes are you angry with me ? I did mean it ; I have 
 it myself, in a lesser degree than you, now ; at one time I 
 had it to a much stronger one." 
 
 " And you think it a bad thing ? " 
 
 " Not at all if it be kept within bounds." 
 
 "Well, mine has been kept within bounds pretty well all 
 my life, so far as my never being able to indulge it goes ; and 
 whatever you may think, Mr Goring, I should never have let 
 it develop in the way your cousin has done though you say 
 that is what she resembles me in." 
 
 "No you are much less rash than Daisy; you would 
 never throw everything to the winds for the sake of gratify- 
 ing any strong passion ; you would conquer it or change it." 
 
 " Don't analyse me any more, Mr Goring. I like to think 
 well of myself." 
 
 " Know yourself, then," he replied, in a low tone ; and 
 when he saw that Charlie forgave him for likening her to 
 Daisy, then he went on, "But how about Frank and his 
 
 
Two Offers. 255 
 
 * Elaine ' ; did he find one at that studio I recommended him 
 to try?" 
 
 " No he only goes there for costumes ; he came upon an 
 
 * Elaine' by accident in the street, I believe. Oh no, it wasn't 
 in the street, though, for he says he was rewarded for encour- 
 aging native talent by seeing a face that will do for * Elaine ' 
 as he was coming out of the English Opera the night before 
 last. Oh and another windfall he has found a publisher, 
 and his book is to come out as soon as it can be printed." 
 
 " That is well. What does he get for it ? " 
 
 " Half profits." 
 
 " That is not well ; he may chronicle the fact, if he ever 
 sees a penny, as the most remarkable occurrence and curious 
 fact of the age." 
 
 " He 's very sanguine about seeing a good deal more than a 
 penny," Charlie said, laughing. 
 
 " So was I once," Walter Goring replied. " I was young 
 at the time, and the publisher who ushered my first book into 
 the world assured me that fabulous sums would be the re- 
 sult of publishing on that system. I kept a hopeful silence 
 for a year, and then, when I suggested that a modest instal- 
 ment would be encouraging, he overwhelmed me with shame 
 and remorse by making frightful calculations on the spot, by 
 which he proved that he was out of pocket some 300 by 
 the transaction." 
 
 At this juncture, Mr Prescott, who had been reading the 
 Times all the evening, came over and joined them. 
 
 " Can that brother of yours keep accounts ? " he asked ; 
 and his manner of mentioning Frank was so offensive that 
 Charlie kept her head set steadily towards Mr Goring, and ig- 
 nored the question. But Mr Prescott was not to be silenced. 
 
 " I say, Mrs Fellowes," he repeated, " can that brother of 
 yours write a decent hand, and has he a tolerable head for 
 figures ? " 
 
 " He says 'no' himself. I think his figures are full of life, 
 but he thinks himself that he hasn't a sufficient knowledge of 
 anatomy, so he has gone to South Kensington to study it," 
 Charlie replied, wilfully misunderstanding her brother-in-law. 
 
 "I wasn't asking about his daubing," Mr Prescott said, 
 letting his upper lip down portentously. " I meant, is he fit 
 for a clerk's place ? because I see a house I know in the city 
 
256 Walter Goring. 
 
 is advertising for a clerk, and I wouldn't mind backing his 
 application." 
 
 "Do you mean that I am to write and tell him this, 
 Robert ? " 
 
 " Yes," he replied. 
 
 " Then why couldn't you have said so," she retorted, " in- 
 stead of standing off from the subject as if it were a disgrace- 
 ful ono ? " 
 
 " You don't consider him a particularly creditable one, I 
 hope?" 
 
 She rose up impatiently. " Pray don't speak to me about 
 my brother at all, Robert/' Then she struggled with herself, 
 and tried to be discreet, and to think that at any rate Mr 
 Prescott meant well. " Your offer is very kind. I will write 
 and tell Frank of it." 
 
 " There is one condition you '11 please to make," Mr Pres- 
 cott began ; and when Charlie asked, " What is that ? " Walter 
 Goring walked away from them, foreseeing a storm. 
 
 " Why, that he gives up his scribbling and daubing ; he 
 has dragged his name through the mire enough already. 
 I '11 not countenance any more of it, by trying to put him in 
 a respectable position, unless he promises to give up wasting 
 his time and spoiling canvas and paper." 
 
 " You may make that condition yourself. / won't." 
 
 " How do you expect he is to live ? Now. when I am will- 
 ing to give him a helping hand, you throw cold water on my 
 intentions." 
 
 " I do nothing of the kind. I simply refuse to throw cold 
 water on his intentions." 
 
 " If he lets any absurdity of the sort stand in the way of 
 this, I '11 never do anything more for him. I promise you 
 that. I 'm willing to do this and give him a chance, and you 
 may tell him so ; I will back him up, and my recommendation 
 will be taken but I won't see him." 
 
 " I assure you he has not the faintest desire to see you," 
 the injudicious partisan said, indignantly. 
 
 " I should think not, if he has any shame left." 
 
 " He hasn't a bit what has he to be ashamed of indeed ? 
 I '11 have nothing to do with your offer or conditions ; make 
 them to him yourself, if you are not afraid." 
 
 Then she got away from him and took refuge by Ellen's 
 
Two Offers. 257 
 
 side. Mrs Prescott was lying down on a sofa just opposite 
 to a wood fire, feeling very idle, and happy, and sleepy, in 
 blest unconsciousness of the wrath that was simmering in old 
 Mrs Fellowes's heart at this fresh evidence of the supine in- 
 dulgence of young women of the modern day. Charlie bent 
 over her pretty sister, smoothing the fair silky hair ; as she 
 did so, she whispered, 
 
 " Did you hear me quarrelling with your husband, Ellen ? " 
 
 " I never listen when you disagree, you know," Ellen re- 
 plied, promptly. " I 'm always so afraid that one of you 
 should ask me to say something ; so when you begin, I don't 
 listen. How funny that Mr Goring should be down here, 
 isn't it ? everybody says he is sure to marry Mrs Walsh. 
 But I hope he won't ; if we do take this place I had rather 
 not have her for a neighbour." 
 
 Charlie left off caressing the fair locks, and moved away 
 from her sister. It pained her to see how entirely indifferent 
 Ellen was as to what would become of her (Charlie), should the 
 Prescotts " take this place." But on Ellen holding out her 
 hand and smiling sweetly, Charlie reflected, " She never means 
 to be ill-natured she is not like Eobert ; " so she returned to 
 her place by Mrs Prescott's side, and that lady continued, 
 
 " I should like to go for a very long drive, and take all 
 the children, to-morrow, Charlie; it can be done, I sup- 
 pose ? " 
 
 " Oh yes ! " Charlie replied. 
 
 "May I ask how?" old Mrs Fellowes struck in. 
 
 " Well really I don't know," Charlie said with a laugh; 
 "but it seems to me that there are plenty of horses and 
 plenty of men to drive them." 
 
 " Do you all, six or seven of you, mean to cram into one 
 phaeton, for instance?" the old lady continued. 
 
 " Allow me to drive you and your sister, Mrs Fellowes 
 do allow me," Walter Goring said, and as Ellen smiled assent 
 to the proposition, Charlie agreed to it right willingly. 
 
 "When I live here I shall have a pony- chaise and pretty 
 pair of ponies," Ellen remarked amiably. And once more 
 Charlie felt devoid of all natural affection for her sister. 
 
 Before the party separated that night, Mr Goring so 
 managed as to get a few more quiet moments with Mrs 
 Fellowes. 
 
 a 
 
258 Walter Goring. 
 
 " I want you to give me Frank's address/' he said. She 
 wrote it hastily and handed it to him. 
 
 " I am going to make a bid for his picture/' he continued \ 
 and Charlie smiled upon 'him gloriously by way of reply, 
 but at the same time said, 
 
 " No, don't do that ; Frank would rather not "be patronised. 
 A fair field and no favour is all he asks." 
 
 " But I 'm delighted with the study he made for it that 
 figure of Guinevere was exquisite." 
 
 When he said that, Charlie remembered that the figure he 
 considered " exquisite " was the figure of Mrs Walsh; and 
 then she smiled no more. In fact, she felt that the evening 
 had been a great failure, as she gave him her hand and said 
 good-night to him. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIIL 
 
 A SYREN SMILE. 
 
 IT soon came to be an understood thing that Walter Goring 
 should drive Charlie and Mr and Mrs Prescott out every fine 
 day. He had plenty of time at his disposal, and Henry 
 Fellowes was too much absorbed in business matters and 
 miserable speculations as to the future to have time or incli- 
 nation for anything that did not appear to him to be a work 
 of necessity. There had been another heavy call made upon 
 him, and now the worst was known. It was no longer a 
 question of letting The Hurst and retrenching. He knew 
 that he must sell the old place, and the knowledge made his 
 heart very heavy. 
 
 " Do keep square with Prescott, if you can, Charlie," he 
 said to his wife two or three days after Mr Goring had dined 
 there. 
 
 " Square with him, why I 'm sweet to him," she said. 
 
 " Yes, I know ; but the fact is, I don't want anything to 
 put him off his plan of buying the house and grounds. 
 Goring has made me a capital offer for the land, but he 
 doesn't want the house, you see. It was such a munificent 
 offer that I closed with it at once." 
 
A Syren Smile. 259 
 
 . Charlie looked up with sparkling eyes and a crimson face. 
 
 "I don't understand, Harry why should Mr Goring 
 seem to come forward as a benefactor in this way ? I don't 
 quite like it. I would rather have heard that the land was 
 sold to anybody else, or at a moderate price to him." 
 
 " I 'm not in a position to split straws ; but I was say- 
 ing, it 's not such an easy matter to get rid of a house and 
 pleasure-grounds when there is no farm to go with it down 
 here, so I should be sorry if Prescott gets put otf his bar- 
 gain." 
 
 " I won't put him off. Meek is no word for what I have 
 been to him for the last two or three days ; indeed, the only 
 thing in which I have ventured to run counter to his miser- 
 able little will, was in not making myself the medium of his 
 impertinence to Frank ; that I wouldn't do." 
 
 "Look at his motive, not at his manner. He meant 
 kindly by Frank, after all, and Frank has had the sense to 
 see that he did. He wrote to Frank himself curtly enough, 
 I allow but Frank has answered him straightforwardly 
 and civilly." 
 
 " Does he accept his offer ? " 
 
 " No ; but he gives such excellent reasons for refusing it that 
 Prescott can't be annoyed at the refusal. He says he has 
 had an offer of 400 for his picture, before it 's painted, too ; 
 it 's fabulous, are you not surprised ? " 
 
 Charlie turned her head away, and made no reply. She 
 did not like to say, (since Frank had kept his own counsel,) 
 that she knew by whom that offer had been made, therefore 
 she said nothing ; but she thought, " I wish Walter Goring 
 would not make himself our guardian angel in this way ; 
 there is no need for the halo about him to be deepened." 
 When she did speak, it was to say, " Dear Frank ! well, I 'm 
 glad that he has contrived to satisfy Mr Prescott," and then 
 she went away to prepare for the drive. 
 
 Ellen, being the senior matron, was always given the place 
 of honour on these occasions by Mr Goring's side, and Charlie 
 and Mr Prescott had to make the best of each other on the 
 back seat. He was a wearisome companion to his sister-in- 
 law at any time, but during these drives he was simply odious 
 to her ; and she did at times find that it was very hard to obey 
 her husband's injunction and " keep square with Prescott." 
 
260 Walter Goring. 
 
 There are several kinds of people whom it is unpleasant to 
 drive about to act as coachman to, or even to sit by them 
 while a third person drives. But there are two orders whom 
 it is more than unpleasant, it is almost unbearable, to have 
 with you. 
 
 The type of the one order is the man, or woman, who ac- 
 credits either the horse or you with all manner of malice pre- 
 pense. If the horse be the object of his distrust, he concen- 
 trates all his powers of observation on the noble animal, and 
 is deaf to all you say, and blind to all you pass. He inter- 
 rupts and worries you perpetually, to ask " if there 's not 
 something uncertain in that creature's eye ? " or " if he doesn't 
 mean mischief when he drops his ear in that way? and 
 would you oblige him by being particularly careful how you 
 pass things, as he sees that horse is bent on a collision." If, 
 on the other hand, he distrusts the driver, he becomes a 
 nuisance of a deeper dye. He wants to " ease the horse " at 
 every dip and rise by getting out and walking. He thinks 
 you a cruel monster if you " don't stop him and let him 
 breathe, poor fellow," every twenty yards. He would like nte 
 thing so much as to have you up under Mr Martin's Act it 
 vou don't get down and wipe away a pertinacious fly from 
 the tip of the horse's ear with your pocket-handkerchief. 
 He deems you guilty of wickedly overtasking a willing but 
 helpless servant if you drive more than four miles an hour ; 
 and finally, and worst of all, he is always sure that your 
 matchless-actioned trotter is " going lame." Now all these 
 things are very hard to endure ; but there is a certain cowar- 
 dice in the first series of offences which calls for contemptuous 
 pity, and a certain kindly tender-heartedness in the second 
 which enlists the sympathy even of the aggrieved. But for the 
 man who, knowing nothing of them, expects and demands 
 impossible feats of endurance and speed from the horses, there 
 is arid should be no toleration. 
 
 Mr Prescott was one of these men. He was as unreason- 
 ing as an infant on the subject. Accustomed as he was to 
 be wafted about behind those wonderful screws which adorn 
 the Hansoms of the metropolis, he held it to be quite in the 
 order of things that a similar pace should be maintained for, 
 say twenty or thirty miles without stopping, when a friend 
 took him for a drive in the country. He knew nothing -' 
 
A Syren Smile. 261 
 
 horses ; they were mere locomotive machines to him, and he 
 held it to be but a puerile policy which ever sought to spare 
 them. " Your cattle don't travel very fast," he would say to 
 Walter Goring, when they were going along at about twelve 
 miles an hour ; and if Mr Goring, goaded by the repetition 
 of the remarks, increased the pace, Mr Prescott would re- 
 settle himself complacently, and observe to Charlie, " That 's 
 a little better, if he only keeps it up ; but he won't." 
 
 " No, of course he won't," Charlie would retort. " Why 
 should he run their legs off ? Where do you want to go, that 
 you are so anxious to get over the ground ? Because I dare- 
 say, there 's a train to it, and we could drop you at a station." 
 
 " I don't want to go anywhere ; but when a man makes 
 me come out with him, I don't want to crawl along no faster 
 than if I walked." 
 
 " Ah! it's only when you're on horseback that you like 
 crawling," she would reply; and then Mr Prescott would 
 Jook about him discontentedly in silence, until he fancied he 
 saw another fair opportunity for saying, 
 
 "Your cattle don't travel very fast." 
 
 Or if he was not engaged in finding fault with the pace, 
 or employed in looking discontentedly over the prospect, he 
 improved the opportunity by catechising Charlie as to what 
 her husband's plans were when he left The Hurst. "He 
 will have very little to live upon, I can tell you that," he 
 would say, encouragingly. " And I don't know what he 's 
 fit for, but a farmer ; it 's been a very bad business for you." 
 
 "For him, not for me," she replied. "I'm thoroughly 
 contented, and shall be thoroughly happy if I only find that 
 my husband thinks as little of it as I do. Don't pity me, 
 Kobert." 
 
 She certainly never looked an object of pity on these 
 occasions. The long-sustained excitement of mingled doubt, 
 suspense,. and hope, had imparted a certain brilliancy to her 
 manner and face that had generally been wanting in the old 
 " dark days of nothingness " at Bayswater. The knowledge 
 that a great deal depended upon her that if she seemed 
 faint in spirit and down-hearted her husband would be more 
 unhappy than he was already deepened and improved her 
 nature. It made her more careful, more thoughtful and 
 self-reliant. Not in a depressed, saddened way, but in a 
 
262 Walter Goring. 
 
 rich, full, generous one, that made itself manifest in a moie 
 glowing physique. She certainly was no object of pity, pos- 
 sessing, as she did, the determination to make the best of 
 things, and the bright belief that things would never be at 
 all worse than she could bear without breaking down. In 
 his heart of hearts Mr Prescott did think that Charlie should 
 have carried herself a little more humbly in these days that 
 she should have borne these trials which had come upon her 
 unrepiningly, as became a Christian ; but humbly, neverthe- 
 less. He did not wish to be unjust or harsh in his judgment 
 of her ; but " when people haven't a penny to bless them- 
 selves with," he would say to Ellen, " they shouldn't hold 
 their heads so high and look so uncommonly well pleased, as 
 Charlie does ; it 's all nonsense her pretending not to feel this 
 downfall at all : she ought to feel it." Mr Prescott was a 
 great advocate for a fitting demeanour being observed on all 
 occasions. In his estimation there was no piety in the heart 
 of a man who did not look perniciously sour in a pew. He 
 liked outward and visible signs of things, and Charlie 
 Fellowes would not soothe him by any signal of distress. 
 
 Meanwhile Walter Goring was making a good many. 
 More than ten days had passed, and still there was nothing 
 heard of Daisy. After all her elaborate packing up, she had 
 gone away, taking nothing with her, save the 600 which 
 had been deposited at the bank ; but, feeling convinced that 
 she was gone to her mother, Walter Goring did not like to 
 put a detective on her track a piece of self-denial on his 
 part which saves me an immense deal of trouble in following 
 the devious paths which a detective is popularly supposed to 
 take. But for all this prudent self-denial, Walter Goring 
 was very anxious and unhappy about Daisy, and his signals 
 of distress were clearly visible to Charlie's naked eye. 
 
 At last his patience was rewarded. The girl herself came 
 upon him suddenly one evening when he was sitting, as was 
 his wont now, in the room which had been sacred to her 
 sitting there thinking of her sadly, and reproaching himself 
 with having been false to his charge. She came upon him 
 suddenly like a ghost, so haggard, pale, and sad-looking, 
 that he had not the heart to be severe to her, when she came 
 almost crouching before him, entreating him to forgive her. 
 
 "I will go back quietly, and never want to leave Mrs 
 
A Syren Smile. 263 
 
 Osborne again," she said, when he had somewhat passionately 
 interrogated her as to where she had been. " I did long so 
 to see my mother ; but, Walter, dortt ask me about her ; only 
 I shall never want to see her again." 
 
 " You have been to see your mother, then?" 
 
 " I have seen my mother yes." 
 
 " Foolish, girl ! Why not have told me you were going? 
 Would I have prevented it, do you think ? I would have 
 raised no barrier." 
 
 "But some one else would. Don't ask me anything 
 don't drive me wild by speaking about it ! Let me forget all 
 this do do do ! She has a husband, you know; and 
 and" 
 
 She threw herself down on the sofa, crying out aloud, and 
 wailing as a child does in some passionate grief. Then he 
 saw that though her face was worn and wan. that she had 
 gained a fuller, rounder beauty of form since their last meet- 
 ing. She was more womanly altogether as graceful as ever 
 but with a more luxurious grace than the lithe one of old. 
 She had altered the disposition of her hair, too : instead of 
 being bound tightly round her head, as formerly, she wore 
 it now unbound, pushed behind her ears, and hanging down 
 her back, a rippling sheet of living gold. The fresh arrange- 
 ment was a new-born beauty to him. He could not feel 
 angry with her, as she was lying stretched before him, weep- 
 ing in her passionate prettiness. 
 
 He went over to The Hurst at once, and claimed Charlie's 
 good offices, and Charlie acceded to his proposal, that she 
 should receive Daisy and keep her until such time as Mrs 
 Osborne could be communicated with, and her good pleasure 
 about taking Daisy back be learnt. It was also agreed that 
 no one save Henry Fellowes, who knew it already, should be 
 told that the young lady had been a defaulter from the path 
 of duty. " Her romantic love for her mother led her into tho 
 scrape, but she shrinks from the subject in such a way that I 
 fancy that love has received some awful shock," Walter 
 Goring said to Mrs Fellowes, when he was on the point of 
 returning to Goring Place to fetch his ward. 
 
 " Tell me ? How am I to account for her here ? " 
 
 " That I leave to you, 'he replied, promptly, in the manner 
 men have of appearing to deem a woman capable of coming 
 
264 Walter Goring. 
 
 any story on the spot. " You are sure to account for her in 
 the best way possible under the circumstances. Besides, you 
 are not accountable to any one are you ? " 
 
 No, of course she was not ; and he was very anxious to 
 throw the onus of his ward upon her that was very evident. 
 Well, she liked him so much, that she was capable of endur- 
 ing even misapprehension for his sake. So she prepared her- 
 self to defend stoutly, if need be, the appearance of the yellow- 
 haired girl upon the scene, and to suffer a little for friendship's 
 sake at the call of Walter Goring. 
 
 Young Mrs Fellowes had schooled herself well by the time 
 Daisy appeared. She took the elder woman's place the 
 married woman's place at once, before that young lady, 
 assuming that it was a thing of course that Daisy should be 
 very much more to her guardian than anybody else. The 
 girl with the sweet voice and the winning ways (ah ! how 
 much sweeter they all appeared to Walter than they had been 
 of old !) was not one from whom such a woman as Charlie 
 could stand aloof. Mrs Fellowes took to her young guest 
 kindly. Daisy's silvery voice, and feline grace, and look of 
 sad, thrilling experience, fascinated Charlie into a feeling that 
 was stronger than liking at the outset of their intercourse. 
 Mrs Fellowes had no faith in Daisy's possession of any one of 
 the more subtle and exalted qualities, which Daisy, by an in- 
 flection of voice, or a gleam of the eye, or a quiver of the lip, 
 would seem to express almost against her own will. But 
 such is the wonderful influence that well-managed dramatic 
 power has over acutely sensitive people, that though Charlie 
 did not believe in these things, she was carried away, and, as 
 it were, partially intoxicated by them. 
 
 And Daisy acted her part well. She was the impassioned 
 penitent the wrong-doer through right feeling to perfec- 
 tion. Every line of her flexible form, every varying expres- 
 sion on her mobile face, appealed to all sorts of feelings in 
 those who looked upon her, that caused them to be lenient 
 in their judgment of her. How far the fair beauty of her 
 forehead, and the cobalt-blue of her eyes, and the living gold 
 of the unbound waves of hair, acted upon Walter Goring and 
 biassed his judgment, I cannot tell. However that might be, 
 something about her had inclined the young guardian so 
 favourably towards his fair ward, that when he left her that 
 
Daisy Wins. 26$ 
 
 night at The Hurst, and went home to Goring Place, with 
 the melody of the last song she had sung them ringing in his 
 ears, he no longer thought the terms on which Goring Place 
 was to remain his at the expiration of the four years after hia 
 uncle's death, hard, or derogatory. In fact, there was a 
 fifty-syren power in Daisy's smile now, partly because, when 
 she was not smiling, the cobalt-blue eyes were so very sad. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 
 DAISY WINS. 
 
 DAISY GORING remained for a month at The Hurst, as 
 Charlie's guest, while Mrs Osborne went through the stages 
 of tremulous anxiety, virtuous indignation, and unforgiving 
 rectitude. Finally, Mrs Osborne was appeased; she con- 
 sented to becoming interested and responsible afresh for 
 Daisy, and then Walter Goring found out that he was 
 very sorry that Daisy should be going away from his im- 
 mediate vicinity. 
 
 During that month of her stay at The Hurst, Daisy had 
 entwined herself about his heart marvellously. She had 
 been the motive of his paying almost daily visits to The 
 Hurst, and she had been one of the principal causes of his 
 finding those visits very agreeable only one of the principal 
 causes, be it understood. The society of young Mrs Fellowes 
 had an interest for him, too. But he reminded himself that 
 she was " out of the betting ; " and so, being a good fellow, 
 and no would-be Don Juan, he did not care to analyse the 
 interest he had in her, but strove to make himself believe 
 that Daisy had the strongest spell. 
 
 Indeed, it would have been a strange thing had he stood 
 the test of Daisy's daily presence, and Daisy's desperate de- 
 termination to please and win him. She seemed to have 
 given up childish things to have merged suddenly into one 
 of the gentlest, softest, and most tractable of women. The 
 defiant manner and the impertinent expression were utterly 
 gone, and in place of them there had come a tender twilight 
 
266 Walter Goring. 
 
 that was specially touching when contrasted with her old 
 sunny, spasmodic habits. 
 
 She made no secret of her desire to please Walter. To 
 win his approbation she was ready to do anything now, even 
 to make those educational efforts which had oppressed her 
 so heavily of yore. " I 'd burst my brain to satisfy him," 
 she would say to Charlie ; and Charlie, though the saying it 
 caused her a painful sensation in the throat, would tell the 
 truth and reply, "No need for that; he is satisfied enough 
 with you already." 
 
 Once a day or two after she came back Mr Goring strove 
 to assume his rightful authority over his ward. He told her 
 that there must be an end of this affectation of mystery, that 
 he insisted on knowing who, and what, and where her mo- 
 ther was ? She lapsed into stubborn silence then a silence 
 so dark, dogged, and determined, that none of his entreaties 
 could move her from it. Defiance he could have mastered, 
 open refusals to tell him anything he would have routed 
 but with a woman who could hold her tongue he felt power- 
 less. Finally, he had to declare his own defeat by telling 
 her that he would not press her further, but that " if she 
 loved him," she would prove her love some day by giving him 
 her confidence. That appeal touched her not to confidence, 
 but to such tears and caresses that she made him forget that 
 he had any cause of displeasure with her. She sat down on 
 a low stool by his side, and leant her head on his shoulder, 
 and slipped her thin hand into his, and made the love he 
 had seemed to question manifest to him in a thousand ways. 
 It was almost as if the soul of Vivien had come back and 
 entered into this girl, Charlie thought, when on "Walter's de- 
 parture Daisy went to her, and recounted the scene with such 
 accuracy that Charlie wondered what was real about her 
 (Daisy), and whether she was acting now or then. In short, 
 irresistibly impelled as Mrs Fellowes was to watch the evolu- 
 tions of this girl, and to take an interest in her progress 
 fascinated as she was by Daisy's voice, and grace, and match- 
 less gift of seeming, she distrusted Miss Goring's perfect in- 
 tegrity in many respects, and specially did she doubt the sin- 
 cerity of Miss Goring's love for her cousin. 
 
 For Daisy was redolent of that air of small trickery and 
 intrigue which disgusts another woman who is capable of de- 
 
Daisy Wins. 267 
 
 tecting it more than a larger, bolder sin would do. She em- 
 ployed the artifices of artlessness too freely for one so clear- 
 sighted as Charlie not to find her out. It disgusted and 
 offended Mrs Fellowes to see Daisy adopt a sort of pleadingly 
 caressing, half-childish manner towards Walter to see her 
 hanging on his arm and pressing her cheek against his hand, 
 and even twisting his brown curls round her white, taper 
 fingers. It disgusted and offended her even more to see that 
 he rather liked all this than otherwise, and that half-childish 
 as the manner was, it was rapidly winning him to think 
 Daisy the one woman in the world. Yet for all the chagrin 
 and annoyance she felt daily almost, Mrs Fellowes was very 
 sorry when Daisy left her, and this partly because the girl 
 had exercised over her the Lamia fascination, and partly be- 
 cause Charlie would rather have watched the growth of the 
 danger than know it flourishing away from her. 
 
 At an early stage of their intercourse, Daisy had taken 
 the very surest means of averting anything like antagonism 
 to or interference in her plans from Charlie. Miss Goring 
 had a mind fully capable of grasping all the contingencies of 
 such a case as this. She knew herself too well to believe 
 that she could successfully deceive Mrs Fellowes ; therefore 
 she resolved upon confiding in, and so appealing to, Mrs 
 Fellowes' honour. " I am very fond of Walter," she said to 
 Charlie, the morning after her arrival. " I didn't feel in- 
 clined to let myself fade out of his recollection by staying at 
 Brighton; he would have come to think of me as a little 
 girl." 
 
 " Was it that which made you cause him all this anxiety?" 
 Charlie asked, holding her head a little more stiffly erect than 
 she had held it before. 
 
 "Yes," Daisy replied, coolly. "Different people take 
 different paths to the same place very often ; I wanted to 
 make him think a great deal about me, and I have succeeded. 
 I want him to fall in love with me now, and I '11 succeed in 
 that if he is not interfered with." 
 
 " I don't think you need fear any interference," said Charlia 
 
 " No, I don't think I need now, for Mrs Walsh is away, 
 find you are married." She dealt the last word out like a 
 shot, and she had the satisfaction of seeing Charlie wince. 
 Charlie felt conscious herself that she had not heard it en- 
 
268 Walter Goring. 
 
 tirely unmoved, and that through her inopportune twitch of 
 nervousness she had put herself in Daisy's power. 
 
 " There is no occasion for you to take that fact into your 
 calculations," she said, and Daisy replied, 
 
 " Nevertheless I do, for Walter thinks very highly of you. 
 I believe you might set him against any one. Mrs Walsh 
 tried and failed ; but I made her smart for it." Then she 
 laughed, and recounted what took place during that journey 
 to town which has been already described, and Charlie 
 listened and found the recital to the full as interesting as 
 Daisy desired she should think it. " It was very unfair of 
 her very wicked, as she had a husband alive then : don't 
 you think it was ? " Daisy wound up with. 
 
 " Do you mean that it was wicked to come to Goring 
 Place, and unfair of Walter Mr Goring, to like her ? " 
 
 " No ; but unfair and wicked to try and come between 
 us," Daisy answered. " And do you ever call him Walter to 
 his face ? You said his name so naturally." 
 
 " No ; of course I don't." 
 
 " I 'm very glad of that. I never shall be because you 
 are always sure to behave beautifully but I could be jealous 
 of you." 
 
 " You'll please to remember that I am married," Charlie 
 replied, gravely. The conversation had taken a turn that 
 was peculiarly disagreeable to her. She seemed to herself to 
 have suddenly come down to a very low level of girlish folly; 
 therefore she threw herself upon her stronghold her dignity 
 as wife, and regained her position. 
 
 Or nearly regained it. She felt that, after all, it was but 
 a drawn game that she had not checkmated her daring 
 young assailant, when Miss Daisy replied, 
 
 " Yes, I know ; but isn 't it funny that we should both 
 have seemed to think it necessary to recall that fact when we 
 were talking of Walter ? " 
 
 From that moment, never by word, or look, or gesture, did 
 Charlie hint to Walter Goring that his cousin was not all 
 that a man could desire the girl he is thinking of falling in 
 love with to be. Indeed, she eschewed private conversation 
 \vith him on the subject of Daisy, dwelling solely, when he 
 forced her to say anything about the girl, on the witchery of 
 her ways, the fascination of her fair face, and the thrilling 
 
Daisy Wins. 269 
 
 joyousness of a voice that grew clearer and more bird-liko 
 daily. 
 
 Indeed, gradually Charlie eschewed private conversation 
 with him altogether on any subject. It came about quite 
 naturally, this change in her custom and desire. The time 
 was approaching for them to leave The Hurst, and Henry 
 Fellowes began to be subject to severe fits of despondency. 
 Mr Prescott had bought the house and grounds, and was 
 very anxious to get possession of them. And Ellen longed 
 to have the house clear, in order that she might refurnish 
 a fact she considerately impressed upon Charlie in every 
 letter. The cottage which Mrs Walsh had hired went with 
 the land Walter Goring had bought, so she suffered no incon- 
 venience through change of landlords. 
 
 At last Henry Fellowes applied for and got the situation 
 of steward to so much of Lord Harrogate's land as was kept 
 in the family about Deneham. There was no house for him, 
 though, on the estate. Accordingly it was proposed and 
 carried, greatly to poor Charlie's horror and disappointment, 
 that the whole family should migrate to a small house in the 
 village, unite their incomes, and live together. 
 
 But only to her brother did she express a word of what 
 she felt. Before her husband she exhibited neither distrust 
 nor down-heartedness but to Frank she wrote : 
 
 " While there was a prospect of a separate establishment I 
 almost rejoiced in the convulsion which has thrown us out of 
 The Hurst. I would willingly have gone to Australia, as 
 Robert Prescott proposed we should do ; but this going into 
 a small square house in that miserable High Street, Dene- 
 ham, with Mrs Fellowes and Miss Dinah, is rather hard. The 
 walls are so thin, that I shall hear their voices from morning 
 till night. However, other people have stood worse things. 
 Forgive me this one howl, dear Frank, and tell me if the ac- 
 companying story is worth reading ? If it is, revise and get 
 it off for me not under my married name, though. If it 
 failed, all the females of the house of Fellowes would revile 
 me into my grave. You know that Mr Goring s cousin has 
 been staying rather more than a month with me. She goes 
 back to Brighton to-morrow; but not for long, I fancy. 
 She's attractive, and he's attracted. How about the picture? 
 
270 Walter Goring. 
 
 I hope you haven't made Lancelot look anything but rather 
 ashamed of himself. It was what old Mrs Fellovves would 
 call ' most unblushing,' to have that talk with Guinevere and 
 then to go off and let Arthur fling one arm about his neck 
 and call him 
 
 ' Lancelot, my Lancelot, thou. in whom I have 
 Most love and most affiance.' 
 
 "The auction is fixed for this day three weeks, and we 
 have to give a fine luncheon that 's the custom here. Fancy, 
 people coming to eat at our downfall! Believe me, dear Frank, 
 Your affectionate sister, CHARLIE FELLOWES." 
 
 The day after writing this letter, Daisy left her, and, as 
 was said before, when it came to the point, Charlie was very 
 sorry to part with the girl. She was touched by the way in 
 which Daisy hung about her, with the tears in her bright blue 
 eyes. " You have been so good to me, Mrs Fellowes ; you 
 have done more than any one else in the world to make me 
 happy," she said. 
 
 " Except Mr Goring," Charlie replied. 
 
 "Always excepting Walter poor Walter!" Daisy said, 
 putting her hands up to her forehead and leaning her elbows 
 on the table. After a few moments' pause, she went on : "I 
 may as well tell you to-day as write it to you to-morrow as 
 I surely should, Mrs Fellowes Walter asked me to marry 
 him, last night. I have won the game I came down to play." 
 She looked up, and smiled faintly as she spoke. 
 
 " You have won much too honourable a man to speak of 
 it so lightly," Charlie replied. Then she remembered all the 
 circumstances under which she had accepted Henry Fellowes' 
 offer. True, she had never done a single thing with design 
 to win or attract him ; but she had taken him in such utter 
 indifference, that she felt not from her lips could Daisy be 
 reproved in justice. 
 
 " Poor Walter, poor Walter ! " Daisy went on, putting her 
 head down between her slender hands again. " Shall I tell 
 you all he said, and how he said it ? " 
 
 "No, no," Charlie replied, hastily; "pray don't. How 
 can you ? " 
 
 " How can I ? Oh, capitally, I am sure. I couldn't help 
 thinking he looked so hanclsome, and he spoke so beautifully 
 
Daisy Wins 2?r 
 
 that it was like an opera scene, though the words were Eng- 
 lish. Do you know, I could hardly help singing my an- 
 swers," she continued, laughing. " Wouldn't he have heen 
 surprised ? He didn't go on his knees." 
 
 " I should think not," Charlie replied, pettishly. " Come, 
 Daisy, do take your coffee. You will have to start without 
 breakfast if you don't ; for Harry is going to drive you to the 
 station, and he never lets any one be late for a train," 
 
 "All right," Daisy rejoined. " I have seen him very near 
 to kneeling before Mrs Walsh, I assure you." 
 
 " Mrs Walsh never knelt to him. There 's no occasion for 
 the adoration to be on both sides," Charlie said. 
 
 "And you mean that I have half knelt and seemed to 
 wholly adore ? " Daisy rejoined, looking up quickly. " Poor 
 Walter ! he does think I love him so much ; it 's that that 
 brought him down, I know ; but I '11 go on just the same all 
 my life, Mrs Fellowes. It wasn't real at starting, I allow ; 
 but it's a thing to grow, isn't it?" she looked keenly at 
 Charlie as she spoke. 
 
 " Daisy, you don't mean that it has all been sham ? " 
 Charlie asked, almost piteously. She liked Walter Goring so 
 much. It seemed to her such an awful thing that this girl 
 should go to him as his wife, seeming to love him so despe- 
 rately, and not loving him at all. 
 
 Daisy wheeled round on her chair, and bent her face over 
 the back of it, turning the long waving mass of bright yel- 
 low hair towards Charlie. 
 
 " I know you 'd never be mean enough to try and break 
 off the engagement, however much you like him. I dare 
 trust you." 
 
 " You may trust me ; but this is oh ! Daisy, it 's horrible ! 
 Don't do him the bitter wrong of marrying him if you don't 
 love. You don't know what it is ; you don't know what it is." 
 
 "Do you?" Daisy asked, suddenly facing round; and 
 Charlie sprang up, exclaiming, 
 
 " You turn off from the subject don't speak about it any 
 more." Then she added, more gently, " Forgive me : I had 
 
 no right to offer you advice, and you may trust me, 
 
 Daisy." In her self-abasement, Charlie looked upon herself 
 as a fellow-sinner, though she had never fooled a man by a 
 feigned love. 
 
272 Walter Goring. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV. 
 
 THE LAST DAY IN THE OLD HOME. 
 
 SUCH of my readers as have had personal experience of the 
 difficulties and disagreeables attendant on removing, with a 
 large family and a limited income, from a large house into a 
 small one and such alone will read this chapter with inter- 
 est ; for it chronicles veraciously, and at some length, the 
 Hegira of the Fellowes from The Hurst. 
 
 It had been decided that enough of the furniture should be 
 kept to furnish the small square Deneham house of which 
 Charlie had made irreverent mention in her letter to Frank. 
 The work of selection, in itself, was therefore an arduous one ; 
 and it was made more arduous than it need have been through 
 the eternal diversity of opinion which prevailed on the subject 
 of each article between Miss Dinah and her mother. 
 
 These ladies had, with an amiable willingness to be ready 
 in time a willingness that was praiseworthy in itself when 
 isolated, but that could not be isolated, and therefore became 
 a detestable nuisance commenced packing up about a month 
 before there was the slightest occasion for it. "If we never 
 make a beginning, we shall never get the few poor things we 
 are suffered to retain, together," Mrs Fellowes would say, 
 vigorously unsettling the standing order of several things in 
 constant use, and judiciously mislaying them. Miss Dinah 
 perfectly agreed with her mother's proposition, but not with 
 her mother's manner of carrying it out. Mrs Fellowes' earlier 
 measures were weak, but inoffensive ; Miss Dinah was of a 
 more martial mind. She desired to resort to extreme mea- 
 sures at once to have all the carpets up and all the bedsteads 
 down, in order that they "might see what they had, and 
 know what they wanted," she said. 
 
 " Don't you think," Charlie once mildly ventured to sug- 
 gest, " that it will be as well to leave the things as they are 
 till the men come to pack them ? It will all be done at once 
 then, and you won't be worn out beforehand." 
 
 " My dear, you know nothing at all about it," her mother- 
 in-law would reply ; and Miss Dinah would add, " No, in- 
 deed ! I am not going to have the men touch that beautiful 
 
The Last Day in the Old Home. 273 
 
 glass and china that we have never so much as used for the 
 last twenty years : I shall pack that myself." 
 
 " Wouldn't it he as well to sell it, as it 's never used ? '' 
 Charlie hinted. 
 
 " No, it wouldn't," Miss Dinah replied ; and after that 
 Charlie contented herself with watching proceedings. " You 
 can make copy out of it all by and hy," Frank replied to 
 her, when she wrote and told him some of these minor miseries. 
 
 At the time, Charlie had very little chance of making 
 copy out of anything ; for the library was never safe from 
 raids from some one or other, who would come to look for 
 some missing or wanted article that was supposed to be 
 buried in one of the cavernous closets of the room. More- 
 over, she had to answer business letters for her husband, and 
 to act as his secretary generally; for the poor fellow's troubles 
 had made him less clear-headed than of old. She did not 
 know to what to attribute it ; but at times he seemed to be 
 in a haze, and to be weak of purpose both in manner and 
 words. She did not know to what to attribute it, but the 
 sight of it sent many a sharp pang through her heart. 
 When it came to the wind-up, Charlie was useless. " I 
 never could keep an account in my life," she exclaimed, 
 piteously, to Walter Goring one day; "and my husband 
 tells me that he relies almost entirely upon my aid in making 
 everything clear what has been sold, and what spent, and 
 what 's due. I can write any number of letters, but the very 
 sight of the bills and account-books drives me mad." 
 
 " Don't go mad ; ask your husband if he will let me help 
 him." 
 
 " Oh, Mr Goring, why should you be so very kind ? Why 
 fihould you waste your time in such a very dreary way? 
 No, no ; we must do the best we can." 
 
 " Of course you must but you will let me do the little I 
 can ? I would do anything in the world to serve you, Mrs 
 Fellowes," he continued, warmly ; " as I can only do it in 
 these trifles, you must suffer me to try. It 's such a short 
 time," he continued, in a lower voice, " since I presumed to 
 give you advice about the management of your life, and now 
 I see you teaching any man a lesson who likes to take it 
 bearing up and behaving as few men do indeed. I hardly 
 know which is my strongest feeling admiration for the 
 
 s 
 
274 Walter Goring. 
 
 change in you the development, rather or regret for the 
 cause of it." 
 
 " Don't pity me, and don't praise me," she replied ; " you 
 know we women stand either very badly ; but you shall help 
 my husband, if you will." 
 
 He did help her husband. No clerk bound down by duty 
 and the hope of promotion could have worked more unremit- 
 tingly at the loosely-kept chaotic accounts that accumulated 
 with rapidity just before the wind-up of Henry Fellowes' 
 affairs. It was a wearisome, thankless office, this labour of 
 friendship for Charlie, which he had undertaken ; but he felt 
 himself to be well rewarded by her gratitude, and the in- 
 creased knowledge he gained of her gratitude being a thing 
 worth having. He had resumed his old place with her, 
 almost the place of the sympathetic confidential friend he had 
 seemed to be before Daisy came. To him she even confided 
 the undefined dread which she had sometimes on account of 
 her husband. " I wish we were out of this," she said, im- 
 petuously, one day ; " I wish my husband could get at once 
 into his new occupation. Doesn't he sometimes strike you 
 as seeming stupid now ? " 
 
 Walter Goring coloured a little as he replied, 
 
 " He thinks about this miserable business too much ; he 
 gets a fit of depression whenever he thinks about you." 
 
 " But he shouldn't men should not break down about a 
 mere money matter." 
 
 " My dear Mrs Fellowes, I have seen the noblest minds 
 break down under the want of a five-pound note." 
 
 " That's pitiful," she replied. 
 
 " It may be so, but we cannot argue about it ; it 's a great 
 fact, whether it be a pitiful one or not." 
 
 On one other occasion, before they accomplished the move 
 from The Hurst, Mr Goring, on his way over to see them one 
 afternoon, met Charlie walking along in the side path that 
 led to the blocked-up lane into Goring Place. There were 
 dark marks under her eyes, and her cheeks looked drawn 
 and pale. " If it were any other woman than you, I should 
 say you had been crying," he said, as he got off his horse and 
 joined her. 
 
 " Turn back with me, the other way. I can't go home 
 yet," she replied, hastily. " Crying yes, I have been crying 
 
The Last Day in the Old Home. 275 
 
 till I have got such an attack of neuralgia in rny head, that 
 I wish I had never been born. All the pleasure / 'm ever 
 likely to have in life can't compensate me for the maddening 
 pain I 'm enduring, and have endured for hours." 
 
 " I 'm very sorry." It was all he could say, therefore it 
 was all he did say ; but he walked along by her side, and it 
 was pleasant to her to feel that there was one human being 
 near to her who did not insist upon saying right things at 
 the wrong time. She was suffering terribly, poor girl ; suf- 
 fering from one of those agonising mutinies in the head, 
 when all the nerves rise up in array against each other 
 when thought, and sound, and light, one and all affect the suf- 
 ferer to an equal degree, and set all the head machinery 
 scrunching one part against the other when a specially 
 lively demon seems to seat himself upon the bundle of nerves 
 on the left temple, and hammers away with both feet upon 
 some very sensitive strings that run from that place to just 
 behind the eyes when the brain seems to be pressing for- 
 ward, and there is a great feeling of pulpiness at the back of 
 the head when meaningless words repeat themselves unceas- 
 ingly, and lines of poetry, that have no special application to 
 anything on earth, insist on being pronounced with emphasia 
 when, in fact, it is just touch and go between temporary 
 insanity and permanent madness, and one can feel nothing 
 but pain. As he glanced down at her, he saw that the slight 
 " Cain's mark," as she herself called the light line on her 
 forehead, had deepened into a plainly perceptible division, 
 and he was shaken by his pity for her agony, and his own 
 incapability of relieving it. 
 
 '" Mrs Fellowes," he said at last, " do come home ; take 
 my arm, and come home." 
 
 " Don't make me talk," she replied ; " speaking makes my 
 head grate against itself." He had never heard other than 
 bright, nervous accents from her lips before ; the change to 
 this low tone of suffering despondency was exquisitely pain- 
 ful to him. He felt, too, that he could do nothing ; he knew 
 that she did not ask him not to speak in order to urge him 
 to do so. Suddenly she turned round and spoke again, 
 
 " I had better get home as fast as I can, Mr Goring. I 
 have tried to walk it off, but it won't go." Then she put her 
 hand on his arm, and he lead her back to The Hurst; and 
 
276 Walter Goring. 
 
 when Mrs Fellowes and Miss Dinah saw them approach, they 
 agreed that it did not look well in Henry's wife very far 
 from well, they were sorry to say. " Evidently went out to 
 meet him," Miss Dinah said, walking away from the window 
 in virtuous haste, " and has been crying, I should say." 
 
 " Can it be about his engagement ? perhaps they have 
 been talking about that ? " Mrs Fellowes rejoined. 
 
 " I shouldn't wonder ; there, do you hear the way she has 
 rushed up-stairs ? what would poor Henry think, I wonder?" 
 
 " Poor Henry" was incapable of thinking about anything 
 just then. It was early in the afternoon, but he was sound 
 asleep on the sofa in the library. " It has been a bitter bad 
 business. God help her, poor dear girl," Walter Goring 
 thought as he went into the room, and stood looking at the 
 recumbent figure for a moment Then he turned and went 
 out, without waking Henry Fellowes, and rode back to Gor- 
 ing Place. 
 
 They had not been, as Miss Dinah supposed, talking about 
 his engagement. It was a subject that they very seldom did 
 talk about, much as they saw of each other again in these 
 days. Indeed, it was a subject that Charlie cared very little 
 to talk about. It was not the most pleasant topic in the 
 world. Very few women do care to discuss the love of a 
 man they have liked, or could have liked, for another woman. 
 In the abstract it is easy enough to contemplate his future 
 devotion to " other lips and other hearts," but not in the 
 concrete ; not when it is concentrated upon one individual. 
 
 And in this particular instance, Charlie had not the poor 
 comfort of despising the lover of another woman. When a 
 man swears eternal allegiance, and backs the vow with all 
 the eloquence of eye and tone, to a woman one week, and she 
 hears the next that he is offering duplicate vows to somebody 
 else, a very brief contempt for what is so lightly lost and won 
 is all she is apt to feel ; and contempt is the best refrigerator 
 when one is left lamenting. But Walter Goring never had 
 offered vows, mute or spoken, to Charlie, and Charlie had never 
 had the remote possibility before her that he ever could come 
 to do so. Nevertheless it was hard for her to feel as she did, 
 that he, the friend she valued most in the world next to 
 her brother, was bowing before an unworthy shrine. 
 
 For, married woman as she was, her husband had ceased 
 
The Last Day in the Old Home. 27; 
 
 to be the friend she had hoped in their honeymoon days he 
 would be while their bond lasted. Nemesis was hard upon 
 her indeed deservedly hard, she told herself. Every single 
 thing which she had hoped to gain in this marriage, which 
 she had made without love, had failed her. The competency, 
 the comfortable home, the position in the county as the wife 
 of a landed proprietor all these were gone; and now the 
 friendship for Henry Fellowes, which, in all honesty, she had 
 resolved upon keeping so pure and undefiled, that it should 
 only be a little less than the love she could not give, was go- 
 ing too. An atmosphere which she did not care to analyse, 
 but through which she could not pass, was growing thicker 
 between them each day, and she stood alone, both as woman 
 and wife, to such a degree, that she feared the extent of her 
 solitude becoming known to the only two who might have 
 solaced her in it her brother and Mr Goring. 
 
 Perhaps there is nothing more disagreeable than the last 
 day in an old home. In Martineau's charming picture, 
 though the pain and misery of a fine old family household 
 breaking-up is placed vividly before us, the artist has avoided 
 painting the pettinesses which always add stings to the big 
 grief. On that canvas the stately side of sorrow is shown 
 to us in the grand old matron lady, and the heart-sore, refined 
 wife; and there is redeeming grace and light-heartedness 
 about the debonair handsome young spendthrift who has 
 brought them to this pass, and who sits with his gallant 
 little son at his knee, uplifting a glass of sparkling wine on 
 high, and toasting his parting glory. A poetic, if a painful 
 part of the clay has been selected. But in real life, the last 
 day in the old home is all pain and no poetry generally. 
 
 At any rate, the poetry of it was not apparent to Charlie 
 as she roamed about through the dismantled rooms the 
 day they left The Hurst. In her heart she was very 
 sorry for all the Fellowes ; she knew that this break-up must 
 cut them to the core. But she couW scarcely express her 
 sorrow for them without seeming to include herself in the 
 list of unfortunates, and this she specially wished to avoid. 
 The small recompense she could make to the man she had 
 married, for having married him solely because he was a 
 great gentleman of fortune and position, she would make. 
 It was not much, she thought, but she would make it as per- 
 
278 Walter Goring. 
 
 feet as it might be ; never from her, by word or deed, should 
 he or any one else learn that she gave so much as one regret- 
 ful thought to the vanished geniality, fortune, and place. 
 It was the least she could do,- but she would do that 
 thoroughly. 
 
 At last all the things they were to take were separated 
 from all the things they were to leave. "Waggons full of the 
 former were despatched under fitting escort to the house in 
 Deneham which they were to occupy hence'forth, and the 
 rest of the things were arranged in lots by the auctioneer's 
 men. Then Henry Fellowes and his mother walked together 
 for the last time through the house that was no longer theirs ; 
 and Charlie could not go with them, being in a state of 
 excited pity, and fearing that they would misunderstand her, 
 and fancy her pity was for herself. 
 
 If the early part of that day was worrying, the latter part 
 was simply woeful. The tears of his mother and sister, com- 
 bined with many glasses of sherry which he took with the 
 good intention of " keeping himself up," made Henry Fel- 
 lowes as lachrymose as a woman might have been. Servants 
 even servants who had been in the employ of the family 
 for a few months only, and who had been utter strangers to 
 them before deemed it incumbent upon them to bedew the 
 melancholy occasion, and speak in the falsetto of sorrowful 
 sympathy. The incoming people the Prescotts were per- 
 petually alluded to disparagingly, and dark doubts were ex- 
 pressed as to what they would do with divers rooms, and 
 how they would presume to alter standing arrangements. 
 Already the Prescotts were looked upon as personal foes of 
 a peculiarly black hue by Mrs Fellowes and all those who 
 desired to stand well with her. Charlie felt that she herself 
 was regarded with an increase of distrust by reason of her 
 relationship to them. Only Miss Dinah insisted upon speak- 
 ing of them as anything save deceitfully dangerous traitors. 
 
 '< The place had to be sold; and it's just as well that 
 they should buy it as any one else," she said. " I don't 
 see that their having stayed here before makes a bit of dif- 
 ference." 
 
 " I only know, that never, as long as I live, will I put my 
 foot inside the gates again alter I leave it to-day," the poor 
 old lady would reply, weeping sadly. 
 
The A uction. 279 
 
 Some faint feeling of satisfaction shot through her mind as 
 she said it ; she fancied that the Prescotts would feel this aa 
 a fit and dire punishment. The not putting her foot inside 
 The Hurst gates would be so very much to her, that she 
 could but imagine that it would also be very much to them. 
 
 " And I shall not take it well if Henry's wife flaunts about 
 here with her sister as if nothing had happened." 
 
 " You can't expect her to cut her sister, mother ?" 
 
 " Ah ! we 're told we can't serve God and mammon," 
 Mrs Fellowes replied, irascibly. 
 
 Then she went on her way again, making a few more faint 
 preparations for getting away, and telling herself, sadly, that 
 there "would be more wall-fruit than ever probably this 
 year the trees had been so well pruned last but that never 
 a bit of it would she touch, though they might beg and im- 
 plore her to cto it." 
 
 It was all very small and trifling, no doubt, these weak 
 womanish outbursts of contemplated revenge. But the sad- 
 ness of it outbalanced the smallness and trifling. 
 
 At last they got away, drove over to Deneham in the 
 carriage behind the horses that were to be sold at the auc- 
 tion. Every horse was to go save the old brown hunter 
 which had dropped Mr Prescott in the ditch. Even the old 
 Major was to be sold, as Henry Fellowes had learnt from 
 Lord Harrogate's outgoing steward that one horse would do 
 all his work. They reached the new house about six o'clock, 
 and found all the wrong things put into the wrong roomei 
 And their new life commenced. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI. 
 
 THE AUCTION. 
 
 THE morning of the auction dawned clear, bright, and fine. 
 The sun shone upon the demolishment of all of the old at The 
 Hurst. 
 
 " If I were you I wouldn't go over, Harry," his wife said 
 to him, as he was restlessly stalking up and down in theii 
 
280 Walter Goring. 
 
 own room waiting for his horse to take him over to The 
 Hurst. " Take me out for a drive instead," she continued. 
 
 " Nonsense ; I shall go. I don't want people to think 
 I 've any shame in the sacrifice," he replied moodily. " I'll 
 go over and show myself amongst them one of them for the 
 last time ; after to-day I drop the Esq., and I 'm only Lord 
 Harrogate's steward." 
 
 She liked and sympathised with the spirit that dictated 
 the move, but the move itself did not commend itself to her 
 taste. That he should so deport himself did chance throw 
 him in the way of any of his own order, was well and good 
 was only manly, and what should be, in fact. But to her 
 mind it savoured of bravado to go and put himself in their 
 midst at the auction. However, she did not attempt to dis 
 suade him further. What a man determined on doing he 
 should do, she thought ; she had no inclination to develop 
 any latent infirmity of purpose by using her womanly wiles 
 on the man she had married. 
 
 This first day in the new establishment bade fair to be as 
 unpleasant as any she had yet passed during the term of her 
 sojourn on earth. The curtains were not fitted to any of the 
 windows yet, and the blinds were all painfully new and glar- 
 ingly white. The sun was rather bright this morning, con- 
 sequently there was not a square inch of shade in any one 
 of the small front rooms and to these she was restricted, 
 Chaos and Miss Dinah reigning in those with a northern as- 
 pect. 
 
 It is never very hopeful work getting things that were not 
 designed for a place adjusted in a place that was never in- 
 tended for them. The little rooms looked oppressed by the 
 weighty old-fashioned furniture. When the dining-table and 
 sideboard were finally settled, there was great difficulty in 
 inserting the smallest person between the former and the 
 walls all round. 
 
 " One will have to sit in the grate, and the other on the 
 window-sill, and the rest will be cruelly compressed," Charlie 
 thought, as she noted the effect ; and then she spent an hour 
 or two in giving frantic little pushes and tugs at the table in 
 order to make the most of the bit of room that was round it. 
 "When the contents of the huge waggon that's still un- 
 packed are brought in, the house will burst," she thought at 
 
The Auction. 281 
 
 last, aa she steered her perilous way through the little hali. 
 "We've brought so many things to make us comfortable, 
 that there will be no room for any of us." 
 
 After a time, it not being in the nature of things that 
 twenty-two can labour long under inactive depression, she 
 picked out the smallest bits of furniture she could find, and 
 tried to make a shrine for herself in the drawing-room, which 
 was to be her special domain. It had been ordained by old 
 Mrs JB'ellowes that as Henry would be away at the auction all 
 day, they should content themselves with a loose sort of 
 luncheon, and no dinner; that they should, in fact, as Charlie 
 phrased it to herself, commence their new life like pigs. But 
 she acceded to the proposition partly because she felt it 
 would be useless to combat it, she was determined to make 
 every concession that might help to keep the atmosphere of 
 the new household serene. Accordingly they partook of 
 their viands in a sketchy way early in the day, and dispersed 
 and resumed their several efforts at adding to the confusion 
 immediately after doing so. 
 
 Charlie laughed to herself as she stood late in the afternoon 
 surveying the effect of what she had been doing. After a 
 tolerably hard day's toil, she had succeeded in making the 
 place look just comfortable, nothing more ; and she remem- 
 bered the plans she had made for combining English comfort 
 with oriental splendour in the lobby at The Hurst, when she 
 came there a bride. " All that ? s over for ever, and serve 
 me right too, for I did think so much of that sort of thing," 
 she said to herself, cheerily enough ; and then she laughed 
 again, and thought " what lots of faults Ellen will find with 
 all I have been able to achieve here, never thinking that I ; d 
 gladly do more if I could ; what a world of trouble such a 
 nature as Ellen's must save its possessor, to be sure." Then, 
 naving done all she could, she turned away to go and dress 
 herself, in order to look as fresh and pretty as it was possible 
 tor her to look when her husband came home ; for the day, 
 though not very disagreeable, had been very dusty. 
 
 Meanwhile, the first day's auction at The Hurst was draw- 
 ing to a close. It had been well attended, for Henry Fellowes' 
 teams of cart-horses were celebrated, and he had been careful 
 to have all the latest improvements in implements on his 
 land. Moreover, in addition to its being well known that all 
 
282 Walter Goring. 
 
 the things to be sold were good, there was much sympathy 
 felt for the sellers. Men who had not the remotest intention 
 of expending a penny, were heartily willing to go and drink 
 a glass of sherry to Henry Fellowes' future fortune ; and he 
 being there, took a glass with them as a matter of course, 
 until after a time he came to regard his future fortune alter- 
 nately as the brightest and blackest of things. Then they 
 would turn away from him, and gather into knots and discuss 
 the future owner, Eobert Prescott, Esq. " The king is dead; 
 long live the king." It was only the old, old story ; Henry 
 Fellowes had no right to be cut by it. But he was cut to 
 the soul. 
 
 Walter Goring was there, bidding for things, of the use of 
 which he had not the remotest conception, and lavishing his 
 money for the good of the Fellowes in a way that made him 
 a marvel to some people. " That young fellow who has come 
 in for Goring Place seems to be going ahead," they remarked, 
 when his nods became chronic ; " he 's going to try experi- 
 mental farming and novel-writing together." Then they 
 cited the example of the author of " Mr Midshipman Easy,'"' 
 who honoured Norfolk by residing in it for the last few years 
 of his life, as an instance of how " that sort of thing " might 
 be expected to succeed. 
 
 Three or four times in the course of the day did Walter 
 Goring seek Henry Fellowes and urge him to go home. But 
 Mr Fellowes would not go home; at first he merely refused to 
 do so energetically, but after a time he refused in the excited 
 declamatory style. " Why should he go home ? " he asked ; 
 " it would all be the same a hundred years hence," with other 
 irrelevant riders, which caused observers to shake their heads 
 benignly as he passed, and prophesy unpleasant things regard- 
 ing him as soon as he was out of hearing. At last the late 
 owner of The Hurst took to demonstrating that a man was a 
 man for all that, meaning apparently all that he had lost, and 
 all that he might lose ; and everybody agreed with him, and 
 advised him " to go home." 
 
 At last, as the afternoon was closing in, Walter Goring 
 induced Mr Fellowes to have his horse round and make a 
 start for home ; and then even the old hunter seemed ashamed 
 of the three or four futile efforts which his master made to 
 hoist himself into the saddle after he had got his foot in the 
 
The Auction. 283 
 
 stirrup. Several of his old friends shook their heads and 
 said it " was an awful thing his heart was broken, poor 
 fellow ! and he might be expected to go altogether wrong 
 now," as he rode away the truth must be told in a maudlin 
 state of intoxication. 
 
 Walter Goring rode with him, not for the sake of the man 
 who could seek oblivion from anything, however bad, in such 
 a source, but for the sake of the high-hearted girl at home. 
 Mr Goring was beginning to understand the best of Charlie 
 Fellowes, but he knew well that she was not cast in the 
 patient Griselda mould, and he did not know how she would 
 stand this last drop in her cup of soriowful experiences. 
 "If she breaks out, everything will be gone," he said to 
 himself as he rode slowly along by the side of her husband, 
 who was sitting crumpled up over the fore part of the saddle, 
 misdirecting the horse with heavy hands. Walter Goring 
 dreaded seeing her, but he dreaded even more her facing this 
 sight which he was escorting to her alone. 
 
 When they reached the house, the young, refined, fasti- 
 dious man of letters, whose worst sacrifices to Bacchus had 
 been made in bubbling, brilliant wines, which only made him 
 sparkle more, got off and helped the man who seemed ab- 
 solutely weighted with dark, glowing liquid, from his horse. 
 Then they got into the hall, or passage, of the little house, and 
 it was so small that Henry Fellowes seemed to be oozing out of 
 it into every room. Walter Goring opened a door quickly, 
 and got the master of the house into the room that was to be 
 held sacred to him and his wife got him into this room by a 
 lucky chance, and then looked up and saw Charlie rising from 
 her desk by the window, and coming forward to meet them. 
 
 He saw, as Henry Fellowes sank on the sofa and Charlie 
 came forward, eves, in those few minutes, Walter Goring 
 saw that the soul of the woman was in revolt. He would 
 have given a goodly portion of the worldly goods of which 
 he was possessed to have been able to couch some phrase 
 which should have the effect of soothing her at first. Of 
 soothing her and of lessening the shock of disgust which she 
 was experiencing. But he could say nothing he could 
 utter no word he could only feel that it would have been 
 wiser on the whole had he suffered Henry Fellowes to stumbla 
 into the house alone. 
 
284 Walter Goring. 
 
 It must be borne in mind, in partial extenuation of the 
 following scene, that Charlie Fellowes had never been for one 
 half-minute what is called "in love" with her husband. 
 She had never experienced for him any of that romantic 
 feeling which whether it be founded on fact or fiction 
 whether it be based on the real or solely on the ideal still 
 enables a woman to endure and forgive even to seventy times 
 seven. Such a feeling had never obtained, for the briefest 
 period, in her heart with regard to the man she had married. 
 She had never done more than like him very much. She 
 had believed him to be faithful, and generous, and manly ; 
 she had known him to be very truly and fondly attached to 
 herself and this belief and knowledge wrought in her the 
 determination to do more than her mere decorous duty to 
 this man ; she could not accord him the unreasoning, blind 
 devotion of love, but he should have from her the devotion 
 of a friendship that only was not love friendship such as 
 the saints in heaven might envy. Her heart could not be 
 his ; that was their mutual misfortune to the full as great 
 a trial and misfortune to the unloving wife as to the unloved 
 husband. Her heart could not be his. But her sympathy, 
 her counsel, her hearty co-operation and interest in all that 
 concerned him, her unswerving comradeship through the 
 campaign of life, her earnest endeavours to brighten his home 
 and make their union as happy as possible all these she had 
 sworn to herself to render him so long as they both should live. 
 
 But now he had brutalised himself, and no saving memory 
 of old romance rose up to temper the loathing that she had 
 for her lot, as she looked upon him lying there a helpless log 
 before her, trying to articulate a request that she would 
 " come and kiss him." Kiss him ! the convulsive shudder 
 with which she recoiled from him and the idea was an answer 
 that made its way to Mr Fellowes' brain even through the 
 fumes of the wine. 
 
 " It has been a fearfully trying and exciting day," Walter 
 Goring whispered ; " quite enough to upset any man let 
 him keep quiet for a time. I '11 say good-bye to you." 
 
 He moved towards the door, and, as he opened it, waves 
 of disgust, of dread, of sickening aversion to being left alono 
 in this way, surged up and overwhelmed her judgment. She 
 sprang after him, and exclaimed, 
 
The Auction. 285 
 
 " Don't go, Mr Goring ! " and the passionate piteousness 
 of her tone made him wish more than ever that he had not 
 come in. She was too pretty to play the part of outraged 
 wife with impunity, especially to a select audience of one im- 
 pressionable man. 
 
 They went across the hall into the dining-room. Mrs 
 Fellowes and Miss Dinah were still up-stairs unpacking, and 
 the room looked cold, and chill, and cheerless as they entered 
 it. " You think too much of this, Mrs Fellowes," Walter 
 Goring said, trying to speak in a light, careless tone, as Mrs 
 Fellowes, interlacing her fingers with angry vehemence, and 
 giving vent to a series of frightened, dry sobs, commenced 
 walking up and down. There was no affectation about her 
 agitation ; she was horribly frightened in the first flush of 
 the realisation of the undefined dread which had haunted her 
 for some time ; and even worse than the fear she felt was the 
 blinding sense of sharne. She sickened at the thought of 
 being left alone with the man who had soaked all semblance 
 of manhood out of himself. 
 
 " What am I to do ? Everything is gone. I can't bear 
 it I won't bear it," she said, wringing her little hands to- 
 gether fiercely. 
 
 " Do calm yourself ; this will pass. You will forget it, or 
 if you remember it at all, you ought to remember at the 
 same time how the poor fellow has suffered to-day." 
 
 " Forget it ! and what if it comes again and again ! " 
 She sat down, and put her arms and her head down upon 
 the table, and he saw the big blinding drops of rage and 
 shame pouring from her eyes. He went over and stood by 
 her, and bitterly regretted that he could not, that he dared 
 not, soothe her. 
 
 "Dear Mrs Fellowes/' he said, "be tolerant to your husband 
 during this phase ; it will pass directly and be forgotten ; 
 you will, won't you ? You will let me still think of you as 
 all that is bravest and truest and best in woman ; and if I 
 can ever serve either of you, you'll remember that only 
 Frank has a stronger fraternal interest in you than I have." 
 
 " Yes, I will." She hesitated for an instant, and then 
 went on, " Now, I '11 go back to my husband : his mother 
 hi& poor mother and sister mustn't know anything of this ; 
 and if I don't see you again, for a long time, good-bye, Mr 
 
286 Walter Goring. 
 
 Goring." She paused and held out her hand, and as he 
 took it the versatility of her nature asserted itself, and she 
 laughed, and added, " If it were Daisy taking leave of you 
 after that, she would sing, 
 
 ' Be happy, rny brother, wherever you are, 
 Good speed to your courser, good luck to your bow. 
 But will you not ? will you not think of me still 
 As you thought of me once long ago, long ago ? ' " 
 
 " Long ago and always. My opinion of you is not likely 
 to alter," he replied, heartily. Then he went away, and she 
 returned to the room where she had left her husband in her 
 burst of irrepressible disgust ten minutes before She was 
 quite ready to take up the burden of life again, after giving 
 one fleeting thought to what might have been. 
 
 She sat by the fire, thinking, struggling, and resolving, 
 until a servant came and knocked at the door to tell her tea 
 was ready. When she went in, she told Mrs Fellowes that 
 " Henry was asleep ; quite tired out, poor fellow." " I 
 think he might have come and let me know how things 
 went, and I think you might have let me know he was in 
 before," the old lady said, angrily. Then Miss Dinah said 
 she would take a cup of tea in to her brother, and Charlie 
 exclaimed, starting up, " No, no ; I '11 do it." She could 
 not bear that they should learn what additional cause for 
 grief they had in seeing the effect their misfortunes were 
 having on a son and brother so believed in and trusted. 
 " I '11 spare them while I can," she thought. Accordingly 
 she begged them not to disturb him at all by going in that 
 night, and they obeyed her request, indignantly assuring each 
 other that it was as they had said all along Charlie was 
 trying to separate them from Henry. She knew that such 
 was their thought from the extra stiffness of their demeanour 
 towards her, and she accepted it as part of 'her punishment 
 for her many sins. 
 
 The following day Walter Goring left Goring Place for 
 Brighton. He stayed a day or two in town, in order to see 
 Mrs Walsh, whom he had not seen since his engagement. 
 She was staying for a week or two with some friends at 
 Kensington, making preparations for a lengthened trip 
 abroad. He wanted to get her to go with him also to Frank's 
 studio, to see the picture wherein that warm admirer of her 
 
" She Shines me Down." 287 
 
 beauty had immortalised her as Guinevere ; therefore when 
 he called he was glad to find that she was at home and alone. 
 But the interview they had was too long to come in at the 
 end of a chapter. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII 
 
 UNTIL Walter Goring found himself awaiting Mrs Walsh's 
 appearance in the drawing-room of the house in which she 
 was staying, he had had no idea of the extreme dubiousness 
 he felt as to her approbation of his choice. He knew that 
 she did not like, and he knew that she would not like his 
 marrying, Daisy. But the thing which caused him the most 
 present anxiety was the doubt he had whether she would 
 let that dislike appear, or whether she would accept Daisy as 
 inevitable, and for his sake make the best of her. 
 
 For his sake ! and why on earth should she do it " for his 
 sake ? " He could not help asking himself this as he stood 
 there waiting. Why should she smile upon and accept 
 Daisy's attainment of the position for his sake now ? It 
 was no use affecting to forego all the former facts. His 
 heart had played fast and loose with him as far as these wo- 
 men were concerned, and by this means he had seemed to 
 play fast and loose with Mrs Walsh. It had only been in 
 seeming ; in reality he had never loved her less or more than 
 while her husband lived, and the feeling had been differently 
 named. But she was not a woman to forgive the smallest 
 slight the tiniest trifling though it were only in "seeming," 
 he told himself. Of all the women he had ever met, she was 
 the one most certain to " scorn, and let him go " utterly, did 
 she fancy that he had given ever so small a tug at his chain. 
 When she knew him gone as lover, she would never keep 
 him on as friend, especially after that last hand-kissing busi- 
 ness down at The Hurst. 
 
 All this he told himself as he stood there waiting for her, 
 and all this he was perfectly justified in believing, judging 
 her from the side of her character which he had studied most 
 
288 Walter Goring. 
 
 assiduously. That side was the one in which love and pride 
 were blended together deftly as are the gorgeous hues in an 
 Indian shawl he scarcely knew where one ended and the 
 other began. But she would teach him now she would show 
 him that she knew where to draw the line ; she would teach 
 him that since he had developed this fatal faculty of loving 
 whatever he looked on, he had made a poor and paltry mistake 
 in ever looking at her. 
 
 Again : would the girl for whom he would lose that unde- 
 finable essence which had made his existence sweet for so 
 many years, repay him for the loss? Walter Goring had 
 never "gone in for killing." In a light, easy, give-and-take 
 way he had played the game that is carried on everywhere 
 under so many different names suffering his heart to seem 
 every woman's toy for an hour or so, but never going far below 
 the surface. Mrs Walsh had said of him in a moment of 
 anger, that " he was a dreadful flirt ; " but this was an ex- 
 aggerated charge. She was the only woman to whom he had 
 ever exhibited any depth of devotion or earnestness of feeling. 
 To every other one he had shown clearly that they were but 
 the Cynthias of the minute, and if after that showing feminine 
 vanity led them into error, the error could not in justice be 
 charged to the account of Walter Goring. 
 
 But between Mrs Walsh and himself the bond had been 
 widely different always, be it understood, with the full 
 knowledge and hearty concurrence of her husband. He had 
 made her the repositary of his hopes of his temporary de- 
 feats of the numerous minor matters which go so far in 
 making the happiness or misery of every man's life. She 
 was the first woman he had ever known well the first wo- 
 man, that is, a full knowledge of whom was improving to a 
 young man, for he never had a sister, and his mother had 
 died when he was a boy. Through her influence he had gra- 
 dually withdrawn himself from the set of clever, idle, dissolute 
 men with whom he associated on his first entrance into Lon- 
 don life artists who never painted authors who never wrote 
 men all of them with expensive tastes and limited exche- 
 quers, and very few good women friends. His intimacy with the 
 Walshes had been very good for him; he could not go into 
 her presence fresh from an atmospere of rattling recklessness, 
 he had felt immediately. So he had withdrawn from the 
 
" She Shines me Down!' 289 
 
 haunts and the habits which he could not discuss with her, 
 while still too young for either to have tainted him. 
 
 Her influence had been very good for him, and he had 
 loved her very much for the exercise she had always made of 
 it, and for its beneficial effect upon himself. She had been 
 to him that which he had been wont to call her, " his god- 
 dess," the purest saving power of his life. He had loved her 
 very dearly, but within bounds which he had never antici- 
 pated seeing broken. When they did break, he had gone on 
 thinking of her and loving her in the old way, for man is a 
 creature of habit. Any change in her would be hard to bear, 
 and would Daisy have the power to make him indifferent to, 
 even if not forgetful of, the subtle charm which had been 
 over him so long ? 
 
 He knew, or thought he knew, Daisy thoroughly by this 
 time. He was well aware that he would have no calm of 
 love with her. As a wife she would probably give him even 
 a more lively time of it than she had given him as a ward. 
 Her love for him was very warm now, he thought ; but he 
 Knew that it was a flarne that would require a good deal of 
 fanning to keep it as bright as at present. He foresaw that 
 she would be jealous and exacting that she would want to 
 cut him off from Mrs Walsh and Mrs Fellowes, even if they 
 did not cut themselves off from him. He knew that Daisy 
 was one whom it would be stark madness to rely upon to any 
 great extent ; her love of acting little parts and her wild de- 
 sire for admiration would require a very light, firm, watchful 
 hand and eye to keep them in check. All this he knew 
 about her, yet, at the same time, she had so fascinated him 
 that he did not regret it very much. There were drawbacks 
 to perfect felicity in their union, doubtless ; but these were 
 more than counterbalanced by her passionate love for him, 
 and the expediency of a marriage with her. 
 
 Meanwhile, as he thus ruminated, Mrs Walsh was prepar- 
 ing herself to meet him and the preparation was not easily 
 made. For many years, from the time indeed when she, a 
 mere girl but such a steady-minded, self-reliant one had 
 been London's beauty and Ralph Walsh's bride she had 
 been accustomed to feel herself to be first friend and coun- 
 sellor to Walter Goring. He had brought his young man 
 troubles, his rnaturer cares, and at last his success and for 
 
 T 
 
290 Walter Goring. 
 
 tune to her and to her husband to discuss, till at length 
 she had come to love him as a brother while Ralph lived. At 
 any rate, if the love she had for him lacked any of the fra- 
 ternal element, she never acknowledged that it did, even to 
 herself, and when first she made her appearance in these 
 pages, she would, as was then averred, have been quite cap- 
 able of seeing Walter Goring take upon himself the trammels 
 of holy matrimony, and of being grandly gracious to a bride 
 of his of whom she approved. That she might have been 
 rather difficult to please in the matter of his choice is extremely 
 probable ; but to the idea of his marriage in the abstract she 
 would have been sweetly acquiescent. 
 
 Since that time things were altered. Ralph Walsh was 
 dead. In the face of reason, nature, and facts, some people 
 will persist in deeming it monstrous that a widow should 
 wed again. With the right or the wrong of their doing so 
 the mere narrator of the story of the life of one has nothing 
 whatever to do. I can only say, that having loved Walter 
 Goring for long years, within the strictest bounds while hei 
 husband lived having become interested in all that concerned 
 his welfare, keenly alive to all that was good in him, thoroughly 
 convinced of the perfect integrity of his regard for herself, and 
 perhaps a little vain of the influence she had had over him so 
 long having done and been all this for years, she slackened 
 the boundary line when her husband died, and suffered her 
 heart to tell her that all would deepen into something more 
 exquisite still an' only he willed it so. 
 
 When she replied to his letter announcing his engagement, 
 she did so in such brief, and at the same time such uncon- 
 strained terms, that they told him nothing, save that, as ever, 
 she wished him well. 
 
 " DEAR WALTER," (she wrote), " In this first moment of 
 hearing it, together with the confusion I am in about taking 
 all I may want, and nothing superfluous, abroad with me, I 
 can scarcely say whether I am surprised or not. Of one thing 
 I am sure, and that is, that you will believe that my hopes for 
 your happiness are as hearty as my regard for you is Avarm. 
 Yours always truly, HORATIA WALSH." 
 
 Yes, he was very sure of it; but the assurance scarcely 
 comforted him while he sat awaiting her this day. 
 
"She Shines me Down" 291 
 
 At last the door opened, and she came in a Juno in deep 
 mourning. A very hurricane was raging in her heart, and it 
 acquired a wilder force the instant she read in his eyes that 
 lie was rather more than agitated. But she kept her proud 
 beautiful face composed, and there was no sign of trembling 
 in the hand which she held out to greet him. 
 
 " I am so glad that I have found you at home," he began 
 at once. 
 
 " Even if t had been out 1 should have written to your 
 address and asked you to come again," she replied cordially ; 
 " it will be so long, probably, before we see each other, and 
 so much will have happened before then," (she tried to smile 
 as she said this, but found that, on the whole, it would be 
 safer to fight her battle without any waving of flags,) "that I 
 would not have let this opportunity pass on any account." 
 
 " Nor I," he answered. " You hold to the plan you hinted 
 at ; you are going on the Continent ? " 
 
 " Yes ; immediately almost. I shall not be here to see 
 you married, Walter ; when is it to be ? " 
 
 Having come to the end of her sentence, she essayed an- 
 other smile here, and this time she succeeded in making it 
 play over her face with tolerable naturalness. " To see you 
 married " to somebody else ; they are not pleasant words for 
 a woman to utter to a man she loves ; they seem to gnaw. 
 
 " In May," he replied. "Come back and see the last of me." 
 
 He lifted his eyes to her face as he spoke, and the tone 
 was the old well-known, well-loved, pleading one that had 
 been for her ears alone for so long that would fall on the 
 ears of another woman with a higher claim to it henceforth. 
 He was not a flirt ; but he really had a great deal to answer 
 for. 
 
 " That will be impossible," she said, and then she paused, 
 for she was afraid that at another word her voice might falter, 
 and she did not want to falter before him. 
 
 " Will you come with me to-day to St John's studio ?" he 
 asked. " I want you to see a picture he is painting for me.' 1 
 Then he told her about Frank having taken her as Guinevere, 
 and what the subject was. 
 
 " And where is his studio ? " 
 
 " Only in Sloane Street, Let us walk up to it through the 
 Park/ 1 
 
292 Walter Goring. 
 
 For a few moments she thought that the trial would be too 
 long sustained to be gone through to the end as well as she 
 had gone through it up to the present juncture. Then she 
 remembered that after this day she might never see him again, 
 for if these feelings lived she could never see him as Daisy's 
 husband. 
 
 " Yes, I will go ; I shall like to see it," she said. " How 
 many years is it that we have gone the round of the studios 
 together before the Academy opens, Walter ? " 
 
 " I forget. I only hope that we shall go the round of the 
 studios for a good many years to come." 
 
 She did not echo his wish. The prospect of going round 
 in the train of his wife was not one of delicious bliss. 
 
 They walked up through the Park and came out into Sloane 
 Street, where they soon found Frank's number. But here 
 disappointment awaited them. Mr St John was not at home. 
 Could they see his painting-room, Walter Goring asked. "The 
 landlady was exceedingly willing that they should do so, but 
 their approbation of this affability of hers was marred by 
 their immediate discovery of the fact of Mr St John having 
 locked the door and taken the key away with him. Accord- 
 ingly they were compelled to return unsatisfied, and de- 
 frauded of those subjects of conversation which they had both 
 legitimately anticipated being supplied with for the walk 
 home. 
 
 It had all been very well going up. They had commenced 
 when they started talking about Frank, and his happy faculty 
 of being able to do everything, and bright-hearted reliance on 
 everything he did succeeding. " He is very clever, with a 
 dash of something that almost amounts to genius," Walter 
 Goring said of Frank. " If he lives, and doesn't wear himself 
 out, the world will hear a good deal of Frank St John." 
 
 " Yet he doesn't seem to be very much in earnest ; he 
 seems to take all things very lightly, at least I thought so." 
 
 " That external lightness conceals a prodigious amount of 
 
 go." 
 
 " It 'i the same, then, with his sister Mrs Fellowes," Mra 
 Walsh remarked. 
 
 " Yes, exactly the same ; she 's a queen," he continued en- 
 thusiastically. " There 's a fate there 's a crew for such a 
 girl to be thrown away upon." Then he told Mrs Walsh 
 
" She Shines me Down." 293 
 
 about the auction, and its effect on Henry Fellowes, and the 
 scene he had witnessed after it. Mrs Walsh could not be 
 sympathetic ; she had not witnessed the scene, and so could 
 not realise it. 
 
 " What nonsense her talking in that way ; ' she would not 
 bear it,' and 'she could not bear it.' Why, she'll/iave to 
 bear it." 
 
 " And she will bear it well, I fancy," he rejoined. " She 
 spoke almost recklessly, but she will never act recklessly." 
 
 " You thought her like your cousin at one time ; do you 
 think them alike now ? " 
 
 He shook his head. " I have left off drawing parallels 
 between them. Mrs Fellowes is one in a thousand, and I 
 know very well that Daisy has numerous duplicates." 
 
 This was the sole mention that had been made of Daisy 
 during the walk up ; but on their return Mrs Walsh spoke 
 of her again. 
 
 " Tell me, Walter," she began, abruptly, " does Miss Gor- 
 ing know the terms of that sealed letter, or secret trust, or 
 whatever you call the illegal nonsense ? " 
 
 " No ; she knows nothing about it." 
 
 " I was in hopes that she did." 
 
 "Why?" he asked. 
 
 " Oh, because then I should have been better satisfied that 
 she is going to marry you for pure love of you ; the fact is, 
 Walter, I 'm as jealous as a mother for you." 
 
 " I don't think you would doubt Daisy's love for me, if 
 you saw her with me," he replied. He had no intention of 
 being cruel, but the picture those words conjured up, caused 
 the ground to quaver under her feet ; that sentence went to 
 her heart like a sharp knife and made her tongue curl itself 
 in parched speechless pain and caused a dull thudding in 
 her throat that interfered with her breathing. But she 
 walked along as erect and stately as ever in her grand Juno- 
 like beauty, making no sign of the agony, of the bitter nau- 
 seating agony that was gnawing at her the while. 
 
 There was such horrible pain in that walk home. She 
 could not bear to speak of her Me to come, for he, the man 
 by her side the man who had made the poetry of her exist- 
 encewould not share it with her. So silence came upon 
 them ; and silence under the circumstances was very danger- 
 
294 Walter Goring. 
 
 cms. Walter Goring could not help thinking what a miser- 
 able man Swift must have been whenever he thought of Stella 
 and Vanessa, since he, all blameless as he but could hold 
 himself, was so miserable now. 
 
 " You must come in with me, Walter," she said to him, 
 when they were nearing the house. " I have something to 
 give you." 
 
 He went in, and once more she left him waiting for her 
 while she went up-stairs to take off her walking-dress, and to 
 get a little jewel-case. She arrayed herself very carefully be- 
 fore she went down ; she meant it to be her last interview 
 with Walter Goring, and so as a priestess would robe herself 
 for an important sacrifice, she robed herself for this. 
 
 The grandeur of her beauty struck him vividly as she came 
 into the room again. She was a woman with one of those 
 long slender throats, who can turn their heads over their 
 shoulders without distorting their frames or faces in the least. 
 So now, as she turned to shut the door, she curved her head 
 round like a swan, and said to him, 
 
 "I cannot be at your wedding, Walter; but I have some- 
 thing to send to your bride." Then she seated herself by a 
 little table and opened the case, and he stood close over her, 
 looking at the gift she disclosed. 
 
 It was a broad band of diamonds and emeralds for the 
 arm, and as she held it up to him, he said something in de- 
 precat.ion of the value of the present ; but she checked him 
 hurriedly. 
 
 " Pray don't say anything of that sort. I shall never go 
 out of mourning; therefore I shall not wear coloured stones. 
 Take it, Walter, and think as little of the gift as of the one 
 who gave." 
 
 The reproach dropped from her lips almost without her 
 knowledge, and in uttering it she threw away her strongest 
 weapon, the reserve she had hitherto maintained. " Take it, 
 Walter," she continued, "give it to her; tell her she shines 
 me down." 
 
 She rose up as she spoke, and held out both her hands to 
 him. As he grasped them and muttered something about 
 her having been so pure a guiding star to him, that none 
 could ever outshine her, she said, " God bless you, Walter 
 for the last time," and went away, leaving him with the dia- 
 
Love's Young Dream. 295 
 
 monds in his hand and her words ringing in his oars. "For 
 the last time," she had said ; had it really come to this ? was 
 he to realise so painfully that there was truth in that axiom, 
 " A man that's married is a man that's marred?" Even as 
 he thought this, she turned back and gave him her hand and 
 said " Good-bye ! " once more. It was so hard, so very hard 
 to part ; she could only do it by degrees after all. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIII. 
 
 LOVE'S YOUNG DEEAM. 
 
 WALTER GORING knew that Daisy was wayward and wilful ; 
 but at the same time despite those little tricks of hers he 
 did believe her to be the truest, purest, tenderest child, in 
 whom a man ever trusted. He recalled all her endearing 
 ways the shimmer of her dear blue eyes the pouting of 
 the red wet mouth, that was always so ready to kiss him. 
 He recalled all these, as the train whirled him down to 
 Brighton the following day, and altogether thought himself 
 round into a very tender frame of mind about Daisy. More- 
 over, he was additionally tender to her, in consequence of a 
 vague and indistinct feeling he had, of having been more 
 wrought upon by other women lately than Daisy would 
 altogether have approved of, could she have known it. He 
 thought that the dear loving child who had given him the 
 first fruits of her heart deserved this at least in return, 
 namely, that no lingering old romance should ever disturb 
 him again. 
 
 Nor should it do so. There was pain, undoubtedly 
 pleasurable pain, perhaps, but still pain in the lately-gained 
 knowledge that Mrs Walsh loved him. It was utterly im- 
 possible that any man should have been indifferent to the 
 love of such a woman. It was such gloriously gratifying 
 love, too it was so utterly unselfish, as strong and generous 
 at what she had declared to be " the last," as when it might 
 have been repaid. For all his good intentions as to maintain- 
 
2C)6 Walter Goring. 
 
 ing perfect fidelity of thought even to Daisy, his mind would 
 dwell a good deal on the last words and the possible future 
 of her who had been his goddess. 
 
 Not that he would have exchanged Daisy for her now. 
 Before his engagement, had he been certain of that of which 
 lie was now certain about Mrs Walsh, Daisy would have lost 
 the game which she came down to play. But he, not being 
 certain of it, had gone on suffering the probability to remain 
 in the haze it had been only discreet to suffer it to remain in 
 for so many years. Warm friendship had been all that he 
 dared to suppose she felt for him in the past ; so he had con- 
 tinued to take the warm friendship for granted till it was too 
 late. 
 
 Not too late for his happiness : that would be well assured 
 he hoped, and nearly felt convinced, in a marriage with Daisy 
 the true-hearted, if occasionally wrong-headed. Not toe 
 late for his happiness, but too late for " hers," he hall 
 thought, and then checked himself for being a conceited cox- 
 comb ; and told himself that Mrs Walsh would in all proba- 
 bility love and marry one of the many men who worshipped 
 her from afar. 
 
 An awful twinge of unadulterated jealousy shot through 
 his heart as the probability struck him : " I hope not ; it 
 would drive me mad to see her married to any fellow who 
 didn't appreciate her ; it 's quite enough to see that poor girl 
 down at Deneham to have another woman I admire and 
 esteem in such a position would be too much." 
 
 The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately 
 wicked; or rather, the simultaneous birth of a dozen 
 emotions, each one good in itself, and their consequent 
 clashing, frequently makes it appear so. On the whole, 
 Walter Goring was not sorry when the train stopped at 
 Brighton, and he was forced into action. It might have been 
 an interesting study to analyse his own conduct and feelings, 
 and the mainsprings of both ; but assuredly it would have 
 been a painful and humiliating one. 
 
 He meant this visit to be an unexpected treat to Daisy, 
 and he was quite sensible enough to feel that it was worth 
 while to try and appear at his very best, before the girl who 
 was now bound to him. So he sent round to . the stables 
 where Daisy's horse was kept, and had the chestnut saddled ; 
 
L 01 'c ' j Young Dream. 297 
 
 and when he was dressed he rode out to Mrs Osborne's villa, 
 looking, as Daisy observed from an up-stairs window, a 
 splendid specimen of a modern cavalier. The small trouble 
 he had taken was not thrown away. With a woman's 
 quickness of perception on these, and indeed most points, 
 Daisy marked in a glance the daintiness of all the accessories 
 of his costume : the trim cut and careful arrangement of his 
 brown hair and golden-brown beard, the perfection of each 
 detail that goes to the making-up of a well-bred man's 
 morning-dress. She marked it all, and felt proud that he 
 was her lover, and hoped that several people would see him, 
 and know that she was a much more important person than 
 his ward that she was going to be his wife. Then she heard 
 from the servant that Mrs and Miss Osborne were both out, 
 and she reflected that since none were by to see him, it 
 would have been just as well for him .to have come later. 
 " I wonder how long he ; 11 stay ? " she thought, as she slowly 
 dressed herself ; " if he will go out for a walk it will be all 
 very well ; but to sit in all the rest of the day will be dread- 
 fully dull and tiring." 
 
 Her eyes looked heavy, and her cheeks were very pale and 
 thin. She saw that they were so when she was ready to go 
 down at last, (with what different feelings had Horatia Walsh 
 prepared to see him the day before,) and she tried to brighten 
 up, and attempted to rub a little colour into her face by press- 
 ing her hands almost roughly over it. But it was of no avail, 
 so she went down at last with a slow, heavy step and a heavier 
 heart. 
 
 There was not the faintest excitement to her in the pros- 
 pect of seeing him whom she had lured on to love her so ten- 
 derly. She liked him very much, and she tried to get up a 
 faint pleasure at this devotion of his, by saying to herself as 
 she went along, "Dear Walter, how good of him to come to 
 me;" but she could not help adding, "I wonder what he 
 wants, and how long he will stay ? " 
 
 She made a great effort, as she neared the door, to throw 
 off that appearance of weariness which could but strike him 
 harshly, she knew, contrasting it, as he surely would, with 
 her old manner before he was won. " If they had only been 
 in to have made a fuss, it would have been all right," she 
 thought, discontentedly j " but what 'P the good of his being 
 
298 Walter Goring. 
 
 here, when there is no one to see how loud he is of me. I 
 hope he '11 go on the pier ; he 's such good style that every 
 one will look, and it will soon get about that he 's my pro- 
 perty." Then she opened the door, and as he came towards 
 her holding out his arms, she sprang into them and hid her 
 face on his waistcoat, which at once satisfied him that she 
 was delighted to meet him, and saved her the trouble of look- 
 ing so. 
 
 Presently he put his hand under her chin and raised her 
 face. "My darling Daisy, how pale you have grown it 
 was time for me to come and look after you." 
 
 The shimmer he had longed to see and thought of so lov- 
 ingly came over the cobalt-blue eyes ; in an instant she threw 
 herself into her proper part. 
 
 " Think how long it is since I have seen you, Walter and 
 you all the time taken up with those Fellowes : s." 
 
 He bent his head and kissed her on the mouth till her face 
 flooded with crimson, and she jerked her head back sharply. 
 " You take away my breath, Walter," she said, petulantly. 
 " Are you going to stay here to dinner ? " 
 
 " Yes, if Mrs Osborne will give me a dinner," he replied, 
 laughing. Then Daisy seated herself on a couch, spreading 
 her dress over as wide an extent of it on either side as she 
 could, and Walter lounged over the arm of it, and took vip a 
 tress of her straw-coloured hair and kissed it. 
 
 "You, Daisy," he said presently, reproachfully, "are you 
 not going to give me one kiss when I have come so far to 
 get it?" 
 
 She turned to him, exclaiming, "Dear Walter!" with 
 effusion, and holding out the pouting mouth ; but she took 
 it away again in a hurry, thinking, " Oh, dear ! if this is 
 to go on for hours, what a bother it will be." 
 
 " Shall I sing to you, Walter, dear ? " she asked. 
 
 " No, speak to me, my pet." If any one had been by to 
 see him then as he came before her and clasped her round the 
 waist, Daisy would have been delighted. As it was, though 
 she began putting his hair further off his forehead with her 
 old bewitching touch, she was thinking, " I wish he wasn't 
 so spoony it tires me out/' 
 
 " I have nothing to speak about, Walter. I am so despe- 
 rately dull here." 
 
Love 's Young Dream. 299 
 
 " Then I have something to speak about. I want you to 
 promise me something, Daisy, darling." 
 
 A frightened look came into her eyes. 
 
 "Oh, it's not about that, is it, Walter ?" 
 
 "What?" 
 
 " What I won't tell." 
 
 " No, dearest. I want you to promise me that you will be 
 my wife in May : it 's sooner than we thought of at first, but 
 it will be better for many reasons. Will you have me in 
 May, Daisy ? " 
 
 For a few moments her bosom heaved convulsively, and her 
 mouth quivered. Then she recovered herself and laughed. 
 
 " Yes, on the first of May, Walter, if you like." 
 
 "The dear unconventional Daisy," he thought, fondly; 
 " most girls would have humbugged about it." 
 
 " And now let me sing to you," she said, hastily, when he 
 had thanked her -with another kiss, and she had undulated 
 away from under it. 
 
 " My darling, you can sing to me when other people are 
 here," he pleaded. 
 
 She checked a resigned sigh which she had been about to 
 heave, and looked as if she thought his suggestion a delight- 
 ful amendment on her own. Then he took out the diamond 
 and emerald bracelet ; and Daisy put it on, and gave way to 
 ecstasies of admiration. When she had done, he framed a 
 neat little message from Mrs Walsh for her ; but he omitted 
 that statement Mrs Walsh had made relative to Daisy " shin- 
 ing her down." 
 
 " They 're lovely," Daisy said, and she meant all she said 
 about them. " Oh, Walter, they make one feel bright and 
 sparkling, don't they ? I 'd like some for my neck and some 
 for my head." 
 
 " You shall have them, dear ; they shall be one of my pre- 
 sents to you on our wedding-day : the other is to be a picture, 
 in which Mrs Walsh figures." 
 
 " Yes. I heard of that when I was with Mrs Fellowes. 
 Has her brother found a whoever it was he wanted to find, 
 yet ? " 
 
 " A model for ' Elaine.' Yes ; I haven't seen it, though 
 we went to his studio yesterday on purpose. St John was 
 out, unfortunately." 
 
30O Walter Goring. 
 
 St John's being out was indeed unfortunate far more un- 
 fortunate than poor "Walter Goring had any idea of. 
 
 " Whom do you mean by ' we ' ? " Daisy asked, quickly, 
 with the carping jealousy that springs from vanity, not love. 
 
 " I walked up with Mrs Walsh." 
 
 " Walter, I believe you are very fond of Mrs Walsh ? " 
 
 " I know I am," he answered. 
 
 " And I believe she 's in love with you," she continued. 
 
 " Then you believe what is not true." 
 
 " Do you mean to say that she is not, Walter ? " 
 
 " I mean to say that any man who thought it, would be a. 
 blind fool not to test the truth of his thought ; and I am not 
 that, Daisy." 
 
 A queer expression half sorrowful, half satiric shot from 
 her eyes as he spoke. She seemed to be pondering over his 
 words for a few moments ; then she replied, 
 
 " So, if you had thought that she was in love with you, you 
 would have proposed to her instead of to me ; isn't that what 
 you mean ? " 
 
 "Yes," he answered, resolutely, "I would; for in that 
 case I should have been in love with her. As it was, you 
 see, none of these conditions were fulfilled. You won me in- 
 stead, and will never have reason to be jealous of anything I 
 have felt, or might have felt, or may feel for another 
 woman." 
 
 " No ; I will never be jealous, Walter. I hope you won't 
 either ? " 
 
 " I won't promise that," he said, laughing. 
 
 She heaved a short full sigh. 
 
 " You will never have cause. I shall not be a married 
 'flirt, like your friends Mrs Walsh and Mrs Fellowes. I be- 
 lieve Mrs Fellowes likes you much better than she does her 
 husband, which isn't to be wondered at." 
 
 " You believe most extraordinary things," he said, more 
 gravely than he had yet spoken. " I 'm afraid you have 
 studied human nature in a bad school, dear." 
 
 She shook her head vehemently. 
 
 " I have indeed," she said, bitterly. " Oh, Walter, do for- 
 give me ! I ought not to forget what my parents were when 
 I am talking in this way." 
 
 " Daisy, dearest, your over-sensitiveness makes you unna- 
 
L ove 's Young Dream. 3 o I 
 
 tural. Don't speak don't think of your parents in sucli a 
 way. Remember one is dead, and the other is" 
 
 " Worse," she interrupted hastily. " Well, if you won't 
 let me sing to you, Walter, come cut for a walk on the pier?" 
 
 " I hate the pier. I '11 go for a walk anywhere else with 
 
 you." 
 
 " On the parade ? " 
 
 " That 's as bad as the pier. Let us go along this road, it 
 looks quiet and pretty enough." 
 
 " It 's so dull," she said pettishly. She wanted to take 
 him out and show him, in order that those acquaintances 
 whom she had made through the Osbornes might see him, 
 and say what a fine young man Miss Goring was engaged to. 
 There would have been a little pleasurable excitement in such 
 a walk ; but there would be none in going along a dull road, 
 where no one would mark and inquire about him, and find 
 out that, in addition to being a fine young man, he was the 
 owner of a fine property, a celebrated novelist, and her own 
 very devoted slave. 
 
 " I would just as soon stay in, dear," she said softly. 
 
 " And I would much rather stay in," he replied. And 
 again Daisy began to feel terribly bored. 
 
 Perhaps if she could have known of that recent scene, and 
 the sensations which beset the female actor in it the spirit 
 of emulation, the feeling of pride, which is said to be en- 
 gendered in the feminine breast when the fact of winning a 
 man who has been wanted by other women is made patent, 
 would have come to the aid of the fatigued Daisy, and caused 
 her to feel the time less tedious. As it was, she could hardly 
 help yawning. She was bored; and he was so all-potent 
 with such much better women. It was a misshapen order of 
 things unquestionably. 
 
 " I tell you what, Daisy," he said, after a time ; "I shall 
 take you to Rome to see the Levinges." 
 
 She shrugged her shoulders. " Did I ever tell you about 
 Mary Levinge coming here ? " she asked, with what she 
 would not suffer to be a blush. 
 
 "Coming here?" 
 
 " Yes. She wanted me to go and stay with them in 
 Rome." 
 
 " Mary Levinge must have had some reason for such an 
 
302 Walter Goring. 
 
 extraordinary proceeding," he said, meditatively. Then he 
 asked abruptly, " What was it, Daisy ? " 
 
 " I don't know. Caprice, 1 suppose. They liked me ; 
 and was there anything so very extraordinary in that I " 
 
 " My pet, every one likes you, (with a magnificent disre- 
 gard of truth ;) " but every one does not invite you to stay 
 with them in this way. What brought it about, Daisy ? '' 
 
 "I'm sure I don't know. Go and make your Mary 
 Levinge account for her own caprice. Don't come to me for 
 an explanation," she said, hotly, tossing the straw-coloured 
 head. " You think all she does is proper, and all she says 
 is right ; she has unsexed herself." 
 
 " Daisy, that 's not your own sentiment ; that is one oi 
 her graceless brother's." 
 
 " Oh ! dont make me give up my authority for every word 
 I use, Walter. If you begin that, I shall be afraid to speak 
 before you." Then she laughed, and put her arms round his 
 neck, and added, 
 
 " You 're so accustomed to plagiarise yourself, you mean 
 boy, that you can't help suspecting me of doing the same. 
 Do try to believe that I think Miss Levinge rather coarse all 
 out of my own head." 
 
 " Mary Levinge never does anything without a motive," 
 he replied, seriously. 
 
 " What a disagreeable toad she must be to be always plan- 
 ning. Well, I will find a motive for this, and natter your 
 vanity. She wanted to get me out of your way ; they are 
 all in love with you, Walter, and you think more highly of 
 every one of them (the deceitful wretches) than you do of 
 me." 
 
 "You remarkably unjust and illogical Daisy," he said, 
 laughing ; " you foolish jealous pet," it was quite pleasant 
 to him to imagine that she was jealous he rather cultivated 
 the idea. " Do you think that Mary Levinge and 1 nurse a 
 hopeless passion for each other ? " 
 
 " I don't suppose you would ever have a hopeless passion 
 for such a great big-handed woman," Daisy replied. " What 
 she may do for you I can't say." 
 
 " There being no accounting for taste, hers may be as bad 
 as your own, you think ? " he replied, laughing. On which 
 she got up and said, 
 
" Woman* s at Best a Contradiction Still" 303 
 
 " Now I will sit down and sing, Walter ; you get so dread- 
 fully silly." 
 
 She sang to him without cessation, until Mrs Osborne and 
 Alice came in. She sang to him, and at him, and amused 
 herself very well, and he looked upon all the vocal efforts as 
 so many pure and simple-minded attempts to please him still 
 further. He was very much in love with her youth and 
 delicacy. The way in which she shrank from his passion 
 whenever it became demonstrative allured him ; she was 
 " Warning the touch while winning the sense, and charming 
 most when she most repelled," in a very pleasing way, con- 
 sidering she was to be his wife. After all, as he told him- 
 self that night when he rode back into Brighton, his was 
 the happiest choice the freshest selection. Those other 
 women, for all their subtle charms, had loved others, even if 
 they had unloved again ! But Daisy ! Daisy was the driven 
 snow ; the softest, richest bloom rested still undisturbed upon 
 the peach he was going to pick. She was all his own ! there 
 was no old romance to dispute possession of her heart with 
 him. Heaven shone in her dear blue eyes for him, and he 
 never dreamt that he was in a fool's paradise. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX. 
 
 " WOMAN 'S AT BEST A CONTRADICTION STILL." 
 
 LATE into the night following that unfortunate day of the 
 auction at The Hurst, young Mrs Fellowes sat on a little stool 
 by the lire, with her elbows on her knees, and her chin in her 
 hands, thinking. There was no external interruption to her 
 quiet. Her husband was lying on the sofa in a deep, heavy, 
 motionless slumber, and his mother and sister had gone to 
 bed at nine, rather tired, and more than rather huffed. 
 
 So she sat there thinking with no fear of his speaking to 
 her, or of their coming in. Her past life spread itself out 
 like a panorama before her, and she went over it inch by inch, 
 as it were, courageously, though the travelling was not plea- 
 cant. 
 
304 Walter Goring. 
 
 First, she recalled the old joyous reign of misrule in her 
 father's house; the happy careless time when all her most 
 strongly marked and worst qualities had been encouraged and 
 applauded with admiring laughs, and with an affected censure 
 that was a still more flattering form of admiration. Her 
 frank defiant nature her restless spirit her intense passion 
 for all that was new her habit of impatience her disregard 
 of every form of authority her blithe contempt, too openly 
 expressed, for all that seemed contemptible to her keen young 
 mind ! All these qualities had been fostered by injudicious 
 training, until they had dominated her entirely, and had 
 caused her to domineer over others. Then her father had 
 died, and she had learnt a portion of the bitter lesson the 
 world is always so beautifully ready to teach those whose cir- 
 cumstances are altered. 
 
 She had learnt a portion of this lesson, but she had learnt 
 it very insufficiently. It remained for Robert Prescott to im- 
 press it more fully upon her mind. If he taught her nothing 
 else, he taught her to feel the helplessness and the humiliation 
 of her position and to hate it. So she escaped from it at 
 the first opportunity ; because she was too impatient to en- 
 dure it. and too proud to stoop to try to amend it. She had 
 told herself that the situation was unendurable, therefore she 
 never attempted to endure. For the sake of attaining ease 
 and freedom, position and wealth; above all, for the sake of 
 attaining greater bodily and mental independence, she had 
 married without love, without the faintest feeling that could 
 even have misled herself into the idea that she did love. 
 Never for an instant had she deceived herself. She had told 
 herself that she should surely come to regard her husband 
 warmly, and to esteem him well ; she had vowed to be the 
 truest friend, the most cordial sympathiser, the most earnest 
 and devoted adherent to the cause of the man she had mar- 
 ried. But she knew that she should never love him, so she 
 never lied about it, e^en to herself. 
 
 Now she was shaken to her soul as she thought this, but 
 still she did think it he had dashed those determinations of 
 hers with doubt. Already he had made it very hard for 
 her to keep to the plain path unlighted by love of duty. 
 Already he had made it very hard; what if he should go on 
 and make it impossible ? 
 
" Woman 's at Best a Contradiction Still!' 305 
 
 She dropped her arms on her lap, and raised her head as 
 her thoughts reached this point, and looked at him and 
 loathed him. At any sacrifice, which could have heen made 
 wholly and solely by herself which could never have touched 
 or pained another she would have taken her freedom, and 
 got away somewhere anywhere ; away out of the possibility 
 of ever seeing him again as he was. If she could have con- 
 centrated all the pain and anxiety on herself if the very few 
 who loved her would never have felt a pang she thought 
 that she would not have cared into what outer darkness she 
 might flee, so long as she escaped from this house of bondage. 
 But she knew that she could not so concentrate the pain and 
 anxiety, and she could not shake the faith those had in her, 
 who, by believing her to be so good, had made her better. 
 
 "No, it must be borne/' she thought, placing her face down 
 into her hands again. But how ? 
 
 She went over with soft steps to look at her husband, who 
 had slept on through this storm that was raging in his wife 
 slept on, not in blest, but in brutal unconsciousness. 
 
 She began to sicken at the thought of his awakening lie 
 would be so fearfully ashamed and penitent, and how could 
 Bhe respond ? "I really hope he will not say a word," she 
 thought. " I hope he will never look me in the face again. 
 What a life mine is ! I have to turn away from something 
 on every side. Why couldn't he have left me something to 
 hold on by ? Now I have nothing. Where shall I drift ? " 
 
 Once more she sat down, and, with a little groan, went on 
 "thinking out " the subject after the manner of women. It 
 Was hard, very, very hard. But she sat up erect under the 
 sudden conviction she was not the sole, or indeed the most 
 important consideration in this business. What if she felt 
 Ms her husband's degradation ? would he not feel it him- 
 self ten times more ? Then she felt that even if she could 
 not be happy herself, she might try to make others so ; and 
 she rose up again, and with even softer steps than before, 
 went over and rearranged the disordered pillow under her 
 husband's heavy head. So " she took up the burden of life 
 again, saying only, it might have been." After all, hers was 
 a sound, sweet nature. She had a thousand impulses in those 
 hours of trial, but the only ones on which she acted were 
 good. She came out of this sharpest ordeal to which she 
 
 u 
 
306 WalUr Goring. 
 
 had yet been subjected intact, even if not purified and refined. 
 But that feeling, that the burden must be taken up again 
 after a dream of " what might have been," is almost madden- 
 ing let it come to whom it will. 
 
 Very few things come up to the expectation formed of 
 them. The thing has been said ten thousand times in ten 
 thousand different ways. Anticipation is invariably fairer or 
 fouler than reality. We all know that this must be. We 
 accept this hideous fact when we grow old ; but when we are 
 young the constant recurrence of the truth is simply over- 
 whelming. 
 
 Charlie poor, imaginative, faulty Charlie made a dozen 
 little mental sketches of what would be said and what would 
 be looked when her husband came back to his place in the 
 scale of humanity again. She grew more gentle and more 
 humble, and so more tolerant to his faults, and less tolerant 
 to her own every minute. Her heart throbbed as she re- 
 solved to stem down the torrent of his self-reproaches, and 
 be that best of friends to him a friend who could wisely ig- 
 nore, and cheer instead of depressing. She felt capable of 
 putting herself and her own feelings out of court altogether, 
 as she renewed her vow of making the best of things, and 
 reminded herself afresh that it behoved her to brighten, to 
 the best of her ability, the lot of the man who had fallen 
 upon evil days, but who had sought her when the sun was 
 on him. 
 
 Her nerves were strung up now to a terrible tension. 
 Women of her order always go off at a hard gallop when 
 their burden has been readjusted. What with her penitence 
 and her pity, she was quite ready to put herself in the posi- 
 tion of the offender instead of the offended when Henry Fel- 
 lowes woke. For many hours she had been dwelling with 
 keen pain upon the possible results of his conduct upon the 
 effect it might have upon her practice, and the effect it must 
 have upon her character. She had been investing the occa- 
 sion with very great importance. I will not say with undue 
 importance, because that which shocks and disgusts a wo- 
 man neai ly out of all sense of propriety, cannot be too seri- 
 ously regarded. She had looked upon it as a turning-point 
 in her destiny ; it was a never-to-be-forgotten episode. She 
 shook all over when she saw him rousing himself; she longed 
 
"" Woman's at Best a Contradiction Still? 307 
 
 to throw herself before him, and entreat him to believe that 
 she would forget as entirely as she had already forgiven. 
 But just as she was about to put her design in execution he 
 got up, and stopped her, by saying, 
 
 " I think I have been asleep, Charlie ; do let us get to bed 
 at once." 
 
 Then she shrank back cold and chilled, as, I suppose, it is 
 the just fate of those foolish ones to be who are born with 
 the weak habit of dying of roses in aromatic pain. 
 
 Her legs trembled under her as she walked up the creak- 
 ing stairs before him. She had suffered the first moment of 
 his recovery to pass without speaking to him, and now she 
 could not bring herself to utter a word. She had fancied 
 that he had looked at her angrily, and she had fancied 
 rightly ; it had not been all such utter oblivion with him as 
 she had imagined. He had seen and felt two or three things 
 dimly through the mists which obscured his brain, and he 
 was aggrieved. 
 
 " Why wouldn't you come and kiss me when I asked you 
 to do it, Charlie ? " he said to her as soon as they reached 
 their own room ; "it was hard just at the time when every- 
 thing is gone from me to see my wife turn away from me and 
 go off with another man." 
 
 He put his hands on her shoulder as he spoke, and made 
 her face him, and she stood with her head thrown back as 
 far from him as she could. 
 
 " I couldn't do it," she replied 3 " if you don't know the 
 reason I can't tell it to you." 
 
 " It stabbed me to the heart to see you rush after Goring 
 in that way," he went on, complainingly ; and when he said 
 that she shook herself free from his detaining hands. 
 
 " I should have rushed after a dog that was leaving mo 
 alone with you then," she exclaimed in a quick low tone. 
 
 " And he consoled you, I suppose consoled you for 
 having a husband, who is such a poor creature that he feels 
 it when all his old friends give him the cold shoulder," his 
 voice broke with a sob ; but he recovered, and went on imme- 
 diately, " by heaven, Goring shall not play that game here." 
 
 The last part of the sentence was injudicious; she had 
 softened when he spoke of old friends giving him the cold 
 shoulder but the allusion to Walter Goring stung her. 
 
308 Walter Goring. 
 
 " Leave his name out of the question " 
 
 " But I won't leave his name out of the question ; I '11 
 have no man coming here supplanting me with my wife, and 
 showing her what a much finer fellow he would be under the 
 circumstances. I '11 have no sneaking hound " 
 
 " Witt you stop ?" she asked. 
 
 " Yes ; when I have finished. It was a mean thing a 
 mean thing of any fellow to do. You both thought me 
 senseless, I suppose, because I was sleepy." 
 
 " Why will you force me to remember what you were ? " 
 she asked, contemptuously. 
 
 " I daresay Goring took care to impress what I was upon 
 you." 
 
 " You are mad." 
 
 She walked towards the door as she spoke. As she 
 opened it he went after her, and laid his hand on her arm. 
 
 " Charlie, where are you going ? " 
 
 "Down-stairs; let me go let me go! I'm afraid to stay 
 here to-night." 
 
 " Afraid of me ? " 
 
 " No, of myself." She was speaking the truth ; she was 
 terribly afraid that she might say or do something which 
 could never be unsaid or undone. The barrier between them 
 was quite high enough already. 
 
 " What do you want ? tell me what you want." 
 
 " I want nothing but to be let go," and as she said 
 it, she twitched her arm away from under his hand. 
 
 " I '11 have no nonsense of the kind ; " he put his arm round 
 her, and drew her back almost roughly into the room, locking 
 the door as he did so. " The mischief has gone farther than 
 I thought ; fallen as you fancy me, madam, I '11 show you that 
 I am strong enough to put a stop to the puling romance of 
 that fellow." Her strength was weakness when he said 
 that, all her good resolutions failed, and she was nearly 
 shaken to pieces by the storm of fury that swept across her 
 soul. 
 
 " If you degrade me by acting as you say you will, I '11 
 leave you." 
 
 " Desert me in my difficulties," he almost whined. 
 
 " Oh ! if you only knew what I would have done for yon, 
 and how cheerfully I would have shared whatever troubles 
 
In Doubt. 309 
 
 you have," she exclaimed, as the tide of fury ebbed again ; 
 *' but how can I hope to make you understand that when 
 you misunderstand the best friend you have." 
 
 " Meaning Walter Goring ? " he asked. 
 
 " Yes ; meaning Walter Goring," she replied, and her voice 
 thrilled as she named him. 
 
 "Well; I want no more of his friendship," Henry Fellowes 
 said sullenly. His head was aching violently by this time, 
 and he was uncomfortably conscious of several things. 
 Amongst others that the ache served him right that he had 
 not been absolutely victorious in this first matrimonial tussle 
 and that he had to get up early the following morning to 
 ride round another man's land. After all there was much to 
 be urged in extenuation of what he had said, and what he 
 had done ; and so Charlie came to feel when he left off talk- 
 ing to her, and she was free to reason and reproach herself 
 again. 
 
 The following day she heard that the Prescotts would be 
 down almost immediately, and that Walter Goring had gone 
 to Brighton ; and she told herself that " it was better far 
 that he should go than stay," and hoped that she might not 
 see him again until after his marriage. 
 
 CHAPTER XL. 
 
 IN DOUBT. 
 
 THE dulness and monotony of both feeling and action which 
 set in in the Fellowes's household after that first unfortunate 
 quarrel between Charlie and her husband, was broken after a 
 few weeks by an active annoyance. The Prescotts came 
 down, and notified their arrival very shortly to Charlie in a 
 message requesting her to go up and see her sister the follow- 
 ing morning. 
 
 They were sitting at dinner when the message was de- 
 livered, and it told on each member of the party at once. 
 The words " John has come down from The Hurst to say, 
 
3io Walter Goring. 
 
 &c." were hardly out of the servant's mouth before Henry 
 Fellowes lost his appetite, and laid down his knife and fork. 
 John had been one of his own grooms. The Hurst had been 
 the home of the Felloweses for generations. Charlie saw and 
 sympathised with his emotion, but it was no use increasing it 
 by noticing it just then. So she said, 
 
 " Give my love to Mrs Prescott, and say I '11 be up with 
 her in the morning." 
 
 " I think, considering all things, that Mrs Prescott might 
 have had the good feeling to call on us first," old Mrs Fel- 
 lowes exclaimed, as soon as they were alone. 
 
 " Ellen never does consider all things," Charlie replied, 
 good-humouredly. She was still in Mrs Fellowes's black 
 books for having kept Henry to herself on the night of the 
 auction. The exacting mother little knew how willingly her 
 son would have been released then and for ever by that young 
 jealously-watched detaining power. 
 
 "More shame for her, then." the old lady replied, tartly; 
 on which Miss Dinah remarked, 
 
 u Just so ; but it's not Mrs Henry's fault." 
 
 Charlie felt grateful to Miss Dinah. It was not active 
 partisanship or even zealous partisanship ; but young Mrs 
 Fellowes did not, therefore, think the less of it. Indeed, on 
 the whole, she rather preferred that which resembled the 
 violet that which was just felt in the atmosphere, and not. 
 too plainly seen. Active and zealous partisans take high 
 rank in the army of friends from whom we pray to be de- 
 livered. 
 
 " Perhaps you will walk over with me," she suggested. 
 " I can hardly fancy Ellen in a half-empty house arranging 
 things." 
 
 " Oh, your sister has come to every comfort, every com- 
 fort," Mrs Fellowes said, seriously, as if there were something 
 impious and to be regretted in the fact. " I am sure I only 
 hope that it may last. / don't wish them ill. Furniture 
 sent down from London days before the family arrive, and 
 men sent down to arrange it ! I hope it may last." 
 
 Charlie did not echo the expression of this hope, partly 
 because she dared not do it, and partly because it did seem 
 to her a matter of very small moment whether Mr Prescott's 
 new goods and chattels " lasted " or not. She was conscious, 
 
In Doubt. 311 
 
 too, of a faint feeling of pleasure in the prospect of having 
 her sister near her for a time. Ellen, though not a too con- 
 genial, would he a safe and tender-hearted companion, and 
 she clung now to what was safe and kind. There had been 
 danger in the sympathetic interest which had been the off- 
 spring of tco congenial a mind ; and there was utter bank- 
 ruptcy at home. Every bill she had drawn of late had been 
 dishonoured. These things conspired to make her glad even 
 of the prospect of Ellen's society, and desirous of keeping the 
 peace, and so enjoying that society without verbal molestation. 
 
 That conjugal scene of the unfortunate auction day had 
 been repeated several times with variations. Mr Fellowes, 
 who in the days of his prosperity had seemed to be as strong- 
 headed as he was soft-hearted, was becoming surely, and, 
 alas! not very slowly, a sorrow and spirit-sodden man. 
 Charlie thought that it was the pecuniary ruin which had 
 befallen him which preyed upon him, and this roused her 
 contempt. But she wronged him there. Had she known 
 the truth, her anger and contempt would have deepened. 
 He had taken in a vague jealousy of his friend and distrust 
 of his wife, and under the influence of these feelings he went 
 a very good way to give himself cause for both, had the 
 nature he was blindly striving to alter been worse than it was. 
 
 After that one outburst of feeling when he had made the 
 miserable mistake of charging Walter Goring and herself 
 with playing a double part a dubious game Charlie had 
 accepted the situation, and bravely, if not cheerfully, made 
 the best of it. " It would have been better for us both if 
 you had not spoken as you did last night, Henry," she said 
 to him the following morning ; " but since you have said so 
 much, I must say a little more. You said you would not 
 have Mr Goring come here again. Even if you hadn't said 
 it, I should." 
 
 " Why so ? " he asked. 
 
 " Why, because I should get fond of him, probably," she 
 replied, recklessly. " Stop, don't say a word ; he 'd despise 
 me as much for it as you would, and I have a greater respect 
 for his opinion than for that of any other human being. 
 How should it be otherwise ? ask yourself." 
 
 She was no hypocrite, therefore she told all that there was 
 to tell about herself. But on the other hand, she was no 
 
312 Walter Goring. 
 
 traitor, therefore she said no word relative to Walter Goring's 
 share in the matter. 
 
 Having made a clean breast of it, she seemed even to 
 Henry Fellowes's jealous observation to forget her avowal and 
 the subject of it altogether. As she had been a cipher at the 
 Hurst, so she was a cipher in the new household ; but the 
 small part that was assigned to her she accepted and played 
 out bravely and contentedly. He could find no fault with 
 her. Her round of duties was not large, certainly, but she 
 never left one of them unfulfilled. She bore with the petty 
 details of domestic life which his mother and sister insisted 
 upon wearying her with, patiently. She devoted her ener- 
 gies to serving him, in every way in which it came within the 
 scope of her power to serve him, assiduously as ever. She 
 cleared up what he confused frequently. She never suffered 
 him to forget an appointment of which she had once heard. 
 With the spasmodic energy that was one of her most promi- 
 nent characteristics, she got up hard dry details connected with 
 the management of land and property of a similar nature to 
 that of which her husband was now steward, and arranged 
 facts and successful experiments and promising schemes, in 
 such a way as enabled him to grasp and act upon them often. 
 Her mind and her memory were invaluable to him, and were 
 always ready at his call, and yet what was it ? He felt 
 that, had they been in different hemispheres, they could not 
 have been more widely asunder than they were ; and she felt 
 the same, only far more keenly and remorsefully. She never 
 reproached him, though cause was not wanting. She never 
 recoiled from him outwardly. She carried herself so con- 
 tentedly, that her " pluck " became the theme of a hymn of 
 praise which was constantly being chanted in her husband's 
 ears. But he would willingly have bartered away all these for 
 one love-glance from the quiet eyes whose language was a 
 mystery to him for one fond touch from the little hand that 
 was as unwearied in his service as it was unwilling to meet 
 his. But these would never be his now never, never ! He 
 strove to drown his knowledge of the fact, and the drowning 
 it made the fact itself more fatally certain. 
 
 However, externally all things were fair, that is to say, 
 they were as fair as things ever are in a household where the 
 means are small, and the members not united by any very 
 
In Doubt. 313 
 
 strong bond of love. On second thoughts I am far from 
 feeling that the latter condition makes the slightest difference, 
 so I will amend the phrase. Things were as fair as a person 
 who had nothing to gain and little to lose, and who was yet 
 resolved to hold on by that which was, could make them. 
 
 Before Charlie went up to The Hurst to see her sister 
 according to promise, she received a note from Frank : 
 
 "MY DEAR CHARLIE," (he wrote): "Your- book is an- 
 nounced, in two volumes. I have been through the proofs 
 for you. I think it will do very well, but don't be down- 
 hearted even if it should not. A letter from Goring puts to 
 flight my intention of trying to get 'Elaine' into the Academy. 
 He wants to have it to give to his cousin the day they 're 
 married, which is to be in May, he tells me. I saw* Prescott 
 yesterday in a shooting-coat and a wideawake ; the sight was 
 pleasant. He was just off to The Hurst, he told me. I '11 
 send you any notices that may appear of your book, and be 
 down soon to see how you are all getting on. Your affec- 
 tionate brother, FRANK." 
 
 This letter gave her plenty to think about as she walked 
 ap to The Hurst. It afforded her pleasant yes, of course it 
 was pleasant, though confusing just at first matter of re- 
 flection. Her book out, and Walter Goring to be married 
 in May ! Delightful brace of facts. 
 
 " I wish we had gone to Australia," she sighed, as she went 
 into the house, and was immediately fallen upon by all the 
 young Prescotts. Then she walked into what had been the 
 drab dull drawing-room, and found it strangely metamor- 
 phosed. But Ellen was sitting there, and the sight of her, 
 cool, and calm, and pinkily pretty as ever, did much towards 
 reconciling incongruities. 
 
 " I J m glad you have come so early, dear," Mrs Prescott 
 said, as she met her sister. " I wouldn't decide on the cur- 
 tains for the bedrooms till you came ; you have such taste." 
 
 " My taste is at your service. Don't say by-and-by, 
 though, when Eobert makes long lips about the bills, that 
 you would have had the cheaper things if it hadn't been for 
 me. I remember the ire and scorn I brought upon myself 
 by exercising my taste when you were remodelling your 
 Bayswater drawing-room. How pretty all this is," she 
 
3 14 Walter Goring. 
 
 continued, looking round the room. "The difference be- 
 tween this room now and the first time I saw it ! " 
 
 " Yes, it is pretty, I must drive you home after luncheon 
 and see your house, I daresay it is pretty too, though 
 small," Ellen replied, with the pretentious feeble magnanimity 
 of her order. 
 
 Charlie laughed. " I think I will leave you to form an 
 unbiassed judgment, Ellen ; come and show me all the rooma, 
 will you ? " 
 
 Mrs Prescott was auspicious, so they went together from 
 room to room, Charlie taking as hearty an interest in, and 
 expressing as unfeigned an admiration for, the improvements 
 and alterations as though this place had never been her own. 
 At last it occurred to Mrs Prescott to say, 
 
 " I hope you don't mind it, Charlie ? " 
 
 " Mind what ? Why, I 'm delighted." 
 
 " I mean, I hope you don't feel my being here, in what 
 was your home once." 
 
 " Indeed, no, Ellen," she said, sincerely : she had so much 
 more to weigh her heart down and cloud her happiness, than 
 the loss of what had never been dear to her. 
 
 " I was afraid you might ; oh, dear, what an unfortunate 
 thing that marriage has been for you, Charlie. What a 
 lottery marriage is, isn't it ? " 
 
 " I seem to have heard the remark before," Charlie replied, 
 trying to laugh carelessly, but catching her breath, and nearly 
 choking in the attempt. " At any rate, Ellen, we 've drawn, 
 there is nothing more to be said." 
 
 " No, nothing ; and, as Kobert says, if it has been bad for 
 you, it has been good for us. We wanted a house in the 
 country, and this suits us charmingly ; it 's an ill wind that 
 blows nobody any good." 
 
 " Exactly so ; let those words be the last requiem sung 
 over the grave of my dead fortunes, dear. What a joyous 
 time this is for the children, there 's no one to look after them ; 
 how well Ella looks ; she '11 be as pretty as her mother." So 
 she ran on until she had succeeded in luring Mrs Prescott's 
 though' s entirely away from the too suggestive subject of her 
 own marriage and its consequences. 
 
 At luncheon, Mr Prescott appeared, looking very country- 
 gentlemanly in his shooting-coat. It was the first garment 
 
/;/ Doubt. 315 
 
 of tlie sort into which he bad ever inducted himself, and he 
 was very conscious of it. He could not help giving Charlie 
 a dubious deprecatory glance when he met her; her eyes 
 danced and the corners of her mouth went up. " I shouldn't 
 wonder if that brother of hers has sent her a stupid caricature 
 of me in this costume already," he thought. " I saw him 
 laugh. Both these young people are much too fond of laugh- 
 ing for their position in life." 
 
 He told his sister-in-law that he should get her husband 
 to look out for a riding-horse for him. " A nice nag, steady, 
 with a good spirit, one that will take me along over any 
 thing," he said, jauntily, forgetting the ditch and the brown 
 hunter. 
 
 " I 'm sure he will do it with pleasure ; and I hope that 
 you'll keep a riding-horse for Ellen, and then when she 
 doesn't want it she '11 lend it to me ; won't you, dear ? " 
 
 Mr and Mrs Prescott both looked pleased. Charlie was 
 so thoroughly at her ease, so entirely resigned to the inferior 
 position, so enchantingly willing to accept the goods they 
 and the gods gave her. Mr Prescott loved to patronise 
 people when he could do it inexpensively. Charlie's manner 
 developed this love of patronage now. 
 
 " Of course she will lend it to you," he said, pompously ; 
 " in fact, any little pleasures that we can put in your way we 
 shall put in your way." 
 
 " You 're very good," she replied. She was not heeding 
 either the matter or the manner of his speech ; she was 
 thinking of that event which was to come off in May, and 
 hoping that they would be happier than she herself was. 
 
 " We shall entertain a good deal," Mr Prescott went on in 
 an expansive manner " We shall entertain a good deal 
 and I may say in a good way and we shall always expect to 
 see you." 
 
 " And in that way you will get asked out by other people 
 who will meet you here," Ellen struck in, in the lavishly ex- 
 planatory manner. 
 
 "Get what ? " Charlie interrupted. 
 
 " Asked out invited to parties, you know." 
 
 Charlie began to laugh, then she checked herself, reflecting 
 that it wa.s hopeless trying to make them understand why the 
 prospect they were seeking to open to her seemed absurd, 
 
316 Walter Goring. 
 
 They were meaning well, and she was much more alive to, 
 and grateful for, anything that was kindly meant, than she 
 had been when we knew her first. They would think her 
 envious and soured, perhaps, if she explained to them that 
 under all the circumstances there was more pleasure to her in 
 absolute solitude than in any number of little evening parties. 
 They would think her soured, whereas it was only her perfect 
 appreciation of the expediency and propriety, nay more, of 
 the absolute necessity, of the give-and-take system of society 
 which dictated the feeling. Sp she checked her laugh, and 
 asked Eobert Prescott another small favour on the spot, in 
 order that he might not think her ungrateful for his more 
 lofty and glorious designs in her behalf. 
 
 " Give me a lot of flowers to take home with me to- day, 
 Robert, will you ? " 
 
 " Of course," Ellen replied. " How dull you must be often, 
 Charlie." 
 
 " Not often ; I manage to get a good deal of time quite to 
 myself," Charlie replied, unguardedly. 
 
 Robert Prescott looked up at her sharply. 
 
 " A good deal of time quite to themselves is what most 
 young wives would consider very dull work," he said, more 
 gently than he had ever spoken to her in his life before. The 
 touch of truth in her tone had gone home to him. He felt 
 at once that all was not well even as outsiders supposed in 
 this marriage which she had made ; and his conscience, though 
 it did not pinch him severely by any means, told him why 
 she had made it. She blushed as he spoke, and when he 
 paused and looked at her for an answer, she said, 
 
 " I never was romantic, you know, Robert ; my own is the 
 only society of which I should never tire, I believe." Then 
 for the sake of appearances she attempted an equivocation, 
 and added, " And as my husband is compelled to be away 
 from me a great deal, I nurse the feeling as much as possible 
 in order to keep contented." 
 
 In about a month after this, Frank fulfilled his promise of 
 sending her all the notices that had appeared of her first 
 venture on the literary ocean. The book itself had come 
 down before, and had been carefully read by each member of 
 both families ; but remarks upon it in each case, save Robert 
 Prescott's, had been reserved. Mr Prescott, Charlie heard 
 
In Doubt. 317 
 
 through Ellen, disapproved of her having published under her 
 maiden name. 
 
 " It seems to me that that concerns Frank more than it 
 does Robert, and Frank advised it," Charlie argued. " Never 
 mind about that. What does Robert think of the book ? " 
 
 " Well, he thinks it has some merit some, you know." 
 
 This, though it could not come under the head of rash 
 encouragement, was more than Charlie had expected. She 
 was so nervously alive to the blemishes in it herself, that the 
 merit had no opportunity of making itself apparent to her. 
 
 The first review that came down was of the laudatory 
 order. It dealt in gorgeous prognostications of future suc- 
 cess, and full-bodied epithets expressive of admiration. She 
 thought it meant fame and fortune as she read it fame and 
 fortune, and a rapid rush up Parnassus. She learnt every 
 word of that first review by heart, and adored the writer of 
 it as such a discriminating demi-god deserved to be adored. 
 Then her husband read it, and was pleased also ; and then it 
 was perused by old Mrs Fellowes, who forthwith fell into 
 sympathetic ecstasies, and expressed herself as coinciding en- 
 tirely with the reviewer's sentiments. " And in your next, 
 my dear, I hope you won't be ashamed to appear under your 
 real name," she said, affably. To which Miss Dinah replied, 
 " Perhaps it will be just as well that she shouldn't, mother 
 you wouldn't like it if the next were a failure." In a cooler 
 moment, Charlie would have felt all the reasonableness of 
 Miss Dinah's remark ; but what young author ever was rea- 
 sonable over a first favourable notice? Failure! after all 
 those brilliant qualities which the intelligent reviewer had 
 discovered in her ? The idea was too preposterously absurd. 
 
 The following day a much more important paper one of 
 the literary journals came down, and with it a line from 
 Frank. 
 
 " You're well slated in the ; but never mind, it's so 
 
 splendidly done, you'll enjoy it," he wrote; and thus pre- 
 pared, Charlie opened the paper, and prepared to enjoy it. 
 
 No doubt it was very enjoyable, if she could only have 
 gone to the perusal in a proper frame of mind. The sentences 
 scintillated before her eyes. The article abounded in clever 
 epigrams and brilliantly-turned sentences. Nevertheless she 
 was very far from enjoying the reading. Unfortunately, too, 
 
318 Walter Goring. 
 
 she had opened the paper before the whole family, and she 
 knew that they were watching her, and felt that she could 
 not keep on reading and holding her peace about it for ever. 
 The splendour of the way in which it was written was less 
 visible to her than the fact that she was denounced as 
 " coarse " in it. If it could t have been kept to herself alto- 
 gether, she could have accepted it as a wholesome lesson, for 
 she acknowledged that it only told the truth, though it told 
 it somewhat severely. But she could not keep it to herself ; 
 she was only a woman, and she knew that it would be made 
 to adorn morals and point endless tales for some time to 
 come. Even Frank, instead of being indignant at it, thought 
 it " splendidly done." 
 
 She gave it up reluctantly at length, and tried to go on 
 eating her breakfast, as if she were a callous and time har- 
 dened author, to whom these things were but as the buzzing 
 of summer insects. But the bread went into dangerous 
 crumbs, and the tea seemed to scald her, when Mrs Fellowes, 
 who had insisted on reading it aloud, began to shake her 
 head, and otherwise deplore. 
 
 But if the review itself was hard to bear, t;he commentaries 
 on it were worse. 
 
 " ' Coarse ! ' Ah, that 's what I thought, to tell the truth," 
 Mrs Fellowes began. Though if she had told the truth, she 
 would have confessed that the Idea had never entered into 
 her mind until she saw it there in print. 
 
 " I was afraid you had touched on one or two points that 
 you had better have let alone, Charlie," her husband said, 
 rather severely. " If you remember, I said so." 
 
 " Never to me, Henry." 
 
 " Oh ! didn't I ; well, I thought so, then." Then he ran 
 his eye over it again when his mother put it dowin ; and when 
 he had finished, he said, in the tone of one who has just made 
 a fresh and before unthought-of unpleasant discovery, " Be- 
 sides, there is scarcely any plot, and no moral whatever." 
 
 " They are not f besides ' all the sins the review mentions, 
 Henry ; they are included in it, in the very words you use." 
 
 He did not look in the least ashamed of himself. Self- 
 elected private critics are the most hardened plagiarists. He 
 simply said, " Oh, are they ? that proves me right, then." 
 Then Dinah picked it up, and read it slowly, syllable by 
 
In Doubt. 319 
 
 syllable, and Charlie steadied herself in expectation of a shock 
 from that quarter but it did not come. All Dinah sakl 
 was, " It seems to me that if you 're all going to be wafted 
 about by every wind of doctrine in this way, that your novel- 
 writing will be more pain than pleasure or profit to you, Mrs 
 Henry. There 's a great deal of truth in this ; but I suppose 
 you knew that before, though neither Henry nor my mother 
 did?" 
 
 " I 've thought it all along, Dinah," the old lady replied, with 
 dignity "all along ; it 's exactly what I've thought exactly." 
 
 " You fancy now that you have thought so, mother, that 's 
 all," Dinah replied, decidedly ; and Charlie felt more grateful 
 to her sister-in-law than ever. 
 
 She could not help wondering what Walter Goring would 
 think of it. It would have cut her to the heart to think that 
 he could believe her to be several things that that review im- 
 plied. She hated her novel lying there in its violet binding, 
 as she thought of this possibility. She hated her " Gerty 
 Grey," and wished with all her heart that she could crush the 
 fatal longing that possessed her to go on writing. But she 
 had another nearly ready, and she could not bring herself to 
 destroy it, or to leave it unfinished. 
 
 In the course of that morning, Mr Prescott and Ellen came 
 up ; and just as then- carriage stopped at the door, Henry 
 Fellowes came home; so they all went into Charlie's drawing- 
 room together, and the review was brought forth for them to 
 look at. 
 
 When Mr Prescott had got about half through it, he 
 looked up at the luckless authoress, and said, 
 
 " Well, I thought at least you would have had a good word 
 here. Your friend, Mr Walter Goring, does nearly all the 
 notices of novels for this paper." 
 
 " I wish mine had fallen into his hands he wouldn't have 
 been so hard on it," she said, with a quickly flushing face. 
 
 " But I think indeed, I'm almost sure that this is his," 
 Mr Prescott replied, resuming his reading. " Oh, yes ; there J s 
 no doubt of it. There 's a sort of tolerant taking-both-sides- 
 of-the-question style about it that is essentially Goring's." 
 
 "H'm! that's what you've got from your friend," Mr 
 Fellowes remarked, with as near an approach to sarcasm an 
 he was capable of. 
 
320 Walter Goring. 
 
 "Oh, it's Goring's undoubtedly/' Mr Prescott pursued, 
 with quiet satisfaction. " Know his phrases very well." 
 
 " I don't believe for one instant that it is Mr Goring's," 
 Charlie said, attempting to speak calmly, and falling far short 
 of her attempt, 
 
 " You don't think that he would see a fault in you, I sup- 
 pose ?" her husband suggested. 
 
 " Yes, I do. Do you imagine that I think him such an 
 idiot ? Of course he would see and censure a dozen faults 
 but in a different way. I should be sorry, indeed, to think 
 that any man who knew me wrote that." 
 
 " Especially Mr Goring ? ; ' Mr Fellowes asked. 
 
 " Especially Mr Goring," Charlie replied, with the hardi- 
 hood of desperation. Then as the remote possibility of this 
 stab being dealt to her by Walter Goring struck her, she 
 added, " He couldn't hurt me so." 
 
 " I 'm sorry to shatter your faith in him," Mr Prescott 
 said, with a little laugh (" they were not his corns that were 
 trodden on," and our latest lost great humourist told the 
 truth about the consoling power of this fact, as he did about 
 every other on which he touched,) " I 'm sorry to shatter 
 your faith in him ; but there 's conclusive evidence in this 
 review, to me, that it 's written by Goring. We called to 
 take you for a drive will you come, Charlie ? " 
 
 " No, I don't think I will to-day," she said. " I had made 
 up my mind to ask my husband to let me walk round the 
 farm this afternoon with him ; will you, Henry ? " 
 
 He agreed to her proposal ; and so the Prescotts went 
 away, and the Felloweses went for a long, dull, tiring walk 
 together. But she courted bodily fatigue this day ; any 
 amount of it was better than the thought that would intrude 
 while she was inactive. The thought that Walter Goring 
 thought so meanly of her as to try to cure her by cruelty ! 
 " It can't be his," she told herself a thousand times ; and 
 speedily after that telling came the miserable doubt, " Why 
 did he do it ? Walter Goring, for his own sake, ought to 
 think better things of me than are implied in that." 
 
 So it went on rankling that one review. No matter what 
 the others said, for good or ill ; that one which might be im- 
 pregnated with his ideas about her was all in all the thing 
 worth living for, and living down. 
 
By the L it tie Brook. 3 2 1 
 
 CHAPTER XLT. 
 
 BY THE LITTLE BROOK. 
 
 MAY was approaching rapidly, as May or any other month 
 has a habit of approaching when something that is not re- 
 garded with rapturous impatience is to occur in it. All 
 things were going on much as usual with the different char- 
 acters of this little drama. Walter Goring was dividing his 
 time pretty equally between Paris and Brighton. Fate kept 
 him away from London, therefore he never chanced to see 
 Frank St John's picture, which was progressing steadily, and, 
 the young artist hoped and believed, favourably ; and some- 
 thing else, perhaps it was feeling, and kept him hitherto 
 from the vicinity of Deneham. 
 
 As for Charlie, she was, so to say, steeped in the last sec- 
 tion of her new novel and some disquieting speculations. 
 The dream of fame and fortune was gone, but the desire of 
 Having some interest independent of her home life still 
 flourished. Indeed, it became more desirable every day al- 
 most that she should possess some such safeguard. Her 
 legal lord had lost the hold he had had over her atone time ; 
 she stood by herself now, and the worst of it was that she 
 knew that she stood by herself. As she had never had love, 
 so now she had neither respect nor sympathy for him ; nothing 
 but pity, more than slightly dashed with contempt. In fact, 
 she stood on shifting sands, and knew well that there was 
 none who could help her to maintain her footing save herself. 
 
 And she was desperately afraid of failing herself. She 
 \vas not one of those women who from custom and conceit 
 believe themselves to be founded on a rock. She recognised 
 fully and gratefully that great truth, which so many women 
 persist in ignoring, that her daily prayer had been answered, 
 namely, and that she never had been " led into temptation." 
 It is easy and pleasing to sit in the seat of the scornful over 
 those who have not been " delivered from evil/' in time to 
 recover breath and save themselves, until one's own strength 
 has been tried and found weakness. 
 
 Her strongest safeguard was this that she knew many of 
 her own worst points. She was not one of those who, be- 
 
322 Walter Goring. 
 
 cause they never have done wrong, think it impossible that 
 they ever should do \vrong. She always remembered that 
 better ones than herself had gone down in the contest to 
 which she had never been called. Better equipped and 
 better endowed ones had gone down women who had far 
 more to lose and many more weapons of defence, and who 
 must have had originally as strong a desire as she had now 
 to stand. The reflection inevitably induced speculation on 
 those subjects which it is perhaps just as well that a woman 
 should not speculate on too freely, predestination and free- 
 will. If the former be implicitly believed in, the inutility of 
 any effort to avert or control becomes the leading idea, and 
 an active-minded woman is in danger of drifting into any 
 madness that presents itself. While, on the other hand, 
 illimitable faith in the freedom of the will does away with 
 the cherished feminine notion of spontaneous passion, and 
 insists upon reason ruling without a moment's cessation. 
 Theoretically, Charlie gave in her adhesion, to this form of 
 faith ; it was a creed that appealed to all that was strongest 
 in her nature. She had a great sense of expediency, a keen 
 sense of humour, and a profound appreciation of that power 
 which is the portion of those alone whose heads govern their 
 hearts. The rule of reason ranked high above the law of 
 love in her estimation, whenever she thought about it. But 
 for all that, she knew very well that there had been little 
 reason and less expediency in the way in which she had 
 suffered the warmest regard she was capable of feeling to go 
 out and settle upon Walter Goring. 
 
 It is perhaps because we are not taught to think coherently 
 on any topic that it is not habitual to discuss in family 
 council or society, that directly a woman takes to thinking 
 about anything she is almost sure to build up some frail and 
 faulty fabric of philosophy about it. There are so many 
 things that come before our eyes, and the mysterious men- 
 tion of which falls upon our ears daily almost, that we are 
 forbidden to " speak about," and advised not to " think 
 about." Naturally we do think about them, but cloudily, 
 and from the reprehending side alone. Under these circum- 
 stances, it is inevitable that either a merciless or a maudlin 
 judgment is formed; we are either too pitiless or too pitiful. 
 If we accept unhesitatingly the dicta of those who have ills- 
 
By the Little Brook. 323 
 
 erectly thrown the halo of mystery, the charm of something 
 to be found out, over the subject on which they recommend 
 silence to be held, and thought to be banished, we are 
 hardened against the offender, without having the faintest 
 notion in what way we may be lured to the offence ourselves. 
 While, if we do not accept this view of the case, we blindly 
 go over to exactly the opposite side, and sympathise stupidly 
 with the result, equally without any knowledge of the cause. 
 Checked thought, repressed doubt, murdered misgivings, 
 surely these have been the rule too long. To deny what is, 
 and to believe what is' not to avow that that is impossible 
 which is proved a possibility daily to hope that foundations 
 which are rotten will be good enough not to crumble in our 
 time to turn the eyes away from some sight which jars, and 
 then feign a faith in its not being because we cannot see it 
 to dread nothing so much as certain things being found to 
 be lies because our grandmothers who held them true ran 
 safely in their grooves to fence ourselves in with modest 
 fictions, and then feel virtuously sure that all who declare 
 them not to be facts are upsetting the order of things, all 
 these things have been done too long and too fervently for 
 there to be social safety for the first generation that emanci- 
 pates itself, far less for the solitary ones who see light through 
 the darkness, and seek to stray to it through new paths. 
 
 Of course, when it is said that Charlie had arrived at the 
 stage of doubting, it will immediately be understood that 
 even so far she had not gone on her own unaided instinct. 
 Women are essentially the undoubting section of humanity. 
 Gifted as they are with marvellous powers of discernment, 
 they rarely bring these powers to bear on anything more im- 
 portant than the paintings, powderings, and flirtations of 
 their unmarried, or the peccadilloes of their married, rivals. 
 When anything larger is set before them in a new light, it is 
 invariably so set by a man. It has never been a woman 
 who has first suspected corruption in either a creed or a 
 cabinet. If they have a doubt, they crush it. They like to 
 believe in a lot of things, the more the better. Calls on their 
 credulity in things of vital importance to humanity are never 
 made in vain. They like to have large bundles of things 
 that have been said and held to be trustworthy for genera,- 
 put before them uiid around them prominently, in 
 
324 Walter Goring 
 
 order that they may have something to lean upon. Whether 
 they keep all the commandments or not, they would willingly 
 see the number doubled, and this no!: out of careless indif- 
 ference, but out of a genuine regard for safeguards that have 
 stood the wear and tear of time. Whatever their practice, 
 they are unfeignedly shocked at the idea of defying any law 
 v.vhich has lasted a long time. Whether they crack the cords 
 .vhich constrain them or not, they will avow that any one 
 who says openly that those cords can be cracked is an atheist. 
 
 The foregoing reflections, all loose, crude, and contradic- 
 tory as they are, were the ones that filled young Mrs Fel- 
 lowes's mind, and considerably disturbed young Mrs Fellowes's 
 peace at this time. They came and went, they were dwelt 
 upon and banished flickeringly and disjointedly, therefore to 
 have thrown them into the form of a soliloquy would have 
 been to have made them assume a position which they ha<?, 
 not attained as yet. When women sit down and strive to 
 think out and reason upon any subject for five or six pages, 
 they do it on paper. At present Charlie had only arrived 
 at the stage when one point at a time would come up and 
 prick and rankle, and then be forgotten as another would 
 rise. She felt that something was wrong either with her 
 fate ; or with her will perchance with both ; and she did 
 not see how it was possible to make the two agree. She 
 knew that there had been a wild mistake somewhere, but 
 whether Providence or the want of sublunary powder had 
 been to blame she could not decide. She was sure of no- 
 thing, in fact, save that she meant to do well. 
 
 One pretty, half tearful, half smiling April morning she 
 had been over to The Hurst, and was hurrying back through 
 the grounds, the nearest way to Deneham, between one and 
 two o'clock. She had promised her husband to be home by 
 three, in order to draw out a little plan or map from his 
 rough sketch of a proposed alteration on Lord Harrogate's 
 property. Henry Fellowes thought he saw the way to re- 
 claim a large piece of marsh land from the encroachment of 
 the tide, and he was anxious to put his plan before the owner 
 of the soil as soon as might be. 
 
 The way Charlie had chosen led her across the fields that 
 had been her husband's. They were Walter Goring's now, 
 and were let to the same Mr Greyling who tenanted the home 
 
By the L it tie Brook. 325 
 
 farm belonging to Goring Place. The partition-wall which 
 had been put up in ill-feeling, had been demolished as soon 
 as Henry Fellowes and Walter Goring knew one another- 
 even before The Hurst land passed into the possession of the 
 latter gentleman. So there was no obstruction now in the 
 short cut to Deneham. 
 
 It was a very pretty day. There is a sort of girlish 
 "when -the -brook -and -river -meet" beauty and simplicity 
 about a young spring day that almost compensates for the 
 want of that richness and intensity which are the portion of 
 the maturer summer and more gorgeous autumn. All things 
 look delicate and slender. The insects that make their way 
 about amongst the tender pale-green blades of grass are not 
 full-bodied and bloated in the face as they are later in the 
 year. Someway or other, too, the sun is more suggestive of 
 all manner of purity and refinement than when his beams 
 grow stronger and hotter. More suggestive ! In the latter 
 stage, indeed, they are not suggestive of purity and refine- 
 ment at all. If one is not physically tired, the hot, fierce 
 kisses of an August sun on the lip and brow make the blood 
 leap. If one is tired, he always serves one as he did immor- 
 tal "Mrs Brown" on the occasion of her memorable journey 
 to the " Victoria Theatre." It is useless thinking with the 
 German sage, " I '11 turn me round." When one feels the 
 setting sun at all, it is always in the " small of the back,' ; and 
 forthwith a hopeless feeling of vulgarity and a wild desire to 
 sneeze sets in. His brazen rays, in fact, make one feel wicked, 
 or weak and dusty. But in the spring they are almost more 
 silvery than golden, and they touch all things with such a 
 tender light that the eyes that look upon them are softened 
 in spite of themselves. 
 
 In the hedges and on the trees on every side, the birds 
 that were come from the south were announcing their arrival 
 to each other by their several call-notes. The blackbird and 
 the swallow, the white-throat and the turtle-dove, were each 
 singing a different strain with a widely different motive. But 
 what wonderful harmony there was in the medley ! Sincerely 
 feeling the sweetness of it, Charlie tried to go further, and 
 cheat herself into the belief that she thought it better far 
 than any of "the operas that Verdi wrote." She wished to 
 feel as unsophisticated and fresh as the weather and the scene. 
 
326 Walter Goring. 
 
 On her left, a very little \v t ay out of her direct path, a little 
 rivulet trickled merrily along, and its banks were fringed 
 with the graceful alder, the weeping willow, and the tremu- 
 lous aspen, in a way that was very fair to see so fair, that 
 she turned and walked up to it, and then stood, half hidden 
 by the drooping boughs of the trees, whose young green 
 leaves threw out the scarlet feather of her hat in strong 
 relief. 
 
 There were little hollows or holes in the brook, and in them 
 the water lost its crystal clearness, and seemed almost black. 
 Tall bulrushes grew in sturdy clumps, making her think of the 
 " Great God Pan," and the rare treatment he received in the 
 verse of Mrs Browning. Feathery plants on the banks were 
 putting forth their young fragile leaves cautiously, to look at 
 themselves in the water below. The bright black eyes of a 
 nervous toad, who dreaded some disturbing influence from 
 the young lady, were fixed upon Charlie from a hole in the 
 opposite bank. A cart-mare and her large-kneed daughter 
 stood out the one a chestnut, touched to gold by the sun's 
 rays, the other a bronzed black on the emerald green of the 
 meadow over the way. A fair harbinger of the coming sum- 
 mer, in the shape of a speckled wood-butterfly, waltzed about 
 in the air to the music of its own thoughts, which perhaps 
 were to the effect that it " would never languish for wealth 
 or for power, or sigh to see slaves at its feet," as Haynes 
 Bayly avowed he would never do, could he but compass his 
 wishes and be a butterfly born in a bower. All these things 
 Charlie saw and felt, as she stood there, to be as fair a pic- 
 ture of the boyhood of the year as she might ever hope to 
 look upon again. What was wanting? What caused the 
 weary sigh to float from between her lips, and then made 
 those lips close themselves in sad resolution ? What was 
 wanting ? " The touch of a vanished hand, and the sound 
 of a voice that was still ? " 
 
 The bright-minded gentleman who finds time to write 
 capital verses, amongst his other multifarious avocations, has 
 painted vividly somewhere, but in what I cannot recall, the 
 stinging pain of awakening to the knowledge that the poetry 
 of life is over. I hope Mr Edmund Yates will forgive me if 
 I make a mistake in them, for I quote the following lines 
 from memory : 
 
By the Little Brook. 327 
 
 " Yet I have known ay, I have known, 
 If e'er 'twere given to mortal here, 
 The pleasure of the loweTed tone, 
 The whisper in the trellised ear, 
 The furtive touch of tiny feet, 
 The heart's wild effervescing beat, 
 
 The maddened pulse's play. 
 Those hearts are now all still and cold, 
 Those feet are 'neath the churchyard mould, 
 And I have had my day ! " 
 
 This is sad enough ; but how about one who has never 
 had the joys, and who yet feels that it is all over ? The 
 sharpest pangs of a memory that recalls bygone blisses can- 
 not equal the dull, dark, hopeless pain that weighs upon the 
 one who has nothing sweeter to look back upon than the 
 knowledge that there would have been a possibility of highest 
 happiness had not something else intervened. It is bitterly 
 hard to feel that the poetry of life is over ; but it is harder 
 still to feel that all chance of such poetry ever lightening the 
 road is past before one has ever read one line of it. On the 
 whole, most people would rather " have their day," however 
 it may be about the after-part. Memory must be a better 
 companion than nothing. " 'Tis better to have loved and 
 lost, than never to have loved at all." 
 
 She stood there a long time. Small wonder that she did 
 so. The purling stream, the banks and trees robed in new 
 verdure, and the smiling sun, were pleasanter companions 
 than awaited her in that Deneham house. The hum of the 
 recently-born insects soothed her into temporary forgetful- 
 ness of the plan she had promised to draw out fairly. 
 
 All at once another sound smote upon her ear, drowning 
 the babble of the brook and the hum of the insects. The 
 toad turned, and vanished, feeling that it was no use keeping 
 her maternal eye on the invader any longer. The cart-mare 
 whisked her tail, and tried to prance, but fell short of her 
 worthy endeavour by reason of being out of practice. The 
 sun shone out more brightly still as Charlie looked up, and 
 the picture was completed. There, on the other side of the 
 rivulet, rode Walter Goring, smiling, and raising his hat from 
 his head,and his horse to the leap across the water, as he caught 
 sight of her. She reconciled the antagonistic beliefs at once. 
 
 She was predestined to meet him, and of her own free will 
 she went forward to the meeting gladly. 
 
328 Walter Goring. 
 
 CHAPTER XLII. 
 
 UNDER GREEN TREES. 
 
 THE sunlight glowed upon his broad clear brow, as he reined 
 up at Charlie's side and bent down with his head still un- 
 covered to speak to her, and she forgot that she had vowed 
 to be very steady and cold and composed whenever she 
 chanced to meet him. Her heart beat, and her eyes sparkled, 
 and the colour deepened on her cheek as she put her hand 
 out to greet him in a way that showed him all too plainly 
 how glad she was that the greeting could be given. 
 
 Do we not all remember how prudent and exemplary was 
 the conduct of " The Lady of Shalott " for any number of 
 years ? Vaguely she had listened to the tale of a curse being 
 liable to fall upon her if she stayed her weaving. So she 
 kept on steadily at her weary work seeing the troops of 
 damsels glad, the plump abbots, the curly-haired shepherd 
 lads, the crimson -robed pages, occasionally even gallant 
 knights, " go riding by to Camelot," without turning away 
 from her mirror to glance after them in the flesh. But 
 when Lancelot rode along, she, oblivious of the fact that 
 queenly fetters fast enchained that peerless cavalier, braved 
 the curse, and left the loom, and looked after the "bearded 
 meteor." Of course she was very foolish ; we who are not 
 placed upon a little islet in a river, with a loom and a mirror, 
 and nothing more to interest ourselves with, can estimate 
 her temptation and folly with admirable exactitude. " 'Tis 
 wiser being sane than mad ; " but a Lancelot flashing across 
 one's solitude is a fearful trial of sanity. 
 
 The man who broke in upon Charlie Fellowes's day-dream 
 was devoid of those gorgeous accessories which strengthened 
 Lancelot's charms in the golden word-picture Tennyson has 
 painted. He had no shield with a red-cross knight for ever 
 kneeling to a lady in it no gemmy bridle no thickly- 
 jewelled saddle-leather no helmet and helmet-feather to 
 burn "like one burning name together." But though he 
 had none of these, he was ail-sufficiently bewildering. The 
 young, good-looking gentleman sittinghis handsome, thorough- 
 
Under Green Trees. 329 
 
 bred horse with the ease and grace of a centaur, or rather of 
 an accomplished equestrian, I will say preferring to draw 
 similes from things I have seen was as disturbing an in- 
 fluence to the modern-minded victim of solitude, as Lance- 
 lot in all his glory was to the type of, and warning to, her 
 sex the lady who looked indiscreetly, loved unwisely, and 
 then had nothing for it but to die. 
 
 For no solitude could be more complete or more painful 
 than was the heart and mind solitude of this wife, whose 
 husband's eyes were too frequently glazed with wine for her 
 ever to look in them and find companionship. To her sorrow 
 she knew that she had never loved her husband; to her 
 terror and. remorse she feared that she did love this other 
 man : to herself, however, she had vowed, that never, by 
 look or word or sign, would she suffer that love to manifest 
 itself. But when she saw him saw him so near, when she 
 had thought him so far off when she heard his voice, and 
 her heart's chords thrilled to it when she met his eyes and 
 the old truth struck her afresh, that question and answer 
 passed between them without speech when she marked that 
 gladness sparkled over his brow and lips and eyes at thu? 
 meeting with her, she forgot all sorrow, terror, and remorse, 
 and through every fibre of her frame was conscious of nothing 
 but joy. 
 
 Why did she love him so well on so little ? it may be 
 asked. I do not know. The spell was wrought, but how, it 
 is hard to say. She loved him best in the world, because he 
 was the best she knew the one than whom nothing ever 
 could be better, brighter, and kinder. She loved him be- 
 cause on her darkest hours he had the power of shedding 
 light. In her hardest moods his smile could soften her in 
 the midst of her unhappiness the mere sight of him made her 
 happy. 
 
 " I didn't know you were home," she said, quickly, hoping 
 that the explanation would satisfactorily account for a certain 
 flushing of the cheeks, of which she was conscious. It was 
 no bad tribute to him, that she felt that she would rather 
 that any other person in the world than himself should 
 fathom her feeling. Then she went on, " How is Daisy ?" 
 
 " Very well, when I saw her last. Which way are you 
 walking?" 
 
33O Walter Goring. 
 
 " Oh ! any way," she replied, forgetting all about tli6 
 " plan " she had promised to be home at three, to draw out. 
 "I have been over to see my sister." Then they talked a 
 little weather, and he told her how he had been a couple of 
 fields off when he caught sight of her red feather through the 
 trees. 
 
 "Have you seen Frank?" she asked, almost abruptly. 
 
 " No. I 've not been in town at all. I went over to Paris, 
 with a man I know, meaning to stay a week; instead of 
 which I stayed many." 
 
 "So Frank told me. He told me also that the picture 
 will be wanted in May." Her lips trembled a little as she 
 spoke, but she covered the trembling with a smile. 
 
 He laughed and coloured a little. " Does Daisy ever write 
 to you?" he asked. 
 
 "Never," she replied. She was longing for an opportu- 
 nity of saying something magnanimous, not to say enthusi- 
 astic, about Daisy. It seemed to her that she was a debtor 
 to Daisy, in that she dared to find solace in the smile of 
 Daisy's future lord. But she did not see a good opening for 
 the magnanimity ; if Walter Goring was a genuine lover, her 
 warmest praises of the one he loved would fall flatly on his 
 ears. 
 
 If he were a genuine lover! The thought that he was 
 Buch to Daisy made her eyes shoot fire, and her heart dance, 
 and herself hate herself for giving these signs of jealousy 
 without right. "Daisy write to her!" No. Why should 
 Daisy write to her ? she wanted no letters from Daisy ! She 
 Wanted nothing save what ? Well, nothing that she could 
 ever have. It is horrible that such trivialities should so 
 deepen and act upon all that makes life worth having hor- 
 rible, but true; but the smallest inflection of the tone in 
 which he said the lightest word this day, deepened the love 
 she had for him ; and his silence was more dangerous still, 
 because in it she had time to think. 
 
 "I hoped that she had written to you," he went on; 
 " those people she is living with are wide apart from her in 
 reality ; she isn't happy, Mrs Fellowes, and she has no woman 
 friend there. I hoped that she had found one in you." 
 
 It was not the tone of blind lover-like belief. It was the 
 tone of a man who had a weighty sense of responsibility; he 
 
Under Green Trees. 331 
 
 spoke affectionately, but as a brother might have spoken of 
 a sister. Charlie could only reply, 
 
 "Oh, you must be mistaken!" It did seem to her so 
 wildly incredible, that perfect happiness should not be the 
 portion of the one in April who was going to marry Walter 
 Goring in May. 
 
 He shook his head. His love for Daisy was no big over- 
 whelming passion, such as he knew himself to be capable of 
 feeling, did he dare ; but it was warm, honest, and active, 
 nevertheless. He had not come to the conclusion that she 
 was not happy without pain ; but before he left Brighton for 
 Paris, Daisy had often been bored, and had frequently jerked 
 her head away impatiently, not to say ill-temperedly, when 
 he was kissing her. He had offered her her freedom once, 
 and she had rejected his offer with a disquietude that led him 
 to suppose that it was but the girlish doubt of how far it 
 would "be proper" to go that made her repel him. But 
 though he was willing to suppose this, he could not cheat 
 himself into the belief that she was quite happy. 
 
 " I wish she could have stayed with you," he went on ; 
 and then poor Charlie saw the opening for the expression of 
 that magnanimity which she was longing to display towards 
 the betrothed of the man she loved. She forgot that her 
 husband's home was not entirely her own; she forgot the 
 hours of anguish it would assuredly cost her; she forgot 
 everything save that it seemed to be within the scope of 
 her ability to serve Walter Goring; or if not to serve, at 
 least to please him: and even if she had "remembered," 
 why she would have counted years of pain to herself as 
 nothing, to the giving him one moment's pleasure. So she 
 said, 
 
 " I wonder if Daisy would come to me till you marry her, 
 Mr Goring ? Ask her ask her, will you ? " 
 
 " Do you really mean it ? " he asked, eagerly. 
 
 " Mean it ? yes, thoroughly, honestly." She did " mean 
 it" thoroughly and honestly as she spoke. She would have 
 done anything to please him that she could do, and at the 
 same time act fairly to the man she had married. Had she 
 been Charlie St John still, she would have counted her own 
 happiest hereafter well lost in making Walter Goring happy 
 here, could his happiness not have been effected at a lighter 
 
33 2 Waller Goring. 
 
 zost. As it was, she felt it well worth while to risk paining 
 herself for the sake of pleasuring him. 
 
 " You can't think how glad I shall be to see her with you, 
 
 Mrs Fellowes ; there 's something " He stopped, and 
 
 Charlie asked, quietly, 
 
 " What is it ? Tell me." 
 
 " I don't know ; you saw how it all came on with Daisy 
 and me. I don't think I 'm a conceited fellow, but I did 
 think when I asked her to be my wife that her love for me 
 was very strong. She did seem to care for me, didn't she ? " 
 
 Charlie nodded assent. Daisy had "seemed to care for 
 him." Charlie could assent to that proposition ; but she 
 knew very well that Daisy had not cared for him. Mon- 
 strously improbable as the idea appeared to her on the face of 
 it, she could but fear that Daisy preferred some one to Walter 
 Goring. But she remembered that Daisy had declared that 
 if Mrs Fellowes suffered a hint of the sort to escape, that it 
 would be because she desired to see the engagement broken 
 off ; and the remembrance fettered her tongue. Of all things 
 she could not have that said, and she knew that Daisy would 
 be very prompt to say it, and " what would he think of me 
 then ? " she thought. Presently Mr Goring resumed, 
 
 " Now I sometimes hardly know what to think abcut it. 
 Heaven knows I would sacrifice anything and release her if 
 she wished. But she won't hear of that, and yet she doesn't " 
 
 He was going to say, u care to have me much with her ; " 
 
 but the confession was a humiliating one, therefore he did 
 not make it. 
 
 " Perhaps she is so fond of you that she can't help being 
 shy," Charlie suggested. She knew that she herself would 
 have paid this man every tribute of open worship, had she 
 been permitted to do so. She would have gloried in her love, 
 and seen no shame in making the most open proclamation of 
 it. But it might be that an equally sincere affection would 
 affect another woman differently, and so cause her to act 
 differently. She tried to think the best of Daisy. 
 
 They had walked the length of the meadow through which 
 the little brook ran by this time, and they had walked it very 
 slowly. In order to get out at the Deneham end they were 
 obliged to retrace their steps along the bank, and the water 
 looked so cool and limpid that it fascinated them into stand- 
 
Under Green Trees. 333 
 
 ing still several times as it murmured a running accompaniment 
 to their conversation. Presently, after once more asserting 
 that he was delighted that Daisy would be with Mrs Fel- 
 lowes for a time, " your influence is good for everybody," he 
 added, warmly, Walter Goring took a little, thin, sage-green 
 book out of his pocket. 
 
 " I have brought you something you '11 like, I 'm sur^i, Mrs 
 Fellowes. Heine's poems." 
 
 " Ah ! I don't read German," she replied, in a provoked 
 tone. 
 
 " But these are translations the best I have seen. Of 
 course, they lose immensely in their English dress ; but 
 you '11 delight in them." 
 
 Then she took the book from him, and sat down on the 
 bank to look at it. After a minute or two he placed him- 
 self at her feet, and asked her to let him find the "pine-tree 
 standing lonely " and thinking of the palm tree ! And when 
 she had read and rejoiced in that most exquisitely suggestive 
 and at the same time simple poem, he found another and 
 another, and the afternoon wore on. 
 
 Charlie Fellowes took to the perusal of the poems very 
 kindly. The little streamlet babbled on, the afternoon wore 
 itself away, Walter Goring's horse stood at ease on each leg 
 in succession and found ease on neither, and still the pair 
 under consideration sat on the green bank under the quiver- 
 ing aspens and graceful willows, reading and talking, and 
 finding it all passing sweet. At last, fell recollection assailed 
 Charlie, and she sprang to her feet, exclaiming, 
 
 " I promised my husband to be home by three ! What 
 shall I do ? It must be hours after the time." 
 
 "It's nearly half-past five," Walter Goring said, looking 
 at his watch. " Allow me to walk home with you and ex- 
 plain to him that literature and I are to blame for your for- 
 getfulness." 
 
 But this proposal she strongly negatived, for she felt un- 
 certain as to what case her husband might be in by the time 
 she reached home. So they said good-bye and separated ; 
 and she walked away to Deneham with a miserable feeling 
 oppressing her, that it had all been very pleasant and very 
 wrong, and all her fault, and that Walter Goring would marry 
 Daisy and be no happier, she feared, than she herself was. 
 
334 Walter Goring. 
 
 CHAPTER XLIII. 
 
 A MOONLIGHT WALK. 
 
 No sooner .was Charlie free from the influence of Walter 
 Goring's presence, than she remembered all the things which 
 she had forgotten while she was with him. She recollected 
 that she had intended being composed, not to say chilling, in 
 her demeanour towards him ; and she recollected the review. 
 Then memory became a poignant nuisance as she thought of 
 what construction he might possibly put upon her refusal to 
 allow him to walk home with her. " He will think that I 
 want to keep it from my husband, and throw an atmosphere 
 of secrecy over it," she thought; "and I shall go down in his 
 estimation. I can't tell him that I dared not bring him back 
 with me, because Henry might make me feel ashamed of 
 being his wife." 
 
 It was past six o'clock when she reached home; the dinner 
 was on the table, but " Master was not in," she heard from 
 the servant, and she was conscious of a -slight feeling of relief 
 as she listened to the statement; but the feeling of relief was 
 of the most transient nature. The moment she came into 
 the room, and seated herself at the table with old Mrs Fellowes 
 and Miss Dinah, she felt that the former regarded her as very 
 culpable, and the latter as very thoughtless. "It's a pity 
 your sister tries to wean you from your duty, Mrs Henry," 
 the old lady began, severely. 
 
 " Why, what has Ellen done?" Charlie asked, wonderingly. 
 
 " Oh, only induced you to break your promise to your 
 husband : it 's nothing, of course. Mrs Prescott supplies you 
 with amusement and gaiety, and so I tell Henry he must ex- 
 pect to be neglected." 
 
 " Then it was very unfair of you to tell him anything of the 
 sort, Mrs Fellowes," Charlie replied, decidedly. She was 
 very angry; the only thing that restrained her from disclaim- 
 ing against the injustice that was dealt to her more determin- 
 ably, was the unwillingness she had to drag Walter Goring's 
 name into the discussion. She could not repel the charge as 
 to the evil effect of the fatal fascinations of The Hurst, 
 without stating where and with whom she had been. Shfl 
 
A Moonlight Walk. 335 
 
 fully intended to tell her husband, but she did shrink from 
 saying anything about it to his mother and sister. Petty 
 injustice from one of her own sex is even harder for a woman 
 to bear than petty injustice from a man. " This is the first 
 time Henry has had cause of complaint against me. I am 
 very sorry that I forgot my promise to be home at three, but 
 I did forget it." 
 
 " Well, I should be ashamed to say it," Mrs Fellowes, 
 senior, replied. 
 
 " I should be more ashamed to say I had not forgotten it, 
 when I had. 1 ' 
 
 " I can't see that it's anything to boast of, Mrs Henry." 
 
 " I am not boasting of it," Charlie replied, warmly. The 
 reaction after the excitement of seeing Walter Goring had 
 set in, and Charlie was very weary. " I am not boasting 
 I am only telling the truth, and I am very sorry that it 
 should be the truth ; but, believe me, it is not Ellen's fault 
 that I am late." 
 
 " Whose fault is it, then?" 
 
 " My own, entirely my own ; no one asked me to stay, no 
 one wished me to stay ; I forgot it." 
 
 " Have you been for a drive with Mrs Prescott ? " Miss 
 Dinah asked. 
 
 Charlie coloured a little as she replied, " No." She began 
 to wish that she had explained at first to these merciless 
 inquisitors that she had not been detained at The Hurst. 
 Now there would be a certain awkwardness in making the 
 announcement of where she had been. 
 
 " Did you stay there alone, then ? " Miss Dinah went on. 
 " I saw Mrs Prescott's carriage go through the town, and I 
 said to Henry, when he was waiting for you, that no doubt 
 you had gone out with your sister." 
 
 " I think, as your sister went out and left you, that you 
 might have come back to Henry, when you knew he wanted 
 you," Mrs Fellowes put in, severely. 
 
 Charlie began to feel as one who is baited, and her spirit 
 rose. As they went on censuring her for nothing, the error 
 of which she really had been guilty looked less and less in 
 her eyes. 
 
 " I shall explain my shortcomings to my husband," OIK- 
 said, coldly. 
 
336 Walter Goring. 
 
 " When he comes in," Mrs Fellowes pursued, remorselessly; 
 " but he went out quite annoyed. During all the years ha 
 lived with Dinah and me alone I never knew him stay away 
 needlessly at dinner-time ; such a thing never happened 
 never ! while he lived with Dinah and me alone." 
 
 " I wish he lived with Dinah and you alone now," Charlie 
 replied ; on which his mother plunged the culprit into a state 
 of penitential despondency by shaking her head, and begin- 
 ning to cry, and lamenting that she should have lived to see 
 such a day ; and the dinner was brought to a conclusion in 
 thickest gloom. 
 
 " The path of duty may be the way to glory, but it 's a 
 hard road to travel," Charlie thought, about ten o'clock that 
 night, as she put the finishing stroke to the plan she had 
 mapped out. For three hours she had worked assiduously 
 at it, and the report which was to accompany it, and which 
 she had put into form from the rough notes which she had 
 found scattered over her writing-table. She had worked at 
 it assiduously, but she had felt no interest in her labour. 
 The embankment of Lord Harrogate's marsh -land was a 
 matter of no moment whatever to her ; whether the German 
 Ocean or the best engineering talent gained ultimate possession 
 of the soil or not, she did not care. She performed her part 
 of this task because it was her duty to perform it, that was 
 all. 
 
 The fire had burnt itself out when she finished ; for the 
 last hour and a half she had worked unremittingly, being 
 anxious to have her tale of bricks completed by the time her 
 husband came home. Bright and sunny as the day had been, 
 the evening was chilly ; and now as she put the pen down, 
 and pushed the paper away, the chili struck her and made 
 her shiver. Of all external influences cold dulness is perhaps 
 the most depressing. She was alone she was in dread of 
 the state in which her husband might come home after his 
 prolonged absence in anger she had been so happy a few 
 short hours before. She was only a woman ; so, thinking of 
 these things, she drooped her head upon her hands, and made 
 her moan over the mistake of her life. 
 
 The weary woman in the moated grange was agreeably 
 situated in comparison with this one, the sharpest pangs of 
 whose solitude consisted in the knowledge that it might be 
 
A Moonlight Walk. 337 
 
 broken in upon at any moment. Mariana at any rate had 
 herself to herself, while she was longing for the advent of him 
 who came not. But Charlie Fellowes, however aweary she 
 might be feeling, was constantly liable to a couple of litigious 
 women, and a liege lord, who was too often in a state that 
 would have made her prefer the society of some of the beasts 
 that perish. 
 
 She had not succeeded in utterly concealing this change 
 which had come over him from his mother and sister. De- 
 spite her best endeavours, they had seen it and sorrowed over 
 it, and old Mrs Fellowes had snarled at her about it. " De- 
 pend upon it," she had said, considerately, "if a man has 
 never been addicted to that before marriage, it 's the wife's fault 
 if he takes to it after." And Charlie had stood even that 
 tha charge of having conduced to his gross excesses patiently. 
 
 Meanwhile Walter Goring was sitting alone too ; but his 
 solitude was so widely different from hers. His was so easy 
 and refined so well booked and well lighted, so fraught with 
 everything that could contribute to the pleasure of both mind 
 and body so redolent of that charm which perfect taste and 
 wealth combined does throw over the spot on which their 
 forces have been united under good generalship. A charming 
 solitude his ; but one which, nevertheless, he would have been 
 very glad to have had broken by Daisy or another. A charm- 
 ing solitude, with the firelight falling flickering on the pale 
 walls, and deepening in the folds of the pomegranate-coloured 
 velvet hangings. A charming solitude to sit and smoke a 
 fragrant cigar in, wondering the while whether Daisy would 
 ever play at objecting to his doing so when she came to be 
 its presiding goddess. A solitude that was peopled by so 
 many objects that were dear to his taste -by a Kembrandt, 
 portrait of a monk, whose face was all power, and whose 
 forehead seemed to be tumbling out of the picture by a 
 Velasquez a proud-faced woman in brown velvet, covered 
 with tracery by a fine copy of the Cenci herself, with that 
 maddening mouth of hers, and that fair fatal beauty of the 
 brow by a pure-lipped " child " of Sir Joshua's, saying its 
 prayers by one of Vandyke's cavaliers, (taken from his place 
 in the corridor, because he was the beauty-man of the Goring 
 family,) whose eyes showed plainly that he had been " very 
 bold to take " whatever he wanted by a marble copy of the 
 
 Y 
 
jj3 Walter Goring. 
 
 Glytie, with her passion-charged bust and purity-charged 
 mouth, with her downcast brow and upheaving bosom by a 
 fair erotic group and by a Leda, preparing to render up a 
 passionate kiss. A charming solitude, one in the midst of 
 which a woman infallibly takes up a better attitude, and thinks 
 moregrace fully ; and Walter Goring knew this truth, and 
 thought of what Charlie would have been in it. 
 
 Perhaps even she, sitting alone in her own little sordid 
 ugly room, did not feel the full force of the bitter bungle she 
 had made of her life, as this man felt it for her. By the 
 light of her liking for him he read her character plainly 
 enough. He saw how she turned to what was fair, and re- 
 coiled from what was foul. He marked how exquisitely alive 
 she was to externals, and at the same time he recognised the 
 northern chill in her southern blood. Had she been all p 
 daughter of the sun, she would have thrown everything but 
 love overboard. As it was, there was a dash of snow in her 
 composition, which made her graver perhaps, but decidedly 
 less happy. He had said of her once,, that she would talk 
 recklessly but never act recklessly ; and after the interview of 
 this afternoon, he saw no reason to change his opinion. 
 Since he had known her at ah 1 , he warmly regretted that he 
 had not known more of her before she suffered herself to drift 
 into a marriage with another man. " In that case, Daisy 
 and Goring Place would both have gone," he told himself ; 
 but at the same time he felt that " Daisy was a darling, and 
 he should be very happy with her." Daisy was a darling ! and 
 as " Charlie," as he called her to himself now, was married, 
 and neither polygamy nor polyandry were the law of the 
 land, or according to his tastes, the best thing was to think 
 of Daisy alone. 
 
 It would have been the best thing to do unquestionably. 
 The worst of it was that he could not do it. The thought 
 of the other one would intervene, and he could not delude 
 himself into the belief about her, that it was " merely the old 
 regard," a thing he was wont to tell himself about Mrs 
 Walsh. The thought of her as she seemed to him, a sweet, 
 wasted, loving, clever woman, would intervene; and loyal as 
 he was to Daisy, he could but regret that he could be so little 
 to the other one, whom he felt could, under kinder stars, have 
 been so much to him. 
 
 
A Moonlight W>.:lk. 339 
 
 By and by, as he could not shake of]' these thoughts and 
 the uncomfortable feeling they engendered, he got up and 
 walked away through the hall out into the garden, picking 
 up a Glengarry cap as he went. The sky was deep blue, un- 
 clouded, star-spangled, and above the silvery moon was sail- 
 ing, touching a thousand points in the earth below, and 
 bringing them into sweeter beauty. It was a shame to go to 
 bed on such a night no day could show him anything fairer. 
 So he thought that he w r ould go round by some plantations 
 where the shadows were lying darkly, their boundary lines deli- 
 cately tipped with silver. Round by these plantations, and past 
 a pretty ivy-covered lodge, where a gamekeeper lived, and BO 
 rjome by another path. He determined not to take any of 
 his dogs. He knew their propensities to go off hunting at 
 wrong times, well-bred as they were ; and he did not care to 
 be obliged to distract himself from the scene by having to 
 whistle up depredating pointers and defiant setters. 
 
 As he walked along he could not help hoping that Daisy 
 would come to care for these things as he did ; or even if she 
 could not care for them to the same extent, that she would 
 invest a little more interest in them than she did in the fall 
 of her drapery and the fit of her Balmoral boots. At present 
 he could but feel that, on the rare occasions of their taking 
 walks together, Daisy's sole thought had been how she could 
 most expeditiously and becomingly get over the ground ; and 
 again, he wished that Daisy were a little more like Mrs Fel- 
 lowes ; and then he fell to wondering why young Mrs Fellowea 
 had not suffered him to go home with her that day. He 
 scouted the idea that would intrude, that it had been because 
 her husband might feel a certain jealous annoyance. "It 
 can't be that," he thougnt ; " he surely can't bother her in 
 that way." Yet what could it be ? Charlie had been so 
 much in earnest in her rejection of his escort. 
 
 The gamekeeper's cottage stood close to a gate that was 
 very rarely used, which opened out from the Goring Place 
 grounds into the Deneham road. Walter Goring thought 
 that he would just go past it, and see the moonbeams amo* 
 rously trembling on the ivy, and try whether he could not 
 get over or through the gate, and out into the road along 
 which he intended to walk to the principal entrance, which 
 was some quarter of a mile higher up. As ne neared the 
 
340 Walter Goring. 
 
 lodge, two figures loomed above the little garden hedge, and 
 remembering that Dagorn, the gamekeeper, had a very pretty 
 daughter, he thought " Halloo ! some rustic Juan sporting 
 with Amaryllis in the shade; old Dagorn should keep a 
 sharper look-out on his daughter ; " and he began to whistle 
 loudly, and to step more firmly, in order to give signal of his 
 approach. As he did so, the figures separated; one went 
 fluttering towards the ivy-covered porch, and the other came 
 out and went hastily towards the gate, where a horse was 
 standing with his rein fastened through the bars. Involun- 
 tarily Walter Goring checked his steps, and sought to turn 
 before he could be seen. In the man who fled like a thief 
 in the night at the approach of another man in the mid- 
 night whisperer of dangerous words to pretty Alice Dagorn 
 Walter Goring had recognised the husband of the woman he 
 admired and was interested in above every other in the world 
 save Daisy, of course. His heart beat thickly with indig- 
 nation and several other feelings, as he saw Henry Fellowes 
 mount and ride rapidly away. It was the worst thing he 
 had learnt in connexion with her yet ; the worst, the most 
 dangerous knowledge. "The dirty hound," he thought, 
 "wasn't it enough that he should get drunk?" Then he 
 thought of Charlie's frank, fearless eyes, and of the honest, 
 defiant nature which was being taught and trained down by 
 duty and necessity to live a lie. " If I were her brother, I'd 
 take her from him," he thought, passionately. But even in 
 that moment of passion he swore never to try to do it, since 
 he was not her brother. 
 
 He walked on, though there was no more beauty in the 
 moonbeams for him. His heart was oppressed with a weight 
 of doubtful sorrow, that he could not throw off. He thought 
 of Charlie as he had seen her some hours before, in the pure 
 light of the spring-tide day, by that limpid water ; and as he 
 thought of her thus, and of her sweet womanly warmth, his 
 anger rose hotly against the man who had gone home to her 
 from a flirtation with the gamekeeper's pretty daughter. 
 
An Empty Saddle. 341 
 
 CHAPTER XLIV. 
 
 AN EMPTY SADDLE. 
 
 " Love in a hut, with water and a crust, 
 Is Love forgive us ! cinders, ashes, dust." 
 
 IF this be true and who can doubt it ? what is hate in a 
 hut? or indifference, strongly dashed with disgust and dread, 
 in a square, incommodious little modern house, in a mortally 
 dull country town ? The cinders, ashes, and dust, which are 
 the portion of love in a hut, must be succulent and daintily 
 flavoured morsels compared with the mental and moral diet 
 on which the luckless one whose situation was sketched 
 secondly must feed. 
 
 For about an hour after the completion of the work which 
 she ought, the miserable sinner, to have been home at three 
 to do, young Mrs Fellowes sat cowering over the table, with 
 her face buried in her hands, making her moan. She was 
 horribly unhappy ; her soul was very dark. The best she 
 could do, were she true to herself, without a moment's waver- 
 ing, would not brighten the dreary swamp of her life it 
 would only enable her to cross it safely. " It doesn't do to 
 sit and think," she exclaimed, at the expiration of an hour. 
 " It 's only those who are well fenced in in pleasant places 
 who may indulge in the luxury of turning things over in 
 their minds." Then she got up and unbarred the heavy 
 shutters, hurting her fingers with the iron bar as she did it, 
 and thus distracting herself a little, and peered out into the 
 street, trying to think that she was anxious for her hus- 
 band's return. After flattening her nose against the glass 
 for a few minutes, and seeing nothing but her own eyes, by 
 reason of the moon being hidden by the chimney-pot of an 
 opposite house, she went back to her writing-table and got 
 out a chapter of the nearly completed novel the one of 
 which she was hopeful, the one that was to efface " Gerty 
 Grey " from the memory of man. As she got into the swing 
 of her story she forgot her dulness and despair, and felt that 
 though her grand venture was a failure, that she might get 
 
34 2 Walter Goring. 
 
 up a sub-interest in life sufficiently strong to carry her 
 through it cheerfully. 
 
 Her pen was not a gray goose-quill, but it was a clearly- 
 running steel slave to her thoughts this night, and her 
 thoughts ran quickly and brightly, as one's thoughts are 
 wont to run at such an hour. For a few pages she progressed 
 very promisingly. Her people had been rather stiff for a 
 chapter or two, by reason of certain doubts which had as- 
 sailed the mind of their creator, as to what it would be well 
 to make them do next. Everything that occurred to her as 
 desirable somebody else had used of late, and she had began 
 to fear that she had exhausted her slender stock of original 
 ideas. But to-night she had no doubt ; the puppets fell into 
 positions that were most awkward for themselves, and conse- 
 quently most pleasing to the reader of their own unaided 
 will, as it seemed. The first sentence she penned was happy, 
 both as regarded its reason and rhythm, she thought ; at any 
 rate, it led her on, which is the most one asks of an opening 
 sentence. 
 
 At last the puppets grew stiff again. The curtain drew up 
 on a love scene, or what she wanted to make a love scene ; 
 but she dared not fall back upon her own personal experi- 
 ences, and she found that without this she could not make 
 them talk with a touch of truth, or move other than in a 
 wooden way. Imagination could not supply the void that 
 was made by a determined obliteration of the most she knew 
 about it. Every one who writes fiction must have experi- 
 enced the difficulty at the shy stage of the outset of their re- 
 spective careers. 
 
 The moment of hesitation relaxed her energies. She began 
 to trace little profiles idealised Walter Goring's on the 
 blotting-paper a dangerous propensity, which it is just as 
 well to nip in the bud and as she did it she thought how 
 ' well his love scenes were always done, and what a lot of 
 practice he must have had to make them so perfect." She 
 was but a tyro in the art as yet ; she did not know that, 
 given certain conditions, and the chances are very much in 
 favour of every one acting alike under similar circumstances : 
 and so the life-like reality of the desperate love he made on 
 paper made her fancy that Walter Goring had flattered and 
 flirted with many besides those of whom she knew. 
 
An Empty Saddle. 343 
 
 Then his poems again those despairing wails, howls al- 
 most by which she had known him first. 
 
 He was a very sweet singer, but, as is the case with the 
 majority of young aspirants for the bays, the melancholiness 
 of most things was much before him in his verse. She ran 
 through the list of those whom he had reviled in old heroic 
 measure, and forgiven with a broken heart in lines that ran 
 trippingly off the reader's tongue. She recalled the ladies of 
 high degree, who, in his first volume of " Poems of Life and 
 Love," had always been doing dark and dismal things, in 
 gorgeous array and high places, with composed countenances 
 and corroding care at the core of their hearts. Occasionally 
 even he had made hazy allusions to royalty his boyish pride 
 had been flattered, he averred, through two and a half verses, 
 by some one who had in the last eight lines resumed her 
 crown and sceptre. There was great consolation to Charlie 
 in recalling and dwelling on these wild effusions of his earlier 
 muse. She found herself feeling more than half convinced 
 that the love he painted so vividly in prose was equally ideal. 
 
 Presently the clock of the town-hall boomed out the hour 
 one, and a sudden qualm at the continued absence of her 
 husband brought her back from the regions of romance to 
 the real life around her. She put away her chapter with the 
 barely begun love scene in it, and stole softly to the hall door, 
 which she opened quietly. Then gazing anxiously up and 
 down the street, she found herself saying, almost against her 
 will, " Pray God he may come home safe ! " 
 
 The utterance of the prayer brought the possibility of some 
 accident having happened to him home to her with hideous 
 force. Supposing ; but no, she would not suffer herself to 
 suppose anything. She drove back thought, but she could 
 neither quiet the vague dread nor stop the chattering of her 
 teeth, as she stood there, looking up and down, in pitiable 
 ignorance of the side from whence her husband or evil tid- 
 ings might come upon her. 
 
 All at once the sound of a horse's hoofs, striking on the 
 hard surface of the street, smote upon her ears. She listened 
 more attentively, and recognised the sharp quick walk of the 
 old brown hunter. Listening still, she heard the horse come 
 on steadily till he came just abreast of a road that led away 
 from Deneham to The Hurst, and then the sound decreased, 
 
344 Walter Goring. 
 
 and with a thrill of alarm she became conscious that he hail 
 taken the turning to his old home. 
 
 For one minute she stood irresolutely at the door, then she 
 closed it gently behind her and ran off rapidly in the wake ol 
 the retreating horse. She knew the step of the old brown 
 hunter so well. Those who are accustomed to horses learn 
 to distinguish their steps as infallibly as they do those of 
 their fellow-creatures. She knew the step so well, and she 
 did so dread that it might bear its master to The Hurst, and 
 proclaim the open shame of the habits her husband had 
 formed to some groom or stable-boy, who might be roused 
 by the sound of the hoofs and come out to know the cause of 
 their being there. The fear gave her wings. She had tied 
 through the street and into the solitary road that led away to 
 The Hurst, before she remembered that there was anything 
 out of the common in her doing it. 
 
 Her pace soon brought her close upon the track of the 
 horse, and she was just thinking, " Henry will be furious with 
 me, I ; m afraid," when, with a cry of horror, she came near 
 enough to see that the saddle was empty. It was useless now 
 to follow the horse ; she let him go on where he listed, and 
 turned back to seek despairingly for help and her husband. 
 
 All thought of keeping anything from anybody was over 
 now. She gathered up her dress and ran back to the house 
 faster even than she had run away from it. One frantic 
 struggle with the door-handle ended in her failing to open it, 
 and then she rang the bell furiously, rousing all the household 
 from their dreams of peace. 
 
 Naturally, the first impulse of women when they are rung 
 up in the night is to congregate together and ask each other 
 if they " heard the bell." That fact ascertained beyond doubt, 
 they light a candle, or rather strike matches, with hands that 
 are unsteady through nervousness, and then essay to apply 
 the light to the wick of the candle, under the auspices of eyes 
 that are half blind with sleep. The result is rarely a success 
 for the first five minutes, but eventually a blaze is achieved. 
 Then they fall to wondering whether they had better go down 
 to the door and tackle the invader there/ or merely challenge 
 him from an up-stairs window. 
 
 This programme was religiously attended to by Mrs and 
 Miss Fellowes, and the cook and housemaid, on the present 
 
An Empty Saddle. 345 
 
 occasion. Charlie nearly went mad with impatience as she 
 watched the flitting about from room to roon:. At last a 
 blind was cautiously lifted and a window sash raised, and 
 Miss Dinah's voice asked, 
 
 "Who's that?" 
 
 " It's I Charlie," Charlie replied. "Do dress and" 
 
 ' How very improper of you to be out there at this hour of 
 the night, and" 
 
 " Henry's had an accident thrown from his horse along 
 the road to Goring Place," Charlie interrupted; "follow me 
 as quickly as you can, Dinah, and make the servants dress." 
 
 " Wait a minute," Dinah cried. Then she ran down 
 nimbly, and let her sister-in-law in. Now that she was 
 called upon to act, Charlie took her place as the ruling spirit 
 with a decision and promptitude that almost paralysed Miss 
 Dinah. 
 
 " We must keep it quiet if we can ; but if he's hurt," (at 
 this poor Charlie's voice broke a little,) "a doctor must be 
 sent for at once so bring Ann with you, Dinah, and be 
 quick." With that she turned, and went off again on the 
 hardest mission that had been hers in life yet. 
 
 She did not run now. She knew that in any case all her 
 strength and all her composure would be needed, and these 
 she could not retain if she ran herself out of breath. But 
 she walked at a pace that soon brought her well on the Gor- 
 ing Place road, and then she began to look eagerly at every 
 place where the bank of the hedge on either side curved and 
 the shade was lying dark as a human body might to look 
 eagerly, and to listen attentively ; but for a while she heard 
 nothing save the croaking of some frogs who were going a- 
 wooing, and the chirp of the grasshoppers in the turf under 
 her feet. 
 
 Suddenly she heard a man's step the next instant she 
 faced the man himself, and with a cry that burst from her 
 heart, telling him all her loneliness and all her helplessness, 
 she recognised Walter Goring. His first fear was that she 
 had been outraged beyond her powers of endurance, and had 
 left her husband's home. It was almost a relief to him when 
 the stammered out, 
 
 " Have you seen my husband ? he has been thrown from 
 his horse." 
 
346 Walter Goring. 
 
 " Not along this road, Mrs Fellowes. I have been saunter- 
 ing up and down for the last hour." 
 
 " But it must be this road beyond where you 've been 
 walking, perhaps ! " Then she told him quickly of the evi- 
 dence the horse had given, and he could not tell her that he 
 had seen her husband start for home within the range of his 
 (Walter's) saunterings. 
 
 " He must have turned down some bye-lane into the 
 town," Walter suggested. 
 
 " No, no ! the horse came straight along the high-road I 
 had listened to his step ever so long ; do let us look along 
 here first." 
 
 He turned with her and offered her his arm, for she was 
 shivering with the cold night air, and her legs were tottering 
 under her. Then they walked along, looking and listening, 
 and dreading that the worst that could happen had happened 
 to Henry Fellowes ; and Charlie girded fiercely against Dinah 
 for not following faster. 
 
 At last they gained the entrance into the Goring Place 
 grounds, where Dagorn's lodge stood, and Walter Goring 
 knew that the man they were looking for had not ridden in 
 the other direction. " We may as well turn back now. 
 I '11 take you home, and then find him by myself do believe 
 that it will be all right, Mrs Fellowes." 
 
 But she could not believe that it would be all right. She 
 was picturing the worst possibilities at one moment, and the 
 next going through a thrilling scene of reconciliation with 
 her husband, who might be just enough hurt to be grateful 
 for her anxiety about him. The worst of it is, however 
 fertile imagination may be in conjuring up miseries, one or 
 two disagreeables of a very poignant order are sure to crop 
 up when the end comes, and take us by surprise. 
 
 Very many years ago when I was a small cbild, and long 
 before Free-trade was in the ascendant, I was startled out of 
 my baby-dreams once in the dead of night by confusion and 
 uproar and the words : " Papa is fighting the smugglers ! " 
 Now smugglers were a very familiar abstract idea to me. 
 Papa was popularly supposed to be always looking out for 
 them and u boarding them," together with the band of Coast- 
 guard men under his command; but he did these things 
 away from home out in Blakeney Harbour, or the Pit. 
 
An Empty Saddle. 347 
 
 The charm of mystery was over smugglers to me. It was 
 delightful intelligence to me that " Papa was fighting them 
 in the watch-house yard/' 
 
 Even at this distance of time I can recall the sensations 
 with which I wriggled out of my crib, and ambled away un- 
 noticed in the confusion that reigned to a western window 
 that commanded the scene of carnage which I hoped to wit- 
 ness. As I ran along I heard an order given for " lots of 
 hot water." " That was for washing the wounds," I thought. 
 I pictured my papa surrounded by smugglers, cutting and 
 slashing, and killing them with that sword of his which I 
 liked so well, and which I should have liked so much better 
 if he would but have assured me that he had ever " killed a 
 man with it ; " but he never would assure me of this. This 
 blood-thirstiness of mine had been engendered by desultory 
 dips into " The Chronicles of Froissart," a book which few 
 children know, and fewer still care about, to the perusal of 
 which I had been driven, first by dulness and the want of 
 something else to read, and afterwards by a certain sanguin- 
 ary taste, which developed as I grew in the knowledge that 
 honour and glory, and medals and pensions, and "honourable 
 mentions," were the portions of those who had run the great- 
 est risks, and destroyed the greatest number of their foreign 
 fellow-creatures in the cause of that " Service " in which the 
 men of my family were steeped. At any rate, whatever the 
 cause, I had the taste, and on this occasion I ambled off ex- 
 citedly and delightedly to see my papa fighting the French 
 smugglers. 
 
 It never occurred to me that he might be killed in the 
 skirmish. I was too much accustomed to run my fingers 
 along a deep sabre scar on his head, and to hear of sundry 
 bullets which gave him great pain sometimes, and which were 
 poured into him during a cutting-out expedition from the 
 "Ganymede," off the coast of Spain in 1813. I was too much 
 accustomed to hear casual mention made of these wounds for 
 a single spasm of childish fear to assail my heart on account 
 of my papa, So I ran briskly cff to that western window, 
 and looked through it, hoping to see his sword flashing and 
 lots of blood flowing. Instead of these things I saw a number 
 of French sailors handcuffed and huddled together, while my 
 father was deciding whether he should billet them in the 
 
348 Walter Goring. 
 
 stable or in his own house for the night. There was no 
 fighting, no danger. The hot water was not wanted to wasK 
 the wounded, but to make coffee for the poor fellows, who 
 were the tamest and merriest of smugglers they were not 
 even angry with their captors ! I was bitterly disappointed. 
 I pattered back moodily to my crib, and was presently found 
 crying, and consolation was then offered me under the mis- 
 taken impression that I had been affectionately fearful that 
 " my papa was in danger." At the time I was not honest 
 enough to state the true cause of my grief, having the grace 
 to be a little ashamed of it even then. 
 
 So Charlie Fellowes, wandering along miserably in tlio 
 moonlight, leaning on Walter Goring's arm and looking foi 
 her husband, was conscious of feeling that she had not pre- 
 pared herself "for the worst," when she came, as she presently 
 did, upon Henry Fellowes. 
 
 CHAPTER XLV. 
 
 ONLY A WOMAN. 
 
 THEY had turned back, Charlie hanging on Mr Goring's arm, 
 and suggesting at intervals of about four moments the dreariest 
 and most doleful of probabilities connected with the subject 
 of the disappearance of her husband, and Walter Goring con- 
 soling her as best he could as only he could ; and wishing 
 with fullest fervour that he could console her better. 
 
 In his own heart he had no very over-weaning sense of 
 horror at the probability of Henry Fellowes having broken 
 his neck. The man had let himself down so of late, and had 
 this night put such a finishing stroke to his conduct, that 
 Walter Goring, though no Sir Galahad, had conceived a con- 
 temptuous aversion for Mr Fellowes an aversion that would 
 have rendered it a matter of indifference whether he lived or 
 died had it not been for Mr Fellowes' wife- As it was, the 
 thought of her banished the indifference, and made him feel, 
 
Only a Woman. 349 
 
 even as she trembled with emotion on his arm, that it would 
 be well for her if her worst anxiety were presently well 
 grounded. He felt so keenly the bitterness of her fate ; and 
 at the same time he felt more keenly still that any attempt 
 on his part to sweeten it temporarily would only embitter it 
 still more in the future. But, though he felt this, he could 
 not but be conscious of the subtle, unintentional flattery of 
 her reliant touch on his arm and comfort in his presence 
 and, feeling this, it was hard for a man not to respond. 
 
 They had retraced their steps nearly into Deneham High- 
 street, when they heard footsteps and loud voices advancing 
 towards them, and presently, before they could realise the 
 possibility, though they had recognised his voice, Henry 
 Fellowes and his sister met them, and Mr Fellowes was as 
 evidently as sound of limb as he was in- a furious passion. 
 Charlie took in both facts by the light of the moon, and her 
 heart began to harden. Her anxiety about this man had 
 been an agony for the last hour, and now he met her with 
 anger in his face. What though he was her husband ? She 
 was a human being one, too, of a higher order of intelligence 
 ihan himself. He could have been no more than angry with 
 a dog who had acted against his wishes in ignorance and with 
 good intentions." 
 
 " Henry, I have been terribly frightened about you," she 
 began at once, without moving her hand from Mr Goring's 
 arm. " How did you lose your horse and get home ? " 
 
 " Alarmed have you been ! " he replied, giving her a full 
 stare in the face and a sneering laugh. " Convenient alarm, 
 madam ; the next time you feel it you '11 be good enough to 
 remain in your own house instead of coming out to meet Mr 
 Goring." 
 
 " Henry ! " his sister remonstrated, ranging herself up to 
 Charlie's side as she spoke. By nature Miss Dinah was a 
 distrustful woman, but she could not distrust the motives 
 which had actuated her brother's wife on this occasion. 
 "Come home, my dear," she went on to Charlie; " don't 
 mind him to-night." 
 
 But Charlie had recovered the breath which her husband's 
 speech had taken away, and she could not take her sister-in- 
 law's advice. 
 
 " Not mind him 1" she cried, passionately. " No, he has 
 
35O Walter Goring. 
 
 said the worst thing he can to me now, I shall never mind 
 anything else." 
 
 " You can hardly need my assurance of my meeting with 
 
 Mvi Fellowes being" Walter Goring was beginning ; but 
 
 he checked himself. He could not bring himself to oiler an 
 explanation to Henry Fellowes, the doing so would be an 
 insult to her. 
 
 " I don't need your assurance about anything," Mr Fel- 
 lowes replied, roughly. " I only know that it's a thing I '11 
 not stand : here I come home worn out and exhausted, and 
 I find my house in an uproar, and my wife roaming about 
 the roads." 
 
 "It shall never happen again," Charlie said, coolly. 
 " Good-night, Mr Goring." 
 
 " I didn't mean anything offensive to you, Goring ; but I 
 was very much annoyed very much annoyed, indeed," 
 Henry Fellowes said, holding out his hand to Walter Gor- 
 ing. 
 
 For Charlie's sake, Walter Goring took the hand thus ex- 
 tended, but its touch was loathsome to him it was brought 
 to bear so coarsely and so heavily on her. Then they 
 parted Walter Goring going back to his own place, and 
 the Felloweses walking on to the house, where the wildest 
 speculations were rife amongst the maids as to what would 
 be the end of this. 
 
 The two maintained a strict silence until they were in 
 the house and the door was barred. Then Miss Dinah 
 spoke. 
 
 " Your horse is gone on to The Hurst, Henry." 
 
 " How do you know ? " 
 
 " Because your wife saw him go when she first went out 
 frightened about you." 
 
 " Then why didn't she bring him back ? " he said, rudely, 
 once more "giving Charlie a hard, determined stare. His 
 mad unfounded jealousy had culminated this night j he re- 
 joiced in being able to show the woman who turned to 
 Walter Goring because he was refined, gentle, and con- 
 siderate, how entirely she was in his (Henry Fellowes) 
 power. He rejoiced in mortifying the woman he had once 
 loved so well the woman he still loved after a fashion. He 
 knew that he had lost all mastery over her heart ar.ri soui : 
 
Only a Woman. 351 
 
 and so, like a brute, he determined on exercising the mastery 
 that was still left to him. He would make her feel that she 
 was his property he would " break her in," he told him- 
 self. So he said now " Then why didn't she bring him 
 back?" 
 
 And Charlie shivered to her soul as she listened. He 
 could speak of her in this way as he would speak of a 
 groom or a stable-boy. She had grown so common in his 
 eyes, that he not only forgot that she was his wife, but ap- 
 peared to forget that she was a woman. She shivered as 
 she listened, and thought that under such treatment she 
 must surely deteriorate. The best of her must be bruised 
 away by such coarse handling ; and, as she thought this, 
 she hated him. And she lifted her head and looked her 
 hate of his physical power but still held her peace. 
 
 Miss Dinah left them almost immediately; and for the 
 first time she betrayed that sort of feminine affection for 
 Charlie which is shown in a kiss. She was very sorry 
 now for her brother's wife ; she pitied her profoundly ; and 
 she was terribly afraid of Charlie being driven into open re- 
 bellion by his manner, and so of a scandal coming upon the 
 name of Fellowes. So she kissed Charlie's burning brow ; 
 and, as she did so, she prayed Charlie to be patient. 
 
 As soon as her sister-in-law left them, Henry Fellowes 
 altered his manner a little. He had taken enough wine not 
 to be intoxicated, but not to be one thing long ; and his ver- 
 satility was about as odious as anything that can be ima- 
 gined. Having humbled her, as he hoped, before Walter 
 Goring the man whom she preferred to himself and his 
 sister, he now wanted to make friends, in order that the sub- 
 ject might be dropped till such time as he chose to resume it 
 and humble her again. If any surprise be felt that a man 
 so hearty, good-humoured, and good-natured as he was when 
 he first came into this story, should have developed into such 
 a coarse, mean-spirited, half-tyrant, half-profligate, let it be 
 borne in mind that the heartiness was the result of full 
 health and prosperity, that the good-humour came from 
 good fortune, and the good-nature from an animal indiffer- 
 ence to every form of annoyance that did not affect himself ; 
 and that none of these things were ever shown to be other 
 than they were. When he lost the position he had been ac- 
 
352 Walter Goring. 
 
 customed to fill, the pleasures which money ermbled him to 
 purchase, and the consideration which position and money 
 alone command, he had nothing to fall back upon. His big 
 handsome frame contained a very small mind and no soul 
 worth mentioning. "While it came easy to him, he had been 
 generous ; while there had been no special call for it, he had 
 shown a sort of graciousness and manly consideration for his 
 wife that was partly the result of his thinking her so pretty 
 and graceful, and partly the result of that deep-rooted dislike 
 he had to discussing unpleasant subjects till he was com- 
 pelled to do so. In fact, while he had been a prosperous 
 animal he had been a very amiable and agreeable one. But 
 when the prosperity vanished, nothing but the animal was 
 left. 
 
 The alteration in his manner as soon as his sister left them, 
 did not strike Charlie as being either graceful or desirable. 
 She had seated herself on her own low writing-chair, and ho 
 came and leant over the back of it and kissed her, saying, 
 
 " We have both been rather foolish to-night, Charlie. Let 
 us forgive and forget." 
 
 " I can't make the smallest pretence of doing either ; and 
 I have done nothing for you to forgive, or that I want you 
 to forget/' she replied, quietly. She could not forget that 
 Walter Goring had heard her taunted with she hardly knew 
 what. She could not forgive it. She had been lowered, she 
 told herself, in the eyes of the man with whom she most 
 desired to stand well. She could not forgive it. 
 
 " You must think that it was enough to annoy any fellow, 
 Charlie," he went on ; and really, though he had brought the 
 annoyance on himself, and fully deserved it, he was quite 
 right as to its being " enough." It must have been altogether 
 about as annoying a reception as could greet any gentleman 
 on his return to his home, when his horse has previously 
 arrived with its saddle empty. 
 
 " What was enough to annoy you your horse throwing 
 you ? or my being anxious about you ? They are the chief 
 points of the case." 
 
 " My horse didn't throw me," he replied, irascibly. And 
 as to your being ' anxious/ you might have been that without 
 going out to meet Goring." 
 
 " What is it you think of me I" she exclaimed, getting up ; 
 
Only a Woman. 353 
 
 she could not bear his leaning over her. It nearly drove her 
 wild to remember that he had the right to do it. " Say it 
 out what is it you think of me ? " 
 
 He followed her, and put an arm round her waist drawing 
 her up against himself. He was a little cowed by her manner. 
 As he pressed her to his heart, a choking sigh burst from her 
 lips ; but she remained passive. She would not cast herself 
 free from his embraces ; but how she abhorred them ! In- 
 stinct told her truths. 
 
 " What do I think of you ? Don't take it so seriously, 
 darling. I only think what 's good of you." 
 
 " Then you told a falsehood just now, when you said I 
 went out to meet Goring ; and what you have made him 
 think of me." 
 
 Her words rang out so fiercely, that he started and let her 
 go ; and she sat down again, running the fingers of both 
 hands through her short waving hair. The thought that 
 Walter Goring would know now that her husband was jealous 
 of her about him, nearly maddened her. This was the real 
 sting. She did not know that Walter Goring had read the 
 secret without any aid from Mr Fellowes ; read it, and 
 regretted it, and felt it to be too sweet a one for him to dwell 
 upon with safety. 
 
 " You might have a little feeling for me in the matter, 1 
 think," he said, moodily. 
 
 " Feeling for you ; ah ! it can't be all on one side. What 
 feeling do you show for me? How you leave me! How 
 you come to me ! Do I ever ask where you go, or reproach 
 you for what cuts me to the soul ? No stop," (as she saw 
 him about to interrupt her,) " I don't want to make a merit 
 of it I know it 's my duty to bear it all. But haven't I 
 borne it ? Have I failed in rny duty ? " 
 
 " Never," he answered, abjectly. 
 
 "And there's very small merit in that either," she con- 
 tinued recklessly. " I have never been tempted to stray 
 from it. If I had been just ask yourself are you going the 
 way to make the path pleasant? I never professed any 
 romantic love for you God forgive me, I never had it to pro- 
 fess and I don't tell falsehoods : but I could have felt so 
 differently for you if only you had let me." 
 
 The last words came out with a sob ; she could but pity 
 
 z 
 
354 Walter Goring. 
 
 herself, knowing how her heart must have been wrung before 
 she could thus bring herself to pain a fellow -creature by 
 uttering such words. 
 
 "Charlie! is it too late?" 
 
 He was thoroughly sobered as he asked it. How he hated 
 himself for having of late found bliss in revelry and forgetful- 
 ness in wine, and balm generally in flirtation with barmaids. 
 Still there was comfort in the thought that his wife didn't 
 know the worst. If she would only forgive, and smile upon 
 him again, he would amend the error of his ways. But a 
 woman cannot forgive to seventy times seven unless she loves 
 the sinner. 
 
 "Yes, it is too late," she said, sadly. "The kindest 
 thing you could do now would be to let me go away from 
 you. Will you do it?" 
 
 " Never ! " he replied, grasping her round the waist, and 
 never heeding the sickened look that spread over her face. 
 " If I can't have your love, I '11 have you." Then he kissed 
 her passionately, almost biting her in his frenzy ; and her 
 heart died within her as she took in the truth, that there 
 was no escape. 
 
 The next morning, at breakfast, Henry Fellowes offered a 
 full explanation of the cause of the old brown hunter and 
 himself not coming home together. Need it be said that he 
 lied freely. He had been to a distant market-town, he told 
 them, to meet a man about " that embankment/' not the 
 engineer, "but another fellow," (here he grew sketchy,) 
 " who proposed something that promised well." Coming 
 home at a slinging trot, the brown hunter had stumbled, and 
 he had gone over its head. On recovering the fall for he 
 had been stunned and getting up, he found the horse had 
 walked on, and so he had come home a short cut across the 
 fields. Even as he offered the explanation, he could see that 
 Charlie was perfectly indifferent about it, and " By Jove ! " he 
 thought, "it is too late." 
 
 Then she offered her explanation. Not a word had been 
 said the night before about her having broken her promise to 
 be home by three, but now she referred to it. 
 
 "You will find the plan drawn out, Henry," she said. 
 " I didn't get home till six, but it is all ready for you." 
 
 " Thank you," he. replied. 
 
Daisy's Appeal. 355 
 
 " The reason I was not home at three was, that in coming 
 through the fields I met Mr Goring, and he had a book for 
 me ; we stayed together reading it, and I forgot my appoint- 
 ment till half-past five." 
 
 She spoke quite coolly and collectedly, and Henry Fellowes, 
 though his brow flushed, felt that he had made too much ado 
 about nothing previously for there to be safety in hinting at 
 displeasure now. So he only said, " Oh ! " timidly, and then 
 Charlie proceeded. 
 
 " He told me that he is to be married in May, and he 
 wanted me to see Daisy before her marriage ; so I asked her 
 to come here and stay with me till the wedding. Now J 
 shall write, and tell him that I can't receive her ! " 
 
 " No, don't," Henry Fellowes protested, faintly. 
 
 " Her coming would put us out dreadfully," Mrs Fellowes, 
 senior, said crossly. 
 
 " Besides," Charlie went on, with a burst of her sex's irra- 
 tionality, " Mr Goring can't wish Daisy to see much of me, 
 after hearing what an opinion you have of me, Henry ; after 
 that I should think he will feel that the less his wife sees of 
 me the better ; so I '11 give the initiative by telling him that 
 I can't have her." 
 
 So, despite her husband's entreaties, she wrote to Walter, 
 and told him this, and he read her reason for doing it. He 
 knew her so well, so very well, that he could but care for her 
 warmly. 
 
 CHAPTEE XLVI. 
 DAISY'S APPEAL. 
 
 IT had been Mr Goring's wish, from the date of his deter- 
 mination to marry his cousin, if she would marry him, that 
 the wedding should take place at Deneham. It seemed onlj 
 just and well that Daisy should go forth from Goring Place 
 as a bride, as any other Miss Goring of that special branch of 
 the family had gone forth. Therefore it had been an under- 
 stood thins, and a thins that caused much commotion in the 
 
356 Walter Goring. 
 
 detached villa outside Brighton that Mrs and Miss Osborne 
 should accompany the bride-elect to what had been her 
 father's, and was her future husband's home, the day before 
 the wedding ; and the wedding was fixed for the 10th of 
 May. Mrs Fellowes' invitation to Daisy would have made, 
 if accepted, but this difference in the original programme; 
 namely, that the whole party would have come sooner, by 
 about ten days or a fortnight, and Daisy would have gone to 
 the Fellowes', while the Osbornes would have taken up their 
 abode at Goring Place. Now, however, since Charlie backed 
 out of her offer, the first plan was to stand unaltered ; and 
 Daisy would be without that good female ' influence which 
 Walter Goring had hoped to see Charlie exert over her, at 
 that turning-point in her career when a woman is popularly 
 supposed to be peculiarly open to impressions for good or ill. 
 
 There were to be no other guests at the marriage ceremony 
 and breakfast, save the people who have appeared in this 
 story the Prescotts and the Felloweses, the Traverses, and 
 Frank St John, who was to come down with his picture on 
 the night of the 9th, made up the list of those invited. 
 Happily for himself, some undefined feeling intervened and 
 prevented Walter Goring from making a greater parade than 
 was possible about his projected plan. 
 
 Daisy had asserted that there was an absolute necessity for 
 her to break the journey from Brighton to Goring Place, by 
 staying in London for part of a day and one night, in order 
 that she might get innumerable "things," which at the last she 
 had remembered were forgotten. Whatever was pointed out 
 forcibly, Mrs Osborne was prone to see invariably. Accord- 
 ingly, she now, as usual, took Miss Goring's view of the case, 
 and agreed to go up to town on the 8th, and remain there 
 the night, instead of passing right through on the 9th. 
 
 From the moment that Mrs Osborne saw the beauty of, 
 and acceded to, Daisy's proposition, Daisy was delightfully 
 agreeable. She had been rather thoughtful, rather downcast, 
 rather sullen, to tell the truth, of late ; but when this last 
 harmless whim of hers was pronounced worthy to be acted 
 upon, she recovered her vigour and animation marvellously, 
 and forthwith proceeded to make herself delightfully agree- 
 able to Mrs Osborne and Alice. In fact, she overpowered 
 the latter with presents of things that Walter had given her, 
 
Daisy 's Appeal 357 
 
 and that were not strictly according to her taste. " He gave 
 me this for my engagement ring," she said, handing Alice a 
 little hoop of turquoise, " but the beastly things turn green 
 if they get wet you '11 remember to take it off when you 
 wash your hands, Alice. I always forget, so you may have it." 
 
 "But what will Mr Goring think ?" Alice had suggested; 
 and. then Daisy had shrugged her shoulders and replied, that 
 "if Mr Goring didn't like it, he could well, give her 
 another." Then she stopped further protestation on Alice's 
 part by steeping that humble-minded young person in a 
 vapour-bath of gratitude, by telling her that she should 
 " come and stay at Goring Place, by and by, as often as she 
 could." 
 
 They reached London on the morning of the 8th by an 
 eleven o'clock train; and when they had put down their 
 trunks at the hotel to which Walter had directed them, 
 Daisy urged that they should start on their shopping ex- 
 pedition at once, walking. She was the guiding star, the 
 ruling spirit of that walk; and she betrayed an intimate 
 acquaintance with localities, and with the several specialities 
 of different shops, that caused Mrs Osborne to look upon her 
 with awe, and follow her blindly. 
 
 It could not be that Daisy had any design in tiring out hei 
 respectable duenna ; yet it was a terrible dance which she led 
 her on that morning. Up and down Regent Street, along Pic- 
 cadilly to Sloane Street ; back again to some matchless silk- 
 mercers on Ludgate Hill, and always walking. More than 
 once, Mrs Osborne faintly proposed a cab. The May sun 
 was a strong one that year, and the pavement was hot, and 
 Mrs Osborne was a woman of weight. But whenever she 
 proposed a cab, Daisy looked alarmed, and said, "Not a 
 four-wheeled one, surely ; all the people w r ith small-pox and 
 fever go to the hospitals in them, you know." It was useless 
 for Mrs Osborne to say, " Those epidemics are not in town 
 now, my dear." Daisy looked unconvinced, and gave pretty 
 shudders, which Mrs Osborne blindly accepted as being illus- 
 trative of fear, and entreated that they might take a " han- 
 som," which entreaty was not complied with by reason of 
 there being a difficulty about all three of them getting into 
 it. The end of it was that when they returned to their hotel 
 in St James's Street, at half-past two, Mrs Osborne was worn 
 
35& Walter Goring. 
 
 out by the combination of unaccustomed excitement and 
 fatigue. The din had made her head ache, and there "was 
 nothing for that," she said, "but to go and lie down quietly, 
 and get to sleep." 
 
 Daisy waited until Mrs Osborne had taken off her boots 
 and her dress, and placed herself upon the bed. Daisy even 
 waited until slumber had begun to press Mrs Osborne's eye- 
 lids down heavily. Then she crept into her room, and spoke 
 in a drowsy kind of tone, in order not too thoroughly to dis- 
 turb and rouse her sleepy protectress. "There are some 
 things that I have forgotten even now," Daisy said, standing 
 in the solitary ray of light which Mrs Osborne had still suf- 
 fered to have free access into her room standing in it, and 
 looking such a pale-faced, yellow-haired embodiment of truth 
 and purity, that a keener and more sceptical person than 
 Mrs Osborne might have been deceived into believing that all 
 things about Daisy were as they seemed. " There are some 
 things that I have forgotten even now little presents for 
 Mrs Fellowes, who has been 50 kind to me, you know. 
 Walter will be quite vexed." Daisy looked pensive, and Mrs 
 Osborne gave an inward groan, and moved her tired feet 
 wearily, but resignedly, in a manner that indicated to the 
 acute Daisy that the owner of the feet was about to flounder 
 off the bed. Seeing this, the considerate young lady went on 
 abruptly, 
 
 " It would be cruel to drag you out again, Mrs Osborne ; 
 let Alice go with me." 
 
 "Mr Goring won't like it," Mrs Osborne faintly protested; 
 but Daisy saw that her protectress was amenable to the 
 amendment. 
 
 " He won't mind it a bit when he knows the motive to 
 get something that will show his friend, Mrs Fellowes, that I 
 remembered her at the last. Do let Alice go with me, and 
 you rest yourself, Mrs Osborne." 
 
 "But you won't be long now, will you, Miss Goring?" 
 Mrs Osborne said, suffering the charm of possible repose to 
 come over her senses again. " I hardly like it. It 's not 
 what ought to be you two girls running about by your- 
 selves; but" (and she looked down upon them piteously) 
 " my ancles are so swollen." 
 
 " We shall not be long, of course not. You '11 see Alice 
 
Daisy's Appeal 359 
 
 back' in less than an hour, and you know it 's Alice you are 
 most anxious about," Daisy replied, laughing. Then she 
 gently went out of the room, and Mrs Osborne blinked and 
 winked, and tried to keep awake long enough to make up her 
 mind that she ought not to let those two girls go out alone, 
 and failed in doing so. 
 
 Daisy went back into the room where Alice was, and told 
 her of the assent that had been given by Mrs Osborne. 
 " Your mother is too tired to come out, Alice, so you 're to 
 come as watch-dog, please ; I am only going to a shop in 
 Piccadilly. We '11 go in a cab, and you can wait in it at 
 the door if you like. I shall not be more than a minute 
 getting what I want." 
 
 " I thought you were afraid to go in a cab this morning." 
 
 " So I was, this morning. I have got over my ' ground- 
 less alarm ' that was what your mother called it. I am not 
 at all obstinate ; I 'm always ready to be convinced." 
 
 When they reached the door of the shop in Piccadilly, 
 Daisy said again, "You needn't come in with me, Alice. 
 Wait here, and I'll soon be out again;" and Alice obeyed 
 her, partly out of delicacy and partly because she was tired. 
 It occurred to Miss Osborne that the liberal bride-elect was 
 going to get some offering of friendship for the lady with 
 whom she had been living of late, as well as for Mrs Fellowes, 
 " and so, naturally, she would rather that I didn't see it till 
 she gives it to mamma," Alice thought, looking affectionately 
 after the peaceful, smiling Daisy, as she went into the shop. 
 
 Miss Goring paused at the first counter and asked for 
 something. Before they could show it to her, she rose from 
 the chair and said she would "just go on and look at those 
 shawls," pointing to some which were hanging in the dim 
 distance beyond an arch in another room. She would go 
 and look at them and then come back for the embroidered 
 handkerchiefs she had first asked for. As she walked along 
 towards the shawls her heart thumped heavily. She was 
 horribly afraid of one of the men following her one of the 
 men who had seen her leave the cab waiting and come in. 
 But they did not do so. They knew that the next depart- 
 ment was competent, and that their aid was not required to 
 bring the young lady and a shawl together. 
 
 When she passed under the arch she looked back. There 
 
360 Walter Goring. 
 
 was no one looking, no one following. One of the attendant 
 spirits salaamed, and went through the rest of the formula 
 observed when a customer enters ; but Daisy passed on, say- 
 ing simply that she had been served. She passed on and out 
 at another door into another street, and then she called a 
 cab and got in, giving a direction hastily and an order to 
 drive fast. 
 
 She never thought once as she was jolted and rattled 
 through the streets, of the girl she had left awaiting her. 
 But she thought a good deal of one who thought to make 
 her his wife so soon. " Poor Walter ! it '& only kindness to 
 him though, if I succeed ; and if I fail oh ! if I fail." 
 
 She could not even think of what would happen then. A 
 white horror crept all over her at the bare possibility, and an 
 awful sensation of sickness came into the palms of her hands 
 and caused her jaws to quiver and open helplessly. A damp- 
 ness broke out on her brow, and for a few moments she saw 
 and heard nothing. In fact, she nearly fainted under the 
 influence of the thought of failing in the something on which 
 she was bent. But by the time she reached her destination, 
 the sickly pallor had fled, her heart was bounding high, and 
 Jier cheek was blushing brightly with hope. 
 
 Her destination was a house in a dull dreary street, in tli8 
 west-central district, the door of which was opened to her bjf 
 a shabby maid-servant, with a swollen face. In answer to 
 her inquiry for some person, the servant said, " Yes, he 's at 
 home," adding, in a mutter that did not reach Daisy's ears, 
 " It ain't often he dare stir out." Then she opened the dool 
 of a back drawing-room, and Daisy walked in, stood for a 
 few moments trying to call to a man who sat writing at the 
 extreme end of the room, failed in doing so coherently, and 
 as he looked round and rose, rushed forward to him ard 
 threw her arms round the neck of Laurence Levinge. 
 
 His first words nearly crushed her to the ground. 
 
 "Daisy, Daisy, why have you come? Why won't you 
 lei us keep what little honour is left us." 
 
 She fell down on her knees before him, sobbing and kiss- 
 ing his hands passionately. 
 
 '* You promised to marry me once. I shall die if you don't. 
 I cant go on I can't marry Walter. Oh, Laurence, let me 
 stay with you ! I love you so ! I love you so 1 " 
 
Daisy's Appeal. 361 
 
 " You '11 drive me mad, Daisy." Remorse for her, and 
 regard for her, and regret for so many mad things, were 
 tearing at the man's heart. He was not all a villain no 
 one is ; but her love for him made him feel himself to be the 
 greatest the sun ever shone upon. Presently he lifted her 
 up and seated her on the chair from which he had risen, and 
 still she clung to him as to the only thing that was dear to 
 her on earth, and prayed him to let her stay with him, for 
 she loved him so. To every argument he used, she only 
 answered that " I love you so. I can't live away I can't 
 die away from you." 
 
 It was a maddening interview for hiii. In vain he painted 
 his worse than poverty, his tremendous debts, his inability 
 to go out even now in the light of day. In vain he told her 
 that he was a gambler out of luck, and prayed her fervently 
 not to try and induce him to add the sin of dragging her 
 down with him to the many he had committed. He was 
 paying a bitter penalty now for having tried in sport to make 
 this girl love him. She was doing it in terrible earnest, and 
 he loved her too. 
 
 Laurence Levinge had fallen upon very evil days indeed 
 It was his own fault truly that he had done so. He had 
 gambled and cheated and been found out ; he had swindled 
 some of his best friends, and been cut by them. He had 
 deceived a girl who believed him to be good and true, as he 
 looked who loved him so well that she would have given 
 her life, her hopes of all happiness, to have served him, and 
 who asked, who cared, for nothing in return save that she 
 might stay with him, and this (it was his hardest punishment) 
 he could not grant. For a few months, if her money lasted, 
 the few poor hundreds, which he knew he should risk at 
 the tables, if he could touch them, they might live. After 
 that, she might starve perchance ; and, selfish as he was, he 
 could not do it, ardently as she prayed him " not to fear for 
 her, but to let her stay, for she loved him so." It was hard, 
 it was pitiful, bad as he was, to crush her plea and beseech her 
 to marry and be happy with Walter Goring, and finally to force 
 her back into the cab, and turn away resolutely from her loving 
 lips, and the eyes that were nearly blind with tears shed for 
 this parting with him. He had been very false, very cruel. He 
 had taken the hottest heart that ever throbbed in a woman's 
 
362 Walter Goring. 
 
 breast, r.nd trifled with it. The end the miserable end 
 justified her in thinking these things. Yet as he turned away, 
 after telling the man to drive her hack to her hotel, his 
 wonderful "beauty, and the love in his sad-looking eyes made 
 her swear that she would marry no other man, though she 
 should not have the courage to tell Walter Goring so until 
 the very last. " None but Laurence my Laurence," she 
 sobbed, fondly. 
 
 CHAPTER XLVII. 
 
 " MY ELAINE." 
 
 THE 9th of May was the fairest day the year had seen yet. . 
 So fair, that one looked involuntarily for the hawthorn 
 blossom on the hawthorn hedges, forgetting that what is 
 customarily called " May " rarely blooms till June so fair 
 that women thought of muslins and men of cooled beverages, 
 and everybody of economical plans, that would enable them 
 to " get away " somewhere to be cooler in the autumn. Up 
 in London, exquisite complete suits of the calibre of cobwebs 
 dawned upon the vision in divers shop windows. Ubiquitous 
 Gatti broke out all over town at once in feverish-looking ices 
 and irrepressible bottles of ginger-beer a liquid which neither 
 cheers nor inebriates, nor does anything, save painfully dis- 
 tend. And down at Deneham and all about Goring Place, 
 people were saying that if it were only " equally fine to-mor- 
 row," it might be hailed as a remarkably auspicious omen 
 about a remarkably hazardous match. 
 
 Daisy and the Osbornes arrived about five in the afternoon, 
 and Walter Goring met them at the station, after the fashion 
 of princes and other young men of mark when their brides- 
 elect come dreadful distances to marry them. Not that 
 Daisy had come a " dreadful distance; " but she avowed that 
 she had done so when Walter remarked how pale and tired 
 she looked. " It 's enough to make any one look pale and 
 tired, Walter the dreadful distance, and such a beast of a 
 train," she said, looking away from him ; and since no other 
 
"My Elaine." 363 
 
 was offered, he was obliged to be content with that explana- 
 tion. 
 
 Daisy had made all things smooth and straight with the 
 Osbornes. When she returned to them the clay before, after 
 that visit to Laurence Levinge, she found them, as she an- 
 ticipated, rapidly driving each other mad by a series of broken- 
 hearted, not to say idiotic, suggestions. Alice had waited in 
 the cab at the shop-door as Daisy had ordered her to do, 
 until her modesty and anxiety combined to make her believe 
 that she was the cynosure of all eyes. Then she had made 
 her way into the gorgeous emporium which seemed to have 
 swallowed up Daisy ; and when she did this, melancholy 
 quickly claimed her for his own. In answer to the most 
 lucid description she could offer of Daisy to the four men who 
 simultaneously pushed chairs out, and asked what they could 
 do for her, the sole answer she got was that " they would in- 
 quire." Naturally, their inquiries ended in nothing. So 
 finally, poor Alice went home in the cab and a state of blank 
 misery. 
 
 For about an hour, Mrs Osborne and her daughter made 
 helpless remarks to each other. Alice's circumstantial evi- 
 dence was flawless up to a certain point. " She got out of 
 the cab and walked into the shop as quietly as possible," the 
 girl said, for the twentieth time, and for the twentieth time her 
 mother made reply, " Walked in quietly and didn't seem 
 flurried, you say, Alice ? " " No," Alice said, decidedly ; 
 but after this her evidence grew weak, dealing principally 
 with the thoughts that had beset herself while she waited. 
 At the end of an hour, and just when they had plunged 
 themselves into an abyss of confusion, respecting what it 
 would be well to do just as Mrs Osborne had shaken her 
 head reproachfully at the ancles, whose inopportune swell- 
 ing had been the indirect cause of the mischief, and Alice had 
 began to entertain dark suspicions as to the suave shopmen 
 having made away with Daisy for the sake of the jewellery 
 she wore, and buried her lacerated corpse under the counter 
 just at this juncture, Miss Goring came back. 
 
 She did not absolutely assert it, but she implied that she 
 had been to her mother once more, for the last time. She 
 was gentle, sweet, subdued to a degree, and Mrs Osborne was 
 too glad to have her back safely to question her very closely. 
 
364 Walter Goring. 
 
 She apologised to Alice for leaving her in such a way. " But 
 I couldn't have taken you with me, dear, and so I had no 
 choice, you see," she said. " I knew, too, that when you 
 got tired of waiting, you would come home." 
 
 " I was tired of waiting a long time before I came back, 
 Miss Goring," Alice said, reproachfully. 
 
 " Oh ! were you ?" Daisy made answer, frankly. " Well v 
 that was your own fault, you know. I should have come 
 away the instant I felt bored." 
 
 " I hope you understand that it is my duty to conceal 
 nothing from Mr Goring," Mrs Osborne said, faintly. She 
 more than half expected that Daisy would reply that she 
 " didn't understand anything of the sort," and insist on her 
 (Mrs Osborne) observing silence. To her surprise, however, 
 Daisy only said, " I shall tell Mr Goring everything, I pro- 
 mise you, to-morrow night : only don't you do it, leave it all 
 to me." 
 
 She was thoroughly in earnest. She believed that she 
 should tell Walter Goring " everything '' that she could 
 not marry him included the first minute she could speak to 
 him alone. But when that minute came, her courage failed 
 her. " I will wait till later in the evening," she thought, aa 
 her heart began to beat thickly in her throat at the bare idea 
 of saying the hard words. 
 
 Young Mrs Fellowes had promised to come up to see 
 Daisy on this last evening before the wedding. She had 
 promised to do so because Walter Goring had asked her, 
 and because she might never again have an opportunity of 
 pleasing him in even so small a thing. It was hard work 
 to keep the promise at all to come up and see him another 
 woman's lover for the first time very hard work ; but as 
 she kept it at all, she kept the promise bravely. 
 
 Daisy (" Can it be hypocrisy ? " was Charlie's first thought) 
 seemed strangely glad to see her so glad, that Walter Gor- 
 ing could but contrast the greeting she gave Mrs Fellowes 
 with the greeting she had given himself. Both these women 
 were so helpless so apparently God and man forsaken that 
 though each felt the other to be her rival though neither 
 knew the full pitiful meed of helplessness and misery of the 
 other they did, through some fine feminine instinct, incline 
 towards and pity each other. Moreover, some subtle sense 
 
"My Elaine" 365 
 
 told Daisy that, let what would come, Mrs Fellowes would 
 be staunch to any professions she made in prosperity ; and 
 Daisy did not feel at all sure of what might come, even now. 
 when all seemed made safe for the ring and altar to-morrow. 
 
 The poor little fair girl, with the dulcet voice and the 
 yellow hair, and the eyes that but such a short time since 
 had been so young and untroubled in their blue impertinence, 
 was tossed about tumultuously by the very vague notions of 
 right and wrong which had been sown by a shaky, vacilla- 
 ting, maternal hand in her mind. She was only sure of 
 one thing, poor child; and that one thing was that she 
 loved Laurence Levinge loved him in a way that robbed 
 the future of all terror to her. "-If I dared tell Walter the 
 
 truth," she thought within her quailing heart; "but" 
 
 she dared not. She only bemoaned the truth, and wondered 
 whether she could live long under the black shadow which 
 it cast over her. Love was no summer romance, no blithe 
 pastime, no pretty toy to her. It was the very essence of 
 her being, and Laurence Levinge had absorbed it all. 
 
 By the seven o'clock train Frank St John arrived, bringing 
 with him the picture wherein he had striven to immortalise 
 Mrs Walsh's beauty. His sister and Mr Goring both went 
 out into the hall to meet him when they heard him come in, 
 and he pointed to a large canvas-covered case, and told them 
 they were not to see the " Elaine " until he had hung it to 
 his own satisfaction, in a good light. " Which room shall 
 it be in, Goring ? " he asked ; and Walter Goring suggested 
 a little room that opened out of the large drawing-room, 
 which Mrs Walsh's taste had hung with pomegranate-coloured 
 velvet curtains. " The very thing," Frank said, anxiously 
 superintending the moving of that into which he had thrown 
 his whole heart and working power. " When it J s up I '11 
 call you." Then he w 7 ent on into the room Walter Goring 
 had indicated, and the master of the house and Mrs Fellowes 
 returned to Daisy. 
 
 She was at her best that night. The cobalt-blue eyes 
 seemed to have been brightened and deepened by the tears 
 she had shed the day before, and the cloud of yellow hair 
 which fell in soft, full, undulating waves, from off her 
 face down over her shoulders, had never looked more golden. 
 The tears had done something else, too made t er face of one 
 
366 Walter Goring. 
 
 unvarying pearly hue. Still, charming as was this increased 
 softness and delicacy both of colouring and expression, 
 Walter Goring hoped to see her look happier more like a 
 creature of flesh and blood again, when she became his wife. 
 
 Charlie was nervously anxious for the moment to come 
 when her brother should call them to look at his picture. 
 " I wish you had seen it before," she said to Walter Goring. 
 " Supposing you shouldn't like it ? I wish Frank hadn't 
 sold it till it was finished, and you had seen it." 
 
 " In any event I should have bid for it. I was determined 
 to be the possessor of Frank's first picture/' Walter Goring 
 replied. 
 
 " Supposing it should be a daub," Charlie urged. " Not 
 that I fear that ; but I shall fancy whatever you say about it 
 that you were determined to say it beforehand. I wish you 
 had seen it before. If it falls short of what we all hope, I 
 shall go mad." 
 
 Charlie got up and moved restlessly about the room, and 
 Daisy presently joined her. " I care much more about seeing 
 your brother than I do about seeing his picture. Walter has 
 told me what a charming fellow he is, often." 
 
 " I never used the adjective, Daisy ; he 's the best fellow 
 in the world. There, he 's calling us," Walter Goring said. 
 Then he came between the two girls, and as Charlie walked 
 along before them he put his arm round Daisy, saying, 
 " Come and see my present, my pet." 
 
 Frank St John stood with his back to them as they 
 walked through the drawing-room, which was dark by com- 
 parison with the brilliantly-lighted little cabinet in which 
 the picture was hung, against a pomegranate-coloured cur- 
 tain. 
 
 For a few moments, as they still advanced, they saw 
 nothing save that the picture was a bright one. It had been 
 begun with a view to its being seen in the Academy, and it 
 was painted up to Academy pitch. Moreover, it was an 
 absolute condition of the attempt at reproducing so bright a 
 scene, that there should be almost a dazzling brightness in 
 the picture. He had seized the moment when Guinevere, 
 with full white arm still upraised, has flung the diamonds 
 down into the water, from whence other diamonds are 
 flushing to meet them. Then while to watch them 
 
At Bay. 
 
 " Sir Lancelot leant, in half disgust 
 
 At love, life, all things, on the window-ledge, 
 Close underneath his eyes, and right across 
 Where these had fallen, slowly past the barge 
 Whereon the lily maid of Astolat 
 Lay smiling, like a star in blackest night." 
 
 Still with his arm about the golden-haired girl who was tc 
 be his wife to-morrow, Walter Goring went on to show her 
 the picture, and introduce her to his friend, the painter of it. 
 The rare likeness that had been maintained to Mrs Walsh, 
 his absent goddess, caught his eye first. Then before he 
 could look further, Frank, looking very artistic in a black 
 velvet suit, turned round, and as he did so his eyes fell on 
 Daisy, who, shrinking, trembling, yet with her gaze firmly 
 fixed on the "Lancelot leaning in half disgust upon the 
 window-ledge," and in whom she recognised Laurence 
 Levinge, heard Charlie cry out 
 
 " Why, it 's Daisy ! " at the same moment that Frank St 
 John exclaimed 
 
 " Good Heavens ! my Elaine ! " 
 
 CHAPTER XL VIII. 
 
 AT BAY. 
 
 HAD a brace of bishops united their forces in former days in 
 hallowing the bond that had existed between Daisy's father 
 and mother, Daisy herself could not have exhibited more un- 
 mistakable signs of race than she did on this occasion. The 
 daughter of a hundred earls, whose mothers had all been 
 countesses, could not have faced the position more gallantly 
 than she did now. The gentle breeding which was hers by 
 right of her sire, told her that no amount of weeping, wail- 
 ing, and gnashing of teeth would remedy the evil and alter 
 the past, while it would very materially complicate the mixed 
 and unenviable feelings of her unwilling detectors. There- 
 lore she neither wept, nor wailed, nor gnashed her teeth ; 
 
363 Walter Goring. 
 
 she simply stood aloof from them all on the instant, seeking 
 no support, praying for no partisanship, acting the part of 
 one who could dare the consequences of all she had done to 
 perfection, as Daisy always would act even at such a crisis. 
 For the rest 
 
 Frank St John had met with one or two little checks in 
 ]ifc, as may have been surmised. The navy had been his 
 career, the one to which, from his childhood, he had looked 
 forward, and it had been blasted, and an old schoolfellow, a 
 boy, who had got the cadetship from the Royal Naval School, 
 the year before he himself had been so fortunate, had made 
 things very unpleasant to him from the height of another 
 " step," even before the blasting of that career. He had 
 loved and unloved in a good many ports ; had " been thrown 
 over once when he had really been very far gone " for a 
 brother officer. But each and all of the pangs he had suf- 
 fered on these and other occasions, were light in comparison 
 to that which assailed him now, when through him this 
 slight, fair, innocent-eyed girl was brought to bay. Nice as 
 was his own sense of honour grieved as he would have been 
 to see Walter Goring's perilled it brought the first glow of 
 shame that ever had been there to his cheek, to feel that his 
 had been the hand to point out where the stain was. For 
 he remembered the circumstances under which he had seen 
 his pale-faced " Elaine " at the Opera he remembered having 
 described her to Walter as a " half -world" and he knew 
 with horrible certainty that the stain was there. 
 
 As for Charlie she was one of those people to whom a 
 thing is never one whit the blacker for being found out. 
 Doubtless this is an unsafe order of mind, nevertheless she 
 had it; the crime was not in the detection to her. She had 
 never believed that Daisy cared for Walter Goring; indeed 
 Daisy had almost confessed as much to her, but had, at the 
 same time, so appealed to her pride and honour, that she was 
 fettered and powerless to protect him from the evil of the 
 marriage. Now all danger of that evil was over thus much 
 was patent to them all at once. But she did not think 
 worse of Daisy for it than she had thought before ; nor did 
 she intend to stand aloof from Daisy, as Daisy proudly gave 
 her the option of doing. Her greatest regret in the business 
 was, that her brother should have been instrumental in 
 
At Bay. 369 
 
 bringing the exposure about; for Walter Goring, she felt 
 that there would be balm in Gilead still. 
 
 But though she was right in feeling this, Walter Goring 
 had got a very bad blow. He had been left the guardian of 
 this girl's honour, and now, before he had been in charge a 
 year, he feared he was given terribly sure proof, in fact, that 
 her honour was gone. He remembered vividly how Frank 
 had spoken of his chance model and of her handsome cavalier, 
 who would do for a Sir Lancelot. He remembered now how 
 Daisy had been missing, lost, at the time of St John's having 
 lighted upon an " Elaine ; " and remembering these things, 
 and looking at Daisy, the living duplicate of the pictured 
 lily-maid of Astolat, he could but feel her lost to him, and 
 himself a defaulter in the matter of his loveless trust. 
 
 Have you never heard some high-toned vocalist fail by the 
 portion of a note, and in the next instant triumphantly assert 
 her claim to " touching ' ; something impossible more clearly 
 than any of her contemporaries? Have you ever seen a 
 spent thorough-bred drop, and pick itself up again before the 
 eye has conveyed the fact of the fall to the brain of the 
 majority ? Have you ever marked the manner in which a 
 man will buckle-to afresh when he has succumbed for awhile 
 to the " examination fever," and the day of his destiny is 
 near ? There is courage in all these reactionary bursts ; but 
 there was more courage in the way in which Daisy held her 
 fair little face aloft, and looked at them steadily from out of 
 the cobalt blue eyes, when, after bending for one instant 
 beneath the fact, she knew herself found out. It is useless 
 to deny it. Those who howl and go down under punish- 
 ment, no matter how well-merited, never command our 
 sympathies to the same extent as one who stands the conse- 
 quences, no matter of what, without flinching. 
 
 As Daisy stood it now. She was not cast externally in 
 the heroic mould. No one would have taken her for a type 
 of a gallant woman. She had not the lofty composed brow 
 and the bony aquiline nose, with which, aided by illustra- 
 tions in the annuals of a past era, we associate feminine 
 composure and determination. Her nose never looked more 
 resolutely turn-up than it did on this occasion ; her forehead 
 seemed to narrow itself between the line of her hair and her 
 brows ; her lips didn't close themselves steadfastly, or express 
 
 2 A 
 
Walter G of ing. 
 
 scorn, or anything of the sort. They had paled for an in 
 stant, those lips, but they looked red and resolute enough by 
 the time any one could look at them red and resolute, and 
 ready to say anything. The gentle blood told ; she was 
 brought to bay, but she was quite ready to fight it out. 
 
 The silence that fell after those exclamations of Frank's 
 and Charlie's lasted only for a few moments; then Daisy 
 broke it broke it with her silvery tones tones that never 
 faltered, though she was so cruelly abased before another wo- 
 man. 
 
 " Walter, you can't be too much disgusted with me ; but 
 I should have told you ; ' for half a second she paused, and 
 bent her head the least bit : the telling was bitterly hard ; 
 but she recovered herself quickly, and went on " what you 
 see there," pointing to the picture. 
 
 Walter Goring moved towards her ; she had plunged them 
 all into a horrible position ; but, her eyes were so very blue, 
 her wantonness, her wilfulness, were all so very babyish, he 
 could but pity and desire to protect her still. But she edged 
 away from his brotherly loving-kindness. 
 
 " No, Walter ! I have been a deceitful little wretch ; but 
 it's no use saying that here before other people, is it?" 
 Then she looked at Frank St John and fathomed some of 
 the feelings that were tugging at his heart. Suddenly she 
 went up to him, and held out her hand : " I believe you 
 would rather have cut off your hand than it should have 
 painted my fault ; don't think I don't know it, and so does 
 Walter; but it is better, much better, that it has.' ; Then 
 she eyed Charlie distrustfully, and Charlie saw that she was 
 so eyed, and did not quite know what to do. Perhaps she 
 did the best thing that was to be done, in going up to Daisy, 
 and saying as she did, 
 
 "I'll stay here with Frank while you go and tell your 
 cousin everything you have to tell him, Daisy. I '11 stay be- 
 cause you may want me ; " and at that Daisy was a little 
 melted. Female arrogance she was prepared to meet and 
 repel, but not female affection. 
 
 So Daisy and her cousin each felt that he could never be 
 more than a cousin to her now had a long interview, in 
 which Daisy told him, as Charlie had advised her to do, "every- 
 thing," with certain reservations. For instance, she would 
 
At Bay. 371 
 
 not tell him where Laurence Levinge was then, nor would 
 she confess that Laurence Levinge had sought her to the full 
 as much as she had him. According to her statement it 
 had all been her own fault, her own weakness. She offered 
 to bear the whole brunt of the blame ; she scorned the notion 
 of any being bestowed upon Laurence. According to her, 
 she had been the wooer and he the wooed, and Walter was 
 fain to accept her version of her story through the dread he 
 had of raking up worse things than had been already 
 brought to light. That she had seen Laurence Levinge 
 .that time when she ran away from Brighton was evident, in 
 a very ghastly way ; but he would not seek to find out when 
 or on what terms. The only thing of which he was quite 
 certain, indeed, in this first hour of darkness, was, that it be- 
 hove^d him to see her married to Levinge, and to enable Le- 
 vinge to marry her. 
 
 Shall it be told how the truth crept through the house like 
 a snake ? A part of the truth that is, the part of it which 
 told to the eagerly listening many that there was to be no 
 marriage to-morrow. Shall it be told how late into the night 
 young Mrs Fellowes stayed with Daisy, not questioning her, 
 but just giving her that wonderful, subtle, reassuring sense 
 of womanly comradeship without which we cannot do, let us 
 strive as we will ? Shall it be told how Frank St John and 
 Walter Goring stayed up together, not because they cared 
 for the endless cigars they smoked, but because each felt such 
 generous sympathy for the other such pity for the fair, frail 
 little creature who was the cause of that sympathy springing 
 up, that there could be no thought of sleep for either of 
 them ? Perhaps it will be as well not to attempt to more 
 fully portray these things. They were done ! And in 
 common with the rest of that night's work, they had 
 better be lightly sketched, and got away from as soon as 
 possible. 
 
 It was not pleasant to make the fact of the wedding being 
 deferred patent to the parson and the parish the next day. 
 Mr Travers bore it like a Christian; but, as his wife ob- 
 served, he had not got a new French white silk for the cere- 
 mony. " It 's a dispensation/' she said, in the course of a 
 call she made on Mrs Prescott on the afternoon of the day 
 that was to have seen Daisy married. " It 's a dispensation; 
 
372 Walter Goring. 
 
 the sins of the fathers visited upon the children, as we are 
 told." Mrs Travers was a very good woman, with a great 
 capacity for kissing the rod ; but her milliner's bill was 
 limited. 
 
 Mrs Prescott bore the disappointment much better. She 
 had not invested in a new dress for the occasion, and the sins 
 of Daisy's father had not been the staple table-talk in her 
 house for years. Still she had a little pebble to fling, and 
 she flung it like a woman. 
 
 " Until I were quite sure of the cause of the rupture, I 
 should be very careful not to mix myself up with the young 
 person, if I were my sister Charlie/' Ellen said, with a little 
 brighter blaze in her cheeks than was ordinarily there. It 
 was so nice to call the girl who had so nearly taken a higher 
 place than herself in the Deneham neighbourhood, " a young 
 person." There was nothing strong or uncharitable in the 
 designation nothing harsh or unfeminine. It was just a 
 nice disparaging form of notice that fitted the subject, Ellen 
 thought ; not because she knew anything adverse to Daisy's 
 morals, but because she went on the broad principle of its 
 being well to think the very worst of her fellow- women when- 
 ever their chariot wheels ran roughly. 
 
 But Charlie was quite the reverse of prudent in the matter. 
 It seemed to her to be so very possible that there should have 
 been extenuating circumstances, though Daisy did not seem 
 inclined to explain them. Moreover, it seemed very possible 
 to disapprove of a sin without striving to crush a sinner. 
 Daisy still held to the course she had adopted at first, namely 
 the course of giving Mrs Fellowes the option of standing 
 aloof from her altogether, if she (Charlie) chose to do so. 
 But Charlie ignored the mute offer. " It 's very hard for 
 your brother, that his picture such a beauty, too should 
 be what Walter will be ashamed to see hung in any room in 
 the house ! I 'm very sorry for that" Daisy said, when Mrs 
 Fellowes was leaving her that night ; and Charlie replied, 
 " You see if Mr Goring does not have that picture hung, and 
 well hung too, and like it for containing the portraits of three 
 friends, if only you '11 let him, Daisy ! " But Daisy shook 
 her head at this, and seemed very dubious. 
 
 The following day the day on which he was to have been 
 married Walter Goring went up to see his lawyer, having 
 
At Bay. 373 
 
 first induced Daisy to give him Laurence Lavinge's address. 
 Before nightfall that gentleman stood in the utterly unex- 
 pected and much " too good for him" (to plagiarise the title 
 of a very capital novel) position of being pledged to become 
 the husband of Daisy, on whom her cousin had tightly tied 
 up 2000 a-year. This sum he had settled on Daisy at a 
 considerable sacrifice ; but he felt bound to make any that he 
 could make without being absolutely Quixotic about it. So 
 he arranged to sell such property as did not belong to the old 
 original Goring Place estate, including The Hurst land. The 
 fruits of this proceeding, together with the large funded pro- 
 perty left him by his uncle, enabled him to secure to his 
 uncle's hapless daughter a sum that gave Laurence Levinge 
 no further excuse for not keeping the promise, the non-fulfil- 
 ment of which had nearly destroyed Daisy. Nor did he want 
 an excuse; her devotion, blind, childishly passionate, danger- 
 ously passionate as it was, had touched him. He accepted all 
 the conditions which Mr Clarke who was far keener in the 
 matter than Walter would have been imposed. Perhaps 
 the hardest one was, that he was to give up what had been 
 the sole thing that made life worth having to him for many 
 years gambling in every form, either on the turf or at the 
 tables. This was the hardest condition, but he agreed to it, 
 partly because he really loved Daisy, and had no desire to 
 impoverish her, and partly because one clause in the settle- 
 ments set forth that, should he not accede to and keep this 
 condition, half the money was to revert at Daisy's death to 
 her cousin, Walter Goring, or his heirs. 
 
 u Did he offer any explanation of the heartlessness that 
 made him compromise her so ? " Walter asked, choosing the 
 mildest expression he could find to fit Mr Levinge's con- 
 duct. 
 
 " Not a word," Mr Clarke replied. " He only said, when 
 the business was settled, ' I hope Mr Goring does not think 
 me a greater blackguard than I am ? ' and I said, ' Certainly 
 not.' He looked at me rather queerly when I said that ; but 
 he was not in a position to quarrel with any man's words. 
 By the way, he said he should write to his mother and sister, 
 and get them over at once." 
 
 " I shall write to Miss Levinge, too, or she won't believe 
 him," Walter Goring said. " The sooner they come, and it's 
 
3/4 Walter Goring-. 
 
 all over, the better. My poor little cousin ! thank God, I 
 was never harsh to her." 
 
 He was more thankful still for that he had never been 
 harsh to her lightest caprice in a short time. Poor Daisy's 
 dream of joy was a very short one. 
 
 CHAPTER XLIX. 
 
 WEARING AWAY. 
 
 UNTIL the arrival of Mrs Levinge and Mary it had been 
 ordained that Daisy and Laurence should not meet. Then 
 Daisy was to go to his mother, and be married from under 
 her protection and temporary roof. Until this arrangement 
 could be carried out, she was to remain at Goring Place, 
 where Mrs Osborne and Alice still stayed with her. 
 
 The girl was rapturously happy now. So intoxicated by 
 her happiness, in fact, that she never gave a thought to the 
 murky paths by which she had come to it. For the first tim& 
 since Walter had known her, he saw the little fair face with 
 a brilliant spot of crimson on either cheek brightening the 
 shining eyes till their gleaming would have been painful, had 
 one not felt that it was only with happiness they gleamed 
 " For weeks and weeks she has not eaten enough to keep a 
 bird in good condition; so I fancy she's a little feverish now," 
 Mrs Osborne told him. Somehow or other, they were all 
 very gentle to Daisy ; gentler than people usually are to one 
 who has done wrong, and dares to be rapturously happy im- 
 mediately after it. 
 
 On that night, when they had first looked upon the 
 semblance of Daisy shining like a star in blackest night in 
 the picture, Charlie and her brother had been Ipft alone, as 
 has been said. No sooner were they alone, than Frank began 
 reviling his task ; the end did not justify the means at all to 
 him. "It's a foul start to have made, Charlie," he said, de- 
 cidedly, when Charlie strove to comfort him, by declaring her 
 belief that Daisy would have told would not have suffered 
 
Wearing A way. 375 
 
 the marriage to take place, even if the picture had not saved 
 her the trouble. " I 'm very glad that Goring has escaped ; 
 but when I saw that little creature tremble, and then get her- 
 self together for the worst, I felt like a mean hound. It is 
 no use my reminding myself that I had worked in the dark. 
 I feel like a mean hound still. I shall never be able to touch 
 a brush again in that place in Sloane Street ; the face of my 
 poor ' Elaine ' would haunt me in every corner. I '11 be off 
 somewhere to South America or California." 
 
 " Oh, Frank ! " Charlie gasped ; she could not help a little 
 thrill of despondency passing over her. She was terribly 
 alone now ; but with Frank in South America or California, 
 the sense of loneliness would be deepened. So she felt for a 
 few moments, in the which she gasped out, " Oh, Frank ! " 
 
 " Don't be afraid that ' 1 shall take some savage woman to 
 rear my dusky brood,' " he laughed. 
 
 "No, I'm not afraid of that; indeed, it would be very good 
 for you to travel, and I 'm not afraid of anything, Frank. 
 Do go, and paint some California!! forest scenery. 
 
 ' And get out of the way of thinking so much about what 
 isn't vital after all," he went on, meditatively. " Shake off 
 the trammels of civilisation, and try to banish the crushing 
 notion that it 's all up with a girl who isn't chaperoned pro- 
 perly. Don't look shocked, Charlie ; I '11 take up the notion 
 again when I return to England, home, and beauty. But 
 dropping it for a while will be the only way to enable me to 
 spend my first ill-gotten gains comfortably. 
 
 "And look here, Frank," she said, eagerly; "persuade 
 Walter Goring to go with you." 
 
 He pulled his light moustache reflectively. 
 
 "Why?" he asked. 
 
 " Oh, only because he must want a diversion even more 
 than you do," she replied, colouring slightly. "And we 
 (the three of us) must give up that idea we had of working 
 at something together; but you and he might write and 
 illustrate an artist's tour through that glorious scenery with 
 effect." 
 
 " Sage counsellor ! I shall put it to him ; the plan pleases 
 me much/' Frank replied. Then Mrs Fellowes was called to 
 Daisy, and the subject had dropped. 
 
 But it had been resumed at a later date between Frank 
 
376 Walter Goring. 
 
 and Walter Goring, and satisfactorily settled that, when 
 Daisy was married, the two young men should start and 
 travel, and work together for a year. They were to go some- 
 where, and do something ; but where they were to go, and 
 what they were to do precisely, was not definitely fixed. 
 
 Meanwhile there was little peace or pleasure beneath the 
 Fellowes' roof. Charlie had once more repented herself of 
 that burst of feeling in which she had asked her husband to 
 suffer her to leave him. She had repented and humbled 
 herself, claiming the fault to be hers, and intreating him to 
 believe that she had spoken in haste, and that it was not too 
 late for her to be the best helpmate a man can have a wife 
 capable of being his friend. But he had injured her, so 
 naturally he could but be distrustful of her. Earnestly as 
 she laboured to please him, untiring as she was in his service, 
 he felt jealous even of her having so small an interest as her 
 writing gave her independent of him. It annoyed him, half 
 unconsciously, that she could get away in the spirit into 
 realms whither he could not follow her. And when her 
 second novel came out, as it did about this time, and she was 
 paid a price that made a very important addition to the 
 family exchequer for it, he took up the narrow-minded 
 notion that she was always remembering the fact, and want- 
 ing to spend the money on herself. 
 
 Moreover, there were other stings in that novel for him. 
 He tried to trace the characters back into real life, and to 
 find out w r hether they had any of them ever stood in similar 
 relations to her that they did to one another ; whether they 
 had ever whispered the soft nothings into her ear, or listened 
 to the sweet words from her lips, which were scattered so 
 freely over her pages. He did not understand that she 
 simply painted, as well as she could, things which she had 
 seen, heard, and read about, superficially, probably enough^ 
 but still up to a certain point clear-sightedly. He did not 
 understand that she painted these things backwards, as it 
 were, arguing from effect to cause, instead of following the 
 commoner (and better) practice of analogism. Some of the 
 experiences had such a genuine ring about them that, forget- 
 ting the happy feminine faculty of arriving at a probability 
 through an inductive process which can hardly be explained 
 forgetting this, Mr Fellowes chose to believe that the ex- 
 
Wearing Away. . 377 
 
 periences were autobiographical, and so grew more jealous 
 than ever. Consequently there was little peace or pleasure 
 beneath the Fellowes' roof, but Charlie made no sign by 
 which an outsider should guess so much. She was striving 
 honestly to teach herself to " suffer and be strong," and the 
 lesson, hard as it was, "was nearly learnt now. 
 
 As the day approached for the Levingcs to arrive and 
 claim her, Daisy grew nearly wild with impatience. She had 
 ceased to observe any sort of reticence now with regard to 
 Laurence to Mrs Fellowes. The love which had been gnaw- 
 ing at and fretting her like a prisoned bird for so long a time 
 was let loose now, and it revelled in the liberty. She would 
 talk of him, of his beauty, his tenderness, of the tone of his 
 voice, and the light of the eyes that had gone into her soul, 
 till she panted with agitation, and the loving words would 
 not fall coherently from her lips. She counted the hours 
 the minutes almost that were bringing her nearer to him 
 by their flight. And then, when she would cease from sheer 
 exhaustion, and they would pray her to be calmer, she would 
 quote Cleopatra's request for Mandrogora, " the only bit of 
 Shakespeare for which she cared," she said, and pity them 
 for never having known what she felt in the love of Laurence 
 Levinge. "What do you think Mrs Osborne says to me-?" 
 she asked Charlie; "'that when she was going to be married 
 to Mr Osborne she should have blushed to talk about it so 
 much as I do.' Who cares what she 'd have done ? I dare- 
 say I should have blushed too if I had been going to marry 
 old Osborne, in his table-cloth cravat and broad-brimmed 
 hat ; as if she could know anything at all about it with an 
 old Osborne. I can neither eat nor sleep for joy, and I'll tell 
 the truth about it." 
 
 This was said two days before the one on which she was to 
 go up to town, and Charlie looked at her with a vague sense 
 of pity, despite that brilliantly portrayed happiness. The 
 \iot eating or sleeping of which Daisy spoke so lightly was 
 beginning to alarm them all. She looked too transparent 
 when she was flushed crimson in the face ; the rounded lines 
 of her figure were gone. 
 
 That night she sat and sang to them in the little room her 
 father had had furnished for her. Good and self-forgetting 
 as Walter was, he had some feeling \vh5ch prevented him 
 
378 Walter Goring. 
 
 [iking to be with, her in the beautiful little room which he had 
 had fitted up as a boudoir for her, when he thought she was 
 to be his bride. So they sat this night in the old place where 
 she had so often sang to them when the Walshes were staying 
 at Goring Place. 
 
 There were only two or three candles burning, and the 
 room was lofty, consequently the light was dim. For a time 
 she sang brilliant opera airs alone, but at last she stopped, 
 saying she would sing something " sweet and tender, like the 
 light ;" and then she sang more sweetly than he had ever 
 heard her sing before with more pathos, more feeling " I 'm 
 wearing away to the land of the leal.'' 
 
 They all Walter, Mrs Osborne, Frank St John, and Alice 
 drew nearer to her as she sang, and they were all most 
 strangely thrilled. She did not seem to heed them, but sang 
 it through nearly through. She was striking the last chord, 
 her glorious voice was floating away on the last note, filling 
 the air with a strain than which no sweeter can be heard in 
 heaven, when her head went down, the song changed to a 
 cry, and a stream of blood chased the music through her lips. 
 At the height of her fullest happiness she had sung her own 
 death-strain. They knew at once that she had broken a 
 blood-vessel, and they knew all too soon that she was "wear- 
 ing away to the land of the leal " with fearful speed. 
 
 She died before her lover, summoned though he was at 
 once, could reach her before she had time to feel much regret 
 at the thoughts of dying at all. Up to almost the last she 
 could not realise it, urging that " she was too young and 
 too happy to die." But suddenly the truth came home to 
 her, and then her sole thought was of Laurence. 
 
 " Poor Laurence ! Let him have all the money, Walter. 
 You ; re so good, you will, I know ; and be his friend, because 
 I 've died for love of him, you know. Be his friend, will 
 you?" 
 
 So she wore away, pleading for the man " for love " of 
 whom she had died. 
 
Very Undecided. 379 
 
 CHAPTER L. 
 
 VERY UNDECIDED. 
 
 POOR Daisy's last words, " You '11 let Laurence have the 
 money, and you '11 be his friend because I loved him so," 
 were strongly in Mr Goring's mind when he met Laurence 
 Levinge immediately on the latter's entrance into the house. 
 There was no need to tell Levinge that Daisy was dead he 
 had heard that already. There was no need to reproach him 
 for aught concerning her ; clearly he was reproaching himself 
 bitterly enough. Moreover, no one else felt inclined to do 
 anything, save to try and comfort the man who had been so 
 richly loved by Daisy. 
 
 He went alone into the room where she was lying, with 
 the life still upon her yellow hair, but death within her eyes 
 into the room where there was solemn quiet, and a sad, soft 
 light ; and, stranger than all, a Daisy who was for the first 
 time cold even to him. Mrs Osborne had prepared some 
 platitudes wherewith to console the bereaved man. She was 
 ready to tell him that he " must hope to meet Miss Goring 
 above," after the manner of material-minded people, who will 
 persist in offering spiritual comfort to others in defiance of 
 their own practice. As Laurence Levinge bent over the 
 waxen cold form of the girl who had loved him so hotly, he 
 was too far from feeling that love is the soul's alone, for Mrs 
 Osborne's contemplated consolations to stand any chance of 
 having a soothing effect upon him. 
 
 He stayed in the room a long time, not mouthing out a 
 long-winded monologue on the vanity of human hopes 
 scarcely thinking, indeed; only feeling, that Daisy was dead. 
 He was too completely stunned by this even to muse upon 
 the matchless organisation of the divine system of rewards 
 and Y>unishmcnts. It was to occur to him afterwards, that 
 Daisy, who had been more sinned against than sinning from 
 the hour of her birth, was cut off in the flower of her youth 
 at the very moment that the cup of joy was about to be 
 offered to her, while he lived ; and, by her will, was well 
 endowed with the goods of this world. These things were to 
 
380 Walter Goring. 
 
 occur to him afterwards, but as he stood looking at her he 
 only felt that the sweet child who was to have been his bride 
 was dead, and that he was the cause of her death. 
 
 His face was as white as the corpse when he came at last 
 out of the room. His impulse was to get away out of the 
 house unseen ; words of any sort from any one would be tor 
 much for him, he felt. But he checked the impulse for hel 
 dear sake, and so Mrs Osborne had an opportunity of offer 
 ing her crumbs of comfort. 
 
 It had been Walter Goring's intention to put the picture, 
 wherein the story was all too plainly told, away out of sight 
 while Laurence Levinge was there. " It ? s no use cutting 
 the poor fellow to pieces with remorse ; my darling Daisy 
 would rebuke me from her grave if I did it," he had said 
 to Mrs Fellowes ; but she took a different view of the matter. 
 
 " He knows about it she wrote and told him, I know. 
 Don't seem to hide it from him. It will be kinder to let it 
 hang than if you let him suppose you shrink from his seeing 
 it." 
 
 So, on Charlie's advice, the " Lily of Astolat," Daisy's 
 parallel, was still hanging when Laurence Levinge came 
 clown, and he soon found it out ; and, rather to the surprise 
 of those who knew where, and when, and how Frank had 
 Been his poor " Elaine," commenced talking about it. 
 
 " My poor little darling," he said, mournfully, to Walter 
 Goring, " I was trying to be generous to her that night I 
 took her to the Opera, little knowing I was breaking her heart. 
 From the time she had rushed up to me half frantic, be- 
 cause she had seen her mother, and her mother's husband 
 wouldn't let them speak to each other from that time, till 
 she left and came down here, she was under the protection 
 of my landlady, a good woman, who thought she was my 
 sister. That night I was trying to make her understand the 
 truth that it was for her well-being that I wouldn't marry 
 her, and drag her down with me." 
 
 " Levinge," Walter Goring began, earnestly then he 
 checked himself " no, no, I '11 ask you nothing," he added. 
 
 "You may ask what you will," the other replied, eagerly; 
 " but before you ask anything, I '11 tell you that heartless as 
 my false prudence and cowardly fear of poverty with a wife 
 made me, I have not the sin on my soul of hav:ng wronged 
 
Very Undecided. 381 
 
 her. I loved her too well," he added, hastily. " She was as 
 pure as her prototype," and he pointed to the picture as ho 
 spoke. 
 
 Directly after Daisy's funeral, Laurence Levinge went 
 away. A great restlessness was upon him ; he could find no 
 rest for the sole of his foot, as it seemed. He met his mother 
 and sister. Ah ! how futile their journey was proved : and 
 there was something in his face that made them spare all 
 semblance of reproach ; though they had come charged with 
 it. " Come back with us, and lead a new life, Laurence/' his 
 sister said to him. " You will never forget her at least, 
 you never ought to forget the poor loving child but you '11 
 think about her less miserably if you 're with us. Come 
 back to Rome." 
 
 But he refused, averring that he could not settle down 
 just yet. He would " wander about for a few months or a 
 year, and then rejoin them," he promised. Then he left 
 England, and as he will appear no more in these pages, it 
 may as well be stated that he never kept that promise. He 
 " wandered about " for a time, trying to train down memory 
 by day, by walking long distances in all sorts of weather; 
 and at night he could not bear to sleep for the dread he had 
 of dreaming. It was for love of him that Daisy died ; but 
 Daisy's friends had no feeling but one of sorrow when, in 
 little more than a year after she had sung her own death- 
 strain, they heard from Mary Levinge, who had heard it 
 from a hotel-keeper, that her brother had fallen a victim to a 
 low fever which had come on after a long-sustained and suc- 
 cessful struggle to save an unfortunate woman from drown- 
 ing in the Sorge, near Vaucluse. So for the best action of 
 his life, he was rewarded by being taken from the world of 
 which he was so weary. At his death the money which 
 Daisy had implored that he might be suffered to have, came 
 back to Mr Goring ; and so, at last, all things were precisely 
 as if his uncle's daughter his dearly loved, wilful ward 
 had never existed. 
 
 Meanwhile Frank St John and Walter Goring were re- 
 deeming their time manfully. They took an " artist's tour," 
 that was really worthy of the name, writing and illustrating 
 it as they went. The scene of their operations were the 
 plains, forests, and mining districts of California, and they 
 
382 Walter Goring. 
 
 took up the life of hunters, living in a log hut, riding un- 
 broken little Mexican mustangs, depending on their guns 
 for everything they ate, " save flour and sardines." Frank 
 wrote to Charlie. So they stayed about in the California!! 
 solitudes for a year and a half, during which time Goring 
 Place was delivered over to a housekeeper, and swathed in 
 brown holland. At the expiration of that time Frank was 
 obliged to quit his companion and come home for two rea- 
 sons, one of which shall be given at greater length in another 
 chapter. The other, and secondary reason, may be stated 
 briefly : their mutual work, " The Artist's Tour/' was ready, 
 and Frank was to come home and see it through the press. 
 The literary part of it was entirely Goring's work ; and at 
 first it had been, decided that he should be the one to come 
 home and see it brought out. But circumstances occurred 
 to alter this decision. He felt that he was better away from 
 England for a time, and Frank felt that he was most sorely 
 needed there. So they parted, and Charlie, who knew that 
 they were to do so, and which of them was to remain, had 
 direful dreams of Walter Goring being devoured by bears 
 and other monsters of the wilds. 
 
 The chief cbeerers of his solitude even while Frank was 
 with, him the only extraneous cheering influence that came 
 to him after Frank left were the long letters that he re- 
 ceived, at long intervals, from his old friend, Mrs Walsh. 
 She knew nothing of the discovery of Daisy's perfidy to 
 him, and the consequent disannulling of his marriage with 
 Daisy. She only knew that Daisy had died, and so she 
 wrote to him as a sister might do to a widowed brother, and 
 said more generous things of the buried Daisy than she had 
 ever brought her tongue to utter of the living one. 
 
 Mrs Walsh had lived abroad for some months ; at first in 
 quaint old Nuremberg, and afterwards in brilliant Vienna, 
 and both places had been equally barren to her. She was 
 not a woman to adapt herself easily to a new life she was 
 essentially one who required to be sought, and who never 
 could bring herself to seek ; and as it was the characteristic 
 of her beauty to look colder and prouder than she was, few 
 cared or dared to seek her. Consequently, the quiet dull 
 city and the gay capital were equally barren to her in both 
 she was alone. Not all the memories she could scrape to- 
 
Very Undecided. 383 
 
 gether, in the one of the cobbler-bard and Albrecht Diirer 
 not all the beauty of those blue Franconian mountains which 
 loom above the town, or the " fountains wrought with richest 
 splendour standing in the common mart " could keep her 
 Jnind away from dwelling constantly on the past. Of old, 
 she had heard Walter Goring and her husband talk of these 
 things of the grand mediaeval aspect of the place ; of the 
 venerable old iron-bound linden planted in the court-yard of 
 the castle by Cunigunde ; and hearing them speak of these 
 things, and of the Old World atmosphere in which they 
 were steeped, she had desired to see them. Now, she was 
 seeing them daily living in their midst arid it was all 
 emptiness. So at last she gave up the cultivation of the 
 mediaeval mind in Nuremberg, and went to Vienna, and 
 found it all emptiness there too. Finally, she obeyed her 
 instinct, and went back to her cottage in Deneham about the 
 same time that Frank St John, away in the wilds of Califor- 
 nia, felt that there was a strong reason for his return to 
 England. " I will go back, and stay in that cottage until 
 Walter comes home, in order that I may see him, and assure 
 myself that it is all over," she thought. " I believe it to be 
 he is a dear brother to me now ; but I will see him, and 
 test myself, and at the end of my three years' lease I '11 leave 
 the place, and try my old London life again." " Try my 
 old London life again ! " Rather a hopeless phrase for a 
 completely-cured woman. 
 
 Her old London life ! As if she could ever taste the 
 flavour of it again ! She could have the old society very 
 probably, the old style of dinners and drives, of " drums " 
 and operas, the old round of shopping and calling, and 
 general fatigue in the social mart. All these she could have ; 
 but that would be missing which had given them all the re- 
 quisite zest. No ; the old life would soon be proved a mis- 
 take, she knew it. What she needed was a new life a new 
 interest. " I 'm only thirty-three," she said to herself on the 
 morning after her return to her Deneham cottage, while 
 looking at the reflection of her face in the glass. " Time 
 has flown by on the wings of a dove for me, but he has not 
 marked his flight by the feet of the crow yet. In the course 
 of nature, my life is not half spent even yet ; the best of it 
 t/iall not be barren because Walter Goring is " 
 
384 Walter Goring. 
 
 What ? She did not know how to phrase it. " Blind " 
 had been on the tip of her tongue ; but was he blind, after 
 all ? Did he not see her fairest of the fair, and feel indif- 
 ferent to the fact ? Then she recalled the expression of his 
 eyes when he had lifted them to her face after bending over 
 her hand and kissing it, and calling her his goddess ! What 
 a pity it is that a woman cannot forget the tender thrill of 
 lips that have thrilled many another hand maybe. The 
 loving deference of the action may mean so little; but it is 
 stamped indelibly on the recipient's memory. It may mean 
 nothing ; but to a woman it always means so much ! 
 
 She was haunted by him as he had been, and " that was 
 why," so she told herself, " she so longed to see him again as 
 he was." If he only came, and was friendly riot frigidly 
 friendly, but friendly after the manner of a man who likes 
 you very much, and knows you like him, and yet feels and 
 shows that he feels that you can get on very well without 
 him if he would only come and be this, it would all be well. 
 " I 've idealised him in his absence, because I have been dull," 
 she told herself ; " if he comes and shows me that he likes 
 me very much, and thinks me an excellent woman, and 
 nothing more, my folly will kill itself." 
 
 All these contradictory soliloquies betokened a very waver- 
 ing frame of mind. Of course they did ; they betrayed the 
 truth. She loved the man ; naturally she veered about per- 
 petually, and said many things that would not agree with the 
 rest about him. But during every phase she wrote to him 
 as a sister might have done, feeling that her love was half 
 the offspring of habit, and that circumstances might arise 
 again which would render it expedient for her to crush it. 
 
 " My folly will kill itself if" he adopts precisely the line 
 
 of conduct best calculated to conduce to the suicide. That 
 was what she said, or rather that was what she meant. The 
 danger was, that he might come and make the expediency 
 of her folly killing itself patent to her in some other way 
 than that which has been sketched above. How, if he mar- 
 ried some OPS else ? Oh ! it was far better, she thought, to 
 put herself where she should " see him at once when he came 
 home again see him, and show him that he was free to do 
 even that." Then she took herself to task for the wording 
 of that phrase even. "Free to do that!" Was he not 
 
Released. 385 
 
 " free ? " Had he not always been, and shown that he knew 
 that he was free ? But it is so very hard to think by line 
 and rule when the heart is much in the subject thought 
 about. 
 
 The romance was over, and it would be idle or worse to 
 recall it. Well ! she was not striving to recall it ; she was 
 only going to act on the good old medical suggestion ot 
 "taking a hair of the dog that had bitten her." The 
 romance was over and there had never been any romance 
 and she wasn't wanting to recall it and yet why shouldn't 
 she wish to recall all that there had been ? Absence dis- 
 illusions most women, but the disillusioning is the fruit of 
 certain conditions. They have no time to think of the absent 
 one, if they have some one else present. She had been op- 
 pressed with too much idle time for the last eighteen months, 
 and she had seen no man capable of displacing Walter Gor- 
 ing from his pedestal. Faithfulness in the case of the un- 
 bound very often is but a shallow euphemism for lack of op- 
 portunity. 
 
 CHAPTEB LI. 
 
 RELEASED. 
 
 WHEN her brother Frank and Walter Goring went away 
 together, the dead calm that succeeded the lately tempestuous 
 moral atmosphere was a hard thing to live through gracefully. 
 Charlie could not help marvelling sometimes whether she had 
 indeed been born for no other end than this, that she might 
 make things as pleasant as possible to a man who made things 
 uncommonly unpleasant to her. One half of her time was 
 spent now in being ashamed for him, and the other half in 
 being afraid for him. Whenever he was away from her she 
 feared a repetition of that stumbling performance when he 
 had gone over the old brown hunter's head ; and when he 
 was with her he brought the blushes to her fae-5 with such 
 fell frequency that wifely feeling was prstty well burnt out. 
 
386 Walter Goring. 
 
 People who "knew" them still, who recognised the exis. 
 tence of the Felloweses, though they were of The Hurst no 
 longer, in a gracious and merciful manner that was infinitely 
 more disgusting than any amount of obliviousness would have 
 been these people said, " How well he bore his reverses," 
 and what "a comfort it must be to her that her husband 
 didn't give way to low spirits," thus making it patent that 
 the air he adopted abroad was one of offensive jollity. They 
 little knew his black moodiness at home. The moodiness 
 that made almost a tangible cloud in the house, and that 
 knew no shadow of a change save into maudlin self-pity. 
 It was very hard for her to live under it ; to feel that her 
 youth was passing away under it. Very, very hard to feel 
 that she had none other than herself to thank for it. The 
 memory of the manner in which she had accepted this man's 
 offer of marriage, back (how far back it seemed) in the pretty 
 road near Portslade, was always with her. The recollection 
 of the honest feeling against accepting it which she had 
 crushed and put away from her, because, oh, fool ! she had 
 yearned for any change would not be banished. It was 
 very hard, but the punishment was less than the offence, so 
 she would go on readjusting her burden and trying to walk 
 with her head up under it. 
 
 There was such an absence of every element of diversion in 
 her life. The dull little country town in which she lived, the 
 dreary women with whom she dwelt, were very stagnating in 
 their influence. She had no friends, no society, no amuse- 
 ment save books and old memories. She was as badly 
 placed as a woman with a quick imagination can be placed ; 
 it was surely some slight merit in her, that under it all she 
 kept a bright face, and struggled to think that her lot was 
 quite as good as she deserved or desired. 
 
 She wrote constantly now when her husband was not 
 rabid in his claims on her attention and she had succeeded 
 (or her publishers had succeeded for her) in making a little 
 bit of a name. But it was the pursuit of literature under 
 difficulties. Now that Frank, and that other one who knew 
 what she meant always without her needing to give wordy 
 explanations, now that they were away, the saving interest, 
 the helping sympathy, the encouraging word, which we aii 
 need, were each and all lackhic. Her hu?band " 
 
Released. 387 
 
 kind of notion, to which he would give utterance sometimes 
 in a vague kind of way, that it was her romance-writing 
 which had weaned her from him, and inclined her to another 
 as he could not but see that she did incline. But she 
 might have replied to this charge in L. E. L.'s tinkling 
 words : 
 
 " It was not my loved lute," she said, 
 " My gentle lute, that wrought the wrong ; 
 It was not song that taught me love ; 
 But it was love that taught me song." 
 
 But he, as people are very apt to do, made confusion between 
 cause and effect. 
 
 At last she was deprived of even the poor diversion oi 
 making pleasant and miserable the lives of imaginary people. 
 Henry Fellowes fell ill from cold and other causes, and then 
 the hardest, saddest, duties of a wife were laid upon her, and 
 everything gave way before the great necessity of nursing him 
 through a long wearying sickness. 
 
 For six months the days rolled along with no shadow of a 
 change, at least with none greater than his being a little better 
 one day and much worse the next. A terrible time, for he 
 was more exacting than ever ; he would take nothing save 
 from her hand, and he would not suffer her to be five minutes 
 out of his presence. He did not like her to read the very 
 thought of her writing threw him into such a state of irritable 
 agitation the first week of his being confined to his bed, that 
 she locked up her desk, and promised him that until he was 
 quite well she would not open it again. From that time she 
 sat through the days in that darkened room, never moving 
 save to serve him, with no other object than to soothe and 
 ease one of the most fractious patients it ever fell to a woman's 
 lot to tend. 
 
 She never seemed to weary over her task ; he grew more 
 satisfied with her every day more satisfied, that is to say, 
 that she was loving him at last, in which, poor fellow, he 
 was mistaken. She was not loving him ; she was only feel- 
 ing more and more sorry for him because she could not love 
 him, now that he was so ill and helpless and dependent on 
 her. The knowledge that she could not do it made her 
 tender, with a tenderness that was as watchful, patient, and 
 long-suffering as love itself could have been ; it gave her the 
 
388 Walter Goring. 
 
 indomitable courage to endure, which love alone is popularly 
 supposed to give. It sustained her as the days rolled into 
 weeks, and the weeks into months, and the once strong hale 
 man became more and more attenuated, more and more help- 
 less, more and more hollow-eyed and sunken-cheeked, and, 
 alas ! more and more fractiously exacting. That tenderness 
 and the feeling half pity, half remorse from which it 
 sprang, enabled her to keep up, in a way that made her 
 mother-in-law marvel at her, and acknowledge to the doctor 
 that u Henry might have done worse." It carried her 
 through darksome, hopeless days, when he was so very 
 ill that it was only through the hold he kept of her hand 
 the little hand whose light fine touch was the only one he 
 could bear that she knew he was asleep, not dead. It car- 
 ried her through sleepless nights of bending over his pillow, 
 when he could not bear her to be even so far away from him 
 as the little sofa at the other end of the room. It carried 
 her, in fact, bravely through as sad and fatiguing a half year 
 as can well be imagined. And at the end of the six months 
 it deepened, and the feelings from whence it sprang deepened 
 too, when her task was brought to a conclusion by her hus- 
 band's death. 
 
 This was the reason which Frank St John had for coming 
 home his sister was alone in the world in reality ; and per- 
 haps this was the reason Walter Goring had for remaining 
 away. 
 
 For some three or four months after Henry Fellowes' death, 
 Charlie remained with his mother and sister. Strangely 
 enough, they seemed to cling to her now ; they had a 
 jealousy of her leaving them. It was not even pleasant 
 to them to hear that Frank was coming home to take his 
 sister to live witH him. So Charlie, as a still further faint 
 sort of expiation for the never-forgotten wrong she had done 
 her husband in marrying him without love, promised to stay 
 with them as long as they willed it, gave up the happy pros- 
 pect of a home in London with Frank of Frank's bright 
 companionship and aid, and promised to remain in the at- 
 mosphere that she could not alter her nature sufficiently to 
 find congenial. It was about this time, just as she had pro- 
 mised to stay with them, that Mrs Walsh came back to 
 Deneham, and then, among other pleasing and diverting 
 
Released. 389 
 
 topics of conversation that kindly callers indulged in, was 
 the probability which they discussed freely of Mr Goring 
 coming home, and marrying his beautiful tenant. 
 
 There was very little intercourse between the two widows. 
 They went occasionally and sat the orthodox ten minutes in 
 each other's houses ; but Mrs Walsh's was the well-endowed 
 and refined country life, and, to tell the truth, Charlie did 
 not like to contrast it with her own. Mrs Walsh lived in a 
 cottage, but it was a cottage that stood on a sloping lawn, 
 in the centre of which beds of the fairest flowers, geometri- 
 cally arranged, made a gorgeous mosaic. It was a cottage 
 the pretty low walls of whose rooms were hung with deli- 
 cately-tinted, satin-surfaced papers, against the pale green 
 and grey of which gilt frames and good bronzes stood out 
 magnificently. It was a cottage where the simple latticed 
 windows were hung with rose-coloured or crimson silk cur- 
 tains, which threw good marble copies of the best antique 
 sculptures into fair relief. It was a cottage that was always 
 pervaded with the perfume of fresh flowers that was al- 
 ways as trim and perfectly appointed and delicately ordered 
 as money alone permits a house to be. Small wonder that 
 Charlie, whose taste was much towards similar things, should 
 eschew contrasting it with her dwelling-place. 
 
 The great London beauty was living an idyll. She would 
 not respond to the advances the county people made to her, 
 simply because she knew that it was upon the cards that at 
 the expiration of her lease she might see cause to remove her- 
 self from the neighbourhood, and it was useless to get in with 
 a lot of people for so short a time. But though she did not 
 visit, and though Walter Goring was away, she was not at 
 all dull. '' I hold it true, whate'er befall," that one never 
 can be dull if left to one's-self with beautiful inanimate 
 things about one, plenty of books to read, and nice horses 
 to ride and drive. Mrs Walsh was surrounded by these con- 
 Jitions of successful solitude. Her eye was always pleased 
 when she was in her house ; the things were her own, and 
 were dear to her by association. Things of beauty that do 
 not belong to one are not half so satisfactory. And when 
 she was out of the house, she was fain to confess that the 
 Norfolk roads may not easily be surpassed for riding anrl 
 driving purposes. 
 
390 Walter Goring". 
 
 There was a certain pleasure too besides the mere fact ot 
 driving her handsome chestnut cobs in going over the 
 ground once more which she had gone over with Walter 
 Goring on the occasion of her first visit to Goring Place. 
 How merrily the days had spun by then, to be sure, when 
 they had bowled over the ground in Walter's trap, she up in 
 front with him, and that poor dead Daisy behind with Mr 
 Levinge ! As she went along the roads sometimes, she felt 
 that, surely, though two of the dramatis personce were gone 
 beyond the bourne from whence there is no return, that the 
 two who were left would see the old places together again. 
 Here at Walsingham Abbey they had all four of them knelt 
 laughingly at the " Wishing Well," and drank and wished in 
 that bright unclouded August weather when she saw the 
 place first. It was August again now three years after as 
 she stood by the well alone, having left her cobs and man 
 down in the village. Had any of their wishes come true ? 
 None ! None ! The Daisy had not wished for crossed love 
 and early death, assuredly, when she had bent down with her 
 yellow hair floating behind her, and drank of the crystal 
 water. Was it worth going on and evoking other memories 
 by visiting some of the other shrines to which they had made 
 pilgrimages ? No, certainly not. 
 
 It rarely is worth while to harrow up one's own feelinga 
 by recalling old memories. These latter are pretty in poetry, 
 and fascinating in fiction, but they are generally intolerable 
 in real life. There almost invariably appears to be a touch 
 less of pleasantless (to say the least of it) in the present than 
 the past. Three years is a long time in a woman's life. It 
 is impossible for her to avoid contrasting her looks then and 
 now when she glances back through the vista. She was 
 paler, or more pinky, better rounded, or more sylph-like, in 
 the bemoaned by-gone she remembers. The intervening years 
 have witnessed the dissolution of some friendships and some 
 hopes that made life a little brighter while they lasted. On 
 the whole, resuscitations are always obnoxious and to be 
 avoided. Nevertheless, in her case, alive as she was to the 
 propriety of forgetting, the dead days would not quite bury 
 their dead. Her memory was unfortunately green. 
 
 When she was well out on the road once more passing 
 along between the close, regularly clipped hedges, what io- 
 
The Dead to the Living. 391 
 
 numerable old associations leapt out upon her from either 
 side ! There, at the sharp turn, where one of the drives 
 from a prettv manor-house gleaming white among the trees 
 ran down into a point and joined the road, the trap had 
 swerved, and Daisy had been nearly off. She remembered 
 now how she had not condescended to look round and ascer- 
 tain the amount of damage done, though Daisy had given a 
 well-modulated scream. The road was unaltered tuere was 
 precisely the same tint upon the trees now as then, the same 
 degree of warmth in the air, the same sounds from the harvest- 
 men in the fields ; but she herself was three years older than 
 she had been then, and Daisy was dead ! 
 
 Somehow or other, a feeling of depression came over her. 
 " You nice county that has been brushed and combed into 
 almost beauty, you won't be my abiding-place ! " she thought, 
 half shaking her head at the landscape as she passed along it. 
 " ' Few views worth painting about here ! ' poor Ralph said 
 once. How is it that so many of them have painted them- 
 selves on my heart, I wonder ? I suppose it would be the 
 same with any place I knew with Walter Goring ; he has the 
 art of making things pleasant. Absurd of me, at my age, to 
 be undergoing the ' Wherever thou art would seem Erin to 
 me ' sensations ! " Then she whipped her cobs, and tried to 
 forget him ; and went on remembering vividly that he had 
 been wont to call her " his goddess," and that young Mrs 
 Fellowes was free as well as herself. 
 
 CHAPTER LIL 
 
 THE DEAD TO THE LIVING. 
 
 FRANK ST JOHN did not receive the announcement of his 
 sister's determination, to stay with the family of her late hus- 
 band so long as they needed her, at all well. He had given up 
 a life that suited him, pursuits that pleased him, and the com- 
 panionship of a man whom he liked very much, in order to 
 
392 Walter Goring. 
 
 come back to make a home for Charlie. And now Charlie 
 made all this null and void out of some absurd scruples. 
 " I '11 wait and see the book out, and then I will go back to 
 Goring," he said, but by the time the book was out, and he 
 quite ready for the start back to California, things arranged 
 themselves according to his first wishes. A gentleman who, 
 twenty years before, had been suspected of entertaining 
 tender feelings towards Miss Dinah having tested him sell 
 and her by this sensible unhasting gauge of waiting nearly a 
 quarter of a century to see whether anybody else intervened 
 suddenly took heart of grace, and declared himself. Accord- 
 ingly Miss Dinah took him in holy matrimony, and her 
 mother to live with her. So Charlie was quite free to go 
 away at last, and live the life Frank had projected for her. 
 
 It must be acknowledged that Mrs Walsh was very glad 
 to witness Charlie's exodus from Deneham. Not that Mrs 
 Walsh had jealous forebodings, but she did not want things 
 to remain undecided for a week after Walter Goring came 
 back, and Walter Goring might come back any day, and 
 Charlie might have the effect of rendering him uncertain. 
 So she witnessed Charlie's exodus with pleasure, and hoped 
 heartily that Charlie would like her new London life too well 
 ever to come back to Deneham. 
 
 Both the brother and sister were thriving in their respec- 
 tive walks of art. Frank drew for wood engraving a good 
 deal, and Charlie, considerably elongated, was useful to him 
 as a model very often for those wonderful young ladies who 
 adorn the pages of our illustrated magazines, young ladies 
 who are' all six feet high, and richly gifted with eyes that 
 are bigger than their mouths and Charlie sold her stories at 
 fluctuating prices truly, but still sold them. The first thing 
 they did, therefore, was to take a pretty little house in a 
 western suburb, in what, in blind reliance on the agent's 
 veracity, they believed to be a quiet neighbourhood. A 
 semi-detached house in a road some little distance from the 
 highway. A road in which willows wept, and ladies stood 
 out on their little drawing-room balconies on summer even- 
 ings and crickets chirped in a con li ding way as darkness 
 fell in a most anti-metropolitan manner. A road rendered 
 respectable by a church all to it?-lf at one end and rendered 
 something else (shall it be called interesting?) by divers 
 
The Dead to the Living. 393 
 
 parrots in divers windows, shaded by the pinkest of curtains 
 by little dogs of snowy hue by two or three retiring little 
 broughams which were great at waiting by miniature mail- 
 phaetons and pairs that went out with a dash and carne 
 home with a limp. A little road in which the residents were 
 almost exclusively of the gentler sex, and the visitors almost 
 as exclusively of the other, through nature's great law of 
 compensation. 
 
 "A sweet little road, close to the park, and quite near 
 enough to Piccadilly, and yet so quiet just the very place 
 to work in," Charlie said to her brother, in a burst of satis- 
 faction with her new abode on the night of their taking pos- 
 session. She modified that statement about its being the 
 very place for working in afterwards. From nine o'clock in 
 the morning till ten at night sons of harmony ground theii 
 weary length along the quiet road. Italian boys with 
 monkeys found it a pleasant place wherein to spend the 
 noontide hour. On Monday it was the favoured resort of a 
 distressed father and five dilapidated children, who sang 
 their agonies in jerks. On Tuesday a corresponding mother 
 imparted an additional and purely maternal interest to a 
 similar performance. On Wednesday an ingenious but un- 
 pleasant man made miserable melody by rubbing his wretched 
 wet fingers round the rims of glasses arranged on a board. 
 On Thursday the whole of the above-mentioned had a grand 
 field day, and out-howled one another. On Friday a band 
 of German boys eased their tender hearts by playing "Father- 
 land ; " and on Saturday the agonies of the week culminated 
 in the Indian with his tom-tom. The quiet little road was 
 catholic in its musical tastes, undoubtedly, but the general 
 liberality of sentiment on the subject was not of an order to 
 appeal to a working resident whose nerves were on the sur- 
 face, and who was conscious of a brain. 
 
 However, they had taken the house, and it behoved them 
 to make the best of it. " Nice customs curtsey to great 
 kings," but mere insignificant subjects are compelled very 
 often to curtsey to nasty customs. In time Charlie got into 
 a habit of enduring the Indian with his tom-tom which is 
 more like the toothache than anything else in this world ; 
 she even grew calm enough about him to contemplate the 
 possibility of making copy out of him at some future time. 
 
394 Walter Goring. 
 
 So time rolled on for about a year then a break occurred. 
 There had been some trifling business relating to the affairs 
 of her late husband still unsettled when Charlie had left 
 Deneham. Some house property in one of the adjacent 
 parishes had fallen to the late Henry Omry Fellowes (as a 
 lapsed legacy,) or rather to the late Henry Omry Fellowes' 
 widow and sole legatee. The houses were old, incommo- 
 dious, and consequently ill-let, but the site on which they 
 stood was good. A practical builder, with an eye for the 
 picturesque, saw that it was so, and made specious advances 
 towards purchasing them of Mrs Fellowes, who, lacking the 
 business mind, suffered these advances to drift away into 
 nothing for a period of many months. 
 
 At last, on the occasion of receiving the small quarterly 
 rents, it occurred to her to tell Frank that some man had 
 wanted to buy on lease the land on which these unremunera- 
 tive tenements stood for building purposes, and it was de- 
 cided that whenever Frank should chance to find himself 
 with a couple of days at his disposal that he should go 
 down and see about making the best bargain he could for 
 his sister. 
 
 " You '11 have to stay a night or two down there, Frank," 
 she suggested, when the spare days came in due course, and 
 when he replied, " Yes," she added, " Then make Deneham 
 your head-quarters, and just give a look at " 
 
 " Mrs Walsh ? Yes, certainly," he interrupted. 
 
 " I wasn't going to say Mrs Walsh, but Goring Place," she 
 laughed ; " but if you should see your Guinevere, say some- 
 thing very civil from me." 
 
 It was late summer weather when Frank went on his busi- 
 ness mission to Deneham, and it was settled that on his 
 return Charlie and he should start for a tour they had long 
 contemplated through the western counties. They had not 
 organised a perfect plan of operations yet, but they had almost 
 decided on avoiding railway-riddled tracks, and travelling in 
 search of the picturesque on stout ponies, their luggage to 
 be sent on to certain salient points hereafter to be fixed upon, 
 and they themselves to be quite free to vagabondise for a 
 month, unfettered by all time-table considerations. 
 
 This prospect had a great charm for both the brother and 
 sister. They had had a long spell of uninterrupted hard 
 
The Dead to the Living. 395 
 
 work, and they both felt that it would be good for them in 
 their respective arts to lie fallow for a time to get away out 
 of the atmosphere of publishing and picture-dealing, of re- 
 views and reviewers to breathe an air unsullied by the 
 sordid interest attaching to these things to get out of the 
 orbit of the daily papers, and the sound of the roar of the 
 young lions thereof to flee paint, pens, and paper, and not 
 to give their address to any one. 
 
 " Be ready to start on Friday, Charlie. We '11 go right 
 away down to Dawlish at once, and cruise about from there 
 for a few days," Frank said to his sister, when he was leav- 
 ing for Deneham on the Tuesday morning. So, during the 
 two or three days of his absence, Charlie looked forward to 
 preparing travelling-dresses that should stand any weather 
 and much wear for a month dresses in which she could 
 mount a pony without looking ridiculous, and which would 
 still be suitable for walking on the earth in. 
 
 Meanwhile Frank had gone down and settled the building 
 business, and had made a duty call on Mrs Foster, late Miss 
 Dinah Fellowes, and a pleasure call on Mrs Walsh, who 
 gave him that sort of welcome a woman does accord the 
 friend of the man she is most interested in, when that man is 
 absent, and the friend has seen him long since she herself has. 
 
 " I was up in town for a few days in June, Mr St. John," 
 she said to him, u and I saw your picture in the Academj'-." 
 
 "Which one?" he asked, "'A. Turning Point' or 'A 
 Falling Star?' the second is a sequel to the first." 
 
 " I only saw the ' Turning Point/ and I liked the feeling 
 with which you indicated a terrible story ; there was great 
 tenderness in it, and great truth." 
 
 Frank felt his face flushing with pleasure ; his fair critic's 
 husband had been a great painter, and had taught her to 
 discriminate must have taught her to discriminate. He 
 felt very much flattered. 
 
 "Did you ever chance to see my Guinevere?" he asked, 
 presently. 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 " Never ; long ago before you had nearly finished it, Wal- 
 ter Goring and I walked up to your studio in Sloane Street 
 you were then to look at it, but you were out, and the door 
 was locked." 
 
396 Walter Goring. 
 
 "You know it is at Goring Place?" he said, interroga- 
 tively. 
 
 " I did not know it. Had I known it, I should have gone 
 to see it long long ago ; for I did hear, Mr St John, that you 
 iaid me the compliment of introducing a very nattering por- 
 trait of me in it." 
 
 " Will you come and see it now, Mrs Walsh ? " he asked, 
 eagerly ; " do let me show it to you. It was my first work, 
 and now after three years' incessant study and labour, I 
 should like to learn from your remarks on it whether I have 
 made any headway in my art or not." 
 
 She grew rather pale at the idea of going to Goring Place 
 with another than the master of it. There was a touch 
 more pain than pleasure in the prospect of doing so. Such 
 trifles chill and sting a woman when the course of a love that 
 she fancies true does not run smooth. Still she desired to 
 please and encourage the man who, though he was her rival's 
 brother, was her lover's friend. 
 
 " Then we'll drive over at once. I have never been inside 
 the gates since Walter left. There are few things more un- 
 pleasant to me than going alone to a deserted place where I 
 have once been very happy, if not gay." 
 
 " If it will give you pain " 
 
 " It will not, to go with you," she interrupted, smiling. 
 " I spoke of going alone." Then she rang the bell and 
 ordered her pony-carriage, and shortly after scandalised and 
 excited the worst feelings of Deneham by driving the hand- 
 some stranger through its streets. 
 
 It is a very dubious and a very ghastly pleasure, after all, 
 going to the deserted home of one who is dear to you. There 
 is a sense of blankness and desolation about the unused 
 rooms that induces melancholy reflection in the most viva- 
 cious and least reflective. Half the furniture is shrouded in 
 chilling linen and the other half in dust. Black-beetles and 
 other monsters which in inhabited days were only to be 
 found in the " vasty deep " of the cellars, advance upon you 
 from unsuspected corners, and "rise up on their hind legs, 
 gnashing their teeth upon you," and obliging you to skip, in 
 order to avoid crushing them, in a way that causes you to 
 feel a forlorn and foolish wanderer in insect and old memory- 
 haunted wilds. All things that have not taken the damp 
 
The Dead to tJte Living. 397 
 
 have taken the dry-rot, and the rest are rusty and broken. 
 The piano is out of tune, and so are you. There is too 
 much reverberation and too much echo, and too much con- 
 trast between what has been and what is, altogether for sad- 
 ness not to obtain a temporary dominion. 
 
 When Mrs Walsh pulled up her ponies at the lodge-gates, 
 the first sign of the marked difference they were soon to see 
 more fully, smote upon both Frank and herself. Instead of 
 the speedy, orderly opening of other days, when a smart 
 young woman (the under-gardener's wife) had always held 
 herself in readiness to swing open the gates at the first sound 
 of the approach of her master or his guests ; instead of this 
 prompt portress, a little child pattered out of the lodge 
 gazed at them with an expression of pleased amaze in its 
 wild blue eyes advanced gallantly upon the gate, and then, 
 instead of opening it, strove to insert its broad, chubby feet 
 between the bars, for the purpose of clambering up and more 
 fully examining the invaders. 
 
 "Open the gate, my little fellow!" Frank shouted; but 
 instead of opening the gate the child made a shrill appeal to 
 its " mammy " to come out ; and then a strange woman 
 came through the doorway and demanded, rather insolently, 
 whether they had a pass for the park, as she couldn't let 
 them in without it. "Mr Goring don't wish it showed," 
 she continued, turning about as if to go into the lodge again. 
 Then Frank parleyed with her in a high key, much to his 
 own indignation, and finally they were admitted, half on suf- 
 ferance, as it seemed. 
 
 " Seeing my Guinevere won't repay you for all this bother 
 and annoyance, Mrs Walsh," Frank said, in a vexed tone, as 
 they drove through the gateway at last ; and Mrs Walsh gave 
 her chestnuts a fierce little cut which betrayed that she had 
 felt being made to wait. 
 
 " I think it will more than repay me ; considering my 
 vanity will find bairn in the sight of myself idealised." 
 
 " I had no occasion to idealise. I wanted ' beauty such 
 as never woman wore,' and I found it." 
 
 A blush so slight that it might only have been the effect 
 of the sun, covered her face as he spoke. Then she flicked 
 her ponies again, but not fiercely at all this time, and 
 said, 
 
39$ Walter Goring. 
 
 "But you had only seen me once, Mr St John, had 
 you ? " 
 
 " I had only seen you once ; but I never forgot a lino of 
 your face. I knew the pencilling by heart, from the moment 
 I first saw you, so well, that at any time during these three 
 years I could have painted your portrait from memory, and 
 made it a vivid likeness." 
 
 She looked him fra*nkly in the face, and said, 
 
 " I am very much flattered." 
 
 " You / flattered by anything I can say ? " 
 
 " I am very, very much flattered by your " 
 
 " Admiration/' he interrupted. " I can't express to you 
 how strong it is. I never thought that I should have dared 
 to try to express it. No one knows the depth of it, save 
 Walter : he called you my inspiration." 
 
 The blush burnt more brightly on her face, as Frank 
 poured the sentence out rapidly. " Walter knew it and 
 didn't disapprove of it," she thought ; " on the contrary, he 
 rather fostered it by giving it a fine name. I dreamt of be- 
 ing Walter's inspiration once. What a glorious face this 
 Frank St John has as fair, frank and proud as Apollo's." 
 
 They had come, by the time her thoughts reached this 
 point, to the gravel-sweep in front of the house. The gardens 
 showed the absence of their owner. The bedding-out plants 
 had not been bedded-out ; the croquet-ground no longer 
 looked like green velvet ; and a raggedly grown untrimmed 
 Westeria in splendid bloom drooped down, entirely conceal- 
 ing the windows of the drawing-room, where poor Daisy had 
 broken the cabinet and claimed the picture, and where after- 
 wards Mrs Walsh had been introduced by Walter to his 
 wilful, wayward, charming ward. 
 
 They had to go through this room, when after a little 
 more delay they were admitted into the house, in order to 
 gain that small room where the picture had been hung. As 
 they approached it Frank felt the old sensations of sorrow 
 and remorse that his should have been the hand to discover 
 Daisy s falseness to Walter and love for Levin ge, which had 
 oppressed him that night when the poor little girl had stood 
 braving them all at bay. 
 
 " You know the story, don't you ? " he asked in a low 
 voice, when they came at last before the picture, and Mra 
 
The Dead to the Living. 399 
 
 Walsh started and exclaimed at sight of the "Lancelot and 
 Elaine," 
 
 " Mr Levinge and Daisy ! No, I don't know it. Walter 
 wrote me word that his marriage with his cousin was broken 
 off, and that she was engaged to Levinge. But he offered no 
 explanation, and I asked for none." 
 
 " They are both dead now. The truth can't hurt them," 
 Frank said, mournfully. So then, standing before the pic- 
 ture, he told the story, and Mrs Walsh found herself far 
 more affected than she once deemed she could have been at 
 aught concerning Daisy. 
 
 " Has it ever been found out who her mother was, and why 
 Daisy made a mystery about her ? " she asked, wiping her 
 eyes as she went and sat down before the Guinevere. 
 
 " Making the mystery was one of her weaknesses. Yes, 
 we found that her mother had been a concert-singer not a 
 famous one by any means when old Goring knew her. He 
 wronged her, as you know," he continued, hurriedly, " and 
 then forgot all about her, as it seems. Two or three years 
 afterwards a man, a clergyman, fell in love with and married 
 her, on condition she quitted the boards entirely, and she 
 consented to marry him on condition of being allowed to 
 retain Daisy, whom she passed off as her niece, the child of 
 a dead sister. After fifteen or sixteen years' marriage, the 
 scruples of her sex assailed her. She gave herself up ; she 
 betrayed her former lover, and she forfeited her child to her 
 husband's wrath. You see, Mrs Walsh, she was weak as 
 water." 
 
 " And Walter would have married the daughter of that 
 woman ! " Mrs Walsh exclaimed ; " a woman who could sin 
 and repent for the sake of gaining a mediocre establishment, 
 and who ended by sacrificing the man for whom she had 
 sacrificed herself ! It 's a pitiful story." 
 
 "It would have been but for Daisy," Frank said, stoutly ; 
 " there was nothing pitiful in Daisy's share in it : she would 
 never have married Goring, even if that daub had not made 
 the truth manifest when it did. Poor little creature ! I 
 ehall never forget her standing there fronting us all, trying 
 not to quail at the sight of Walter's sorrow, for fear wo 
 should think she was ashamed of her love for Levinge.'' 
 
 " Was Walter so very sorrowful about it ? " 
 
400 Waller Goring. 
 
 " Ho was. What man wouldn't have been ? " Frank 
 cried, heartily. 
 
 " Yours was the worst position. You were so blamelesa 
 and so miserably placed ; you to play the part of domestic 
 detective, however undesignedly ! " 
 
 " It was undesignedly Heaven knows ! You know that, 
 don't you ? " 
 
 " Do I not ? Indeed I do so well. What a lot of pain 
 there is in life," she continued, sadly. 
 
 " But each pang has its compensating pleasure." 
 
 " I don't think so : instance yourself, Mr St John. What 
 compensation can you ever find for the pang of having been 
 the cause of that disclosure ? We can't be too thankful for 
 Walter's sake that it was made when it was ; it enabled him 
 to try to make that poor girl happy. But what can com- 
 pensate you for the pain of being the cause ? " 
 
 " Your sympathy that compensates me." 
 
 " Such a poor trifle ! does it ? " 
 
 She looked so bravely up at him as she spoke, and she 
 was so very beautiful. " By Jove ! I wish I hadn't come," 
 he thought ; " I was very well before ; ass that I was not to 
 know how it would be if I came down and saw more of her/' 
 
 " Shall we go away now ? " she asked, presently, in a low 
 voice, and he assented to her proposition, though he hated 
 going away. He seemed to have a nearer interest in her 
 standing there before that semblance of herself which he had 
 painted. 
 
 The thing he liked next best to her exceeding beauty in 
 this woman was, that she was not piously anxious to draw 
 morals and adorn tales from Daisy's story. The little blonde 
 who had looked upon that picture of his, and known herself 
 a found-out fallen star, had sinned doubtless ; but had she 
 not suffered suffered unto death ? He would have loathed 
 any untempted woman who had sat in judgment upon her 
 he would have deemed any woman weak who had for effect 
 seemed to seek to find commonplace excuses for the girl who 
 had been consumed by her ill-placed passion. But Mrs 
 Walsh did not seek to extenuate, nor did she set down 
 aught in malice. She just accepted the facts of Daisy's case, 
 and found thorn sad ; but she did not strive to improve them 
 for the edification of the living. 
 
The Dead to the Living. 401 
 
 He liked this quality in her ah ! and how many others ? 
 
 " A thing of beauty is a joy for ever, 
 It's loveliness increases ; it will never 
 Pass into nothingness." 
 
 So he sang who touched the beautiful mythology of Greece, 
 and did not " dim its brightness," and so he believed pro- 
 bably when he wrote the opening lines of his " Endymion." 
 But Frank St John knew better, or thought he knew better. 
 The beauty of this woman now looking up into his fcice 
 would cease to be a joy to him, did it pass not into "nothing- 
 ness," but into the possession of Walter Goring. " I shall 
 never be able to stand it," he thought ; " I shall leave dear 
 little Charlie to fight "her way by herself, and cut my native 
 land. Fancy the fellow who could come home and have 
 her staying away in California ! " There was the law of 
 compensation at work even here. Walter evidently had not 
 the joyful power of fully appreciating the glory that had 
 befallen him in having gained this woman's tenderest 
 smiles. 
 
 " Shall we walk round the house ? " she asked at last, and 
 then they made their way to the room wherein Daisy used to 
 sing with Laurence Levinge. The room was the same ; not 
 a tint of its delicate green was faded ; no blur had come 
 over the surface of the gold on moulding and picture-frame. 
 The same spider-legged little tables stood about to upset the 
 unwary ; the same untarnished mirrors flashed back your 
 face when you looked into them ; the same myrtle which 
 the had planted bloomed and budded in the jardiniere ; the 
 same low couch on which Mrs Walsh had sat, with Walter 
 at her side, on the night of her first arrival at Goring Place, 
 stretched its luxurious expanse ; the same winking Cupid on 
 the ormolu clock on the mantle-board levelled his golden 
 arrows at the hour and half -hour ; but the piano was silent, 
 and Daisy was dead. 
 
 The room was ghastly in its unaltered state. Whether it 
 had been through mere carelessness, or through some half- 
 unconscious sentiment on the part of the housekeeper, they 
 could not tell. They could only feel that it was all painfully 
 as of old. 
 
 There on the centre table open still, and turned down on 
 
 2c 
 
4O2 Walter Goring. 
 
 the face of its pages was that volume of Macaulay's lays 
 which Daisy had been reading when Walter took her away 
 to Brighton first, when his own educational code had failed. 
 It was such a little thing to touch them. Probably the 
 book had been taken up scores of times since Daisy put it 
 down; taken up and dusted, and carefully readjusted by 
 some housemaid's hand. But for all this probability it 
 ?eemed to be so very sacred to the fair dead gir] who had 
 opened it at that page. It was such a very little thing to 
 touch them, but somehow or other they were touched by it, 
 or something else which I cannot define. 
 
 Briefly, but very kindly, as they were afterwards walking 
 through the picture gallery which Ralph Walsh had rear- 
 ranged, did Mrs Walsh allude to her husband. " There was 
 no method observed, and every picture was hung in the worst 
 light when we came down here to stay ; now the true artist's 
 hand is traced in the placing of each one. Don't you see 
 it?" 
 
 " They 're hung as well as they could be hung on such 
 walls ; these deeply-embrasured windows are not the ones to 
 show off pictures to advantage. 5 ' 
 
 " Well, no, they 're not ; but my husband did all that could 
 be done. It was the last exercise of his great talent the 
 "better adornment of Walter Goring's house." 
 
 She smiled almost tenderly as she spoke, and Frank waxed 
 uncomfortable. Allusions, fond allusions to Walter, friend 
 though Walter was of Frank's, were not too pleasant things 
 to which to listen. But this linking together of the " loved 
 lost and the loved living " was specially distasteful. 
 
 " It all falls to Walter's share," Frank said, after a brief 
 space. 
 
 "All what?" 
 
 " Friendship, fortune, success, love everything that makes 
 life worth having, in fact." 
 
 " Has he availed himself of it all ? Does he seem as if he 
 cared for the friendship ? He knows our hearts are wrung 
 with anxiety for him, yet he stays away in those horrid wilds 
 from choice." 
 
 She spoke in a sudden gust of affectionate indignation ; she 
 could not resist betraying the chagrin she felt at this perver- 
 sity of my hero's. Frank could not sympathise with her. 
 
Morning and Evening. 403 
 
 'I must acknowledge that my heart isn't much wrung 
 with anxiety about Walter. It 's not half so savage as you 're 
 pleased to suppose : he has his rifles and dogs, and two or 
 three Mexican servants with him." 
 
 " Oh, I don't doubt his capability of taking care of him- 
 self," she replied, with her sex's inconsistency. " Shall we 
 go away now? It's rather depressing, walking about these 
 deserted halls." 
 
 As they were driving home, Mrs Walsh asked, " Have you 
 seen your sister ? " 
 
 " I saw her the day I left, of course," he answered. To 
 him, there was but one sister in the world Charlie. 
 
 " Ah! I meant your other sister, Mrs Prescott." 
 
 " No ; are they at the Hurst ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes ; and you must go and see them," she .replied, 
 wheeling her cobs round rather too sharply into the re-opened 
 private lane that led from Goring Place to the Hurst. The 
 sudden swerve excited the chestnuts ; they made a sharp bolt 
 forward before the hind- wheels of the phaeton could turn ; 
 the bricked corner of the hedge came crashing against them ; 
 the cobs started off at full speed, and in an instant or two the 
 phaeton went over the near side, and Mrs Walsh and Frank 
 were both shot out. 
 
 CHAPTER LIII. 
 
 MORNING AND EVENING. 
 
 " THANK the Lord, it 's the left arm," Frank thought, when 
 he had picked himself up and discovered that the h'mb of 
 which he spoke stood oif from the elbow at an acute and 
 unnatural angle. He had seen immediately that Mrs Walsh 
 was unhurt, or he would not have thought an adjuration 
 about himself at all. 
 
 The cobs had kicked themselves free of the pole ; and they 
 now stood panting, with their traces hanging loosely about 
 them, and the buttoned boy, who always accompanied Mrs 
 Walsh, at their heads. The youth stood very much agape 
 
404 Waller Goring. 
 
 when his ordinarily composed mistress reproached herself and 
 her chestnuts and her page as the cause of the accident to Mr 
 St John, all in one breath. " My awkwardness ! They are 
 full of vice from want of work ! Why didn't you take Robin 
 Hood -up a hole or two before we started, John ? " she con- 
 tinued, angrily alluding to the pony that had been in on the 
 near side, and who had, to tell the truth, evinced a marked 
 inclination to shirk his work and play at going breadth-ways 
 several times. " Mr St John, what can I what can I do ? " 
 
 Frank's arm was swelling rapidly. It was a promising 
 dislocation at the elbow; the small bone was broken imme- 
 diately below it, and the wrist was sprained. Altogether the 
 accident was a remarkably complete one. 
 
 " I tell you what I '11 do. Trust rne to pull your arm in 
 lean!'; 
 
 He saw that her face flushed as she spoke. He would 
 have distrusted the pulling-in powers of a woman who had 
 gone pale while proposing it. " Trust you ! I 'd trust you to 
 do that or anything else/' he replied ; " but you haven't the 
 strength." Then he tried a feeble smile, and added, " When 
 men get out of joint, they don't go in again in a hurry." 
 
 " Let me try do let me try ! " she cried. " Have you a 
 knife?" 
 
 He had a knife, very much at her service. Accordingly, 
 she ripped his coat-sleeve from the wrist to the shoulder- 
 seam ; cut open his shirt-sleeve very daintily, and then without 
 the shadow of a tremble prepared to pull in the swollen limb 
 which she had been the cause of dislocating. 
 
 All round the region of the elbow-joint the flesh had puffed 
 up terribly. She shuddered inwardly when she saw it, but 
 she would not suffer the shudder to make itself visible. " Put 
 your arm round my waist to steady yourself. I '11 be like a 
 rock, Mr St John,', she said, when she laid her long, snowy- 
 white fingers on the battered wrist ; and, tender as her touch 
 was, it seared his tortured flesh like hot iron. The next 
 moment there was a creaking and a horrible jerk, and the 
 joint was rightly adjusted again. No one who has not had 
 his elbow dislocated can quite appreciate the prtfound inten- 
 sity of that love of the beautiful which enabled Frank to 
 think only of the grace and charm with which Mrs Walsh 
 performed thia little bit of surgery while she was doing it. 
 
Morning and Evening. 405 
 
 When she had made a temporary sling out of the silk 
 Bcarf she wore, there was nothing else to be done save to 
 get home and send for a doctor as soon as possible. Mrs 
 Walsh wanted to send her boy into Deneham for a carriage, 
 but Frank declared himself able to walk. 
 
 " I must drop a line to Charlie," he said, " or she '11 be wild 
 on Friday if I don't put in an appearance ; and I don't think 
 I '11 risk a railway journey on the Great Eastern yet." 
 
 " I should think not. I will write to Mrs Fellowes, and 
 beg her to come down, Mr St John. You must stay at my 
 house till you have got quite over the effect of my careless- 
 ness." 
 
 Frank St John tried very hard to refuse this invitation with 
 manly firmness and decision. He knew well that it would 
 only be the worse for him eventually if he did put himself in 
 the way of seeing her constantly. But she routed every 
 excuse he made, and finally he gave way and consented to go 
 and be happy for a time under her roof, and to be in diurnal 
 receipt of her tender sympathy. 
 
 "She does it for Walter's sake," he thought; "I'm 
 Walter's friend. No doubt she'd nurse a dog of his just as 
 tenderly. Well, it's my luck it's this child's destiny. 
 * No woman's eyes shall smile on me, no woman's heart be 
 mine,' I suppose. I hope Ellen won't come over and bother 
 me to go to The Hurst, though there '11 be more pain than 
 pleasure very likely in staying with Mrs Walsh, especially 
 when the edge of her admiration for him is whetted by the 
 sight of Charlie. But I ; ll be a Christian martyr, and bear 
 my share of pain." 
 
 The doctor came, and found his task made comparatively 
 easy through the prompt measures Mrs Walsh had taken. 
 He advised that Frank should go to bed at once, and sent 
 him a sleeping draught. Frank took neither the advice nor 
 the liquid composure ; he sat in the drawing-room till eleven 
 o'clock, and was made much of by Mrs Walsh in a way that 
 was far more soothing to his feelings. In order to retain this 
 state of things he would not have had the smallest objection to 
 dislocating each one of his limbs in succession ; he blessed 
 those swerving ponies and that obtrusive corner, and thought 
 kind things of the boy who had neglected to take Robin 
 Hood's traces up a hole or two. Fin-ally he went to bed at 
 
406 Walter Goring. 
 
 eleven very much in love, and very conscious of his folly in 
 being so. The consequence was that he passed a feverish 
 night, and in the morning was found by his attendant to 
 have vague notions about the majority of things. This grew, 
 until by the time Charlie arrived (which she did late on the 
 day following the accident) he was delirious, and Mrs Walsh 
 unfeignedly frightened. 
 
 Women almost invariably meet each other graciously in 
 times of sickness. The hostess and her guest had been rivals 
 undiscovered rivals ; nevertheless now that they had this 
 common interest they seemed to banish all memory of that 
 rivalship, and to incline towards one another as sisters might 
 have done, or rather as sisters are supposed to do by those of 
 limitless faith, but do not too frequently. 
 
 Frank's was a very brief access of delirium, that is to say, 
 he only stayed " out of his head " as the domestics of Mrs 
 Walsh's establishment termed it, for a day and a night. But 
 the time, all brief as it was, had been quite long enough for 
 him to commit himself to the statement of sundry sentiments 
 which were quite new to his sister Charlie. They were new 
 in verbal form also to Mrs Walsh (who heard some of them 
 very undesignedly in the course of sundry missions of mercy 
 and assistance which she paid the sick-room,) but that they 
 were utterly unsuspected by that matron, after those passages 
 before the pictures, is more than can be stated in truth. 
 
 Charlie had brought down all the letters which had arrived 
 for Frank since his departure, and among them was one from 
 Walter Goring. " It has the San Francisco postmark upon 
 it. He has evidently left the wilds and has come down to 
 San Francisco ; perhaps is on his way home," Charlie said, 
 as Mrs Walsh and herself stood investigating the envelope of 
 the letter late at night. 
 
 " How very glad your brother will be to see him home 
 again," Mrs Walsh remarked in reply. 
 
 " Yes, and how his return will improve your neighbour- 
 hood." 
 
 " I don't suppose he will be here much just in the hunt- 
 ing and shooting season. But there'll be too many claims on 
 him in town for him to reside here altogether." 
 
 " Well, you know him much better than I do," Charlie 
 said, with a spasm of pain at the truth of her own words. 
 
Morning and Evening. 407 
 
 "You're far better able to judge of what he will do than I 
 am." 
 
 " I have known him years how many years longer but 
 do I know him better, Mrs Fellowes ? " 
 
 " I think you do," Charlie replied, frankly. 
 
 " I think I do not," Mrs Walsh said, with equal frankness. 
 " I thought I knew him well, knew him as well as I loved 
 him, until he wanted to marry Daisy ; that staggered my own 
 faith in my knowledge of his character : she was unsuited to 
 him in every way." 
 
 " Do you think that the consideration of suitableness enters 
 into people's calculations when circumstances bring about 
 their marriage ? " Charlie asked. 
 
 Mrs Walsh remembered Charlie's marriage and her own, 
 and declined to give a decided opinion. 
 
 " Because I don't," the embyro philosopher went on. 
 " What men think about chiefly, I can't say ; pleasing them- 
 selves, I suppose. But the majority of young women think 
 about everything save those contrasting or sympathetic points 
 in a man's character which are essential to happiness in a 
 close union. My own idea now is that if I couldn't take 
 extreme pleasure in a man's society and companionship under 
 any circumstances, that sense and decency demand that I 
 should utterly put down the possibility of marrying him. 
 This may seem a very mild statement of feeling till you think 
 about it, Mrs Walsh ; but when you do think about it, say, 
 how many girls are actuated by it after all ? Girls take as 
 their husbands men with whom they would ridicule the idea 
 of forming intimate friendships. I knew it." 
 
 " But, on the other hand, how many intimate friendships 
 we form with men whom we wouldn't marry on any con- 
 sideration ? " 
 
 "Yes and that's redeeming, I allow; but my proposition 
 has a great deal too much truth about it, you '11 find, when 
 you come to consider. Now I must go to Frank." 
 
 i: Let me sit up with you. What sorrow and trouble I 
 have been the means of causing you ! " 
 
 " Yes, you have," Charlie thought, " but not in the precise 
 way in which you mean it." Then she thanked Mrs Walsh 
 for her offer of sharing the vigil, and refused it, and went 
 away with Walter's letter in her hand to Frank's bedside. 
 
408 Walter Goring. 
 
 The next morning Frank was better; well enough to break 
 the seal, and read his letter, and tell them coherently that 
 Walter announced his return. " We are to expect him by 
 the next mail not the next, the one after, unless he 's de- 
 layed," Frank said in the reverse of enthusiastic tones to his 
 sister ; then Charlie passed the news along to Mrs Walsh, 
 and the two women, out of the intensity of their nervousness, 
 grew almost affectionate to one another while discussing it. 
 
 Ellen came over as Frank had dreaded, and was anxious 
 in a sisterly way about him. " I should like to see him, if 
 he 's not bruised in the face, Charlie/' she said, after greeting 
 the young widow. 
 
 " He 's not bruised in the face, I assure you ; but if you 
 have any doubts about your own nerves, don't go in : he J s 
 suffering too much to be disturbed by other people's emotions." 
 
 "I don't so much mind what he suffers, if it doesn't 
 show," Ellen replied, candidly. 
 
 " How consistent you are, Ellen ; always the same, dear. 
 I would venture to stake my life on what your expressed 
 feelings would be whenever you heard of anybody being hurt 
 or injured." 
 
 Ellen bridled her fair pretty little head with pleasure. 
 " Yes," she replied, " I always was dreadfully tender-hearted. 
 I can't bear the sight of blood, or anything nasty. I daresay 
 you don't mind it so much. You always were a little coarser 
 in your tastes. But really it is fortunate for Frank that you 
 don't mind, isn't it ? " 
 
 "Perhaps it is. Well, come in, Ellen. But mind 111 
 turn you out the instant you air your delicacy of feeling. I 
 won't have Frank agitated." 
 
 Mrs Prescott was very far from being cold-hearted or ill- 
 natured. These are black qualities, and none of hers were 
 " put in " in anything but the most undecided neutral tints. 
 She was weak, that was all ; therefore, at the sight of Frank 
 apparently helpless in bed, she showered down a soft spray 
 of tears, and said " he was unfortunate, always unfortunate ! 
 dreadfully." 
 
 * Oh ! this isn't so bad," he said, carelessly. " How 's 
 Prescott?" 
 
 " Very well in health," Ellen replied, as if her husband 
 were very ill in something else. 
 
Morning and Evening. 409 
 
 " Is he at The Hurst now ? " 
 
 " Yes, he 's there ; you don't want anything of him, do 
 you, Frank?'' 
 
 " I ? No, certainly not." 
 
 " Ah, I 'm so glad. I told him I didn't think you would, 
 but he was afraid your arm, you know, might prevent your 
 doing anything for a long time, and it put him out upset 
 him." 
 
 " He 's very good to be so considerate on Frank's account," 
 Charlie put in, rather haughtily. 
 
 " Yes, he is very good ; I often think how lucky I was to 
 be settled and well provided for so young, while everything 
 has gone wrong with you and Frank ; it makes me quite 
 wretched, quite low, when I think about you both often," 
 Ellen continued, with that delightful vivacity people do oc- 
 casionally display when discussing the sorrows of others. 
 " There 's Frank, now, no further on in life, and with 
 not such good prospects as when he first went into the 
 navy; and you have to write for your living, Charlie; it 
 does seem hard." 
 
 " I think we 've talked long enough to Frank now," Charlie 
 interrupted. 
 
 " No," Frank said, laughing. " Ellen's sympathy is so un- 
 commonly sweet that I d like to have more of it." 
 
 "We think you might have found time to call at The 
 Hurst, Frank," Mrs Prescott resumed, suddenly adopting an 
 injured tone. " You could go and see Mrs Foster, and drive 
 about with Mrs Walsh, but your own sister you couldn't 
 give an hour to. Don't you think Mrs Walsh is falling 
 on 1 ?" 
 
 " Not a bit," Charlie replied. She heartily wished that she 
 could think Mrs Walsh less beautiful than of yore, but it was 
 not possible to do so. 
 
 "I suppose she's not likely to marry again unless she 
 marries Mr Goring, after all?" Ellen went on, meditat- 
 ively. 
 
 " After all what ? " Charlie questioned, sharply. The sup- 
 position was not a pleasant one for either Frank or herself, 
 she felt. 
 
 " Why, after all you know ; there 's one thing certain, she 
 can't marry unless the man has money." 
 
4io Walter Goring. 
 
 "Why not?" Charlie was the speaker. Frank had 
 turned his face rather more to the wall. 
 
 " Oh, because her husband made that a proviso. Mr 
 Prescott saw the will when he was in town last; if she 
 marries again she loses her income." 
 
 "How unfair! how abominably unjust !" Charlie cried, 
 indignantly. 
 
 " Mr Prescott and I don't think so ; his will is the 
 same." 
 
 " I think I should like to have a sleep now, if you won't 
 mind leaving me," Frank muttered, drowsily. Whereupon 
 his sisters left him to sleep ? 
 
 No ! not to sleep, to think. Ellen was right. She had 
 spoken a bitter truth in her feeble inconsiderate way when 
 she said he was unlucky, and no further on in life than when 
 he had gone into the navy a mere boy. Hope fled from his 
 breast as he recalled the past and pictured the future. He 
 was stung to the soul, and all energy was crushed out of him. 
 
 Unconsciously he had nurtured the hope that when 
 Walter came home Charlie would reap her reward, and win 
 him, and that then Mrs Walsh might in time incline to 
 another love. Frank had determined to give Walter fair 
 play. He would take no mean advantage of his friend's 
 absence, he had told himself, but would just bide his time, 
 and if, when Walter came back, Charlie lost and his Guine- 
 vere won, he (Frank) would accept his defeats like a man. 
 If, on the other hand, Walter Goring gave unmistakable 
 evidence of its being only friendship pure and simple which 
 he had felt all along for his goddess, Frank would put his 
 fate to the touch, and seek her for his " wife " who had been 
 his " inspiration." 
 
 But now these resolves were broken up, sent to the winds 
 like chaff before the fell blast of Ellen's tidings. For him- 
 self he did not want the money ; it would have been pleasant 
 to have it together with her of course, but it should have 
 been under her sole control. Nevertheless, though he did not 
 want the money, he felt that he could not ask her to forfeit 
 it by marrying him. Here, again, the gods favoured Goring; 
 he could make it up to her, what she lost would be as nothing 
 to what she would gain in becoming the mistress of Goring 
 Place. Luck was against him in every way. 
 
Morning and Evening. 411 
 
 Lying there in a good deal of pain from his broken arm, 
 and a good deal more pain from his broken hopes, his future 
 looked a dreary dark blank before him. " The many fail," 
 in all things especially in all branches of art. * It was 
 more than probable that he was among the * many ' destined 
 to do so it would only be like his luck. Truly he'had done 
 tolerably well, had made good progress heretofore, but it 
 wouldn't last, nothing did last with him. It was more than 
 likely such creative power as he had would fail him. Natur- 
 ally the public would get tired of his style. There were so 
 many better men than himself in the field that he could only 
 come in with the ruck. As it was, during the period of his 
 temporary popularity (he was convinced that it was only 
 temporary) he would have to waste his time and the little 
 talent he had in doing things that died with the day, and 
 would never make him a decent name. Whoever looked 
 twice at the pictorial part of a magazine ? Or, indeed, for 
 that matter, whoever looked twice at any part of a magazine? 
 He wished from the bottom of his heart that he had never 
 written those essays in which he had sought to prove the 
 brilliantly original theory of what is good in itself being 
 acknowledged in time. He had written them when he was 
 in high spirits, when he was happy, when the day was 
 sufficient to him, before he had seen so much of Mrs Walsh, 
 in fact ; and now they seemed like unto the brayings of an 
 idiotically contented and absurdly hopeful ass. There was 
 poor Charlie, too ! Wasn't her life one unceasing struggle 
 to seem happy and light-hearted, when he knew very well 
 that she wasn't so in reality ? The whole thing was a big 
 sham, and not worth keeping up any longer ! " So things 
 looked to him in the morning. But in the evening they 
 brightened. John, the neglectful, who had omitted to take 
 Robin Hood up a ho!e or two, proved a capital valet. 
 Through his aid Frank inducted himself into his clothes, and 
 when he was dressed Mrs Walsh sent up a deputation in the 
 person of Charlie to ask him to come down into the drawing- 
 room. 
 
 He went down, and his hostess met him at the door, and 
 drove the will and its consequences out of his head by taking 
 his sound hand in both her own and welcoming him warmly. 
 She was out of her weeds, but she still wore black as a rule ; 
 
412 Walter Goring. 
 
 this night, however, " she regarded as a festival," she said, 
 and she had dressed for it accordingly. She was radiant in 
 her beauty, and her joy at seeing him down again, and her 
 white, soft, semi-transparent robe, girded in round the waist 
 with a silver cord. As Frank looked at her and listened to 
 her, he forgot his dark doubts of the morning, and felt that 
 he was safe to do ever so much in the world, and to succeed 
 brilliantly. 
 
 It was very pleasant to play the invalid under such 
 auspices. Mrs Walsh carried him his cup of tea as he sat in 
 one corner of the couch that was generally sacred to herself ; 
 and she held the saucer for him while he took the tea in slow 
 sips, feasting his eyes the while on her beauty, over the brim 
 of the cup. She also readjusted his sling for him. Finally, 
 she made a proposition which nearly sent Frank off into 
 delirium again. 
 
 The night was very lovely ; daylight had not quite died 
 out of the sky yet, and as they sat near to the open window, 
 the beauty of the evening and the fact of Charlie having had 
 no out-door exercise that day struck Mrs Walsh, who accord- 
 ingly asked, 
 
 " Now wouldn't you like to go out for a drive, Mrs Fel- 
 lowes ? it would do you good." 
 
 Frank's face fell ; he thought he was to be deserted ; but 
 it brightened presently, when Mrs Walsh added, 
 
 " John should drive you round to The Hurst and to see 
 Mrs Foster, if you liked. I will stay with Mr St John, and 
 try not to let him feel dull while you 're away." 
 
 Charlie hesitated, but Frank decided. 
 
 " I think you ought to go and see the late Miss Dinah, 
 really, Charlie ; and the ah- will do you good, dear." 
 
 So Charlie went, and Frank and Mrs Walsh were left 
 alone together. 
 
 For five or six minutes after the little excitement of watch- 
 ing Charlie drive off, there settled a calm and a silence down 
 upon them. Mrs Walsh began to wish she had not proposed 
 the drive ; Frank began to wish he had not seconded it. To 
 what end, he asked himself, was a tete-ct-tete vouchsafed to 
 him when he could not in honour profit by it. Even if 
 there had been no Walter Goring in the case, he could not 
 ask a woman to give up liberty and plenty for penury and 
 
Morning and Evening. 4 1 3 
 
 himself. The bare idea was preposterous ; he could not be 
 so mean he could not be such a fool he could not presume 
 to reward her gracious condescension by such a mece of pre- 
 sumptuous madness. 
 
 His meditations were interrupted by her saying, 
 
 " Don't be offended with me, Mr St John, when I tell you 
 that I 'm perfectly surprised to see what a charming woman 
 your sister has grown, or become rather." 
 
 " Do you think she has ? " he replied. 
 
 He really could not take any intense interest in Charlie's 
 development at the moment. 
 
 " Yes, very. I didn't like her at one time I don't know 
 why, but I did not and she responded freely, I fancy ; but 
 we understand each other better now, and are very good 
 friends. She is sure to marry again. You mustn't hope to 
 keep her with you." 
 
 " I hope she will marry again ; but I have heard her say 
 that she never will." 
 
 " That means nothing," Mrs Walsh said, quietly. 
 
 " In the majority of cases unquestionably it means no- 
 thing ; but Charlie had a remarkably unpleasant experience, 
 remember. She married a wealthy, jovial, manly, frank 
 fellow, and in a few months he turned out a bankrupt, 
 drunken and ill-humoured. I never said a word against 
 my sister's husband to any one while he lived. I should 
 never say what I thought of him to her now, but I assure 
 you, it was the best news I had ever heard in my life when I 
 heard he was dead. She must have had an awful time of it ; 
 not that she howled or complained she stood to her guns 
 gallantly but I know she had an awful time of it." 
 
 " Yes ; Walter Goring told me of one scene which he 
 witnessed the night of the auction at The Hurst, the first 
 time her husband stood a sot before her." 
 
 " She has never told me of it," Frank said. 
 
 " Mr Goring told me that the struggle between her refine- 
 ment and her sense of duty was an agonising thing to wit- 
 ness ; he was very much impressed by it. I should have 
 thought that she was more likely to be swayed by feeling 
 than anything else ; but she didn't allow herself to be so in 
 that instance, Walter said." 
 
 " Her feelings always sway her in the right direction," 
 
414 Walter Goring. 
 
 Frank said, fondly ; " still though I know that, I hope 
 when I leave her that it will be under a husband's protec- 
 tion." 
 
 " Leave her ! Where are you going ? " 
 
 " That I hardly know myself, Mrs Walsh. I only know 
 that I must get away somewhere because I dare not stay/' 
 
 He spoke in an earnest, impassioned tone, fixing his eyes 
 full on her face as he spoke. She was sitting on a low chair 
 by the side of the little couch he occupied. As he said this 
 she put her hand up and rested her brow upon it, covering 
 her eyes by this means. 
 
 " Going away? you too!" she said, softly; "though I 
 have known so little of you, I can't help feeling very sorry 
 that you should think of going away. I detest these dis- 
 solutions," she continued, suddenly rising and walking away 
 to the window. 
 
 " Dissolutions I " he repeated, echoing- her last word. 
 
 " Yes, dissolutions ; here just as Walter Goring is coming 
 home, you, the only man who has been much to him during 
 these later years, talk of going away. Walter had a reason 
 for going and trying to turn himself into a barbarian a rea- 
 Bon I appreciated ; but now that he is coming back sound 
 and quite recovered from all that sorrow and mortification 
 coming back as he thinks to a band of friends who will wel- 
 come him, and be about him as of old why should you want 
 to be off?" 
 
 She faced round as she asked it fronted him fully in all 
 that " beauty such as never woman wore." 
 
 CHAPTER LIV. 
 
 " NOXIOUS VAPOURS." 
 
 SHE fronted him in all her beauty, reproaching him for 
 thinking of going away, and her doing so nearly sent all his 
 magnanimous determinations to be noble and miserable to 
 
"Noxious Vapours" 415 
 
 the winds. Then he reminded himself that it was on Gor- 
 ing's account that she objected to the scheme on Goring'o 
 account entirely. " She 's not one of those women who like 
 to see men wear their hearts upon their sleeves abjectly," he 
 thought ; " she 's not one to want to add any fellow to her 
 train of worshippers she's had too many of them that 
 isn't why she wants me to stay; she thinks about me so 
 little that she doesn't even see that I love her." 
 
 He was uncommonly blind, quite as blind as he gave her 
 credit for being. She did see how things had gone with the 
 handsome young artist. He had mad) his state of mind 
 quite clear to her, and she was not ill disposed towards it. 
 His passionate admiration for her, and the chivalrous feelings 
 which kept him back from fully avowing the same were pa- 
 tent and pleasant to her. But she could not make any 
 further move in an encouraging direction. She had ap- 
 pealed against his determination to go away, and he had 
 reiterated that determination. There was an end to that, of 
 course. 
 
 It was rather hard work to go back to mere common 
 places immediately after the excitement into which they had 
 both been betrayed ; but she had perfect tact, and managed 
 it. She rang for lights, and every one knows how infallibly 
 the strongest thread of conversational interest is snapped by 
 the entrance of a servant, who disorganises the room, and 
 abolishes the light of heaven for the evening. By the time 
 the lamp was on the table and the blinds were down Mrs 
 Walsh and Frank were quite themselves again, toned down 
 to perfect safety for any number of hours' solitary confine- 
 ment together. 
 
 By-and-by Charlie came back from her drive, not at all 
 exhilarated by it, as those who had advised it had hoped 
 she would have been. Indeed it may bj questioned whether 
 one ever is exhilarated by a visit, after a lengthened absence, 
 to old scenes and old acquaintances. When, after a period 
 of separation, one goes back to, or meets, old friends the 
 case is widely different; but friends are not plentifully 
 scattered over any one's path. The majority of people with 
 whom one meets are of that calibre that one doesn't much 
 care whether one ever meets them again or not. Therefore, 
 when they do turn up, either premeditately or unexpectedly, 
 
416 Walter Goring. 
 
 one is apt to feel them to be uncommonly depressing and 
 burdensome. 
 
 On the most shallow pretext they will refer to old times. 
 They will go and dig in the mouldy past, and resuscitate the 
 most unpleasant memories. They will remind one of some- 
 thing, not so intolerable in itself perhaps, but that brings to 
 mini something else that is more than intolerable. They 
 will remark upon one's tenderest points on the crow's-feet 
 of the maiden lady, who knows her last chance is going, if 
 not gone on the gray hair that plentifully besprinkle the 
 raven locks of a past young Apollo on the immutability of 
 one's prospects, which are no better and no worse than when 
 they met one last. They will enlarge upon the preposterous 
 prognostications that had been formed in the by-gone time 
 for one, and sigh over the falsification of the same. They 
 will remind one that as one was then, and is now, so one 
 will in all probability ever be in this world. They ruthlessly 
 (and undesignedly, which makes matters worse) brush away 
 the little bloom that is left, and knock down the few remain- 
 ing illusions. One can but ask, " What is the motive " of 
 all the striving, and struggling, and sorrow, and suspense 
 which, passed through, leaves one in precisely the same posi- 
 tion as before ? Many who read this passage on a gloomy 
 afternoon in November will ask themselves the same ques- 
 tion. Here I think is the answer. 
 
 Because the ordeal brings out the highest qualities, deve- 
 lops the noblest faculties. Patience, endurance, pluck, none 
 of these can have fair play while there is no opportunity for 
 their displayal. The circumstances which call forth these 
 qualities are not pleasant if they were, the qualities wouldn't 
 be called forth ; still they are as good and strengthening as a 
 dose of quinine or a dip in the sea when the chill of October 
 is on it. They brace. Life is fully worth all we suffer in it, 
 as we must all acknowledge, when we remember that on going 
 into partnership in the great firm of Humanity, we put no- 
 thing in. All that comes to us of joy or grief, of pain or 
 pleasure, is clear gain. We paid no premium. The majority 
 of howls against the all-pervading sorrow and sin of this fair 
 world are born of the cup that inebriates without cheering, 
 far more frequently than from sober conviction. There is 
 unfortunately too much of those sad alliterative twins, but 
 
"Noxious Vapours? 417 
 
 inveighing against them in neatly turned sentences, or in 
 mellifluous verse, does little good. 
 
 There is a very bright side to life as well as the dark one 
 which has been so well worked by poets and romancists. 
 There is a great deal of literal, of moral, and of mental sun- 
 shine, abroad in this world, which art too often " renders " 
 gloomily. Of course it " is not always May." What a bore 
 May would be if it were ! But if we look for the light, we 
 can generally find it even in suicidal November or dreary, 
 dark December. I have a perfect faith in change and alter- 
 natives. If one place is wearisome, go somewhere else. If 
 one thing does not answer expectation, try another. Every 
 one may not be able to avail themselves of the former piece 
 of advice, but the latter is at the command of all, from the 
 highest to the humblest. Work is an unfailing panacea for 
 every evil. Work induces hope, and assists digestion. It is 
 those who are drunk with idleness, not those who cannot 
 pause to dally, who find the world so dark, and life so 
 drear. 
 
 The story is so nearly told, that I have allowed myself this 
 digression without compunction. Moreover, the matter of it 
 is not utterly irrelevant to the declared subject. Mrs Fel- 
 lowes came back from her visit to old scenes and old familiar 
 faces considerably depressed, it was stated, as may be remem- 
 bered a few pages back. This depression was a natural con- 
 sequence of certain conditions to which the most prosperous 
 mortal may be subjected. In the first place, the heat of the 
 day and the confinement to the house had physically weak- 
 ened her. In the second place, she had been compelled to 
 sit for an hour in the society of a stupid well-meaning man, 
 (Mr Foster,) and a couple of women equally stupid. aW per- 
 haps not equally well-meaning, who had no interest in com- 
 mon with her present all- en grossing pursuit, and no know- 
 ledge whatever of the place where she dwelt, or the people 
 with whom she mixed. This in itself would have been of no 
 consequence ; but it became important when she was com- 
 mitted to sit amongst and converse with them for a time. 
 It is impossible for mediocre women to talk other than fool- 
 ishly or far too curiously on any social topics of which they 
 are utterly ignorant. Mrs Fellowes, senior, and Mrs Foster 
 were eminently mediocre the word seemed to have been 
 
41 S Walter Goring. 
 
 made for them. They asked irritating little questions 
 about things that could not possibly concern them, and 
 they reverted to the old days with suppressed lamenta- 
 tions, and to the future in subdued tones that betokened 
 much doubt. Altogether, Charlie was conscious of her chin 
 having lengthened itself a little when she left them. They 
 had stolen over her like a fog they, and the recollections of 
 the past. 
 
 Nor were matters brightened a bit when she reached The 
 Hurst her old home the sight of which made her think 
 rather kindly of the man who had lost it, and gone to dis- 
 traction for grief at that loss. Mr and Mrs Prescott were 
 sitting in the library, Ellen sitting at the still open window 
 with a little stand close to her on which stood a candle and 
 a plate of peaches. Ellen looked like a peach herself. 
 There was a bloom a downy tender softness on her cheek 
 still. Not a line on her sweet, pretty face. " Time tries all 
 but Ellen," Charlie thought, as she looked at her sister. 
 
 Her brother-in-law was far less pleasant to behold. Mr 
 Prescott was sitting with a magazine in his hand, holding it 
 up behind a candle, the light of which was cast fully on his 
 face. Charlie saw at a glance that the magazine was one 
 of those for which Frank drew. Presently she discovered 
 that Mr Prescott was criticising one of Frank's draw- 
 ings. 
 
 Mr Prescott's canons of taste were by no means uncom- 
 mon. He liked what it was safe to like ; what had received 
 the commendation of centuries, or at any rate of the preced- 
 ing generation. He would go and stand close up against 
 Raphael's cartoons till each limb of each figure seemed a 
 monstrous deformity, and find them surpassingly beautiful. 
 He would view a Turner from that special point from which 
 it was nothing but a smudge, and declare it " glorious." But 
 he could see no good in the work of any young man without 
 a name. 
 
 He had no faith in aspirants. " Fulfilments, not pro- 
 mises, were the things," he was wont to say. The young 
 men who were upsetting tradition, and painting things as 
 they were, received no encouragement from that liberal patron 
 of art, Robert Prescott, Esq. He would have his walls 
 covered, but it should be with something that was " by," or at 
 
"Noxious Vapours!' 419 
 
 any rate " after," somebody of old, who could never cast a sus- 
 picion on Mr Prescott's taste by failing prominently to suc- 
 ceed contemporaneously with himself. Need it be said that 
 he took a particularly hopeless view of his brother-iri-law's 
 future. On the advent of every fresh magazine or new 
 number, rather bearing those now well-known initials, " F. 
 S. J." in the corner of the principal illustration, Mr Pres- 
 cott would inquire of his wife " what the good of it all was ? " 
 adding with a snarl that " that brother of hers wouldn't gain 
 either fame or fortune by drawing croquet mallets and neat 
 ancles." Ellen agreed with him, of course, and sighed for 
 half-a-second over Frank and his perversity. 
 
 When Charlie came in the evening, Mr Prescott put the 
 magazine down on the table before him, and gave it a fierce 
 little pat. 
 
 " It will be a long time before that brother of yours is 
 able to do even this sort of rubbish again ? " he asked, ad- 
 dressing Charlie. 
 
 Charlie by way of reply took off her hat, and held her 
 curly hair out to its extreme length, ^to let them see how 
 long it had grown again. 
 
 "I say that he won't be able to do any of this rubbish 
 again for a long time," Mr Prescott repeated. 
 
 " Do you think not ? " Charlie replied, unconcernedly. 
 
 Mr Prescott felt his gorge rising. If Frank had only de- 
 clared himself to be in an evil case, Mr Prescott felt that he 
 could have forgiven much. He didn't know what he had to 
 forgive exactly, but " much " sounded magnanimous and was 
 marginal, and he was ready to forgive it. But while Frank 
 arid Charlie for him bore himself bravely, Mr Prescott 
 could neither forgive nor wish him well. 
 
 " I can tell him that when he finds his daubing a failure 
 he needn't look to me to repeat that offer I made him before 
 of a berth in the city," Mr Prescott said, testily. 
 
 " I don't think he '11 want it, Robert ; and I 'm certain ho '11 
 never apply to you for it," Charlie replied. 
 
 " How's he to do without it, if his ' artistic talent'" (Air 
 Prescott tried a sneer an J couldn't lift his lip) " fails him? I 'm 
 speaking seriously, of a thing thatmay very possibly occur." 
 
 " Pray Heaven it won't, any more than all the shares you 
 hold in everything may come to smash. However, Frank 
 
42O Walter Goring. 
 
 and I have cast in our lots together ; while one of us can 
 work, the other won't want." 
 
 "Maudlin nonsense," Mr Prescott snorted contemptu- 
 ously ; " sounds very well just now before you have ' wanted ; ' 
 but I 'd have you think, Charlie I 'd have you think." 
 
 " What about ? " she asked. 
 
 " What about ? why about what is to become of you both ; 
 how you 're to live and be clothed and lodged ; fine talking 
 and fraternal affection won't satisfy your tradesmen, I'm 
 thinking." 
 
 " Ah, don't try to dishearten me, Robert," she cried. 
 
 " I 'm not. I 'm only putting things before you in a plain 
 light ; you 're not a girl any longer, unfortunately." 
 
 " Rather ' fortunately,' since I am compelled to shift for 
 myself," she interrupted with a rising colour. 
 
 " Well, that 's a matter of taste on your part ; I said ' un- 
 fortunately' because there is no longer a chance of you* 
 marrying comfortably, and being provided for in a way that 
 will ease your friends of all anxiety on your account." 
 
 She remembered the time at Brighton the hints that she 
 had even before then received about establishing herself. 
 She could not quote the horrible experience of her married 
 life to these people, so she only said, 
 
 " Putting that out of the question altogether, have you 
 any other unpleasant fact to put before me ? " 
 
 " No ; I was only going to say that that maudlin nonsense 
 you were talking about Frank and you having cast in youi 
 lots together being all humbug, it would be well for you to 
 think seriously of what you '11 do in the event of his marry- 
 ing. Why doesn't he propose to Mrs Walsh ? " 
 
 If Mr Prescott had asked why Frank did not propose to 
 the Queen of Sheba, Mrs Fellowes could not have been more 
 astonished. She regarded Mrs Walsh as apportioned indis- 
 putably to Walter Goring if Walter Goring chose to take 
 her. 
 
 " I really don't know. In the height of our ' maudlin 
 nonsense ' we never question each other on such topics ; be- 
 sides, Frank would never ask a woman to sacrifice for him 
 she would lose her property if she married." 
 
 " How do you know ? You 're very much mistaken." 
 
 " Ellen said so this morning." 
 
"Noxious Vapours? 421 
 
 " I 'm sure I thought you, said so, Robert," Ellen put in 
 deprecatingly. 
 
 " I said I should make it a condition of my widow's 
 marrying again, and that Walsh was a fool for not having 
 done so. Of course you made a mistake; you never do 
 comprehend if a fact and a suggestion are set before you at 
 the same time." 
 
 " Well, it 's no consequence," Ellen said, blandly ; " take a 
 peach. Mrs Walsh is sure to marry Mr Goring, so what does 
 it matter whether she loses her picture or not. I remeniber 
 once I thought that he 'd have proposed to you, Charlie." 
 
 " Really when ? " Charlie asked ; then a pang of annoy- 
 ance caused her to add, " considering that I was engaged the 
 second time I saw him and married the last, your reasons for 
 thinking so must be very sound." 
 
 "Ah, but it was the first time you saw him how many 
 years ago it seems. Gracious ! how you 're aged, and altered, 
 and " 
 
 "Dear Ellen, how exactly the same you are," Charlie 
 replied, rising and putting on her hat. " I must go back 
 now ; Frank won't care to be late, and he '11 want to see me 
 before he goes to bed. We 're off to town to-morrow, you 
 know ; so I shall not see you again." 
 
 So with a general embrace, the pleasant evening at The 
 Hurst came to an end, and Charlie went back to Mrs 
 Walsh's, and when she arrived there was found to be not at 
 all exhilarated by her drive and visits. 
 
 There was no opportunity of repeating a word of this con- 
 versation to Frank that night. Indeed, she felt no desire to 
 do so. It had been very unimportant in reality, so far as 
 she knew. All it was worth, in fact, was the further insight 
 it had afforded her into a character of which she had known 
 quite enough before. She determined to keep it till she was 
 quite cool, and then recount it to Frank and make him 
 laugh. As a study from real life, it might not be utterly 
 valueless to them both. 
 
 The next morning Frank's arm was pronounced fit to 
 travel, and Mrs Walsh lost her guests, and Deneham its 
 choicest gossip. Frank and his sister went back to the 
 semi-detached house in the secluded road, and Mrs Walsh 
 found Deneham duller than ever. 
 
422 Walter Goring. 
 
 The talk about the old familiar topics had touched some 
 long silent strings, and caused her to long to be free of that 
 old world again ; to be once more within ear-shot of the 
 jargon with which she had sometimes declared herself to be 
 bored while Ralph lived. These are interests that can never 
 be dropped entirely when once one has had a large share in 
 them, and the wives of men who are eminent or earnest in 
 any branch of art have a far larger share in their more 
 sesthetic interests than outsiders imagine. The wife hears 
 the best passages when they first drip from the pen ; she sees 
 the favourable review, and points it out to him before any 
 one else thinks of looking for it ; she is his guiding star in 
 all matters of costume, and indeed in all that is good and at 
 the same time feminine in his book, or most correct in 
 modern costume in his pictures. After the never-ceasing 
 excitement of such a life, it is almost impossible for a woman 
 to settle down contentedly to a career of middle-class nothing- 
 ness. Mrs Walsh tasted blood in conversing with Frank 
 St John. She hungered and thirsted for more when he was 
 withdrawn, and there was no one left with whom she could 
 go on conversing in a similar manner. 
 
 " I was never meant to live an idle, albeit godly, life down 
 in the country," she said to herself, laughing and shaking her 
 head, after thinking long and earnestly about these and 
 sundry other things the night of her guests' departure. " I 
 wonder if it 's to be my fate to be seized with restlessness 
 now, and like the Paradise bird, never to find a resting-place? 
 I can't go on living here of that I 'm sure. I should die of 
 myself in a few months. What a horrible vacuum agreeable 
 people leave, to be sure in that Mr St John would see the 
 law of compensation at work again. He ought to do some- 
 thing brilliant with that power of his. " He 's one of the 
 men who would be disheartened by prudent recommendations 
 to plod, but who might be incited to do something splendid 
 by one who understood him. The painting and the poetry 
 of that ' Guinevere ' are equally good ; if he had only learnt 
 drawing before he did it, it would have been superb ; as it is, 
 in the cant phrase, it 's full of promise, and shows that he 
 will take a foremost place amongst modern painters. How 
 proud " 
 
 She checked her reflections by rising up abruptly as she 
 
"Noxious Vapours? 423 
 
 recalled the fixed determination she had read in his eyes not 
 to speak the love that lived in them. He had adored her too 
 openly the first day the day they drove to Goring Place 
 for his after scruples, whatever they might be founded upon, 
 to be justifiable. "Pythias won't interfere with the bird 
 notoriously winged by Damon," she thought scornfully. " I 
 daresay Walter is conceited enough to believe that no amount 
 of his indifference is capable of curing me, and possibly has 
 breathed this belief into his friend's ears ; if it wasn't that, 
 what could have come over the man ? " 
 
 What will the " only love " theorists think of all this ? 
 That it is untrue to nature ? or that I viciously choose to de- 
 pict a bad type of woman ? Either supposition is equally 
 incorrect, as any one will find who can contrive to extract 
 the truth from the best women whom it is his happiness to 
 know. If Walter Goring had come home before this meet- 
 ing with Frank, Mrs Walsh would never have wavered ; but 
 Walter Goring had not done so, and Mrs Walsh was con- 
 scious of wavering considerably. Frank had stood a far 
 better chance with the beautiful widow than he had imagined 
 even in the maddest moments of his delirium. 
 
 It must be acknowledged that the long-contemplated tour 
 through the western counties proved a mistake. They began 
 to feel dull at Dawlish before they had been there two days. 
 Then they moved to a village at some little distance inland, 
 and hired the ponies according to programme, and regularly 
 for the first three days of going out upon them, got wet 
 through. Charlie had repeated that conversation which has 
 been already detailed, which she had had with Robert Pres- 
 cott ; and from the moment of her doing so Frank grew more 
 restless and gloomy than she had ever seen him before. He 
 thought now, that had he only known this before he left 
 Deneham, he would not have left Deneham in doubt; but 
 after having behaved in the " idiotically undecided way I did 
 when she said she was sorry I thought of going away, can't 
 go back or write : it would look like an after-thought, and 
 she wouldn't stand that ; the game 's gone. Goring, as usual, 
 will have the luck." 
 
 By way of improving his own spirits and rendering himself 
 agreeable to Charlie, Frank took to discussing the possibility 
 that was so odious to them both very freely about this juuc- 
 
424 Walter Goring. 
 
 ture. " Probably we shall not see Goring when he first 
 arrives ; naturally he will go straight away to Deneham," he 
 would say : and Charlie, though she did not think it at all 
 natural that Goring should so conduct himself, was compelled 
 to agree, because she had not the spirit to differ. 
 
 Dull as they found it mistake though their riding tour 
 was they stayed away from London till the beginning of 
 November, partly because Charlie dreaded the interval that 
 must elapse between their going home and Walter Goring's 
 return. But at the beginning of November they were com- 
 pelled to go back in order to answer certain professional calls 
 that were made upon them. 
 
 Once since leaving Deneham Charlie had written a sort of 
 note of recognition for services rendered and kindnesses re- 
 ceived to Mrs Walsh, and Mrs Walsh had replied to it civilly 
 and briefly, and then the correspondence had ended. But 
 they heard from Ellen that the widow was still down at her 
 cottage, but that she had such was the report determined 
 to give it up after the next quarter. 
 
 " Sharp measures," Frank growled. " Of course she won't 
 want the cottage when she has Goring Place. But she 's 
 shaking off her old shell betimes." 
 
 The time was drawing very near for Walter's return. The 
 housekeeper at Goring Place reorganised her staff, and the 
 gardeners made frantic efforts to get the grounds into such 
 order before the master's return as should induce that gentle- 
 man to believe that they had never been neglected. Mrs 
 Walsh robbed her own conservatory of the best flowers for the 
 adornment of the room that had been Daisy's, in order that 
 Walter might feel that neither he nor the dead Daisy were for- 
 gotten when he came home. The steward wanted to have 
 something like a triumphal arch erected, and something like 
 a procession of the tenantry and villagers formed to welcome 
 back the Squire. But this Mrs Walshto whom the steward 
 confided his desires negatived strongly. " I am sure Mr 
 Goring would hate it," she said ; " consider, it will be his 
 first visit to the old place since his cousin's death, and he was 
 very fond. I know Mr Goring so well that I may venture 
 to say that he will be far better pleased to be received as 
 quietly as possible." The steward assented to her amendment 
 quietly enough while in her presence, but he went away and 
 
"Noxiotis Vapours." 425 
 
 grumbled at her interference. " She's a proud one, she is," 
 he said to the select many to whom he had confided his 
 triumphal-arch hopes ; " when she 's married to the master 
 we shall have to mind what we 're about, or my lady will have 
 us out in no time." 
 
 Up in town amongst those with whom we have to do, there 
 was equal excitement. The long-looked-for had come. 
 Frank found the announcement of Walter's being in London 
 awaiting him in a note at his club one evening, and Frank 
 rushed home with the tidings. 
 
 " Goring is home 1 " he exclaimed. 
 
 *' Oh, is he ? " Charlie replied. " I am sure you 're very 
 glad." 
 
 " And are you not very glad, Charlie dear ? " 
 
 Frank asked it very seriously. The sudden light which 
 had flashed all over his sister's face when he told her that 
 Goring was home, proved to him plainly that Goring waa 
 very much to Charlie ; so much, indeed, that Goring's mar* 
 riage with Mrs Walsh would be as bitter a misery to Charlie 
 as it would be to himself. Could that silly little Ellen have 
 been speaking the truth, when she said that they were always 
 unlucky ? "I Ve had my share of ill-luck, surely," he 
 thought dejectedly ; " but this will be the worst of all ; and 
 I might have won her that night, if I hadn't been an ass and 
 believed Ellen's gossip." 
 
 When Frank asked, " And are you not glad, Charlie 
 dear ? " Charlie replied : "I hardly know ; it 's two years and 
 a half since I saw him he may have forgotten me now ! " 
 
 Frank laughed. " Have it your own way ; I suppose it 
 gives women pleasure to nurse such imaginative unpleasant- 
 nesses, or they wouldn't do it. Why on earth should he have 
 forgotten you ? Or how on earth could he, when he always 
 mentions you in his letters to me, and I always mention you 
 in my letters to him ? " 
 
 " You never told me either fact, Frank," she said in a 
 slightly injured tone ; but the news though late was very 
 welcome. 
 
 From that hour till the hour of seeing Walter Goring, 
 young Mrs Fellowes lived in a mental maze, and was conscious 
 of it, and only quite alive to the fact of its being just as well 
 not to make it patent to her brother that she was doing BO. 
 
426 Walter Goring. 
 
 She was very impatient and very anxious. She was well 
 aware that they had been very sympathetic to one another. 
 She knew that Walter had taken a great deal of pleasure in 
 her society, even when he was engaged to the younger, 
 prettier, more exciting Daisy even when that wonderfully 
 beautiful Mrs Walsh was attainable. But she also knew very 
 well that a man may take a great deal of pleasure in the so- 
 ciety of a w r oman who likes, admires, and appreciates him, 
 without any feeling stronger than friendship reigning in his 
 breast the while. She knew that he may be sympathetic, 
 and that the very openness with which he makes manifest 
 that he is so, is no proof of his being nothing more. She 
 was very impatient to see him ; but very doubtful whether 
 that sight would bring more to her than confirmation strong 
 that she had sighed for that moon who smiled on so many 
 brooks, and that the stars were unpropitious. 
 
 The best panacea for impatience for every form of mental 
 ill, indeed is work. It is utterly impossible to be down- 
 hearted when you are striving to be as coherent, amusing, 01 
 engrossing as it is in you to be on paper. If Mariana in the 
 South had only been fortunate enough to get upon the staff 
 of some of the magazines of the day, she would have ceased 
 to be so very weary. She could not have cared so much 
 about his coming while she was making copy ; and respite 
 from wretched reflection is a great good gained. Charlie 
 believed in this all-potent panacea, and worked a good many 
 hours that day. Laboured through some pages of Chaucer, 
 at Frank's instigation at first, and then read him for love of 
 those subtle, delicate, quaint conceits those turns of expres- 
 sion which cannot but enrich the vocabulary of the most 
 careless reader: read the "Faery Queen" with a gleam of 
 understanding, thanks to Frank ; and so managed to pass 
 the time away that necessarily intervened between that note 
 of return being sounded, and Walter's coming to them, with- 
 out falling a victim to that sick prostration of soul which is 
 the common lot of the woman who fondly loves the man who 
 is coming to her and to her rival. 
 
 She had been out a good deal since her return to town. 
 The visiting had come about gradually. Frank had a good 
 many friends, and was a very good-looking man. The 
 natural result of this combination was, that he was invited 
 
"Noxious Vapours!" 427 
 
 out a great deal ; and as he would not go without his sister, 
 she doffed her deep widow's weeds and went out with him. 
 Moreover, she was sought on her own account, as being not 
 alone a pretty, fascinating woman, but as the author of a 
 book that had succeeded, and that augured well for her 
 future success. And she revelled in these recognitions of 
 what she had done, and of what she was expected to do, and 
 went forward, as was her wont, gladly, to meet any hand 
 held out to her in honest, unpatronising kindness* She 
 went once more, in fact, into the society of which she had had 
 glimpses in the Walshes' house long ago, but, as was natural, 
 on a very different footing. 
 
 Altogether it had been a happy time. The friendship 
 that exists between a brother and sister is as fine and thorough 
 a one as can be formed between any brace of human beings. 
 It is untainted by the jealousies and misgivings which assail 
 the subtler union between husband and wife. It is stronger 
 than any possible bond between sisters, and warmer than the 
 friendship of man. And the best of it is, that if it was 
 cemented in childhood, however it may be in seeming, nothing 
 can destroy it in fact. In boyhood's scrapes and manhood's 
 troubles a sister is sure to be a sympathetic confidante, 
 though she may be sorry enough for the matter confided ; 
 while for the girl, a brother is the best, the only ally. 
 
 Frank and Charlie were friends after this pattern. She 
 was proud of him proud of his handsome face, and his 
 debonaire bearing ; proud of his popularity with women, of 
 his invariable success with them, at the same time that his 
 frank manliness made him well reputed amongst men. She 
 was proud of his talent too ; of the ease with which he was 
 winning his spurs in two fields of art. In short, she was 
 proud of him altogether, and especially proud of his pride in 
 her. 
 
 She got more fun out of society when he was with her. 
 Those hours that one spends on London staircases, or gasping 
 in the doorway with a ghastly smile ready prepared to let otf 
 at your hostess and impress her with the fact of your being 
 there and liking it when she is good enough to glance at you, 
 those hours are all their length occasionally, when you have 
 no sympathetic child of misfortune near to give back smile 
 for smile. But when her brother -was with her, Charlie waa 
 
428 Walter Goring. 
 
 sure to get all that could be got out of the gathering. They 
 were both very quick to see, as became artists ; their corres- 
 pondence was perfect, and their memories were good. On 
 the whole they owed a good deal to society. 
 
 It happened on the day after Walter Goring came home 
 that they were going to an at-home at a house familiarly 
 known as the " Menagerie." Walter Goring had called on 
 them the night of his arrival, but they were out and missed 
 him. However, he left a note stating that he had met the 
 husband of the lady who was " at home " on the following 
 night, at his club, and that he had pledged himself to go to 
 the Menagerie, where he hoped to meet them. 
 
 When night came, Charlie, who had succeeded in keeping 
 apparently quiet during the day, gave up the attempt, and 
 got away to her own room "to dress," she said. " What do 
 you want to be hours dressing for ? " her brother asked he 
 was finishing a drawing on wood and thought it " would 
 be quite soon enough if they got to Mrs Drayton's at eleven." 
 As a rule, Charlie thought so too; but Walter Goring 
 might go and come away again before that ; she could not 
 stand it. 
 
 " Oh, Frank, let me go at ten do ! Mrs Dray ton says 
 we 're always late, and I don't want her to think me affected 
 about it." 
 
 " Who cares what she thinks ? No ; wait for me, Charlie 
 dear." 
 
 " Not till eleven, Frank ; I can't." 
 
 '* Why can't you ? " he asked, wonderingly, looking up at 
 her as she stood playing with the door-handle. 
 
 " I have nothing to do but dress, and when I 'm dressed I 
 think it odious to sit at home ever so long with bare shoulders 
 and flowers in my hair." 
 
 " You needn't bare your shoulders or put flowers in your 
 hair. I think you look nicer when you do neither," Frank 
 replied ; after the manner of men, he had some weak theory 
 about simplicity and beauty unadorned. 
 
 " Let us compromise then/' she said, laughing ; " I '11 
 meet you half-way half-past ten will you go then ? " 
 
 " Yes, I '11 go then," he said ; and then Charlie got away 
 without further inquiries as to the cause for hurrying being 
 made of her. 
 
"Noxious Vapours." 429 
 
 At half -past ten they reached Mrs Dray ton's, and had the 
 satisfaction of finding themselves amongst the earliest. 
 '* This is very lively and pleasant," Frank whispered to his 
 sister as he followed her up to the reception-room ; " there 's 
 a thin sound flowing through the doorway that warns me 
 that those of my fellow-creatures already assembled are con- 
 scious of feeling hideously conspicuous. This is your doing, 
 Charlie ; you wanted to come in with the lamps." 
 
 " Never mind," Charlie pleaded ; " we can go the sooner." 
 
 There was the half-guilty look on the faces of those already 
 there when Charlie and Frank came in, of being very clearly 
 outlived, and also of feeling very glad that some others had 
 come to share the sensation. The centre of the room was a 
 barren waste, and the sides were but delicately fringed. A 
 noble-minded girl was taking off her gloves towards the piano, 
 and the hostess was wildly introducing people who did not 
 want to be introduced. " So glad you 're come," she ex- 
 claimed, holding out her hand to Frank. " Mr Goring, the 
 author of that delightful book on California, has promised to 
 come in ; and you 've been there, haven't you ? You can 
 talk over your different experiences." Frank tried hard to 
 look as if he saw the humour of this happy speech being 
 made to the artist of the book eulogised, when Charlie laughed 
 about it afterwards, but he did not quite succeed some way 
 or other. 
 
 Time dragged on ; the rooms filled and overflowed on to 
 the staircase, but still the author of that delightful work on 
 California did not make his appearance. " He has gone 
 down to the place to see Mrs Walsh," she thought, some- 
 times ; and when she could banish that worst dread another 
 assailed her. " When he comes I shall be lost in the crowd, 
 and he won't see me ; or I shall be fastened upon by some 
 bore, and he will be too polite to drive him away." 
 
 At last the floor seemed to surge up to the ceiling and the 
 ceiling to come down to the floor, and the faces around her 
 grew indistinct, and their voices sounded far away, and her 
 heart thumped audibly, as Walter Goring came in and saw 
 her and made straight for her at once, with the old look in 
 his eyes as he bent down to speak to her, with the old warmth 
 in the hand which she put hers into so gladly, with the old 
 tone in the voice that said, 
 
430 Walter 
 
 " The sight of you makes me realise that I 'm at home 
 again ; nothing else could have done it. Where's Frank?" 
 
 " Here, somewhere in the room," she replied, and she 
 trembled a little as she spoke. Two or three people stand- 
 ing near to them scented a flirtation immediately with the 
 acuteness that marks the by-standing mind. They did not 
 know that it was long past that stage with one of them at 
 least, if not with both. 
 
 He took her hand and placed it on his arm. " Let us get 
 *,ut of this ; it 's much cooler and clearer outside on the stair- 
 case ; besides, some one is going to play, and I agree with 
 Keats, ' Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are 
 sweeter.' " 
 
 They made their way out into a comparatively quiet spot, 
 and then she, finding that she could not stand steady any 
 longer, sat down on the top stair, and a few who were near 
 to them moved farther off judiciously. 
 
 " You look as you did the rst time I saw you at Mrs 
 Walsh's," he said, bending down ; " have you forgotten 
 it?" 
 
 " No. I thought you would have gone down to Mrs 
 Walsh's at once." 
 
 " I shall go soon. I shall be glad to see her, and she'll 
 be glad to see me ; but there 's no hurry about it. Long ago 
 it might have been different, but somehow it wasn't different ; 
 now I perfectly understand. You remember the ' Knight of 
 Toggenburg ? '" 
 
 "Yes; what of it?" 
 
 '' He sat down in the damp and died when she told him, 
 ' Knight, a sister's quiet love gives my heart to thee.' I 'm 
 not going to die under the knowledge that my dearest old 
 friend can give me no more, Charlie." 
 
 The words, the words she had longed to hear for so long a 
 time, were on his lips almost, but at the moment Mrs Dray- 
 ton came up with a little red-faced man, who looked like one 
 smile. 
 
 " My clear Mrs Fellowes," the hostess began, " do let me 
 introduce Mr Moore to you ; " then, in a whisper, " a re- 
 markably clever young man the author of an admirable 
 work on 'Noxious Vapours.' I knew you'd like to know 
 him." 
 
 
"Noxious Vapours? 431 
 
 What banes people are who won't let their guests find 
 bliss according to their lights, especially when those lights 
 lead them into sequestered nooks on staircases. 
 
 The talented author of " Noxious Vapours" was a tremen- 
 dous bore to poor Charlie; but so Anacreon or Sidney 
 Smith would have been at the moment. Mrs Drayton had 
 carried Mr Goring back with her, however ; so Charlie had 
 nothing for it but to endure the man of science and his 
 smiles. " He looked as if he had been buttered," she said 
 afterwards to her brother ; " ' Noxious Vapours ' is without 
 exception the most odious specimen of learn dom 1 've seen 
 
 yet." 
 
 It happened, unfortunately, that " Noxious Vapours" 
 thought kinder things of the young novelist than she did of 
 him. He was one of those hapless men who never know 
 when a woman is bored ; and who, clever though they are, 
 never know how to avoid boring her. So he held her in the 
 leash of his conversation till there was a move made to go 
 down and have champagne cup and ices. Then Walter Goring 
 went back to her, and somehow or other Mr Moore, the 
 talented author of " Noxious Vapours," saw through his own 
 dazzling smiles that he was not wanted. And when Charlie 
 left the Menagerie that night she was as happy as even an 
 animal with a lot to eat and nothing on its mind can be. 
 She was marvellously happy for a human being with a 
 happiness that stood every chance of lasting, for she felt that 
 she was forgiven that first false marriage vow ; her sharp, 
 weary duty-time had been accepted as partial expiation. 
 She had lived down the consequences of her first mistake, 
 and was to be rewarded for a certain struggle, to endure the 
 consequences of that mistaKe a struggle which she had 
 made unceasingly, though she had been sometimes worsted 
 a struggle during which she had humbled herself very much, 
 and suffered very much, and thought and repented very much 
 a struggle during the continuance of which she had learnt 
 that the means do not justify the end, and that though 
 " there is a Providence that shapes our ends, rough-hew them 
 as we will," that we must not hew them carelessly and rely 
 on luck making all things straight for us. She was rewarded 
 for that struggle after long years by being asked to marry a 
 man who loved her, and whom she loved. As she came 
 
432 Walter Goring. 
 
 down to her carriage that night, leaning on the arm of an- 
 other than her brother for the first time for many months, 
 she felt that the clouds had cleared away from her life, and 
 that the stars which were shining above did not make the 
 sky half so bright as did the love Walter Goring was throw- 
 ing over it make her future. 
 
 So the end came in a crowd, after all. No, not the end, 
 the beginning. We romance writers err wofully in this, that 
 we drop the lives of our young people generally just when 
 they are richest in promise. The " end " had not come to 
 Walter and Charlie when they pledged themselves to each 
 other, any more than it had to Mrs Walsh when she heard 
 of that pledging. " I loved your husband very much from 
 the hour he came to me with his first disappointment in 
 literature," she said to Charlie some time afterwards, "and 
 I love him still very dearly : but Frank would have put him 
 out of my head, even if you had not put me out of Walter's." 
 
 That picture of Frank's had a mission, undoubtedly 1 
 
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