BH -::-^,,;;v, KS ; , s meim i : i] mim i m- 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